My Beauty Best Teacher

Time reports on how 'Tunisia Prepares to Vote'

For many years, many of my students and several of my fellow teachers have been telling me that I have to see the movie V for Vendetta, because I would really like it. They assured me that this movie would be the movie for our generation, a movie that spoke to us and informed us and gave us a hero to cheer for. Students and several fellow teachers see V as a hero and saw him as the good guy of that movie. But they are wrong, horribly wrong, and their celebration of V as a hero will lead them and our nation into destruction.

V is a nonhuman, godlike figure who mentally abuses and rapes women. He hides his face from others, relies on wealth taken from others to live a life of luxury, produces no goods or products or services, and prefers to kill his victims using knives rather than guns simply because he is sadistic in nature. His vision of the world is one that involves blowing up authority and replacing it with an even more sinister and brutal authority, mixing anarchy and dictatorship to achieve his goals.

He does not submit to a candid world his ideals and ideas for their consideration, arguing in favor of natural rights of men and the goodness of mankind- rather, he tells people what he is going to do, imposing his will on the situation, and does so because he views all of man as fallen and wrong.

The same people that rave about V being a hero are the same people who look to the Arab Spring for inspiration and guidance, as if small groups of very active people overthrowing a dictator to replace that dictator with an army-led government influenced by fanatical terrorists is really an instructive example of any sort. Libya will be run by just the other tribe and will be as vindictive and tyrannical as before, Egypt has empowered the Muslim Brotherhood and the Army and is burning churches and attacking civilians from other nations, and Tunisia continues to tumble through anarchy- and that is what many students and teachers want for America.

Heroes are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Ronald Reagan- these people, whether you agreed with their policies or not, they fought and defeated evil enemies in the open, being human, and resting the strength of their victory on the power of the individual. Our Founding Fathers were heroes- they wore uniforms and fought and defeated a superior enemy on the basis of their superiority in principles and beliefs and ideals- they did not remove their dog tags and hide behind masks and rape women in the streets in their fight for 'freedom.'

Nor did our Founding Fathers or any of the great heroes of our nation dress up like zombies or glorify those who do- the same people who glorify the Arab Spring and V for Vendetta now pretend that the Occupy Wall Street Movement is some sort of noble enterprise, and not just a delusional carnival of antisemitic rich who wish to smash one group (Wall Street) only to put in place a more horrifying and inhuman system (an all powerful government that will take people's wealth and property and control their actions in the name of 'fairness' or 'the environment').

V, Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab Spring- they may all sound appealing, but so did Lenin and Communism and Hitler and Fascism when they first came about, and we all know exactly how those enterprises turned out. I have nothing but scorn and pity for those who support or like these groups- they have valid concerns and valid criticisms of the system they find themselves in, but they have decided to support the wrong side and history will judge them as doing so.

Liberal talk radio and liberal bloggers are all pretty much using the same talking point over the last couple days- that Republicans are wrong on Libya. They feel that Republicans should have been against US involvement early and supportive of Obama's involvement of the US in Libya late, and see current Republican criticism of Obama as just opportunist hypocritical games. But, as is usual, they are wrong, and there is a good article on National Review counting all the valid and good reasons for conservatives and Republicans to be critical of Obama's recent actions in Libya.

From Let Us Count the Ways...

1) Timing: If the administration believed this monster should have left, it should have acted when the rebels had the momentum, and not issued threats and demands for Qaddafi to go without commensurate efforts to follow such saber-rattling up. Fairly or not, the administration established a goal that it now seems to be backing away from, as it talks of toning down the operation before it is even a week old. We boasted about storming Vienna, pulled up at its outskirts, froze, and are now bewildered that someone inside actually is fighting back.

2) Approval: To start a third war in the Middle East, the president should have first gone to Congress, especially since he and Vice President Biden have compiled an entire corpus of past speeches, some quite incendiary, equating presidential military intervention without congressional approval with illegality to the point of an impeachable offense (cf. Biden’s warning to Bush over a possible Iran strike). And why boast of U.N. and Arab League approval but not seek the sanction of the U.S. Congress?

3) Consistency: Why is meddling okay in Libya but was not okay in Iran when dissidents there were likewise making headway? Is there any rationale that determines our response to unrest in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, or Libya? It seems we are making it up ad hoc, always in reaction to the perceived pulse of popular demonstrations — always a hit-and-miss, day-late-dollar-short proposition.

4) Aims and Objectives: Fact: We are now and then bombing Libyan ground targets in order to enhance the chances of rebel success in removing or killing Qaddafi. Fiction: We are not offering ground support but only establishing a no-fly zone, and have no desire to force by military means Qaddafi to leave. Questions: Is our aim, then, a reformed Qaddafi? A permanently revolutionary landscape? A partitioned, bisected nation? What is the model? Afghanistan? Mogadishu? The 12-year no-fly-zone in Iraq? A Mubarak-like forced exile? Who are the rebels? Westernized reformers? Muslim Brotherhood types? A mix? Who knows? Who cares?

