Boasting Weakness
investors.com
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 10/21/2008
Election '08: The latest in the endless series of gaffes from Obama running mate Joseph Biden is his warning that our enemies would test a President Obama early on. We need a president they would fear to test.
An early sign of the coming greatness of the Reagan presidency was that within an hour of the former actor's taking the oath of office, the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamofascist regime in Iran released the 52 U.S. hostages it had been holding for 444 days.
Somehow, Ronald Reagan's lack of foreign policy experience didn't give Tehran the impression it would be a good idea to find out what he was made of; the mullahs already knew.
So why does Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joseph Biden think it's such a good idea to advertise that within months of taking office a President Obama would be faced with "a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy"?
What Biden is saying is that either Iran or al-Qaida or Russia or perhaps North Korea will launch some kind of attack on America or American interests abroad to feel out the new president.
And that this, presumably, would be practice for a more ambitious move against us later.
Speaking at a Seattle fundraising event Sunday night, the unfailingly foot-in-mouth-prone Biden said, "Mark my words," promising that "it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking."
As if promising a terrorist attack or an invasion of Taiwan or a suicide bombing of a U.S. base wasn't enough of a faux pas, Biden went on to implore his audience of donors that "he's going to need help," that Obama supporters will have "to stand with him, because it's not going to be apparent initially . . . that we're right."
Why is the supposedly seasoned foreign-policy wise man Biden in such a frenzied state?
Clearly, one purpose is to cast a Camelot-esque spell, comparing Obama to the much-beloved President Kennedy.
As attractive as JFK was, however — especially comparing his defense and tax-cutting policies to those of today's Democratic Party — it was his perception of vulnerability that brought America to the edge of the nuclear precipice in the October Missile Crisis.
Sen. Obama has been very fond of quoting Kennedy's inaugural address, in which the young, idealistic president declared that America should "never fear to negotiate."
As talk radio's Larry Elder and the Las Vegas-based "Cutting Through the Fog" blog have both noted, JFK ended up proving that you should sometimes fear to negotiate.
"It was Kennedy's own perceived weakness that caused Russia to move missiles into Cuba," the Cutting Through blog noted.
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev "saw weakness when Kennedy miserably failed to properly implement the Bay of Pigs invasion" with military backup, the blog said. "The way Kennedy handled the post-Bay of Pigs Invasion negotiation for prisoners was also seen as being weak."
JFK rushed to negotiate with Khrushchev, proposing in March of 1961 what became the Vienna Summit, which took place less than five months after Kennedy took office, and less than two months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner notes in his history of the CIA, "Legacy of Ashes," Kennedy "wanted a quiet coup" against Castro in Cuba and was talked into believing the CIA would deliver him one; meanwhile U.S. bombers charged with destroying Castro's air force were cut in half at the crucial hour.
Russia would have been foolish not to test a president who had demonstrated such incompetence. In Obama's case, it's not just Russia that may want to see how far it can go, but also an Iran well on its way to becoming a nuclear power, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups in the Middle East, not to mention Syria, and China.
President Kennedy's solution to the Cuban missile crisis ended up being a secret deal with Khrushchev to remove our medium-range nuclear missiles in Turkey, which would have been devastating to Kennedy politically had it become known.
What kind of things will Obama swap with our enemies? |
