Obama: An Unqualified Success

It really is starting to feel like going after Obama's grasp of foreign policy is not unlike dynamiting fish in a bucket. But every time it looks like he has committed the ultimately breathtaking blunder which will never be topped, he manages to outdo himself more stunningly than I'd ever had the audacity to hope.

The latest oral-pedal event took place in Oregon this weekend, when the junior Senator declared that "tiny countries" like Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Cuba should not be considered serious threats, and should be engaged directly by the highest levels of the USGOV. The 'reasoning' here is that previous US Administrations engaged in direct talks with the USSR, which was a "greater" threat, and that it was on the strength of those talks that the Berlin Wall fell, Communism collapsed, etc., etc.

Once again, words simply fail me. Ed Morrissey's above-linked fisking of the latest Obama silliness is worth reading in its entirety, in order to grasp the full breadth of Obama's awe-inspiring incoherence on matters of past and present geopolitics. Indeed, watching Obama stammer and stumble through his speech, it was easy to imagine a part of him screaming, "do you even hear what the devil you're saying here, dude?!" The premise that the mere size of an opponent's national acreage or military budget should determine our assessment of the threat it represents goes way beyond the merely naive:

[T]he danger in Iranian nuclear weapons has nothing to do with the capacity of its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Iran’s sponsorship of terrorist organizations will allow them to partner with any small group of lunatics who want to smuggle a nuclear weapon into any Western city — London, Rome, Washington DC, Los Angeles, take your pick. That’s the problem with nuclear proliferation; it doesn’t take a large army to threaten annihilation any longer, which is why we work so hard to keep those weapons out of the hands of non-rational actors like Iran. The Soviets may have been evil, but they were rational, and we could count on their desire to survive to rely on the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. The Iranians believe that a worldwide conflagration will have Allah deliver the world to Islam, so a nuclear exchange may fall within their policy, and that’s assuming we could establish their culpability for a sneak nuclear attack to the extent where a President Obama would order a nuclear reprisal.

Let's be charitable here. Let's work temporarily under the assumption that Obama does understand the radical asymmetry at work with a nation like Iran, much of whose military leverage rides on the support of non-conventional forces like Hezbollah, and which therefore represents a greater threat than a simplistic accounting of its stand-up military would indicate. Let us assume, further, that he understands the prestige that direct, high-level, unconditional talks would confer on such a nation. Let's say that he was short-handing his message for a political speech, but that his actual plans if elected would possess a great deal more subtlety. Even granting such a mountain of mulligans, however, we are still left with a prospective leader who is so strikingly unable to refrain from giving a damningly mistaken impression of his plans --despite his much-vaunted eloquence-- that any rational, reasonably well-informed observer of history and world affairs who simply took him at his word would be forced to conclude that he is either a rank neophyte, a certifiable dunce, or a knowing enemy propagandist.

By contrast, we have John McCain, who today fired back at Obama's latest foray into aggressive self-disqualification. For all his faults --and they are legion-- McCain has shown an admirable grasp of the stakes in our dealings with Iran, and an excellent ability to put the relevant issues into words which do not require an army of spin doctors and media apologists to finesse into an easily digestible paste:

Senator Obama has declared, and repeatedly reaffirmed his intention to meet the President of Iran without any preconditions, likening it to meetings between former American Presidents and the leaders of the Soviet Union. Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama’s inexperience and reckless judgment. Those are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess. An ill conceived meeting between the President of the United States and the President of Iran, and the massive world media coverage it would attract, would increase the prestige of an implacable foe of the United States, and reinforce his confidence that Iran’s dedication to acquiring nuclear weapons, supporting terrorists and destroying the State of Israel had succeeded in winning concessions from the most powerful nation on earth. And he is unlikely to abandon the dangerous ambitions that will have given him a prominent role on the world stage.

Say what you will about McCain, but when it comes to matters like these, he Gets it. And, unlike the current crop of Democratic candidates (or our current President), he is actually able to be intentionally funny when the situation calls for it.

Ah, Obama. I wonder what he'll say next...

SOF Raid Into Syria: Multitasking in Mesopotamia

Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal reports that today's raid 5 miles into Syrian territory from Iraq was an unprecedented operation whose purpose was apparently the capture of a very high value target:

The US military incursion into Syria was aimed at the senior leader of al Qaeda's extensive network that funnels foreign fighters, weapons, and cash from Syria into Iraq, a senior intelligence official told The Long War Journal.

