A Simple Government (23 page)

In a 2008
Military Times
poll of active-duty servicemen and women, 10 percent said they would leave the military if homosexuals were allowed to serve openly; an additional 14 percent said they would consider doing so. That adds up to a quarter of our military forces! One recently retired general has said, “I joined the military when homosexuality was illegal, I served when it was allowed, and I have decided to retire before it was required.” If a wave of resignations hit a private company, if middle and senior managers left in a body, the solution would be to recruit from other companies. But if our career officers and enlisted men walked away, where would we find their replacements? Would the liberal cast of characters in Washington who support this change rush right down to the recruitment office? I don’t think so!

Not surprisingly, conservatives are considerably more likely to join the military than liberals are. In other words, liberal elitists are seeking to impose their will and values upon an institution their like seldom choose as a career and thus don’t really understand. This is dangerous arrogance. It would threaten the very existence of our volunteer military if they succeed in creating conditions that discourage social conservatives from volunteering, since such conservatives are more likely than liberals to object to serving alongside soldiers who are openly homosexual. Those who advocate the same-sex agenda should consider the many potential costs, including the possible need to reinstate the draft.

Lest you think I’m stereotyping conservative views, a June 2010
USA Today
/Gallup poll found that 48 percent of conservatives describe themselves as “extremely patriotic,” compared to only 19 percent of liberals and 22 percent of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine. If about 80 percent of liberals in general and young people in particular aren’t patriotic enough to volunteer for the military, then good luck replacing all those conservatives leaving the ranks.

In contrast with the likelihood of resignations if the current policy is overturned, note that over the past decades, discharges for homosexuality have been less than one-half of 1 percent of all discharges. Furthermore, many of these have been for actual sexual assaults, not for just “telling.” This pattern has not been a significant loss compared with the sweeping losses that would result from changing the policy.

As we’ve seen before, this administration sure seems to enjoy taking action before all the facts are in! Like the Red Queen in
Alice in Wonderland
, who said, “Sentence first, verdict afterward!” they do things backward. (The operative motto of Congress is only slightly different: “Pass first, read afterward!”) In this case, it was wrong of the House to vote to repeal DADT—a major policy change by any standards—before the military finished its own internal review. Admiral Mullen publicly made just that point. Moreover, the House vote, as a done deal, is likely to discourage honest input from the ranks.

Most important, the final decision isn’t even Congress’s to make. President Obama gets the last word (yes, yes, I know), in consultation with Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen. When the decision is made, I can only hope that our commander in chief will step back from the front lines of his ongoing “culture war” and instead dedicate himself to the task of ensuring that our armed forces are as strong and united as possible. Essential to that job is keeping our servicemen and servicewomen as safe as they can be, without the distractions to unit cohesion that can be caused by a leftist political agenda.

 

 

 

 

I
’ve spent most of this book discussing the problems we face at home, but I want to take a moment to say that in order for America to be as great as it possibly can be, we must remember our place in the world. Most of us live our lives not thinking about what’s going on in some other country. Trying to cover the cost of rent, groceries, and gas for the car doesn’t afford us the luxury of spending much time pondering what they are thinking in Pakistan. But dealing with friends and enemies in the world community is important, and much of our own national security is at stake.

Nothing presents a more tangled Gordian knot for a new president than foreign policy. Indeed, much of Barack Obama’s case for electing him hinged on convincing voters that President Bush’s approach of staunchly standing by our allies and standing up to our enemies was too simplistic and that a sophisticated, “nuanced” approach to dealing with the world would make nations that dreamed of killing us suddenly love us enough to want to take us to the prom. The Left even gave this approach an appropriately egotistical name: “smart diplomacy.” As if the only reason there were intractable problems in the world was that the diplomats who had dealt with them through the previous decades were morons compared to Obama’s Ivy League brain trust. It’s like the kid in school who waves his
A
test score in front of the entire class but never gets picked to play baseball. He’s an arrogant nerd, and no matter how smart he is, he can’t hit, he can’t throw, and he can’t run.

As of this writing, the nuance brigade have been applying their superior intellects to American foreign policy for approximately eighteen months, and there’s no question that they’ve had a major impact on our standing in the world. Tin-pot dictators from the Middle East to Latin American to North Korea still hate us; only now they openly mock us as well, defying American threats like a spoiled child who knows that no matter how much his parents threaten, they’ll never really spank him. British leaders question whether our two nations’ time-tested “special relationship” has been irreparably shredded. Some of our bravest allies in Eastern Europe feel betrayed at seeing the promise of an American missile shield blithely broken to appease Russian hardliners. And the war in Afghanistan has been simultaneously escalated and muddled. The administration attempted to cover every bet by increasing troop levels while announcing its timetable for leaving. There’s no greater gift to an enemy in wartime than to reveal when you plan to stop fighting. The result: more combat-related deaths in the first eighteen months of Obama’s tenure than in the previous nine years of war. Obama’s handpicked commander was even forced to resign after a
Rolling Stone
writer quoted him openly disparaging the competence of his superiors.

The one bright spot: Among nations that are traditionally anti-American, President Obama still enjoys high approval ratings. Why am I not surprised?

