Europe's Nobel peaceniks handcuff Obama

The Nobel Peace Prize has always been a reflection of the political inclinations of the Norwegian Nobel Committee – a group of five former lawmakers and politicians from one of Europe’s most liberal countries. The list of winners over the past two decades include Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Anan and Yasser Arafat, and reads more like a political commitment to left-wing causes than a sober award for promoting real peace in the world. This year’s award to Barack Obama is all that – and more. In fact, for the first time the Nobel Committee has managed a twofer: it has rewarded someone who shares its goal of diplomacy “first, last and always”, while at the same time placing a substantial set of symbolic handcuffs around the U.S. president’s ability to use force in the defense of American interests – including the war in Afghanistan. In bestowing the Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said this about Barack Obama:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.

For Europe, Obama thus represents a real breakthrough: an American president who fancies himself as a “citizen of the world”, who has spent his first nine months rejecting the notion of “American exceptionalism”, and who seems to truly believe in the transformative potential for talking through even the most intractable problems. After eight years of a Bush Administration that was committed body and soul to American interests and security, Barack Obama represents a leader more interested in compromise than conflict, and who believes that American national interests are largely indistinguishable from those of the international community.

It would be a mistake, however, to view the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama as simply a rejection of the Bush years – or as just a pat on the back to America for electing such a cosmopolitan “man of the world”. The decision of the Nobel Committee to make award Obama was influenced heavily by the President’s commitment to a core value of the European peacenik movement – nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. The elimination of all nuclear weapons is an idealism based on the utility of diplomacy – even with rogue states such as North Korea and Iran – and is the logical extension of Europe’s multilateral engagement strategy. As Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician and member of the Nobel Committee said in a phone interview with the Wall Street Journal after the announcement,"…this was primarily an award on his work on, and commitment to, nuclear disarmament -- and his dialogue.”

But it is really more than just about Obama’s willingness to talk. Rather, there is something more strategic involved: an attempt to restrict Obama’s range of decisions in the critical reassessment of the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan. According to Valle, the Nobel Committee reached its decision on the Obama award at their final meeting on October 5. It was thus no secret that the Obama Administration was in the midst of a full scale review of General Stanley McChrystal’s request for 40,000 additional U.S. soldiers in an expansion of the U.S. mission. Nor was it a secret that Vice President Joe Biden and others in the Administration were openly lobbying for a change in U.S. strategy that would dramatically reduce the American footprint in Afghanistan in favor of a targeted “offshore” force that would be used for surgical strikes against terrorist targets. The Nobel Committee clearly also knows that in the wake of an all-out focus on health care reform, the Obama Administration has let public support for the Afghan war drift; the latest polling shows that less than half of America supports the war that Obama himself once called “necessary” for America’s long-term security. The Norwegians know that Obama is wavering on Afghanistan, and that the Peace Prize could be an effective leverage point in convincing him to radically reduce – or even end – the U.S. war there.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee understands that awarding Obama the Peace Prize will appeal to the President’s own image as a transformational figure, and will serve to heighten the already stratospheric confidence he has in his ability to alter the status quo ante. Obama’s own belief in the power of his words is well known. Now, with the Nobel Prize in hand, he has a validation that Europe also sees him as The One. The net effect of this will put Obama in a tough position as he addresses America’s security concerns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere. With little more than a press release, the Nobel Committee has achieved what Europe has been trying to do for a generation: it has handcuffed the American president with the imprimatur of “Peacemaker”, narrowing the options for unilateral action in the process. For the peaceniks of Europe, awarding Obama the Nobel was a true masterstroke of preventive medicine.

The Nobel Committee has thus given the world's most prestigious award for peace to the American commander-in-chief in a time of war. Can the Nobel Peace Prize winner really escalate the war in Afghanistan? Or, for that matter, order a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the event that the current round of diplomacy fails? Even before the Prize, there was obviously much doubt as to whether Obama would make such tough choices. Now, it seems even more unlikely.

Poland: A Friend Betrayed

By Joe Gschwendtner Poland’s expansive plains have made her lands a military corridor in regional skirmishes and world wars. Teutonic Knights, cavalry and tanks have controlled her vast spaces and she has been uniquely oppressed by outsiders. Outstripping this history and braving long odds, she is now a successful recovering Soviet client state, defiant and free, the beneficiary of a robust capitalism flourishing within her borders and Eastern Europe. We would do ourselves great harm to not remember that this is the Poland of Generals Kosciusko and Pulaski who fought for our freedom in the American Revolution and it is the heritage of Colonel “Gabby” Gabreski, likely the greatest American air ace in U.S. history. Her soldiers have fought bravely, shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is it possible she is now a friend betrayed, the casualty of a missile defense gambit in the broader initiative of global engagement?

