WASHINGTON - Just days after the Nobel committee in Oslo awarded United States
President Barack Obama its coveted peace prize, two of Washington's most
prominent foreign policy hawks launched a new group and ad campaign designed to
depict the president as weak and defend the more aggressive policies of his
predecessor, George W Bush.
The new group, Keep America Safe, was co-founded by neo-conservative
heavyweight William Kristol, who also edits The Weekly Standard; and Elizabeth
(Liz) Cheney, the outspoken daughter of Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, who
is believed to harbor political ambitions of her own.
"Amidst the great challenges to America's security and
prosperity, the current administration too often seems uncertain, wishful,
irresolute, and unwilling to stand up for America, our allies and our
interests," according to the mission statement of the new group, whose third
founder-director, Debra Burlingame, is also co-founder of 9/11 Families for a
Safe and Strong America.
"Keep America Safe believes the United States can only defeat our adversaries
and defend our interests from a position of strength," the statement says.
"We know that America has, for 233 years, been an unparalleled force for good
in the world, that our fighting forces are the best the world has ever known,
and that the world is a safer place when America is trusted by our allies and
feared and respected by our enemies."
"Keep America Safe will make the case for an unapologetic approach to fighting
terrorism around the world, for victory in the wars this country fights, for
democracy and human rights, and for a strong American military that is needed
in the dangerous world in which we live," it says.
The new group, which, under the rules of its incorporation, will be permitted
to lobby the US Congress and endorse political candidates, will focus initially
on raising money to help disseminate its video ads, the first of which is
currently featured on its website.
"The left has dozens of organizations and tens of millions of dollars dedicated
to undercutting the war on terror," Kristol told Politico on Tuesday. "The good
guys need some help, too."
Earlier this year, Kristol co-founded with his long-time collaborator, Robert
Kagan, another hawkish group, the neo-conservative Foreign Policy Initiative,
which has published open letters urging Obama to promote democracy in Russia,
send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, and reassure Washington's
Central European allies about its defense commitment.
The two men were also co-founders and directors of the Project for the New
American Century, a number of whose 1997 charter members, including the elder
Cheney, former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and their two top aides - I
Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Paul Wolfowitz, respectively - played key roles in
promoting the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Bush's other first-term policies when
the hawks exercised their greatest influence.
Kristol and Cheney, who are also commentators for the far-right Fox News, have
been among the sharpest right-wing critics of Obama's efforts to court foreign
opinion, especially in Europe and the Muslim world whose publics were most
alienated by the Bush administration's policies, according to public opinion
surveys.
They have been particularly scornful of the Nobel committee's decision to honor
Obama.
Cheney, a lawyer who headed the State Department's Middle East
democracy-promotion programs from 2002 to 2004 and is reportedly considering
running for congress next year, called the award a "farce" and suggested that
Obama send a "mother of a fallen American soldier to accept the prize on behalf
of the US military ... to remind the Nobel committee that each one of them
sleeps soundly at night because the US military is the greatest peacekeeping
force in the world today".
Kristol called the committee "anti-American".
Like most other far-right and neo-conservative commentators, they have tried to
paint Obama's foreign policy as designed to weaken and constrain US power in a
dangerous world by abandoning policies championed by Cheney's father, whose
memoirs she is reportedly helping to write.
"By turning away from the policies that have kept us safe, by treating
terrorism as a law-enforcement matter, giving foreign terrorists the same
rights as American citizens, launching investigations of CIA [Central
Intelligence Agency] agents, cutting defense spending, breaking faith with our
allies and attempting to appease our adversaries, the current administration is
weakening the nation, and making it more difficult for us to defend our
security and our interests," the new group's mission statement reads.
The developing right-wing narrative against Obama has been most comprehensively
laid out by neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, in an article
entitled "Decline Is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the End of American
Ascendancy" published this week by Kristol's Weekly Standard and featured on
the Keep America Safe website.
"The current foreign policy of the United States is an exercise in
contraction," according to the article, which goes on to argue that Obama's
acknowledgement in various major speeches that Washington's conduct abroad has
not always lived up to its principles "effectively undermine[s] any moral claim
that America might have to world leadership".
"[T]he new left-liberal internationalism goes far beyond its earlier Clintonian
incarnation in its distrust and distaste for American dominance," according to
Krauthammer, an unabashed promoter of global US dominance since 1990 when he
penned a famous essay in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Unipolar Moment".
"For what might be called the New Liberalism the renunciation of power is
rooted not in the fear that we are essentially good but subject to the
corruptions of power - the old Clintonian view - but rooted in the conviction
that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful
that it cannot be trusted with, and does not merit, the possession of
overarching world power."
Under Obama, Washington is engaged in "strategic retreat", according to
Krauthammer.
He cites as evidence, among other things, the administration's abandonment of
the phrase "global war on terror"; the "unilateral abrogation" of missile
defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic; "indecision on Afghanistan";
the failure to treat Iraq as a "prize ... of great strategic significance that
the administration seems to have no intention of exploiting"; support for a
"Chavista caudillo" in Honduras; and "heavy and gratuitous America pressure on
Israel".
The notion that such measures, which he sees as futile efforts to regain the
moral high ground, will "lead to reciprocal gestures from the likes of Iran and
North Korea is simply childish".
"In a word, it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline - to
make America essentially one nation among many," a process furthered by
domestic policies that are social democratic and European in their privileging
of butter over guns, according to Krauthammer.
"[W]hile globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has
changed, it has not," he went on. "The international arena remains a Hobbesian
state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power ... Do we really
want to live under unknown, untested, shifting multipolarity? Or even worse,
under the gauzy internationalism of the New Liberalism with its self-enforcing
norms?"
The point was echoed by Cheney in her critique on Fox News of the Nobel's
decision.
"What the committee believes is, they'd like to live in a world in which
America's not dominant," she said. "They may believe that President Obama also
doesn't believe in American dominance and they may have been trying to affirm
that belief with the prize. I think, unfortunately, they may be right, and I
think it's a concern."
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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