One of the first things President Obama did upon assuming office was to return the bust of Winston Churchill that the British government had presented to President Bush right after 9/11, on indefinite loan from their national art collection. This didn’t just insult our closest ally; it insulted all Americans. We like Winston Churchill and were proud to have that bust in the Oval Office as a reminder of British solidarity with us, from the First and Second World Wars through the war on terror. Obama’s action wasn’t just boorish; it set an ominous tone for what was to come. What else was going to be tossed out that we liked and believed in but that this new president didn’t?

The British newspaper the
Daily Telegraph
explained Obama’s strange behavior: “Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr. Obama than for those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill’s second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion. . . . Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President’s grandfather.”

Every president is the keeper of our American narrative, “our story.” He is the commander in chief, yes, but he is also commemorator in chief. Our wartime partnership with Winston Churchill and the British people is part of our story; the Mau Mau rebellion is not. When we elect a president, we entrust to him not just our security but also our story. The two are inseparable because our security depends on the story that we believe in, that inspires us, that we teach our children, and that we, as a nation, are willing to fight for.

President Obama’s emphasis on
his
story rather than
history
has become symptomatic of his tenure. He is going to impose his agenda on Americans, and he doesn’t care if we don’t share it, don’t believe in it, or don’t want it.

In his Cairo address of June 2009, President Obama declared, “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” He used very similar language before the UN General Assembly in September 2009: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.”

This is a startling and disturbing view of America. Here again, he rejects a vital part of our story: our shared belief in American exceptionalism. By the time the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville coined that phrase in 1831, it had already been part of our national psyche for two hundred years, going all the way back to John Winthrop’s 1630 speech to the Puritans he led:

For almost four hundred years now, Americans have understood that we have been chosen for greatness but have heavy responsibilities. Yet President Obama takes what we regard as a solemn covenant and reduces it to silly chauvinism, as he did in an interview in Strasbourg in April 2009: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” So according to him, America is just one nation among many, and we haven’t achieved and don’t stand for anything special. Then why is America the only nation with such a staggering illegal immigration problem? When other nations put walls and guards on their borders, it’s to keep people from leaving; when we do so, it’s to keep them from flooding in.

In May 2010, the president presented his first National Security Strategy (NSS), a document the president is required to send Congress every four years. President Obama’s introductory letter doesn’t sound as if it comes from the leader of the world’s only superpower. “Our long-term security will come not from our ability to instill fear in other peoples.”
Since when?
If that’s true, why bother spending seven hundred billion dollars a year on our military? Theodore Roosevelt believed that the way to command the world’s respect was to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Other presidents have chosen to speak loudly and carry a big stick. But this is the first president who believes you can command the respect of rogue nations by apologizing and throwing away the stick.

With respect to Iran, the NSS is truly pathetic: “Yet if the Iranian Government continues to refuse to live up to its international obligations, it will face greater isolation.” You can almost hear the laughter all the way from Tehran. Isolation? That’s our threat? “Do as we say, or we’ll make you unpopular?” Well, it’s certainly consistent with not wanting to instill fear in anyone. And just look at how well it’s worked on North Korea.

The Obama NSS backs away from the Bush doctrine’s post-9/11 assertion of our right to wage a preemptive war in our defense. Instead, it is big on multilateral pie in the sky: “We must focus American engagement on strengthening international institutions and galvanizing the collective action that can serve common interests.” And because we all know what a ringing success the UN has been, “we are enhancing our coordination with the U.N. and its agencies.” In other words, we are going to waste a lot of time and money and get nothing in return that enhances our security.

Obama is naive both in what he thinks he can accomplish and in where he believes our interests lie, and he harbors far too much faith in the power of his own personality to change the tides of history, just as he once promised that it would lower the tides of the oceans. For instance, he asserts that his “biography” gives him credibility in the Muslim world. But from their point of view, he is someone who was born Muslim through his father and converted to Christianity. Abandoning your faith doesn’t win you the “Mr. Popularity” title in the Muslim world.

President Obama has suggested that Israelis are suspicious of him because his middle name is Hussein. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. The fact that he has abandoned decades of bipartisan U.S. policy toward Israel has nothing to do with it! In June 2010, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, lamented Obama’s stunning policy shifts as “a tectonic rift in which continents are drifting apart.” These shifts are not just strategically wrongheaded; they are morally repugnant.

President Obama views Israel not as the partner and ally in the war on terror that she is, but as part of the problem, if not the root of it. The truth is that radical Islam is the problem, and Obama’s consistent refusal to call that evil by its true name will never change that fact.

In his Cairo address of June 2009, President Obama said, “Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism—it is an important part of promoting peace.” Then why don’t moderate Muslims rise up and do more to defeat the radicals among them? The extremists get much of their funding and other support with a wink and nod from those who claim to be moderates. Besides all the self-proclaimed wolves in the Muslim world, there are far too many wolves in sheep’s clothing, saying one thing and doing another. The president doesn’t see our allies and our enemies clearly because he doesn’t see the world clearly. Again, the haze of nuance obscures the simple truth.