By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, July 08, 2014
Often, crazy things seem normal for a time because
logical catastrophes do not immediately follow.
A deeply suspicious Richard Nixon systematically and
without pushback for years undermined and politicized almost every institution
of the federal government, from the CIA and the FBI to the IRS and the attorney
general’s office. Nixon seemed to get away with it — until his second term.
Once the public woke up, however, the eventual accounting proved devastating:
resignation of a sitting president, prison sentences for his top aides,
collapse of the Republican party, government stasis, a ruined economy, the
destruction of the Vietnam peace accords that had led to a viable South
Vietnam, the end of Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic breakthroughs, and a
generation of abject cynicism about government. Did Nixon ever grasp that such
destruction was the natural wage of his own paranoia?
In the post-Watergate climate of reform, for nearly three
years a naïve Jimmy Carter gave utopian speeches about how American forbearance
would end the Cold War and create a new world order based on human rights —
until America’s abdication started to erode the preexisting global order. Scary
things followed, such as the fall of the shah of Iran, the rise of Iranian
theocracy, the taking of American hostages in Tehran, revolutions and
insurrection throughout Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
radical Islamists taking over Mecca, more gas lines, continued stagflation, and
China invading Vietnam. Did the puritanical Carter ever understand what might
be the consequences of his own self-righteousness in an imperfect world?
Barack Obama likewise has done some crazy things that
seemed for years to have no ramifications. Unfortunately, typical of the ways
of Nemesis (a bitter goddess who waits until the opportune moment to demand
payment for past hubris), suddenly the bills for Obama’s six years of folly are
coming due for the American people.
When a president occasionally fails to tell the truth,
you get a scandal like the monitoring of the Associated Press reporters. When a
president serially fails to tell the truth, you get that plus the scandals
involving the IRS, the NSA, the VA, Benghazi, and too many others to mention.
The same is true abroad. The American public hardly
noticed when Obama recklessly withdrew every peacekeeper from Iraq. Did he not
boast of “ending the Iraq War”? It did not mind when the U.S. posted dates for
withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trashing all the Bush–Cheney anti-terrorism
protocols, from Guantanamo to renditions, did not make much sense, when such
policies had worked and, in fact, were of use to Obama himself. But again, most
Americans took no note. Apparently the terrorists did, however, and they
regrouped even as the president declared them “on the run.”
Lecturing Israel while praising Islamist Turkey was
likewise ignored. America snoozed as its president insidiously redefined its
role in the Middle East as secondary to the supposed pivot to Asia. Each new
correction in and of itself was comparatively minor; but in aggregate they
began to unravel the U.S.-inspired postwar global order.
At first, who cared whether Iran serially violated every
Obama deadline on halting nuclear enrichment? Did we worry that Libya, where
Obama was proud of having led from behind, was descending into Somalia? Few
Americans were all that bothered over Obama’s empty order to Syrian president
Bashar Assad to step down, or over Obama’s later vacuous red-line threats that
bombs would follow any use by Assad of chemical weapons.
Few noted that Obama lied to the nation that a video had
caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, that Obama had known who the
real terrorist perpetrators were but had ordered no immediate action to kill or
capture them, and that Americans had been engaged in mysterious and still
unexplained covert activities in Benghazi. After all that, we still shrugged
when the president traded five top terrorist leaders for an alleged American
deserter.
Trashing George W. Bush’s policy toward Vladimir Putin
while promising a new reset approach (illustrated with a plastic red button) to
an aggressive dictator raised few eyebrows at the time. Nor did many Americans
worry that our Pacific allies were upset over Chinese and North Korean
aggression that seemed to ignore traditional U.S. deterrence.
We were told that only Obama-haters at home had
catalogued the president’s apologies abroad, his weird multicultural bowing to
authoritarians, his ahistorical speeches about mythical Islamic achievements,
his surreal euphemisms for radical Islam, terrorism, and jihadism, his shrill
insistence about civilian trials for terrorists and closing Guantanamo, or the
radical cutbacks at the Pentagon, coupled with the vast increase in entitlement
spending.
But after six years of all that, our allies have got the
message that they are on their own, our enemies that there are few consequences
to aggression, and neutrals that joining with America does not mean ending up
on the winning side. The result is that the Middle East we have known since the
end of World War II has now vanished
Supposedly crackpot fantasies about a worldwide
“caliphate” are becoming reified. What were once dismissed as conspiracy
theories about an “Iranian arc” — from a
nuclear Tehran through Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon to the borders of Israel
to the Shiite minorities in the Gulf kingdoms — do not seem so crazy.
