Obama's message of weakness

Obama's message of weakness

06/05/09

A superpower that feeds on mediocrity cannot survive for long on
leftovers from the past.

"As recently as last summer, General Motors filing for bankruptcy
would have been the biggest news story of the week. But it's not such
a very great step from the unthinkable to the inevitable, and by the
time it actually happened the market barely noticed, and the media
were focused on the president's "address to the Muslim world." As it
happens, these two stories are the same story: snapshots, at home and
abroad, of the hyperpower in eclipse. It's a long time since anyone
touted GM as the emblematic brand of America – What's good for GM is
good for America, etc. In fact, it's more emblematic than ever: Like
General Motors, the U.S. government spends more than it makes, and has
airily committed itself to ever more unsustainable levels of benefits.
GM has about 95,000 workers but provides health benefits to a million
people: It's not a business enterprise, but a vast welfare plan with a
tiny loss-making commercial sector. As GM goes, so goes America?

But who cares? Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a
speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State
Department Web site, "President Obama Speaks To The Muslim World From
Cairo."

Let's pause right there: It's interesting how easily the words "the
Muslim world" roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives
who'd choke on any equivalent reference to "the Christian world." When
such hyperalert policemen of the perimeter between church and state
endorse the former but not the latter, they're implicitly
acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political
project, too. There is an "Organization of the Islamic Conference,"
which is already the largest single voting bloc at the United Nations
and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an
"Organization of the Christian Conference" that would hold summits
attended by prime ministers and Presidents, and vote as a bloc in
transnational bodies. But, of course, there is no "Christian world":
Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Barack Obama
bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is
"one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." Perhaps we're
eligible for membership in the OIC.

I suppose the benign interpretation is that, as head of state of the
last superpower, Obama is indulging in a little harmless
condescension. In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on
inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less-bloodcurdling
sections of the Quran. As sociohistorical scholarship goes, I found
myself recalling that moment in the long twilight of the Habsburg
Empire when Crown Prince Rudolph and his mistress were found dead at
the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling – either a double suicide, or
something even more sinister. Happily, in the Broadway musical
version, instead of being found dead, the star-crossed lovers emigrate
to America and settle down on a farm in Pennsylvania. Recently, my old
comrade Stephen Fry gave an amusing lecture at the Royal Geographical
Society in London on the popular Americanism, "When life hands you
lemons, make lemonade" – or, if something's bitter and hard to
swallow, add sugar and sell it. That's what the president did with
Islam: He added sugar and sold it.

The speech nevertheless impressed many conservatives, including Rich
Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, "esteemed editor" being
the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich
thought that the president succeeded in his principal task:
"Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, 'We respect
and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that
you don't hate us and murder us in return.'" But those terms are too
narrow. You don't have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders.
And you don't even have to hate him if you're too busy despising him.
The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly
cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted
goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building.
Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including
the wish to expand the boundaries of "the Muslim world" and (as in the
anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond
criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant
challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the
details, the subtext – the absence of American will – became explicit.
He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to
communicate, consistently, American weakness: "No single nation should
pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons." Perhaps by "no
single nation" he means the "global community" should pick and choose,
which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which
means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and
that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will
reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea
and any other psychostate minded to join them.

On the other hand, a "single nation" certainly has the right to tell
another nation anything it wants if that nation happens to be the
Zionist Entity: As Hillary Clinton just instructed Israel regarding
its West Bank communities, there has to be "a stop to settlements –
not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions." No
"natural growth"? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you've
got to talk gran'ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn or
wherever? At a stroke, the administration has endorsed "the Muslim
world's" view of those non-Muslims who happen to find themselves
within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: the Jewish and
Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to
grow. Would Obama be comfortable mandating "no natural growth" to
Israel's million-and-a-half Muslims? No. But the administration has
embraced "the Muslim world's" commitment to one-way multiculturalism,
whereby Islam expands in the West but Christianity and Judaism shrivel
remorselessly in the Middle East.

And so it goes. Like General Motors, America is "too big to fail." So
it won't, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence,
sclerotic and ineffectual, declining unto a kind of societal dementia,
unable to keep pace with what's happening and with an ever more
tenuous grip on its own past, but able on occasion to throw out
impressive words albeit strung together without much meaning: empower,
peace, justice, prosperity – just to take one windy gust from the
president's Cairo speech.
There's better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs,
in a coinage of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on
Foreign Relations. The president emeritus is a sober, judicious
paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on
American decline, he writes, "The country's economy, infrastructure,
public schools and political system have been allowed to deteriorate.
The result has been diminished economic strength, a less-vital
democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit." That last is the one to watch:
A great power can survive a lot of things, but not "a mediocrity of
spirit." A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital
of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a
while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow
superpower."
.

Relevant Pages

  • Do Not Let Them Erase Our History
    ... More recently -- in fact on May 26, one day after his Daily News ... forbidding a Muslim to sell land to a Christian, ... Why did the mastermind behind the attacks on America of September ... IN WHICH SADDAM FIRST TRIED TO ASSASSINATE FORMER PRESIDENT BUSH IN ...
    (alt.politics.bush)
  • Re: Obamas message of weakness
    ... good for America, etc. ... "President Obama Speaks To The Muslim World From ... communicate, consistently, American weakness: "No single nation should ...
    (soc.retirement)
  • My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern American
    ... East Village called Michael and Hushi. ... into the cab of a Bangladeshi Muslim? ... President Bush said, "Those who feel like they can intimidate our ... Every day, I lose America and America loses me, more and more. ...
    (talk.politics.misc)
  • My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern American
    ... East Village called Michael and Hushi. ... into the cab of a Bangladeshi Muslim? ... President Bush said, "Those who feel like they can intimidate our ... Every day, I lose America and America loses me, more and more. ...
    (sci.military.naval)
  • My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern American
    ... East Village called Michael and Hushi. ... into the cab of a Bangladeshi Muslim? ... President Bush said, "Those who feel like they can intimidate our ... Every day, I lose America and America loses me, more and more. ...
    (soc.culture.pakistan.politics)