Wednesday, November 13, 2013

The Sweet Sort of Sour Grapes

Daniel Pipes sees a silver lining in what he describes as an America that has been weakened by Obama. He expresses this sentiment in an article that was published on November 13, 2013 in National Review Online. Appropriately enough, the article has the title: “The Silver Lining of Obama's Weak America” and the subtitle: “Maybe now our allies will realize how much they need us.”

This is a sour grapes kind of approach to presenting the situation in the Middle East, having lamented all these years about Obama's policy of extracting America from old wars. Thus, it is a sour grapes that the world has welcomed; more importantly one that America has needed so as to give the mentally challenged in the Congress a crutch against which to repose.

It is that the American legislators need an excuse to stop for a moment and catch their breath, having been subjected to a relentless campaign asking that they send their own people to one war after another, and serve the interests of a Jewish lobby working on behalf of the foreign entity that is Israel. This moment in the electoral cycle is rendered crucial by the fact that the primaries for the mid-term elections will start in a few months.

To develop his point, Daniel Pipes says that he still rues for what he sees as America's foreign policy being in ”free fall.” But he is happy that the socialist government of France blocked a potential Western deal with Iran. And there lies the silver lining because America's allies will now stand the chance to see the light that he has been trying to shine in their eyes, and in the eyes of everyone else.

Being a Jew, he does what comes naturally to Jews, and that is to mutilate history. Thus, speaking of Vietnam, he says nothing about America being dragged into it by the French who bolted out and let the American suckers die, get hurt and lose billions of dollars fighting a war that was never their business. Speaking of the Cold War, he says nothing of the fact that the Soviet Union was ready to undergo both a perestroika and a glasnost long before Churchill convinced the American suckers to contain it by spending trillions of dollars building installations and stationing troops in a Europe that was hungry for dollars. And speaking of the war on Saddam Hussein, he says nothing about the fact that Bush Senior was reluctant to get involved till the Saudis and the Kuwaitis offered to rent the American military, and pay for the war to oust Saddam from Kuwait.

Undeterred, Pipes builds on that mutilation of history then concludes the following: “In each case, Americans rushed ahead on their own, then beseeched allies to work together against a common enemy – a completely illogical pattern.” Yes, indeed, it would have been illogical if things happened the way he describes them, but that's not how they happened. Still, he goes on to say: “The locals should have been begging the Yankees to protect them. Why was this persistently not the case?”

To answer the question, he comes up with a scenario that is full of motivations drawn from a place so alien to us, it could only have been another galaxy, not our beloved Milky Way. And so, I can only ask you to sit back, my friend, and enjoy the ride. Here it is: “Because the US, persuaded of its superior vision and greater morality, brushed aside the allies” which left them, he goes on to say “with an awareness of their own irrelevance. They indulged in political immaturity, anti-Americanism and other dysfunctional behaviors.”

That was then, says Pipes, but things have changed under Barack Obama. Now, says he: “the United States is no longer the adult in the room, having taken a seat at the kids' table.” Thus, he expresses unhappiness at seeing Obama respond to crises on a case-by-case basis, consult with other governments and lead from behind. But what is it that he wants to see happen? Maybe he wants to see Obama respond to crises by rushing headlong without consulting anyone, hitting in every direction as if on a rampage and not on a surgical operation that is specific to the case at hand. That would be a biblical sort of savagery that humanity has left behind thousands of years ago. It is evident, that the galaxy from which Daniel Pipes has come is a backward one.

And so, he ends by saying that it is worth it because now the allies will grow up and start doing things for themselves because they cannot rely on America anymore.

If he is going to pray for this to happen, let's join him and say at least: Amen.