Obama is really the epitome of the empty-suit suite.  I sometimes think he is so vacuous you can here a sucking sound when you meet him in person. Even more disturbing is the fact that Obama (and his Obamabots) are so blissfully unaware of his state of utter emptiness.  

Case in point this week is the fact no one knows what Obama plans are for Iraq.  He has spoken out of all sides of his mouth, telling each audience or listener what they want to hear, not what he plans to do are take into account when formulating his decisions. And he appears to be lying to foreign leaders publicly:

SEN. BARACK OBAMA told Iraq’s foreign minister this week that he plans to visit the country between now and the presidential election. We think that’s a good thing, not because Sen. John McCain has been prodding the candidate to do it but because it will give Mr. Obama an opportunity to refresh his badly outdated plan for Iraq. To do that, the Democrat needs to listen more to dedicated Iraqi leaders like Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister — who, it seems, didn’t hold back during their telephone conversation.

…

the situation in Iraq has changed dramatically, with violence down 75 percent from its peak and the Iraqi government and army in control of most of the country. But Mr. Obama has not altered his position: He still proposes withdrawing most U.S. troops according to a fixed timetable, set to the most rapid pace at which commanders have said American forces could be pulled out.

Mr. Zebari, who has served as foreign minister in every Iraqi government since 2003, finds Mr. Obama’s proposal worrying.

…

“We have a deadly enemy,” Mr. Zebari said. “When he sees that you commit yourself to a certain timetable, he will use this to increase pressure and attacks, to make it look as though he is forcing you out. We have many actors who would love to take advantage of that opportunity.”

…

Mr. Zebari said that in addition to promising a visit, Mr. Obama said that “if there would be a Democratic administration, it will not take any irresponsible, reckless, sudden decisions or action to endanger your gains, your achievements, your stability or security. Whatever decision he will reach will be made through close consultation with the Iraqi government and U.S. militarycommanders in the field.”

Obama denies the most crucial elements of his discussion with Zebari, which is why this is so disturbing. Either Obama is not paying attention, or he is so thick-headed, so stubborn, so enamored with his own messianic powers that he could care less what people with years of on-the-ground experience are trying to warn him not to do.  Obama is a neophyte – and apparently an incredibly naive and ignorant one to boot.  And that is a really scary combination when it comes to the very subtle and dangerous business of national security.

His stubborn and two-faced positions on Iraq, clearly one of the most important issues of our time, has some people getting very, very nervous.  Now some are making the argument that Obama’s only shot at gaining power is to continue to lie to America and the world about Iraq. And Iraq is not the only subject where Obama is starting to really, really worry people.  He is so wedded to the pre 9-11 faux Nirvana of ignorance about terrorism he wants to go back to the time where we chased terrorists with lawyers.

Lawyers are no match of suicidal Jihadists, mainly because their strongest case is after the fact, when there are dead bodies littering the ground at the WTC.  Once an act has been accomplished, then the law kicks in. The folks at Powerline note this suicidal ignorance, and reference Andrew McCarthy who has first hand experience in the futility of defending America with a phalanx of lawyers, ready to jump once the terrorists actually attack and kill.  Here is the comment from the experienced McCarthy:

This is a remarkably ignorant account of the American experience with jihadism. In point of fact, while the government managed to prosecute many people responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, many alsoescaped prosecution because of the limits on civilian criminal prosecution. Some who contributed to the attack, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, continued to operate freely because they were beyond the system’s capacity to apprehend. Abdul Rahman Yasin was released prematurely because there was not sufficient evidence to hold him — he fled to Iraq, where he was harbored for a decade (and has never been apprehended).

But let’s assume incorrectly, for argument’s sake, that everyone was brought to justice in that case. What about Khobar Towers, Sen. Obama? After Iran and Hezbollah, perhaps with al-Qaeda’s assistance, killed 19 members of the United States Air Force, the Clinton administration responded with … a criminal investigation. The result? No arrests — in fact, no indictment was even filed until 2001.

