Barack Carter or Jimmy Obama - Take your pick

from Cheat-Seeking Missiles
Posted by: Laer

Were you, like me, made to feel a little less secure when the holiday weekend reports on the North Korean nuclear test and missile launches included the news that the NoKos gave us a one-hour warning? Did you think, like I did, that a presidential administration that was on its foreign policy and intelligence game wouldn’t need a one-hour warning because they’d already have a good idea what was going on?

And then there was the standard-issue statement of outrage from our president. You know the one; it’s the one from the third cubby on the left. “Outrage … blah, blah … reckless … yada, yada … U.N. Security Council.”

I didn’t hear an acknowledgement from the admin or the larger left that John Bolton was right; after all, he’d written in the WSJ on May 20 to “get ready for another North Korean nuke test.”
In fact, that was the headline. William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection notes:

As usual, the Left lashed out at Bolton, who may be third after George Bush and Dick Cheney in being portrayed as crazy and paranoid. Bolton has been derided as “the neocon’s neocon” who “laps up the hosannas of fellow knuckle-draggers.”

Allison Kilkenny at Huffington Post applied the left-wing attack on Bolton Specifically as to Bolton’s North Korea position, in a post titled, Update: John Bolton Still Crazy:

… Today, Bolton chose to growl at the old, but reliable, enemy of North Korea. This is a particularly vintage move when one considers North Korea already tried to strike fear into the hearts of Americans last month when they tested a missile that fizzled and fell into the ocean 1,300 miles off the east coast of Japan. Bolton’s stance is pretty brave because his frenzied ideology flies in the face of scholarly counsel.

It turns out that Ms. Kilkenny’s post proved just who still is crazy, and it’s not Bolton.

You can call John Bolton many things. ”Right” is one of them. “Jimmy Carter” is not. The same cannot be said of the president. It’ll take a bit more time for history to prove the wrongness of his foreign policy, but the cat-calls about his Carter streak are getting louder, including this from Forbes:

A series of actions taken by the Obama administration have created an impression in Iran, the “Af-Pak” region, China and North Korea that Obama does not have the political will to retaliate decisively to acts that are detrimental to U.S. interests, and to international peace and security.

Among such actions, one could cite: the soft policy toward Iran: the reluctance to articulate strongly U.S. determination to support the security interests of Israel; the ambivalent attitude toward Pakistan despite its continued support to anti-India terrorist groups and its ineffective action against the sanctuaries of Al-Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistani territory; its silence on the question of the violation of the human rights of the Burmese people and the continued illegal detention of Aung San Suu Kyi by the military regime in Myanmar; and its silence on the Tibetan issue.

Its over-keenness to court Beijing’s support in dealing with the economic crisis, and its anxiety to ensure the continued flow of Chinese money into U.S. Treasury bonds, have also added to the soft image of the U.S.

The article, by retired Indian intelligence officer and China expert Bahukutumbi Raman, wraps up by pointing out that it took Jimmy Carter more than three years to turn America’s overseas reputation into pudding, but Obama seems intent to accomplish the same in his first year in office.
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