Obama Uses World Stage to Apologize & Express Regret

Since taking office, President Obama has made a habit of using podiums abroad to apologize and express regret for American behavior of past years.

from FOXNews.com
Sunday, May 10, 2009

During the 2008 presidential race, then-President George W. Bush took heat for seeming to criticize Barack Obama as an appeaser during an address to Israel's parliament.

It was considered poor form to take shots, direct or indirect, at a U.S. dignitary while overseas.

But since taking office, Obama has made a habit of using overseas podiums to delicately jab at his predecessor by apologizing and expressing regret for American behavior in recent years.

While the move could yield diplomatic fruit by easing tensions between the U.S. and nations that felt sidelined during the Bush administration, Republicans have also criticized the president for using the world stage to scold his own country.

The following is a list, in reverse chronological order, of the Obama administration's overseas apologies and clarifications to date:

April 18: "We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations."

-- President Obama, at the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad

April 16: "Too often, the United States has not pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors. We have been too easily distracted by other priorities and have failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas. My administration is committed to renewing and sustaining a broader partnership between the United States and the hemisphere on behalf of our common prosperity and our common security."
-- President Obama, in an op-ed that appeared in U.S. and Latin American newspapers prior to the Summit of the Americas

April 6: "I know there have been difficulties these last few years. I know that the trust that binds us has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practiced. Let me say this as clearly as I can: the United States is not at war with Islam."
-- President Obama, in Ankara, Turkey

April 3: "In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive. But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious. Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what's bad. On both sides of the Atlantic, these attitudes have become all too common. They are not wise. ... They threaten to widen the divide across the Atlantic and leave us both more isolated."
-- President Obama, in Strasbourg, France

April 2: "It is true, as my Italian friend has said, that the (economic) crisis began in the U.S. I take responsibility, even if I wasn't even president at the time."
-- President Obama, at the G20 in London, as reported by Germany's Der Spiegel

April 2: "I would like to think that with my election and the early decisions that we've made, that you're starting to see some restoration of America's standing in the world."
-- President Obama, at G20 summit in London

April 1: "If you look at the sources of this crisis, the United States certainly has some accounting to do with respect to a regulatory system that was inadequate."
-- President Obama, at a press conference ahead of the G20 in London

March 25: "I feel very strongly we have a co-responsibility (for drug-fueled violence in Mexico). ... Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade. Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians."
-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, en route to Mexico City

Jan. 26: "All too often the United States starts by dictating ... and we don't always know all the factors that are involved. So let's listen. And I think if we do that, then there's a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs. ... My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect."
-- President Obama, in an interview with Al Arabiya

The Obama administration has also expressed plenty of regret stateside as it rolls back some of Bush's counter-terrorism policies. The president, for instance, acknowledged potential "mistakes" as he addressed CIA employees April 20 and discussed his ban of enhanced interrogation techniques.

"Don't be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we've made some mistakes. That's how we learn," Obama said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Urkel, Oops.. Obama: Did I Forget To Apologize For That?

The President hasn't apologized enough

from American Thinker

By Edward Bernard Glick

May 05, 2009

President Barack Obama has made abject apologies for the actions of his predecessors a cornerstone of his foreign policy."

In his recent trips to Europe and the Caribbean, he apologized for the arrogance of President George W. Bush, and he sought forgiveness for the latter's treatment of terrorists captured after 9/11. But Mr. Obama should go further.

He should apologize to the French, the British, and the Russians because we entered the First World War three years after they did. "The War to end all Wars" started in 1914; yet we didn't come into it until 1917.

Mr. Obama should apologize because the United States failed to join the League of Nations, the predecessor organization to the United Nations. Our absence was a compelling reason why the League stood by and did nothing, in the 1930s, when Imperial Japan invaded China, Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, and Nazi Germany took the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, annexed Austria, and remilitarized the Rhineland.

Mr. Obama should apologize to the Japanese because we made them attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor was our fault because we never bothered to learn Japanese language, culture, and history. In Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Idaho we discriminated against both Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans.

And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the run-up to Pearl Harbor, steadfastly refused to let the Japanese extend their power in East Asia. That's why they destroyed much of our Pacific fleet. We ignored their vital interests and their legitimate national concerns.

President Obama should apologize to the Germans as well. They would never have declared war on us if FDR had acquiesced in the Nazi need for lebensraum in other parts of Europe. Also, to his eternal shame, President Roosevelt never engaged Adolf Hitler in dialogue. Aren't all problems solvable if you negotiate about them long enough and hard enough? As in the case of Japan, President Roosevelt never bothered to fathom the "root causes" of Germany's unhappiness with the United States.

Moreover, instead of ending the Second World War as rapidly as possible, he warned that the war would end only when the Allies were completely victorious. Instead of waging it as humanely as possible, he permitted carpet bombing of both German and Japanese cities, sometimes killing 100,000 enemy civilians in a single night.

That kind of talk and that method of warfare might have been acceptable to an aging British imperialist like Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who preached "victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival."

But, then as now, there's no room for such war talk and such warfare in liberal America.

President Obama must also apologize to the Koreans, the Cubans, and the Israelis.

By not decisively defeating the North Koreans in the 1950s' Korean War, and breaking one of the world's most brutal regimes, President Harry S. Truman made it possible for the communists to develop and sell nuclear weapons and associated delivery systems. The North Korean leaders thus remain a mortal danger to their people, to their neighbors, and to faraway regions in which terrorists and others are more than eager to buy and use the items of bellicosity that the cash-starved North Koreans want to sell.

The Cubans are owed an American apology because, by failing to overthrow Fidel and Raul Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, President John F. Kennedy condemned the Cuban people to live for 50 years under the most repressive regime in all of Latin America.

Finally, President Obama should apologize to the Israelis for, so far, refusing to let them strike Iran. He may believe that Americans are willing to live with Iran's nuclear weapons. After all, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not calling America an illegitimate "entity" and threatening to wipe us off the face of the earth. But the Israelis, many of whom are the sons and daughters of Holocaust victims, can never ignore such an existential threat.

Hitler and the Holocaust have taught the Israelis that if someone says he wants to kill you, you had better believe him and kill him first.

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