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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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November 30th, 2009

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Monday, November 30th, 2009 08:33 am

That's the subtitle of Fouad Amaji's WSJ article about the failure of Obama as an international statesman.  His policy of abasement, and apology has convinced the Islamic world that he is a weak, vacillating, untrustworthy President with nothing new to say.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance.  No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity.  "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims.  The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

We who have sat here watching the trainwreck could have told him that.  Does the man have NO competent advisors at all? Or is the problem perhaps that he believes he knows better and won't listen to his advisors?

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