September 14, 2012

Krauthammer on Arab Turmoil: What We're Seeing Is the Meltdown, The Coll...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: What we're seeing on that screen is the meltdown, the collapse of the Obama policy on the Muslim world. 

The irony is that it began in Cairo, in the same place where the speech he made at the beginning of his presidency in which he said you wanted a new beginning with mutual respect - implying that under other presidents, particularly Bush, there was a lack of mutual respect, which was an insult to the United States, which had gone to war six times in the last twenty years on behalf of oppressed Muslims in Kuwait, in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

So to imply that we somehow had mistreated the Muslims, which was the premise of his speech, and how the Iraq War had inflamed the Arab world against us, well, there was no storming of the U.S. embassy in Cairo in those days. What we're seeing now is al Qaedistan developing in Libya; a meltdown of our relations with Egypt; we've got riots in Yemen; attacks on our embassy in Tunisia. 

This entire premise that we want to be loved and respected, we're going to apologize, has now yielded all of these results and these are the fruits of apology and retreat and lack of confidence in our own principles.

1 comment:

flyingvan said...

It is naive to think a group of people that hate other groups of people more than they love their own children---evidenced by a willingness to strap bombs to their own children to do harm---is capable of respect. They are capable of appreciating military strength, but when we don't even allow our marines to put bullets in their guns, good luck with that.