State of the Union Address on Foreign Policy: Careful Phrasing Conceals Disasters
While the State of the Union message was overwhelmingly domestically oriented, the foreign policy sections were most interesting. I’ll review them here.
The president began in the same neo-patriotic mode used in the second inaugural address, with a special emphasis on thanking U.S. troops. He used the imagery of the end of World War II paralleling the return of troops from Iraq to promote his idea that the American economy must be totally restructured.
Obama defined his main successes — careful to credit the military (whose budget he seeks to cut deeply and whose health benefits he’s already reduced) rather than his usual emphasis on taking the credit for himself — as the following:
For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq.
For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country.
Most of Al Qaida’s top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken. And some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.
Now there certainly have been accomplishments on these three fronts, but these claims are also profoundly misleading and very carefully worded. Let’s take them one at a time.
— It is true that U.S. forces are largely out of Iraq, yet this was inevitable, with one key reservation. There was no likelihood they would be there in a large combat role forever. Whatever one thinks of the invasion of Iraq, the American forces were staying for an interim period until the Iraqi army was ready. Any successor to George W. Bush would have pulled out the combat forces.
The reservation, of course, is that it was the success of the surge — which Obama opposed and his new secretary of defense (yes, he will be confirmed) Chuck Hagel opposed. So he is taking credit for a policy that was inevitable and that was made possible by a success that he was against.
Lest you think that assessment is unfair to Obama, consider this: he did absolutely nothing to make this outcome happen. No policy or strategy of his administration made the withdrawal faster or more certain.
— This is a strange phrase: “For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country.” It is a new way of putting out the “Obama killed Osama” meme, while hinting that al-Qaeda is not a threat to the United States. Well, as Benghazi shows, al-Qaeda is still a threat, but wording the sentence the way Obama did implies otherwise without saying so and looking foolish at making an obviously false claim.
— Notice a very strange and ungrammatical formulation: “Most of al-Qaieda’s top lieutenants have been defeated.” I think this can only be understood as an incomplete change of the traditional slogan that al-Qaeda has been defeated. The administration can no longer make this argument so it is looking for something that gets in bin Ladin’s assassination and that of other al-Qaeda leaders (al-Qaeda has been decapitated) while hinting that al-Qaeda has been defeated.
In other words, someone did a bad job of proofreading the speech. Of course, all of this glosses over the fact that al-Qaeda hasn’t been defeated. It is on the march in Mali, the Gaza Strip, Somalia, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Yemen, and other places.
Incidentally, al-Qaeda will always be defeated politically because it has no strong political program or structure. That’s why al-Qaeda kills but the Muslim Brotherhood wins. And Obama is helping the Muslim Brotherhood.
A simply excellent commentary on O’s State of the Union address. Frankly, I rarely listen to any of these as they are full of silly platitudes, meaningless phrases & 99% brown sugar. However, O has reached the pinnacle of lies in his address. Certainly, NO one could have done it better than O-even Bill Clinton. And, quite frankly, everyone knows what an excellent liar he is.
Our Dear Leader just yaps away like an annoying, arrogant & proud poodle at the world while our country races down the path to the garbage heap of nations. Sadly, our 0nce great land will never recover from the Obama regime.
How can so many not see that the Emperor (meant in every sense of the word) has no clothes & is a complete phoney & failure? It is truly beyond me…
“If American cars are on those foreign streets, it will be because they were manufactured in China. (I wonder if Obama’s choice of South Korea rather than China as the Asian country in his list was deliberately made to conceal that fact.)”
Weren’t South Korea, Panama and Colombia the three free trade agreements Democrats had blocked under Bush but finally ratified under Obama? That’s where I assumed his speech was pointing to. With one of their own in the White House, Dems are free traders. (As with NAFTA and GATT under Clinton. Would a Democratic Congress have passed either of these agreements with Bush 41 in the WH?)
This guy Obam is ridiculing the political awareness of Americans and at most the global community. I’ve got a disturbing hunch, he himself is not aware of the facts, nor had he not gone across the speech before delivery, his writers pure charlatans fishing accolades for their Big Patron the president, than serving the people with facts and truths.
This person, is a real inspired one by the ‘abomination of desolation’. He is a typical or exact replica of it.
I disagree with Mr Rubin: the State of the Union speech by Pres Obama was cogent, eloquent and poignant. It is a privilege to be alive in the Obama era, year in which America at last shed its legacy of racism. From his pioneering approach to Islamophobia to advocacy for social justice, Pres Obama will effect fundamental change in the United States and throughout the world. Let us open the borders and set the minimum wage to $100,000 per year as an innovative program to eliminate poverty in this hemisphere. Watch and wait as unilateral cuts in the American nuclear arsenal inspires the world — and in particular Iran and North Korea — to eliminate their own nuclear weapons programs. The Nobel-recognized moral example of Pres Obama will surely bring peace in our time.
Let me guess moshe, you are also in favor of getting rid of marijuana laws.
after re-reading you comment, I realized it was sarcasm.
“… & 99% brown sugar.” Ah – ha! I knew you were racist! (Sorry…couldn’t help myself.)
With the situation in the middle east becoming more unstable by the day and several large African nations perpetually on the brink of a Muslim / Christian civil conflict I can’t see even Obama’s delusional world view maintaining his run of imaginary foreign policy successes
This is an interesting and still-timely commentary, but it seems to apply to the 2012 SOTU, not the one delivered by Obama this week.
Notice a very strange and ungrammatical formulation: “Most of al-Qaieda’s top lieutenants have been defeated.”
This is neither ungrammatical nor strange. And, with respect, it’s not too difficult to find “ungrammatical formulations” in any of Dr. Rubin’s posts. An annoying recurring example is the improper use of “would” in conditional protases expressing past-tense counterfactuals.