The idea of visiting the Egyptian pyramids or hoping to
reengage with a reforming Libya is absurd. The best of the Middle East —
Israel, Jordan, Kurdistan — no longer count on us. The worst — ISIS, Iran,
Syria — count on us to remain irrelevant or worse. Old allies in the Gulf would
probably trust Israel or Russia more than the Obama administration. In the next
two years, if Obama continues on his present course, we are going to see things
that we could not have imagined six years ago in the Middle East, as it reverts
to premodern Islamic tribalism.
The same trajectory has been followed on the home front.
Americans at first were amused that the great conciliator — and greatest
political recipient on record of Wall Street cash — went after the rich with an
array of hokey epithets and slurs (fat cats, corporate-jet owners, Vegas
junketeers, limb-lopping and tonsil-pulling doctors, business owners who should
not profit, or should know when they have made enough money, or should admit
they didn’t build their own businesses). Few connected the dots when the
polarizing attorney general — the John Mitchell of our time — referred to
African-Americans as “my people” and all the rest of the nation as “cowards.”
Did we worry that the craziest things seem to come out of the president’s own
mouth — the Trayvon-like son he never had, the stereotyping police, the absence
of a “smidgen” of corruption in the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, or the mean
Republicans who “messed” with him?
The president before the 2012 elections lamented to Latino
groups that he did not have dictatorial powers to grant amnesty but urged them
in the meantime to “punish our enemies” — a sort of follow-up to his 2008
“typical white person” incitement. Who was bothered that with “a pen and a
phone” Obama for the first time in American history emasculated the U.S. Border
Patrol, as part of a larger agenda of picking and choosing which federal laws
the executive branch would enforce?
Those choices seemed to be predicated on two extralegal
criteria: Did a law contribute to Obama’s concept of social justice, and did it
further the progressive political cause? If the answer was no to either, the
statute was largely unenforced. No president since World War II has done more
to harm the U.S. Constitution — by ordering the executive branch not to enforce
particular laws, by creating by fiat laws never enacted by Congress, by
monitoring the communications of journalists and average Americans, by making
appointments contrary to law — to the apparent yawns of the people.
Too few also seemed to care that almost everything the
president had promised about Obamacare — keep your health plan, retain your
doctor, save money on your premiums, sign up easily online, while we were
lowering the annual deficit and reducing medical expenditures — was an abject
lie. In such a climate, Obama felt no need to issue accurate data about how
many Americans had lost their health plans, how many had simply transferred to
Obamacare from Medicaid, how many had actually paid their premiums, or how many
were still uninsured. The media ignored the serial $1 trillion deficits, the
chronic high unemployment and low growth, the nonexistence of the long-promised
“summer of recovery,” and the nonappearance of “millions of shovel-ready and
green jobs.” The fact that electrical-power rates, gasoline prices, and food
costs have soared under Obama as wages have stagnated has never really been
noticed. Nor have the record numbers of Americans on food stamps and disability
insurance.
Meanwhile, as Obama has refused to enforce immigration
law, the result is chaos. Tens of thousands of children are flooding across our
border illegally, on the scent of Obama’s executive-order amnesties. Advocates
of open borders, such as progressive grandees Mark Zuckerberg and Nancy Pelosi,
assume that these impoverished Third World children will not enroll in the
private academies attended by their children or grandchildren, or need housing
in one of their vacation estates, or crowd their specialists’ waiting rooms.
They do not worry about the effects of illegal immigration on the wages of
low-income Americans. Dealing first-hand with the ramifications of open borders
is for unenlightened, illiberal little people.
Obama’s economic legacy is rarely appreciated. He has
institutionalized the idea that unemployment between 6 and 7 percent is normal,
that annual deficits over $500 billion reflect frugality, that soaring power,
food, and fuel costs are not proof of inflation, that zero interest rates are
the reward for thrift, that higher taxes are always a beginning, never an end,
and that there is no contradiction when elite progressives — the Obamas, the
Clintons, the Warrens — trash the 1-percenters, while doing everything in their
power to live just like them.
We are the roost and, to paraphrase the president’s
former spiritual adviser, Obama’s chickens are now coming home to us.
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