US special operations hunter-killer teams entered Syria in an attempt to capture Abu Ghadiya, a senior al Qaeda leader who has been in charge of the Syrian network since 2005. US intelligence analysts identified Ghadiya as the leader of the Syrian network, The Washington Post reported in July. Ghadiya was identified as a “major target” by the US military in February 2008.

When I first heard that Special Forces had actually infiltrated and dismounted from their gunships for this raid, my first thought was that we had received some extremely credible intel on the location of some very important AQI figure, possibly even AQI leader Abu Ayyub al Masri himself. There was simply no other explanation for not just launching a hellfire or five down a chimney. This post from the invaluable FormerSpook at "In From The Cold" echoed my suspicions.

Excellent as it would have been to capture or kill al Masri, this is just about as good. Capturing or eliminating someone like Ghadiya, while he was strolling free and unworried on Syrian soil would accomplish several ends at once.

First, it would deal a severe blow to the organizational and command structure of what remains of AQI. You can rightly make the "Hydra-head" argument here, but it would only go so far; the capacity for an embattled organization like AQI to continually replenish its senior-most commanders and facilitators is finite. The loss of organizational memory and continuity which such merciless attrition inflicts will have a cumulative effect on an organization's ability to integrate its activities and stay anywhere near inside the decision cycle of its enemies. Its activities will fragment, its operational security will degrade (yielding more actionable intelligence, and thus accelerating the cycle), and the degree to which it is able to attract recruits will erode in much the way that the oft-quoted character from The Sun Also Rises went broke..."gradually, and then suddenly."

Next, a raid into Syrian territory would send a message to Syrian president Assad that there are costs associated with continuing his policy of winking at the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq. Although that flow has slowed to a relative trickle over the last year or so (but don't say the Surge worked!), it is a particularly toxic trickle. The tacit (?) complicity of the Damascus regime in the continued flow of terroristic Jihadis into northwestern Iraq had greatly complicated the pacification and reconstruction of that region, and it is high time that it encountered consequences. For, despite the predictable plume of propaganda which rises from any such bold action, the fact is that such a highly politically dangerous operation --which would have had to be approved at a very high level-- would not have been undertaken unless there were rock-solid intel which supported the taking of such risk. Much like last September's Israeli strike on what is generally believed to have been an unfinished Syrian nuclear reactor site, this operation is a signal to Assad that others are, indeed, paying attention to his actions, and that there are limits to how far he can push without experiencing push-back. Given the renowned Syrian penchant for gamesmanship, such firm limits are absolutely essential.

On yet another geopolitical level, an action like today's raid puts a prominent punctuation mark on efforts to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran. There are definite carrots dangling before Assad's eyes (the potential return of the Golan Heights, via some sort of negotiated settlement with Israel, for example). But the sticks which would drop on his head if he should be less than comprehensive in his divorce from the Mullahcracy do bear emphasizing. One of the Iranian regime's most potent weapons (given how "tiny" a country it is...) is its ability to forward-deploy Hezbollah operatives into a variety of theaters. Since Hezbollah is very much a creature of Lebanon and Syria (though nurtured and funded from Tehran), a schism between Syria and Iran would drain much of the mojo from that organization in its capacity as unconventional forces of the Islamic Republic.

Finally, this action further emphasizes the fundamental continuity between the various theaters of operation within the Long War. Reading about the raid into Syria, I was reminded of nothing else so much as the various similar raids and strikes into Pakistani territory, in an effort to attack AQ Prime and its Taliban lapdogs. At the most fundamental level, the two areas of operation are as contiguous on a strategic level as they are distant on the tactical. This last is a reality which is, alas, all-too often obscured to score political points, amid much nonsense about where the "Real Enemy" resides. The Real Enemy resides wherever the ideology of Radical Islamism takes up arms to expand its purchase in the world. The task of our generation is to beat it back wherever it so asserts itself.

I fear the time may soon come when we will look back wistfully on the days when we lived in a Nation which would take bold risks such as these to protect our allies and ourselves. As of this writing, there is still just a bit of time to weigh the real risks, to decisively reject the pious pontifications of addle-headed amnesiacs, and to keep us on the offensive against the evil (there, I said it!) arrayed against us.

(UPDATED to airbrush several small but irksome spelling and minor structural errors from wee-hours blogging)