The Deep Concerning over President Obama’s Appeasement Policies

Two interviews on yesterday’s program deserve to be read and circulated widely.

Max Boot and Bill Kristol have their share of detractors on the left, but mainstream liberals know that both are serious students of national security and both are widely respected for their analysis of world events.

The transcript of my conversation with Boot for yesterday is here, and the transcript of the conversation with Kristol is here. Two excerpts.

From the Boot interview:

HH: Now some of my Democratic friends really bristle when I use the term appeasement. And I point out to them that appeasement has a genealogy, it has a specific approach to world affairs, it has a specific way of dealing with aggressive regimes. Is it fair for me to use the term appeasement, Max Boot, in relation to the world’s response to Iran?

MB: Well, it’s an incendiary term, but I think in the current case, it more or less applies, because here you have Iran doing outrageous things in violation of international accords, and the reaction from the world is basically to meet with Iran, and to talk about serious consequences, but not really deliver those serious consequences. So yeah, I mean, if that’s not appeasement, I’m not sure what is.

From the Kristol interview:

HH: Yeah, it is a four front policy of appeasement, and I used that word advisedly, not just Iran and Iraq, but the Pole and Czech decision, and then this decision that you reference, the Afghanistan pullback. And I want to go there now. I sense, especially in this Washington Post article today, the preparation of the political battlefield for basically a retreat from Afghanistan. Do you share that assessment?

BK: Yes, I think that was a very significant piece in the Post where the forces who want to go to a so-called counterterrorism strategy, which is really a way of just staying offshore and killing a few terrorists, I suppose, and hoping it all doesn’t blow up in our face, that…I had assumed that Obama would reject those counsels. But I don’t see how you can explain his behavior over the last month except to say that he is trying in various ways to lay the groundwork for not accepting General McChrystal’s recommendation, the commander he put in there six or seven months ago. They’re going to pretend that the election changed everything, the Afghan election, was a mess and that changed everything, and somehow now we’re going to go to, I don’t think he’ll go to any kind of immediate withdrawal, but I really think we’re now…he is, I believe now, he had thought things through in this way. He thinks that he wants to go to the country in 2012, to this country for reelection as president, and say I have gotten our troops out of these messy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are having diplomacy all around the world, and he will hope that these places don’t blow up in his face. And they may not immediately. I mean, even if we have 30-40,000 troops in Afghanistan, they can probably do a lot of, prevent some bad things from happening for quite a while, cross his fingers, and hope Pakistan doesn’t just blow up, cross his fingers and hope that the Middle East doesn’t blow up, I guess. But you know, I really, as I say in the past, I’ve kind of assumed that look, he’s president of the United States, he’s going to…although there’ll be a lot of things I’ll disagree with, and things we’ll pay a price for, but that on some big decisions, he’ll be responsible. But I now really fear that on these really decisive decisions, he’s not going to make the right decision.

Read both interviews in their entirety and you will be –or should be– alarmed.

These conversations reflect the growing concern among center-right, and perhaps even some honest center-left foreign policy elites that the president is in full retreat mode across the globe and that he views American power as always the problem and never the solution. Clearly the left wing of his party has always believed as much, but he did not run as its representative on any issue except Iraq, and the president in fact ran as a proponent of greater force in Afghanistan, up to and including an invasion of Pakistan.

What is being unveiled right now is not just troubling but deeply dangerous. Center-right elites have held their fire in the months since President Obama’s election and then his inauguration, and have hoped that the combination of Secretary Gates-General Jones-Admiral Mullen-General Petraeus would keep the president on a mainstream course, one which recognizes that American power must be deployed in the world to check its worst actors.

If the decision on the Afghanistan recommendations by General McChyrstal goes the wrong way and President Obama refuses the reinforcements requested for a strategy of victory there, the course of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy will be set and it will be unmistakable. It will also not be what the vast majority of Americans voted for, or what they believe in.

And it will be an incredibly dangerous decision to trust that our enemies will leave us and our allies alone.

A Young Conservative Laments

Will Munsil writes for the Arizona State University newspaper, and he’s dismayed that some big conservative voices have hurt the reputation of the party. I think young Munsil paints with far too broad a brush –Rush, for example, is a enormously influential voice in the country because he is in fact a powerful proponent of genuine conservative values and is funny and timely– but Munsil is right to warn about marginal voices destroying mainstream messages.

