It is sad, but President Obama is an arrogant, racist interventionist

On FOX News this week, I described President Obama’s attitude toward Libya and the Muslim world generally as that of an “arrogant” and “racist” interventionist, a description I thought would surprise few. To my surprise, however, this commonplace analysis provoked a flood of angry and astounded, Claude-Rains-like “I’m shocked” comments from Obama supporters and those generally ignorant about the ongoing collapse of the always wrongheaded, tyrant-based, and pro-Israel U.S. strategic policy in the Muslim world and the interventionist causes of the unfolding disaster.

Obama’s arrogance: We have now seen the president on television multiple times saying things like “Qaddafi must go”; “The international community will not tolerate Qaddafi’s continued rule”; and — my favorite — “Qaddafi must stop killing his own people” (NB: This comment is interesting and smacks of Obama’s and Senator John Kerry’s — Obama’s regime-change stalking horse — debilitating experience of an Ivy League education. Crack a history book and what do you find: Established, internationally recognized governments — dictatorial, monarchical, or democratic — almost always resist treasonous rebellions with military force. King George III’s government resisted the treasonous colonials until they beat the British army and became virtuous Americans. It’s simply the way of the world. I believe Lincoln once said that no government provides for its own dissolution and overthrow.)

Now, if this is not “arrogance,” I am afraid I do not know what arrogance is. Obama is orchestrating the defeat of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of enemies’ armed mostly with Korean war-era weapons. The ultra-modern and unprecedentedly powerful U.S. Navy finds it impossible to destroy the slapdash Somali pirate “fleet”; a job which its three-masted, wooden predecessors disposed of in short order in the 19th century. And Obama and his security advisers get their foreign-policy fantasies tied in an ideological knot because General Clapper truthfully states what today seems obvious: Qaddafi is winning.

When you stand at the world’s most attention-getting pulpit and speak — as Mr. Obama has — as if you have overwhelming power and are ready to wield it, but when you are, instead, in the midst of a major strategic disaster in the Arab world and you are all but impotent to temper, let alone stop it, you are undeniably the superstar of arrogance.

Obama’s racism: Racism, of course, comes in all kinds of varieties, and I doubt many humans are immune from one or another of its manifestations. Obama’s racism is most evident in his clear and oft-stated belief that the world must be made all secular and all democratic; indeed, all secular-democratic.

Now, Obama’s acolytes, most of the media, and many Americans approve of and prosper under the secular democracy now operating in the United States. Some poor souls also support endless wars by advocating its export. And when Obama — or presidents Bush and Clinton, for that matter — assert their intention to bring the glories of secular democracy to all of the world, it sounds good if they say it fast, but if you stop to consider the words and their intent, they truly are a combination of the ideas of such war-causing international busybodies as the racist Woodrow Wilson and the imperialist Rudyard Kipling, or more contemporaneously Hilary Clinton, John McCain, CNN, the BBC, and every Neoconservative.

Obama and other recent U.S. presidents are out to teach foreigners to elect good men, as well as to help elevate our uncivilized little brown brothers to the heights of our near-perfect secular (semi-pagan) democracy. Whether those little brown brothers want to give up their faith, tribalism, patriarchal societies, family structures, societal mores, or ethnic distinctiveness is irrelevant. Mr. Obama and his predecessors know what is best for all of them, and U.S. policy will be to impose it on them at all costs, even if we have to intervene and kill many of our little brothers — and perhaps uselessly waste the lives of many of our soldiers and Marines — to bring about this sublime culmination.

Doubt this? Watch what happens if Qaddafi survives. The U.S., the EU and the UN will impose economic sanctions — but will keep buying Libyan oil — that will kill innumerable Libyan civilians and leave Qaddafi and his crowd, like Saddam and his, unaffected.

This policy and the attitude that drives it are arrogant and racist.

Author: Michael F. Scheuer

Michael F. Scheuer worked at the CIA as an intelligence officer for 22 years. He was the first chief of its Osama bin Laden unit, and helped create its rendition program, which he ran for 40 months. He is an American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst.