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Dr. Hanson: Obama has left the Middle East in ruins…

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Who is Dr. Victor Davis Hanson? Read his impressive bio HERE.

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson via National Review:

Obama’s unfortunate Middle East legacy was predicated on six flawed assumptions:

(1) a special relationship with Turkey;

(2) distancing the U.S. from Israel;

(3) empathy for Islamist governments as exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt;

(4) a sort of non-aggression agreement with Iran;

(5) expecting his own multicultural fides to resonate in the region;

(6) pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Let us examine what has followed.

Obama’s special relationship with Recep Erdogan proved disastrous from the get-go, as Erdogan immediately began to provoke Israel and promote Islamist revolutionaries. Turkey today not only dislikes the U.S., but also poses an existential problem for the West. It is a NATO member that is antithetical to everything NATO stands for: the protection of human rights and constitutional government against the onslaught of aggressive totalitarian regimes. Turkey is now operating like the old Soviet Union in using murderous proxies to enhance its own stature; for example, it finds ISIS useful in whittling down the Kurds. As a rule of thumb, any enemy of Erdogan’s Turkey — Israel, the Kurds, Greek Cyprus, Greece, Egypt — is likely to be far more friendly to the U.S. and NATO than are other nations in the region. If Turkey were attacked by ISIS, Syria, Iran, or the Kurds, would Belgium or Greece send in its youth under NATO’s Article V?

What did ankle-biting Israel accomplish other than giving Hamas a green light to send rockets into the Jewish State in hopes that we might do something stupid like slow down scheduled arms shipments to Israel or shut down Ben Gurion Airport for a day? Israel has nothing to do with the slaughter in Libya or Syria or Iraq, but it is a constant reminder that the United States is indifferent to its friends while it courts its enemies. As Obama’s new policy against ISIS is shaping up, Iran is emerging as more of an ally in his eyes than is Israel.

Our once-close relationship with Egypt is ruined. All that is left is U.S. foreign aid to Cairo, largely because we have no idea of how not to give a near-starving Egypt assistance. Obama, under the guidance of Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice, gyrated from Mubarak to Morsi to el-Sisi, as the U.S. went loudly full circle, from disowning the pro-American kleptocrat to embracing the anti-American theocrat to humiliating the neutral autocrat.

Obama kept quiet when a million Iranian protesters hit the streets in 2009 to show their disgust with theocratic corruption. Apparently the American president thought the pro-American tendencies of the young protesters were proof of their inauthenticity.

…

In order to win over the Islamic street, Obama has tried almost everything to remind the Middle East that America is no longer run by a white male conservative from a Texas oil family. His multifaceted efforts have ranged from the fundamental to the ridiculous. The Al Arabiya interview, the Cairo Speech, the apology tour, the loud (but hypocritical) disparagement of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, the new euphemisms for jihadist terror, the multicultural trendy pronunciation of Talîban and Pâkistan, and references to his father’s religion and his own middle name resulted in American popularity ratings in many Middle Eastern countries lower than during the Bush administration. In the Middle East, the only thing worse than being unapologetically proud of past U.S. foreign policy is being obsequiously ashamed of it.

Continue reading HERE.

Budget, Econ, Obama, True Talking Points

VDH: We too can lose our civilization…

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Dr. Victor Davis Hanson (excerpt):

In my state, Californians for 40 years have hiked taxes; grown their government; vastly expanded entitlements; put farmland, timberland, and oil and gas lands off limits; and opened their borders to millions of illegal aliens. They apparently assumed that they had inherited so much wealth from prior generations and that their state was so naturally rich, that a continually better life was their natural birthright.

It wasn’t. Now, as in Greece, the veneer of civilization is proving pretty thin in California. Hospitals no longer have the money to offer sophisticated long-term medical care to the indigent. Cities no longer have the funds to self-insure themselves from the accustomed barrage of monthly lawsuits. When thieves rip copper wire out of street lights, the streets stay dark. Most state residents would rather go to the dentist these days than queue up and take a number at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Hospital emergency rooms neither have room nor act as if there’s much of an emergency.

Traffic flows no better on most of the state’s freeways than it did 40 years ago — and often much worse, given the crumbling infrastructure and increased traffic. Once-excellent K–12 public schools now score near the bottom in nationwide tests. The California state-university system keeps adding administrators to the point where they have almost matched the number of faculty, though half of the students who enter CSU need remedial reading and math. Despite millions of dollars in tutoring, half the students still don’t graduate. The taxpayer is blamed in constant harangues for not ponying up more money, rather than administrators being faulted for a lack of reform.

In 1960, there were far fewer government officials, far fewer prisons, far fewer laws, and far fewer lawyers — and yet the state was a far safer place than it is a half-century later. Technological progress — whether iPhones or Xboxes — can often accompany moral regress. There are not yet weeds in our cities, but those too may be coming.

The average Californian, like the average Greek, forgot that civilization is fragile. Its continuance requires respect for the law, tough-minded education, collective thrift, private investment, individual self-reliance, and common codes of behavior and civility — and exempts no one from those rules. Such knowledge and patterns of civilized behavior, slowly accrued over centuries, can be lost in a single generation.

A keen visitor to Athens — or Los Angeles — during the last decade not only could have seen that things were not quite right, but also could have concluded that they could not go on as they were. And so they are not.

Washington, please take heed.