The current administration’s decision to cancel the promised missile defense system has left Poles scratching their heads while other allies silently writhe. Is this really a small tactical decision that eases tensions and saves money? Or have we witnessed a grave course adjustment in the ship of state? Has Poland again become a pawn of a new war? Her history of being on the receiving end of plunder and partition is instructive.

Polonians (“people of the open fields”) are fiercely independent and resilient; they have had to be. Their first millennium was marked by dominance and manipulation, first by Mongols, Tatars, Swedes, Cossacks, and Russians, their own nobility, and then the late empires of Europe. These constant upheavals stunted the growth of both democratic institutions and a middle class needed to drive them. Not until World War I’s Treaty of Versailles in 1918 and the tenuous independence it granted was Poland really in a position to act strategically.

As that document’s ink was still drying, President Josef Pilsudski and the Polish people recognized the appetite of the Soviet bear to the east. Clearly, Lenin’s records prove his intentions to recover territories surrendered by Bolshevik Russia during World War I and then to later create a Communist “Anschluss” with German Socialists using Poland as his corridor. The Polish-Soviet War that resulted in 1919 was a pre-emptive effort by Pilsudski to thwart a reconstituted Russian military from resuming its march westward. The humiliating defeat of the Red Army at Warsaw resulted in the Treaty of Riga in 1921. With Russia’s territorial urges still unrequited and smoldering, the devil’s table was set for Stalin’s later revenge and en passant machinations at Tehran and Yalta during World War II.

Poland’s geopolitical significance would rise exponentially with the dominance of mechanized warfare in World War II. Germany’s invasion of Poland began with the bombing of Wielun and the overwhelming of Gdansk on September 1, 1939, an act of a war that would put 100 million men under arms globally. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, struck weeks earlier between Germany and Russia, committed the signatories to non-aggression while allowing the Red Army to move quickly into eastern territories ceded to Poland at the end of World War I. The pact also made provisions for a later, final partition of Poland between Russia and Germany.

In a ruthless seven months of terror, Stalin initiated a comprehensive round-up of Polish intelligentsia, primarily officials, policemen, academics, and military officers. His defining act of revenge and brutality was the April 1940 Katyn Forest Massacre near Smolensk where 4,421 Polish officers were summarily executed. At three other nearby locations another 14,400 leaders were shot and buried in mass graves. Killings were clinical and efficient, virtually all delivered with a bullet to the back of the head.

With Operation Barbarossa, Hitler double-crossed Stalin and launched Germany’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. With the Polish pawn in play, the ebb and flow of unchecked warfare was visited upon the people of the open fields. Brutalized or exterminated by the Germans, Poles were then subsequently raped, plundered, and finally yoked by their Russian Slavic brethren in their counter-offensive. Most of today’s aging survivors have long gotten over the Germans, but will never forgive Russian depravities.

In a final preview of things to come, an extraordinary Warsaw uprising staged against the Germans by the Polish resistance in 1944 was unaided by the Russian Army positioned just across the Vistula. Stalin’s unwillingness to help was motivated by his Katyn-like desire to see the German defensive force destroyed by a still vigorous underground in a fight to the death. That Polish pawn played in Warsaw resulted in over 200,000 military and civilian deaths and Hitler’s vengeful order to level the city block by block.

Whether Katyn, the Warsaw Uprising and other compelling evidence was conveniently overlooked or ignored by the Franklin Roosevelt’s State Department is debatable. Indisputable is FDR’s bad call on the beguiling Josef Stalin. Unmoved by Winston Churchill’s suspicions, Roosevelt remarked: “I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man….I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” The Iron Curtain and almost 45 years of oppression was the price of that gross miscalculation.

At the Potsdam Conference, Truman was more wary of Stalin, but east-west political boundaries had been established in Crimea and only minor adjustments were made. Pawned again, Poland’s national sovereignty continued to be ignored as was her ravaged populace. Russia unilaterally shifted her post-war boundaries, reclaiming Slavic peoples and territory in eastern Poland and returning territory to Poland in the west at the expense of Germany. In the process, millions of Germans and Poles were displaced and forcibly relocated.

