Real Hope and Change

"Where you have na tions that are oppressing their people, isn't there an international responsibility to intervene? I think the need for intervention becomes a moral imperative. . .

"There are going to be objections to just about any decision, because there are some in the international community who believe that state sovereignty is sacrosanct. . .

"But we also say we're not going to just wait indefinitely and allow for the development of a nuclear weapon, the breach of international treaties, and wake up one day and find ourselves in a much worse position and unable to act."

So, what happened to the non-meddling (except in Central America) foreign policy stance? Don’t get us wrong, we are certainly more agreeable to this hawkish, neo-con approach to foreign policy than the wait, wait, wait….. wait and see response we got with respect to Iran.

Is there a fundamental shift at work here or do we have a differing set of standards depending on the location on the globe?

Ralph Peters, no fan of Obama he, says the President’s speech was the finest on Africa made by an American President.

Yet there's hope. Obama's latest adore-me tour began badly, but ended on a powerful positive note. Following the debacle in Moscow and disappointment in Italy (where the G8 proved resistant to charisma), the president made a wise, useful and praiseworthy stop in Ghana...

It was a great speech (he should give a variant of it to several of our own domestic constituencies). I could not have been prouder of our president.

Read more, here.

Naivete' You Better Believe

“It's not that he thinks the court can protect the villagers now being killed and maimed and raped in Darfur; his investigation into war crimes there will take years. What he is convinced of is that the prospect of prosecuting war criminals in Darfur and elsewhere will deter others from committing horrific crimes.”

Argentinian, Luis Moreno-Ocampo is the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. He seems to be a decent, honorable and well-intended man but, ironically enough, it is because he is these things, it is unlikely that justice for Darfur will ever be served in court. Precisely because the genocidal criminals in the Sudanese government and international terrorists are the antithesis of decent, honorable and well-intended, is the reason why an international court is a dubious option for ridding the world of these people. Story here.

And unfortunately, we see now that Barack Obama favors this approach to fighting the War on Terror.

We all saw how well fighting terrorism as a law-enforcement matter worked back in the 90s. The civilian criminal prosecution of the World Trade Center bombers in ’93 did nothing to deter terrorists from carrying out their deadly missions on U.S. interests over the next 8 years (American embassies in Africa, Khobar Towers, USS Cole), culminating, of course with the 9-11 attacks here on U.S. soil.

Since that time when we have actually gone out, hunted down and killed terrorists, successful terrorist attacks on U.S. interests and American soil: Zero. This is not a coincidence, this is not a statistical anomaly. And to be honest, we don’t care if terrorist man-hunts are a deterrent or not… dead terrorist can’t terrorize. Period.

Yet with this stark evidence before him, Barack Obama wants to return this nation to fighting the terrorists via criminal prosecution .

Ralph Peters in story here, has some pretty basic national security/anti-terrorism questions that Obama’s adoring media haven’t quite got around to asking the Senator themselves. Among them:

* How would you manage the consequences of the military incursion into Pakistan you've threatened? Are you willing to go to war with Pakistan?
* What would be the specific results of a swift troop withdrawal from Iraq?
* Why would a judicial approach to defeating terrorists work this time when it failed to protect us in the past?
* Do you truly believe that self-admitted terrorists, when captured, deserve the full legal privileges of US citizens?

Obama, while at Columbia is said to have been averse to studying history. This is apparent as he has filed 9-11 and the events and the acts of folly that led up to that point under “Ancient Western Civilization.”