Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Does Obama conduct foreign policy out of personal grudges?

http://tinyurl.com/yg6rsmu
Does Obama have it in for Britain? By Nile Gardiner
He insults our troops and PM while sucking up to the French and Germans...For decades, Britain and the U.S. have been the closest of allies...Over 70 years, the special relationship has certainly had its ups and downs. The cast has changed - Thatcher and Reagan, Blair and Bush ... but it has always endured. Until now.
... Barack Obama has failed to mention the special relationship between Great Britain and America in any of his speeches both before and after becoming President of the United States....there wasn't a single mention of America's main ally in the region, Britain... Never mind that we have 10,000 troops on active service there - far more than any other of America's so-called allies - and never mind that 237 of our brave soldiers have already lost their lives there, Great Britain wasn't even a footnote. Even some of Gordon Brown's sternest critics thought he was appallingly treated by the Obama administration when he visited Washington in March...Given the level of sacrifice by British troops, it was the most extraordinary and insulting oversight... Obama seems keener on currying favour with Germany and France - who have failed to provide adequate support in Afghanistan - than he is with Britain
...while the special relationship may not be dead yet, it's certainly dying,...becoming the first U.S. President in modern times to place no importance on the historic relationship between the U.S. and Britain. This is a watershed moment in the political evolution of our two countries....The U.S. President presented Prime Minister Gordon Brown with 25 DVDs on his departure from the United States in March this year...a man who, within days of being sworn in as President, ordered that a bust of Winston Churchill - a gift from the British people to the U.S. in the dark days that followed 9/11 - be removed from the Oval Office... His Kenyan grandfather, however, was reportedly mistreated under British colonial rule during that country's Mau Mau rebellion - an event to which he devotes 35 pages of his memoir, Dreams From My Father.****Now we see it: the PERSONAL animosity to Britain, the PERSONAL affinity for Muslims (and, likely, the PERSONAL animosity to Israel from his Chicago days associating with Farrakhan, Wright and Khalidi.) He bows low to the King of Saudi Arabia ( a Muslim obeisance to the Keeper of the Two Shrines ), covers it up (he thinks) by bowing low to the Emperor of Japan but had Michelle casually put her hand on the shoulders of the Queen of the United Kingdom.The continual affronts to the PM of Britain, Gordon Brown, are myriad.****...Obama apparently keener on sitting down with President Ahmadinejad of Iran, or cosying up to his new friends in France or Germany than he is on spending time with the Prime Minister....the speed at which the special relationship - an alliance that had endured for seven decades - has fallen apart in barely 11 months is both remarkable and deeply alarming....very real danger of being banished to the history books for ever. Obama, however, seems to be a president with no real grasp of history, as one of his first major acts on gaining office showed....appeased the Russians, he also betrayed the Poles and the Czechs,...just been released from the yoke of Soviet control ...The Obama administration is far happier doing business with Brussels than it is with Britain....Two key NATO command posts have recently gone to the French at Britain's expense,...The threat to an independent, sovereign Britain is clear and yet, remarkably, the country leading that threat is our oldest ally....when it comes to taking decisive military action, the only country the U.S. has ever been able to rely on is Britain... • Nile Gardiner is director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.
****It should not be surprising that Obama is not on Britain's side in anything (or Eastern Europe's, or Israel's, etc ); it's not clear he's on AMERICA's side in anything, at least the America of the traditional values and interpretation of the Constitution ( asserting that the Constitution was deficient in being negative about limiting the role of government rather than being positively redistributionist in guaranteeing people things. )****

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