Fortunately, the Polish people retained their indomitable resilience. They continued on with the business of rebuilding their lives after betrayal, living as Poles and not Communists, ever guided by their Catholicism. Poles who survived the German General Government and the Polish Communist State will tell you bluntly that their beliefs were unshakable and that they deceived their communist masters at every opportunity.

It was in this environment that a shipyard worker in Gdansk and the first Polish Pope concomitantly led worker-based and spiritual efforts that would finally set them free of Cold War bondage. Pawns no longer, and in concert with other eastern bloc uprisings, the Poles foiled their masters with unionized solidarity and simple Christianity. The award in 1983 of the Nobel Peace Prize to Lech Walesa was the signal event and when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Poland quickly made its own political transition. Mikhail Gorbachev himself would later acknowledge that the Wall’s collapse would have been impossible without Pope John Paul II.

Nowhere in the failed Socialist states of Eastern Europe did freedom take deeper root. Along with the Czech and Baltic republics, no countries were more anxious to embrace America as a partner in the quest for freedom and Poland proudly joined the European Union in 2004. Her current economic challenges are not insubstantial, but Poland is committed to an ambitious $3.5 billion privatization effort to eliminate remaining state-run industries.

The defensive missile agreement struck with the Bush Administration in 2002 was emblematic, proof positive that Poland understood the nature of her contemporary adversaries and readily accepted her role in the Free World’s defense. The cancellation of this agreement has significant implications beyond the current tactical situation. Unlike current American policymakers, Poland knows that new threats to peace are no longer limited to powerful nations with massive military might, but also include stateless terrorist rogues and bad state actors with enough nuclear capacity to annihilate millions in the civilized world. Few countries on earth could know more about the horrors people are willing to inflict on each other.

What other nation is better positioned and willing to protect the Free World against an almost certain destruction that can be rained down upon the northern hemisphere from Middle Asia? If one correct answer is a willing Poland, how is it that the politics of globalization seem to have prevailed over common sense? Has Poland served as a pawn yet again?

Is it possible that our President has not completely studied the success and failures of his idol FDR? Are Mr. Ahmadinejad’s intentions not clear for the entire world to understand? Does he really think that Russia is ready to disown a history of territorial aggression? Has a potentially fatal miscalculation been made about the many threats we face? Is it worth the risk to find out?

A useful phone call for President Obama would be to former President George W. Bush. I suspect the conversation would go something like this:

“Mr. President, this is Barack Obama and I need your advice. When you said that you looked into the eyes of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and you could see the measure of his soul, what did you really see?”

Joe Gschwendtner is a Denver businessman and writer

We're talking. But do we speak the same language?

Finally! A national news outlet has published a piece on something I have been railing about for the past several years: the futility of more negotiations with Iran. As Michael Ledeen writes in today's WSJ: "We've Been Talking to Iran for 30 Years".  And what do we have to show for all that talk? Absolutely zilch. Nada. Nothing.

It all began with Jimmy Carter after the fall of the Shah in 1979. In an effort to "reach out and engage" the Ayatollah Khomeini and his new revolution, Carter offered "aid, arms and understanding". And what did we get in return? A siege of our Embassy in Tehran and a year-long hostage crisis.

A lot of good that did us.

And it goes on -- every administration since has tried (and failed) to negotiate with Tehran. Here's what Ledeen says about the George W. Bush years -- the administration that was notorious for its (supposed) unwillingness to negotiate: Most recently, the administration of George W. Bush—invariably and falsely described as being totally unwilling to talk to the mullahs—negotiated extensively with Tehran. There were scores of publicly reported meetings, and at least one very secret series of negotiations. These negotiations have rarely been described in the American press, even though they are the subject of a BBC documentary titled "Iran and the West."

At the urging of British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, the U.S. negotiated extensively with Ali Larijani, then-secretary of Iran's National Security Council. By September 2006, an agreement had seemingly been reached. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Nicholas Burns, her top Middle East aide, flew to New York to await the promised arrival of an Iranian delegation, for whom some 300 visas had been issued over the preceding weekend. Mr. Larijani was supposed to announce the suspension of Iranian nuclear enrichment. In exchange, we would lift sanctions. But Mr. Larijani and his delegation never arrived, as the BBC documentary reported.

Negotiations have always been accompanied by sanctions. But neither has produced any change in Iranian behavior...

