By Daniel Greenfield On October 9, 2012 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 1 Comment
On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took President Obama to task for his administration’s disastrous handling of American foreign policy over the last several years, which has had catastrophic consequences, most recently in the form of the heinous attacks against our embassies in Libya and Egypt. To understand what happened in Benghazi or in Cairo requires more than poking around the rubble, wiping off some of the ashes and pronouncing the whole thing a tragedy. The German invasion of Poland wasn’t the tragedy; the Munich Agreement was. Similarly the tragedy wasn’t the consulate and embassy attacks, but the foreign policy that caused them to happen.
The underlying philosophy Romney pointed to, the Obama Doctrine, has often been described as appeasement, but that’s a vague and general criticism. The Munich Agreement was appeasement, but the Obama Doctrine goes beyond anything as simple as appeasing as a single nation’s territorial ambitions.
The Obama Doctrine sought to resolve the War on Terror by dividing Islamists into two camps: the moderate political Islamists and the extremist violent Islamists. These categorizations were wholly artificial and everyone from Obama on down knew how artificial the differences between the so-called extremists and moderates were.
In Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood had transitioned the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group from the status of violent extremists allied with Al Qaeda to political Islamists committed to political reforms. That did not actually make the LIFG, which exploited its newfound moderate status and the freedom that came with it to go on fighting Gaddafi as part of the civil war, non-violent. The difference between the Al Qaeda-affiliated LIFG and the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated LIFG was a few pieces of paper.
But the gruesome absurdity of the whole thing was laid out plainly for all to see in Afghanistan. The plan for Afghanistan was not to defeat the Taliban, though that was how it was sold to the American people, it was to divide the Taliban into moderates willing to engage in a democratic political process and extremists who would be defeated and isolated.
The Afghanistan surge, which cost nearly 1,500 American lives, was a brute force mechanism for engineering a divide that was supposed to result in the military defeat of the Taliban and their transformation into a political party.
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The underlying philosophy Romney pointed to, the Obama Doctrine, has often been described as appeasement, but that’s a vague and general criticism. The Munich Agreement was appeasement, but the Obama Doctrine goes beyond anything as simple as appeasing as a single nation’s territorial ambitions.
The Obama Doctrine sought to resolve the War on Terror by dividing Islamists into two camps: the moderate political Islamists and the extremist violent Islamists. These categorizations were wholly artificial and everyone from Obama on down knew how artificial the differences between the so-called extremists and moderates were.
In Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood had transitioned the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group from the status of violent extremists allied with Al Qaeda to political Islamists committed to political reforms. That did not actually make the LIFG, which exploited its newfound moderate status and the freedom that came with it to go on fighting Gaddafi as part of the civil war, non-violent. The difference between the Al Qaeda-affiliated LIFG and the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated LIFG was a few pieces of paper.
But the gruesome absurdity of the whole thing was laid out plainly for all to see in Afghanistan. The plan for Afghanistan was not to defeat the Taliban, though that was how it was sold to the American people, it was to divide the Taliban into moderates willing to engage in a democratic political process and extremists who would be defeated and isolated.
The Afghanistan surge, which cost nearly 1,500 American lives, was a brute force mechanism for engineering a divide that was supposed to result in the military defeat of the Taliban and their transformation into a political party.
-go to link-
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