5) Hypocrisy: This Libyan war is transpiring in a political climate where, for the last ten years, Obama and his supporters have lectured us that it is not only amoral and unwise but illegal for America to attack an oil-producing Muslim country that does not threaten our national security, a sin magnified if committed without congressional approval. It also follows similar demagoguery on Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detentions, etc. — measures blasted as near-criminality under Bush but embraced or expanded under Obama. In this regard, the prior rhetoric of an Eric Holder or a Harold Koh bears no resemblance to their present action — a hypocrisy that follows from the president himself.

6) Means and Ends: The monthly federal budget deficit now exceeds the yearly deficit prior to when Bush went into Iraq — at a time when we are engaged in two other Middle East theaters, gas is soaring, inflation is back, and we have borrowed $5 trillion since this administration took office.

7) Leadership: This is a Potemkin coalition, far smaller than the one that fought in either Afghanistan or Iraq, notwithstanding loud proclamations to the contrary. We are not even done with the first week of bombing, and yet no one seems in charge: What body/country/alliance determines targets, issues communiques, or coordinates diplomacy? The U.K. goes after Qaddafi, and we plead “They did it, not us”? Again, fairly or not, the impression is that Obama dressed up preponderant American intervention under a multicultural fig leaf, earning the downsides of both. A loud multilateral effort could be wise diplomacy, but not if it translates into a desire to subordinate American options and profile to European and international players that are not commensurately shouldering the burden — and not if all this is cynically used to advance a welcomed new unexceptional American profile.

When we talk of “European leadership,” we mean the U.K. and France, not Germany, Italy, or most of the EU. When we talk of the “Arab League,” we mean essentially zero military assets. And when we talk of the “U.N.,” we mean zero blue-helmeted troops. So, like it or not, there is a level of understandable cynicism that suspects Obama’s new paradigm of multilateral, international action is simply the same-old, same-old, albeit without the advantages that accrue when America is unapologetic about its leadership role, weathers the criticism, and insists on the options and prerogatives that a superpower must demand in war by virtue of its power and sacrifice.

These are all valid criticisms of Obama's involvement on the US in Libya, and he should be made to answer for them in 2012.

Doug Ross has put together an excellent summary of all of President Obama's recent foreign policy actions. Let us not forget that while we have a Congress to worry about and work on domestic policy, it falls on our President to worry about and work on foreign policy, and Obama has performed very poorly in it. This is some fairly harsh criticism of Obama, but it is not wrong:

• Pakistan is said to have increased its stockpile of nuclear weapons, secretly surpassing India's level of atomic arms. In addition, Pakistan is becoming 'enveloped by Islamists' as radicals hold more and more sway over the people and the government.
• The government of Egypt is about to fall, threatening a replay of the 1979 Iranian revolution in which a populist democratic movement was quickly subsumed by a well-organized and violent cadre of religious extremists. Unlike Iran, however, Egypt's "military is a powerhouse in the region, possessing hundreds of advanced tanks and fighter aircraft that could fall into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Lebanon is under new management: the vicious, Iranian-backed group called Hezbollah, which is responsible for the terrorist attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut. Their aim is written into their charter -- to destroy Israel, Britain and the United States
• Tunisia is in the throes of its own revolution with hard-line radical Islamists poised to take control of the government
• Iran continues its work on nuclear armaments and intercontinental ballistic missile technologies, its steady progress delayed only by a clever cyber-attack
• Gaza's Hamas-led government is reportedly importing a new strain of Iranian extremists; Hezbollah agents are said to be making their way into the Palestinian enclave to train soldiers for an attack on Israel; in their spare time Hamas is lobbing missiles into Israel
• Venezuela, Hugo Chavez' dictatorship, is now said to be fielding Iranian military personnel and missiles with 'scientific' collaboration revolving around warhead design and nuclear technology
• The military regime of North Korea recently torpedoed a South Korean warship and is threatening to retest its nuclear weapons. It was also busted importing nuclear technology into Syria and has -- as a bonus -- assisted Iran with its development of missile guidance technologies
• China is on the move: building aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, locking up energy contracts all over the world, and generally preparing to occupy Taiwan and -- eventually -- regions closer to the U.S. All the while, it uses North Korea as a proxy for delivering advanced technologies to rogue regimes to ensure that the United States can never rest easy
• According to a disclosure in Wikileaks, Al-Qaida is "on the brink" of using a nuclear weapon and is far closer to deployment of chemical and biological weapons than previously believed.

Now I know that I have a lot of liberals and Democrats read my blog, so go ahead and list in my comment section all of the incredible foreign policy accomplishments of Obama, and we'll all compare. I predict that the best that Democrats and liberals can do is offer a laundry list of excuses and reasons why bad things occur whenever they are in charge, or lame attempts to pin the blame on someone else, or things that they can take credit for that were things they voted against or spoke out against when they were running for office. The balance is likely to be pointing one way on this one, and that is against the competence of the Obama administration's handling of foreign affairs.