After the embassy bombings, the aforementioned bin Laden was indicted along with his top henchman Ayman al-Zawahiri and nearly two dozen others.

McCarthy goes on to expose over and over and over how Obama’s naive ignorance is dangerously wrong. Is Obama ignoring history or is it something deeper?  Neville Chamberlain was never this bad, and he was a unmitigated disaster!  Ralph Peters also does a number on the Obama The Oblivious:

This week, Obama claimed, again, that he’d promptly capture Osama bin Laden. OK, tell me how:Specifically, which concrete measures would he take that haven’t been taken? How would he force our intelligence agencies to locate bin Laden? And he can’t just respond, “That’s classified.”

He also claimed that fighting terrorism is a law-enforcement problem, not a military one (should we send the NYPD to Mosul and Kandahar?), and that the answer to terrorism is the approach taken after the 1993 World Trade Center attack, featuring conventional trials and prison terms.

That flaccid post-’93 response only encouraged terrorists – who are unfazed by the prospect of a US prison, where the quality of life’s better than it was at home. The Clinton administration’s hesitancy and softness gave us the subsequent attacks on the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, on our embassies in East Africa, on the USS Cole and, ultimately, the events of 9/11.

The senator needs to tell us why it would be different now.

I think we are seeing some global parallels as this War on Terror unfolds.  We saw many times people grasp for the conventional wisdom, the tried-and-failed policies that dominated the debate for decades. For the West this was a Faustian choice that promoted short term stability over the long term, tougher solution of freedom.  For decades we propped up dictatorships as pawns against the larger enemy of Communism, only to have those cesspools rot to the core and, after the fall of communism, become the source for the modern threats.

Saddam Hussien’s Iraq and the Taliban of Afghanistan after the fall of the USSR are perfect examples. The desire to walk away from Iraq and the war on terror is just another knee-jerk response to run back to the old days of ignoring evil instead of dealing with it. 

That is one parallel.  The second one was that terrorism was the best solution to exploit the first condition.  If status quo was the over-arching historic goal, then terrorism was the method of exploiting concessions and money out of those trying to hold together the status quo.  By its nature the status quo approach removed the option of large, military responses from the table, simply because military actions (as we have seen since 9-11) completely up-end the status quo.  So with that option off the table terrorism is a way to walk up to the line and maximize concessions from the West.  

This old paradigm is why al-Qaeda thought they could destroy the West with 9-11 and subsequent hits on Europe, and why the Sunnis in Iraq initially allied with al-Qaeda.  They were still operating under the premise that terrorism was the kind of localized act that could extort the West while not creating a massive response.  Well, under George W Bush this paradigm was thrown out the window.  Every terrorist attack was met with a strong response.  When the Sunnis allied with al-Qaeda we redoubled our efforts, and forced al-Qaeda to expose their inner brutal evil as they tried to retain their hold over the Iraqi Sunnis.

This very recent and still unfolding history cannot be ignored when contemplating where to go with Iraq. One worries me is the Messiah’s Obamabots are making the same Faustian choice that led us into 9-11 in the first place.  They are more like the Sunnis when they allied with AQ, relying on outdated paradigms to solve their dilemma.  Obama and his minions are not yet up to where the current Sunni thinking as reached, where they realize the old paradigm is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong.

The Sunnis (and Afghanis) had to experience the bloody mistakes in their decision process before they could adjust and get on the right path.  Bush had to do the same thing in some ways when he moved from the Rumsfeld approach to the Petraeus approach (though that required the Sunnis to be brutalized to the point they changed their overall world view and switched sides). 

Is America going to follow Obama has he is forced to learn harsh, bloody and all to obvious lesson here? Are we going to have to go down the wrong path (again) like so many have done in this war against Islamo Fascism because of simple impatience?  Is our impatience worth the price in lives and injuries that will results (or even might result)? When is Obama and his groupies going to stop being teenage idol-worshippers and start being serious about the lives at stake?

Obama is an empty suit.  And that is a very scary thing to contemplate when tens of thousands of lives are at stake.

Tags: al-Qaeda, Iraq, Obama, Victory