NOTABLES: Persons of interest

Forgive me for 'indulging' myself, but for the benefit of those who do not live in the USA and may still be getting the European media's starry-eyed view of Barack Obama, here is an account of what Obama's nine months of appeasement and apology and even occasional grovelling have 'earned him so far'....

And this, without even mentioning the domestic debacle that has seen his popularity dip to 49% today compared to 78% when he took office in January. By a great majority, Americans are asking why the administration is so obsessed with a super-expensice healthcare reform that the nation clearly cannot afford now, when they are not doing anything about creating jobs - which the polls identify as the public's #1 concern.



Debacle in Moscow:
Obama’s foreign policy
is amateurish and wrapped in naïveté
By Charles Krauthammer

Oct. 16, 2009


About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award “premature,” as if the brilliance of Obama’s foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.

To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points.

After all, this was precisely the spin on the president’s various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration — excuse me, outreach and understanding — is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign-policy successes shall come.

Chauncey Gardiner [the 'hero' of Jerzy Kozinski's brilliant 1971 satirical novel Being There about, among other, things, how emptiness triumphs so easily in today's media-manufactured world - he was a simple unlettered man whom everyone took to be a genius and became a worldwide celebrity whose advice was sought by the US President even, simply because he answered every question put to him in terms of gardening, which is the only thing he really knew] could not have said it better. Well, at nine months, let’s review.

What’s come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program.

What’s come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama’s shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told). China hasn’t moved an inch on North Korea, Iran, or human rights. Indeed, it’s pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

What’s come from the new-respect-for-Muslims Cairo speech and the unprecedented pressure on Israel for a total settlement freeze? “The settlement push backfired,” reports the Washington Post, and Arab-Israeli peace prospects have “arguably regressed.”

And what’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign-policy stroke — the sudden abrogation of missile-defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the Eastern Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.

But maybe not gratuitous. Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it’s too late?

Just wait and see, said administration officials, who then gleefully played up an oblique statement by Pres. Dmitry Medvedev a week later as vindication of the missile-defense betrayal.

The Russian statement was so equivocal that such a claim seemed a ridiculous stretch at the time. Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get?

“Russia Not Budging on Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart.” Such was the Washington Post headline’s succinct summary of the debacle.

Note how thoroughly Clinton was rebuffed. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov declared that “threats, sanctions, and threats of pressure” are “counterproductive.” Note: It’s not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

It gets worse. Having failed to get any movement from the Russians, Clinton herself moved — to accommodate the Russian position!

Sanctions? What sanctions? “We are not at that point yet,” she averred. “That is not a conclusion we have reached. . . . It is our preference that Iran work with the international community.”

But wait a minute. Didn’t Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face “sanctions that have bite” and that it would have to take “a new course or face consequences”?

Gone with the wind. It’s the U.S. that’s now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We’re not doing sanctions now, you see. We’re back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.

Henry Kissinger once said that the main job of Anatoly Dobrynin, the perennial Soviet ambassador to Washington, was to tell the Kremlin leadership that whenever they received a proposal from the United States that appeared disadvantageous to the United States, not to assume it was a trick.

No need for a Dobrynin today. The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck, needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and “reset” buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever, or even serious behind it.

It is amateurishness, wrapped in naïveté, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.


Something Mr. Krauthammer failed to cite was Obama's deliberate decision not to meet the Dalai Lama. David Hart summarizes the mostly-ignored story in this post
www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/10/obama-and-the-lama


...

For those who missed it, when the Dalai Lama arrived in Washington this past Monday for, among other things, a scheduled audience with the president, it was disclosed that his visit to the White House had been cancelled.

And this decision had been taken — there was no attempt to hide this fact — in order to please the Chinese government, which has of late been making a concerted effort to see that the Dalai Lama is made a persona non grata in the halls of power in countries around the world.

The damage the president’s decision does the cause of Tibetan independence — which is scarcely even a pipe dream in any event — is entirely unquantifiable, admittedly.

But this is the first time since 1991 that an American administration has declined such a meeting, and by waiting till the arrival of the Tibetan delegation in Washington to make the announcement, the White House succeeded in making the rebuff as public as it could possibly be.

Other governments around the world, enduring similar pressure from the Chinese government to refuse the Dalai Lama access to their heads of state, have now been given considerable cover by Obama, the world’s most popular political figure and (so we are always told) “leader of the free world.”

And no doubt it has given the superintendants of Chinese prisons a pleasantly dispiriting tale to relate to the Buddhist monks and nuns in their custody.

....

And yet, the American media - along with the European media, to whom the Dalai Lama has been a revered icon two decades longer than Obama - have virtually ignored all this.

If George W. Bush had done what Obama did, he would have been damned to hell a million times over by all his critics. And yet, last year, Bush not only met with the Dalai Lama but went to Congress to witness them grant the Dalai Lama the Congressional Medal of Honor. Of course, no one gave him any credit for it.

Americans have started to take off their Obama-blinkers. When will the Obamanic media do so? When will honesty, fairness and objectivity come back to journalism, if at all?