OPINION:
I served for more than 30 years on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and even longer in public service. I have watched numerous American presidents handle foreign policy crises — from the Iran hostage standoff to Ronald Reagan’s stare-down of the Soviet Union to the invasion of Afghanistan.
From very early on in the current administration, it was clear to me that President Obama and his advisers had a dangerous obsession with viewing the world as Mr. Obama wanted it to be, instead of how it really was. The result, predictably, has been disastrous for the United States and our allies.
Some say Mr. Obama is weak and indecisive. I believe he knows exactly what he is doing. I believe there is more than just rose-colored glasses shading the president’s view of the world. Consider these facts.
The single biggest challenge confronting the world today, including in the United States, is radical Islamic terror. Yet the president refuses to engage radical Islamic terror here at home. He has repeatedly refused to label the Fort Hood shootings, the Boston Marathon bombings or the San Bernardino attacks as acts of radical Islamic terror. He has refused to aggressively confront rogue regimes such as Iran (in fact, he’s gone out of his way to appease the mullahs) or radical Islamic terror groups like the Islamic State. In fact, in a 2014 New Yorker profile by David Remnick, the president infamously dismissed ISIS as a junior varsity organization.
In 2009, when the president addressed the Muslim world in Cairo, the administration insisted that at least 10 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist group long banned in Egypt, be allowed to attend his speech over the strenuous objections of a U.S. ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The brotherhood has supported violent campaigns against Israel (and Egypt’s own government) and has direct links with terrorist groups like Hamas. When the Arab Spring movement reached Egypt in 2011, Mr. Obama quickly called for President Mubarak to step down and hold early elections — elections unsurprisingly won by the brotherhood.
After the Muslim Brotherhood moved aggressively to enshrine Islamic Shariah law as the main source of Egypt’s constitution, the Egyptian people rose up in a new round of popular uprisings. The Egyptian military ultimately quelled the crisis by ousting the brotherhood’s President Mohammed Morsi. The Obama administration’s response was to suspend military aid to Egypt.
Also in 2009, when Iranians were being brutalized on the streets of Tehran for protesting the controversial (and possibly rigged) re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — a man who repeatedly called for America’s and Israel’s destruction — the president repeatedly refused to call for Mr. Ahmadinejad to step down. In fact, Mr. Obama said it would not be “productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling.” In addition, from the earliest days of his administration, the president repeatedly blocked efforts in Congress and the United Nations to impose tougher sanctions on Iran over its nuclear and ballistic missiles programs.
Ultimately, those sanctions were imposed, but Mr. Obama quickly agreed to undo them to pursue a reckless nuclear “agreement” with Iran. The agreement, finalized in 2015 — despite the president’s oft-repeated promise to do “everything, anything” to prevent Iran from going nuclear — does quite the opposite. It legitimizes Iran as a nuclear threshold state, it gives Iran up to 24 days to move, hide or destroy materials sought by inspectors (far from a foolproof inspection regime given Iran’s long history of cheating), and it does nothing to rein in Tehran’s ballistic missile program or support for terrorist organizations. In fact, the agreement lifts the conventional arms embargo against Iran and also gives Tehran approximately $150 billion to finance global terrorism.
Iran’s thank you to the president for his appeasement: first violating U.N. Security Council resolutions by test-firing a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead last October and December, a provocative and dangerous rocket test near U.S. warships and commercial traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz, and just days ago seizing U.S. patrol ships and sailors in the Persian Gulf. Did the president mention these provocations in his recent State of the Union address or the Americans essentially being held hostage in Iran (since released)? No, he didn’t, but he did gush about the great “deal” he got from the Iranians.
Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, from Ukraine to North Korea, is a disaster. But his near-eagerness to bury his head in the sand and deny that radical Islamist regimes even exist is very troubling. It certainly makes me and many other Americans wonder about President Obama’s philosophy and how well it fits with the radicals around the world.
• Dan Burton is a former Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of its Middle East subcommittee.
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