Thirty years of negotiations and sanctions have failed to end the Iranian nuclear program and its war against the West. Why should anyone think they will work now? A change in Iran requires a change in government. Common sense and moral vision suggest we should support the courageous opposition movement, whose leaders have promised to end support for terrorism and provide total transparency regarding the nuclear program.

Exactly. But this should be no surprise to anyone who even has a basic understanding of revolutionary regimes. They don't want accommodation. The animating principle around revolutionary change is to upset the status-quo. The Shah represented the capitalist West and all its "depravity". It kept Iran from a society based on the core tenets of Shia Islam. Khomeini and the Mullah's sought to destroy Western influences and create a fundamentalist Islamic state -- which they have done so, even as they pay lip service to "democratic elections" (we saw how democratic those elections were this summer). They do this by exporting revolution and their ideology abroad. It is the reason the current Iranian state came into being.

President Obama said during his speech at the recent G20 that Iran "has an opportunity to join the community of nations". This is pure folly. This is not a nation -- sorry, Mr. President -- that wants to be a part of the international community". Iran wants fundamentally to destroy the system, not join it.

The point here is this: Iran isn't interested in substantive negotiations with the United States, Europe or anyone else. We speak different languages -- both literally and figuratively. Iran wants power so that it can further its Islamic goals. It doesn't want to play nice and play in the international sandbox.

This should be crystal clear to anyone who is willing to listen and look objectively at the record of Iran since the 1979 revolution.

Got that, Mr. President?

For Dems, it’s always ‘butter’ over ‘guns’

In the wake of the Obama Administration’s looming failure with its government health insurance and possibly its cap-and-trade proposals, it has made a grand splash on the international stage–at the United Nations in New York and the G-20 (formerly G-7) meeting in Pittsburgh. No one could fairly call Obama a tyrant, for he lacks a tyrant’s power, and he is certainly not acting like one (except for Honduras). When a tyrant runs into difficulties at home, he diverts attention by stirring up troubles abroad. But Obama is apparently contemplating reversing course in Afghanistan.

Like previous Democrats, President Obama’s international strategy seems rather to diminish than enlarge our world role. When he is not denigrating the previous administration or apologizing for his country, Obama is determined to build up the power and prestige of international organizations. Ostensibly aimed at curbing the aggressive designs of rogue nations like North Korea and Iran, the President’s real objective is to check the supposedly imperial ambitions of the United States.

Like failed presidential candidate George McGovern, Obama wants America to "come home" from its international responsibilities, dropped into its lap by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and kept there by the Soviet Union’s drive for world domination. Liberal Democrats believe that almost all international "tensions" arise from either misunderstandings or America’s own failings.

When one puts this together with the pressures from domestic politics, we get retreat from international leadership. As liberal Democrats in Congress indicate their displeasure with Obama’s attempts to rescue its health care "reform" by reducing or masking its socialistic features, Obama may have found the tactic that will placate them.

Early on, Obama seemed to make good on his promise to give our efforts in Afghanistan the priority they have long deserved by a commitment of 40,000 troops with a new commander. However, liberal Democrats in Congress made it clear that they did not wish to continue our efforts there.

So when someone in the Beltway leaked to the Washington Post that the commanding general wants to ratchet up the total numbers to 100,000, the President suddenly announced that, until we have settled on our strategy and tactics, he cannot approve the request without more study. Friends, this was the "good war" that the bad Bush neglected for nation building in Iraq. Why the abrupt change?

I submit that, however forcefully Obama declared that he would prosecute the war in Afghanistan, his heart was never really in it. The truth is, the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan were fought against the same enemy, often working in tandem with each other and always against the United States and the Western world. As Bin Laden is a terrorist without a government, Saddam Hussein was a terrorist with a government.

It was clever and useful for Obama to distinguish between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for it gave a patina of truth to his claim that his quarrel with Bush was tactical, not strategic. Obama needed only to accept the windup of the American campaign in Iraq, but Afghanistan turned out to be more difficult than he thought.

So now that the left wing of his political party (Obama’s wing) shows signs of restiveness over his domestic policy, that faction’s zealotry for socialism and indifference to the plight of other nations is combining to cause the biggest disaster for America since the fall of southeast Asia to Communism. That defeat, too, was a direct result of the left’s hostility to political freedom abroad and its disrespect for American honor.

Just as our retreat in Vietnam made meaningless the sacrifices of our fighting men in that long conflict, so those brave men and women who have served and continue to serve in harm’s way in Afghanistan face a similar prospect.