Earlier last week I was critical of Obama's response to Tunisia's revolution, where it appeared that rather than take an active role in events, Obama's administration simply sat on the sidelines and tried to figure out where Tunisia was (I'm kidding- I heard that he had a 40 minute briefing on Tunisia after the revolution broke out- I'm sure he learned about it then). He is dangerously incompetent, especially on important world events that our President is supposed to be the primary actor on in our political system. The revolution in Tunisia though was just the start of something bigger, something that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has taught us will have repercussions lasting decades, and that is the revolution that is taking place right now in Egypt.

For the past couple days I have been trying to get a handle on events there, much like our President, and like usual, my reactions have mirrored Obama's. First I first supported the young revolutionaries against the bad dictator, while Obama supported the bad dictator. But now I support the bad dictator over the evil militant terrorist groups who want to take power in Egypt, while Obama now supports the evil militant terrorist groups (he supports them by not saying anything bad about them while saying bad stuff about Mubarak- that's an upgrade over his usual 'voting present' by showing support for the bad guys). Obama is dangerously incompetent again and once again, anyone who voted for him or his party made our nation and world a worse place by doing so.

The best article that I have found to help me get a handle on what is going on in Egypt appeared today in the Jerusalum Post by Caroline Glick called Our World: Clueless in Washington. I am going to pass on some of the better parts of it to you to help you too understand a little bit better what is going on in Egypt...

The Egyptian multitudes on the streets of Cairo are a stunning sight. With their banners calling for freedom and an end to the reign of President Hosni Mubarak the story these images tell is a simple one as old as time.


On the one hand we have the young, dispossessed and weak protesters. And on the other we have the old, corrupt and tyrannical Mubarak. Hans Christian Andersen taught us who to support when we were wee tots.

But does his wisdom apply in this case?

Certainly it is true that the regime is populated by old men. Mubarak is 82 years old. It is also true that his regime is corrupt and tyrannical. Since the Muslim Brotherhood spinoff Islamic Jihad terror group murdered Mubarak’s predecessor president Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egypt has been governed by emergency laws that ban democratic freedoms. Mubarak has consistently rejected US pressure to ease regime repression and enact liberal reforms in governance.

This reality has led many American commentators across the political spectrum to side enthusiastically with the rioters. A prestigious working group on Egypt formed in recent months by Middle East experts from Left and Right issued a statement over the weekend calling for the Obama administration to dump Mubarak and withdraw its support for the Egyptian regime. It recommended further that the administration force Mubarak to abdicate and his regime to fall by suspending all economic and military assistance to Egypt for the duration.

The blue ribbon panel’s recommendations were applauded by its members’ many friends across the political spectrum. For instance, the conservative Weekly Standard’s editor William Kristol praised the panel on Sunday and wrote, “It’s time for the US government to take an active role… to bring about a South Korea/Philippines/Chile-like transition in Egypt, from an American-supported dictatorship to an American-supported and popularly legitimate liberal democracy.”

The problem with this recommendation is that it is based entirely on the nature of Mubarak’s regime. If the regime was the biggest problem, then certainly removing US support for it would make sense. However, the character of the protesters is not liberal.

Indeed, their character is a bigger problem than the character of the regime they seek to overthrow.

According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.

When given the opportunity, the crowds on the street are not shy about showing what motivates them. They attack Mubarak and his new Vice President Omar Suleiman as American puppets and Zionist agents. The US, protesters told CNN’s Nick Robertson, is controlled by Israel. They hate and want to destroy Israel. That is why they hate Mubarak and Suleiman.

WHAT ALL of this makes clear is that if the regime falls, the successor regime will not be a liberal democracy. Mubarak’s military authoritarianism will be replaced by Islamic totalitarianism. The US’s greatest Arab ally will become its greatest enemy. Israel’s peace partner will again become its gravest foe.

What has most confounded Israeli officials and commentators alike has not been the strength of the anti-regime protests, but the American response to them. Outside the far Left, commentators from all major newspapers, radio and television stations have variously characterized the US response to events in Egypt as irrational, irresponsible, catastrophic, stupid, blind, treacherous, and terrifying.

They have pointed out that the Obama administration’s behavior – as well as that of many of its prominent conservative critics – is liable to have disastrous consequences for the US’s other authoritarian Arab allies, for Israel and for the US itself.

The question most Israelis are asking is why are the Americans behaving so destructively? Why are President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton charting a course that will necessarily lead to the transformation of Egypt into the first Salafist Islamic theocracy? And why are conservative commentators and Republican politicians urging them to be even more outspoken in their support for the rioters in the streets?

Does the US not understand what will happen in the region as a result of its actions? Does the US really fail to understand what will happen to its strategic interests in the Middle East if the Muslim Brotherhood either forms the next regime or is the power behind the throne of the next regime in Cairo?...

...As Prof. Barry Rubin wrote this week, “There is no good policy for the United States regarding the uprising in Egypt but the Obama administration may be adopting something close to the worst option.”
 
Unfortunately, given the cluelessness of the US foreign policy debate, this situation is only likely to grow worse.

Two more years remain in President Obama's term of office. Hopefully voters in America will wake up and realize how dangerously incompetent his administration has been and how destructive the impulse to take a flier on this unknown was.