Congressman Alan Grayson: The Official Biography

The Orlando, Florida Democratic Congressman who has been making the outrageous statements on the House floor the past two days has an “official biography” on his House web site that is definitely worth reading. Count the number of Harvard references:

“Justice, justice, ye shall seek.”

– Deuteronomy, chapter 16, verse 20.

There is right, and there is wrong. We in Central Florida have sent someone to Washington who fights for what’s right.

Our Congressman, Alan Grayson, grew up in the tenements in the Bronx. It was a hard life. He had to be a fighter to survive.

His parents were teachers. They made great sacrifices, to make sure that Alan received the best education.

Alan was a sick child. His mother took him to the hospital four times a week, for treatment. Without health coverage, he would not be alive today. He remembers that.[# More #]

Alan rode the subway to school each day, and he worked hard. He was the valedictorian of his junior high school. By passing a test, he was admitted to an exclusive public high school. In high school, he achieved the highest test score among almost 50,000 students who took the test. Harvard College saw something in him, and admitted him.

For Alan, life at Harvard wasn’t easy. Alan cleaned toilets, and worked as a night watchman. Yet he earned a bachelor’s degree in only three years, with high honors, and he was Phi Beta Kappa. Alan graduated from Harvard in the top two percent of his class.

Alan took economics classes at Harvard, and he worked as an economist after college. But he felt a calling, to learn more. He returned to Harvard. In only four years, Alan received a J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School, and a master’s degree from the Harvard School of Government, and Alan finished all of the course work and passed the general exams for a Ph.D. in Government.

Alan’s master’s thesis was on the important subject of gerontology – how to improve the health of older people. Alan called for the creation of an organization to support research on the health of seniors. Shortly after he left school, Alan formed such an organization: the Alliance for Aging Research. Alan served as an officer of the Alliance for 22 years. Alan’s Alliance has increased federal support for aging research by 500%, leading to breakthroughs in the treatment of blindness, weak bones, Alzheimer’s disease, and other afflictions of the elderly. The motto of the Alliance is “Living to 100 – and Loving It.”

Wall Street firms recruited Alan heavily when he graduated from Harvard Law School, but Alan chose to be a judge’s assistant instead. For two years, he worked with such luminaries as Judge (now Justice) Ginsburg, Judge (now Justice) Scalia, Judge Mikva, Judge Bork, and others. After that, he accepted an invitation to join the law firm where Judge Ginsburg’s husband was a partner.

From the beginning of his legal career, Alan gravitated toward the important question of how the Government spends the taxpayers’ money. He mastered the incredibly complex rules regarding government contracting, and represented hundreds of clients in that field.

In the early 1990s, Alan took leave from the practice of law, and started a business. Alan was the first President of IDT Corp., a telecom/internet company. The business started on the second floor of a funeral home. It grew to be a $2 billion-a-year business, on the Fortune 1000 list, and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In short, Alan has lived the American Dream, starting a successful business and seeing it grow.

Later, Alan decided to leave that business, and return to the practice of law. Alan and his wife also decided to move to Orlando, and raise a family. Their first child, Skye, was born in 1995. Now they have five children: Skye, Star, Sage, Storm and Stone. Storm and Stone, twins, were born in 2005.

After Alan went back to the field of government contracts law, he began to represent whistleblowers, who witnessed fraud against the Government. Alan brought more and more False Claims Act cases on behalf of those whistleblowers, against fraudulent contractors. After the war in Iraq began, Alan was the only attorney who was willing to pursue such cases, in the face of hostility from the Bush Administration. Congress called on Alan four times to testify about contractor fraud in Iraq. Taxpayers Against Fraud named Alan Grayson its Lawyer of the Year. Public Justice also recognized Alan for his work. The Wall St. Journal lauded Alan, saying that he was “waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.” And Vanity Fair published an 11-page profile.

Alan’s mammoth struggle against contractor fraud has been applauded by liberals and conservatives alike. And now that he is in Congress, he can do even more to protect the taxpayers. He has joined the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittees of both the House Financial Services Committee and the House Science and Technology Committee. There, Alan does what he has been doing for decades – “keeping ‘em honest.” And furthermore, with a quarter century of experience in how the Government spends its money, Alan can help to direct more of that money to Central Florida, where we need it.