Lyndon Johnson was determined not to follow the example of his hero, Franklin Roosevelt, who shelved the New Deal in order to give priority to saving America from German and Japanese imperialism. The war in Vietnam was the "bitch" that Johnson felt he was cursed with but which he would not permit to delay his cherished Great Society.

Like LBJ, Obama would rather "transform" American society than attend to the common defense. Placing its faith in international organizations, this administration imagines that foreign threats will go away as long as our nation takes the socialistic course. We will pay for this folly.

Iran's election shows Obama is a lot like Bush

Barack Obama apparently has more in common with his reviled predecessor, George W. Bush, than anyone on the left would like to believe. We've seen, of course, some grounding in Obama's national security policy since the election that has prompted him -- and other Democrats -- to maintain many of the Bush era's tactical policies in the war on terror (oops -- I meant "the fight against man-made disasters".) And while it true that he has recently sidled left on many issues -- releasing Gitmo detainees to Bermuda and Palau so that they can bask in the sun, for example -- the Obama administration has not gone nearly as far in rolling back the Bush national security regime than the left-wing base of the party has wanted. But the Obama administration's response to the Iranian elections shows a different kind of "Bushism", one that is less about policy and more about temperament and judgment. It seems that Obama's tepid response to the protests and the obvious fraud in the results may be a response to the president's simple inability to adjust his strategy to new information on the ground. As Robert Kagan writes in the Washington Post today, Obama has a plan for dealing with Iran, and it is based on having a stable leadership in place:

One of the great innovations in the Obama administration's approach to Iran, after all, was supposed to be its deliberate embrace of the Tehran rulers' legitimacy. In his opening diplomatic gambit, his statement to Iran on the Persian new year in March, Obama went out of his way to speak directly to Iran's rulers, a notable departure from George W. Bush's habit of speaking to the Iranian people over their leaders' heads. As former Clinton official Martin Indyk put it at the time, the wording was carefully designed "to demonstrate acceptance of the government of Iran."

This approach had always been a key element of a "grand bargain" with Iran. The United States had to provide some guarantee to the regime that it would no longer support opposition forces or in any way seek its removal. The idea was that the United States could hardly expect the Iranian regime to negotiate on core issues of national security, such as its nuclear program, so long as Washington gave any encouragement to the government's opponents. Obama had to make a choice, and he made it. This was widely applauded as a "realist" departure from the Bush administration's quixotic and counterproductive idealism.

It would be surprising if Obama departed from this realist strategy now, and he hasn't...Whatever his personal sympathies may be, if he is intent on sticking to his original strategy, then he can have no interest in helping the opposition. His strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government's efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition's efforts to prolong the crisis.

So it appears that the tail (Obama's original strategy of engaging Iran's hard-line government in diplomacy) is now wagging the dog -- namely the unprecedented grass-roots democratic movement that is collectively risking life and limb on the streets of Tehran. The goal of the U.S. government should be to encourage and empower true democracy in Iran -- not to legitimize the totalitarian Islamic regime that is in power. By the luck of the Iranian regime's sheer arrogance, that opportunity now exists. But Obama is too vested in his original course of action to change, and can't seem to see that a new approach might now be warranted. He's following a strategy that is almost certain to fail; most people can clearly see that the prospects of real progress with the theocracy in Iran is poor at best. It's a double down on a bad hand.

The parallels with Bush in Iraq in 2005-2006 are striking. During the height of the insurgency and the sectarian strife that followed, Bush stuck far too long with the failed "attrition" strategy of Gens. Abizaid and Casey, preferring to double down on a bad hand of his own. The tactics of the American military in Iraq were clearly not working; month-after-month the evidence was coming in that things were getting worse and not better. Bush knew that his strategy in Iraq was failing, and yet seemed paralyzed to make the kind of strong, decisive decision to change that he was known for. Not until early 2007 did the surge take root with real changes in tactics, strategy and personnel.  For far too long, Bush didn't have the judgment and temperament to look closely at the results of his previous policies.  The result was that the successful surge of 2007-2008 could have likely been done earlier,  in 2004-2005, with much better results for both America and Iraq.

Obama is in the midst of a similar paralysis; he needs a "surge" on Iran, but he is afraid to tear up his script. His policy of "negotiating without preconditions" with Iran is a cornerstone of his foreign policy plan, and his deep belief in the power of his own diplomatic skills in getting some trans formative change from Iran is dominant. Its where hubris meets naivete -- and its a dangerous place for America to be.