By Shoshana Bryen
WASHINGTON, D.C.–Adversaries of the United States blame the United States for their woes. THE President, not “this president,” or “that president,” receives the animus of those who need America to be their adversary. Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua -to some extent Russia and China-all use the United States as a foil. In the previous administration, President Bush was the focus of their ire and there were those who said it was deserved. Now, increasingly, President Obama is the object of their anger-unfortunately, he still seems to think he doesn’t deserve it.
It is not enough for the President of the United States to boast of his minority status, Third World parentage, Islamic heritage in his background if not in his practice, or even, as he once said, a “funny” name. It is not enough to apologize for the prior sins of America, not enough not to be “not President Bush,” and not enough to continually and publicly foist blame on his predecessor. To those who need a big, bad United States to deflect from their own shortcomings, President Obama is indistinguishable from the rest of us.
Which is actually the way it’s supposed to be.
JINSA has no comment on the climate change agenda, but the Copenhagen meeting was worrisome-not for any impact it may have on countries’ behavior as regards climate, but for the bludgeon it handed to avowed enemies of the United States and the West, the response of the assembled and the serial failure of the President to defend his country.
Hugo Chávez and Robert Mugabe-responsible for the impoverishing of otherwise bountiful countries and the wreckage of human rights and human lives in Venezuela and Zimbabwe-denounced President Obama, the United States, and the West. Chávez only months ago praised President Obama by saying he had replaced the “smell of sulfur” (referencing his prior insult to President Bush) at the UN with the “smell of hope.” But in Copenhagen said, “It smells of sulfur here. It keeps smelling of sulfur in this world.” He encouraged President Obama to “leave by the back door.”
Mugabe, who beggared the “Breadbasket of Africa” and is under international sanction for massive human rights violations, told the assembled, “When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it’s we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere who gasp and sink and eventually die.”
Nothing new, but the damnation of capitalism, America and the West by dangerous, raving lunatics was met with thunderous applause by the European and Third World assemblage-some of whom are our friends and allies in other arenas.
President Obama will never placate or bribe Chávez or Mugabe or Assad or Ahmadinejad into a change of fundamental attitude-and we are beyond the point where he should be apologizing for his country. It is time for the President to take up a strong defense of the capitalist West against the agglomeration of Western anti-Western, anti-American, anti-capitalists who were cheering for our-and their own-demise.
The applause is more worrisome than the lunatics.
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Bryen is senior director of security policy of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Her column is sponsored by Waxie Sanitary Supply in memory of Morris Wax, longtime JINSA supporter and national board member.