An important election is coming up, and I don’t mean the one in Canada. God knows, ours is important enough, but at least we’ll have some say in it. In democracy’s supreme contest south of the border we won’t. U.S. voters will choose a new leader for the free world, or what’s left of it after the Taliban, al Qaida, al-Shabab, ISIL, the Houthis, Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong-un and their like-minded friends have used it as a playpen for another 18 months.
Fortunately the world is a large place. Nobody managed to destroy it completely so far, though Timur the Lame gave it a good try with an estimated 17 million killed. He did that in the low-tech days of the late Middle Ages, 600 years before Adolf Hitler, without Zyklon-B-equipped gas chambers. Neither had nuclear weapons. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un does, and the Supreme Leader of Iran is working hard to acquire the technology. The pop song calls this cloudy weather. These aren’t friendly skies.
One can only hope that Americans will make a better choice than they have on the last two occasions. Make it four occasions if you like, for George W. Bush was hardly an inspired choice, though still not a patch on Barack Obama.
I’m not saying Obama is the worst U.S. president in history, but he’s in the running, and these aren’t the best of times with ample room for error. When it comes to foreign policy, Obama is neck-and-neck with Jimmy Carter. In fact, if it weren’t for advances in drone technology, I’d put my money on Obama to cinch last place.
st September President Obama announced that he was ready to destroy the monster ISIL he helped create. This wasn’t the way he put it, of course, and no doubt some will find the way I put it unfair. President Obama, they’ll say, welcomed and encouraged the Arab Spring, not the masked head-hackers of ISIL. True as this is, it’s the defence of the sorcerer’s apprentice. The leader of the free world ought to have known the likely consequences of proclaiming, as he repeatedly did, America’s heartfelt apologies for its achievements, success and eminence, coupled with his hasty endorsement of fundamental changes in the Middle East, the world’s most volatile region.
Democracy without democrats is a chimera. It may replace tottering tyrannies only to pave the way for vigorous tyrants. The French Revolution set the pattern with equality, fraternity and liberty leading first to the Reign of Terror, then the liberator-turned-emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. A century later, Alexander Kerensky’s moment of democracy followed the collapse of Russia’s absolute monarchy in 1917, only to be replaced by the Marxist tyranny of V.I. Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades. The Weimar Republic tried to hang on, but became only an interlude between the Hohenzollern dynasty of Wilhelm II and the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler. In 1979, it became the turn of theocracy to follow autocracy, with the sloganeering Shiite clergy’s “Death-to-America” Islamist revolution replacing the Shah’s tottering Peacock Throne, and we’re witnessing Islamism’s merciless militancy rising from the vacuum of the Arab Spring.
The results of demagoguery such as Obama engaged in at Cairo University in 2011 (among other times and places) were visible this week as floating corpses in the Mediterranean, as refugees attempt to cross the sea from Libya to Italy in overloaded ships to escape the storm troopers of militant theocratic Islam. These corpses were predictable long before they appeared as tragic images on TV and computer screens. Many commentators predicted them, myself included.
We might as well have saved our breath. For a time Obama dismissed Islamism’s threat to global equilibrium with flippant remarks, calling ISIL the region’s “junior chamber of commerce.” Only when this became untenable, was the president’s strategic answer revealed in his Sept. 10 announcement last year of a protracted military campaign. It was to expand air strikes to support Iraqi and Kurdish troops trying to reclaim the vast northern territories taken over by the Islamic State — some junior chamber of commerce! — along with extending U.S. air power into Syria, where ISIL controls the northern half of the country.
Finally, seven months ago, the president spoke and minced no words. “Our objective is clear,” he said. “We will degrade, and ultimately destroy [ISIL] through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy. This counter-terrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out [ISIL] wherever they exist.”
Degrade? Take out? Comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy? Maybe I’m overly suspicious, but this sounds like drone-talk to me.
Drones are dandy, but they won’t by themselves rectify shortcomings of policy and diplomacy. Still, they’re better than nothing. They may ameliorate the worst consequences of bad political and diplomatic choices. Given the attitude and illusions of the White House, maybe assassinating bad guys is the best the United States, the leading democracy on Earth, can contribute to the world’s peace and liberty at present. Current American culture has no taste for causing casualties and no tolerance for suffering any, but it’s a champion inventor of electronic gizmos. Targeted assassination seems to suit it perfectly.
Ideally, of course, Americans should consider electing a leader worthy of the great country in which he or she is running for office. Are there any such candidates on the horizon? If there are, they aren’t among the most visible. The most visible, in fact, is one whose relationship with facts, whether pertaining to her email account, or her experience as a traveller in the former Yugoslavia, or the murder of an ambassador in Benghazi on her watch as Secretary of State, augurs that she may bring to the office the flaws of Richard Nixon combined with the merits of Jimmy Carter.
