by Austin Bay
October 21, 2008“Mark
my words,” Joe Biden told a group of wealthy contributors. “It will not be six
months before the world tests Barack Obama like it did John Kennedy.” A moment
later Biden added, “Watch, we're going to have an international crisis, a
generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
So
let’s play Name That Crisis, the one Biden says will test Obama within six
months of his inauguration. Understand any answer will be tentative. Even if the
prognosticator correctly identifies the antagonists and the battlefield, the
actual sequence of events will defy astrologers, political science-fiction
scenarists and intelligence agencies.
Gomer Pyle’s kitsch litany (from “The Andy
Griffith Show”) will damn us once again: “Surprise, surprise,
surprise.”
Pyle’s flabbergast served as a plot device
in a family comedy. Obama’s test will be an American tragedy. Hope for a better
tragedy, one where the body count -- friendly, enemy and in-between -- is
minimized and the material destruction
manageable.
I know the keyword in that last sentence is
“hope,” a word that plays an energizing poetic and emotional role in Obama’s
campaign litany.
As president, Obama was supposed to avoid
nasty conflicts because he in his very person brings hope and embodies change --
galvanizing hope and fundamental, perhaps utopian change. Review his primary
speeches and his oration in Berlin. That’s the messianic
message.
Diplomatic and military planners
“operationalize” a policy. Obama promised us a messianic operation: Personal
negotiations conducted by himself with some of the world’s worst dictators and
America haters, with the implicit point that his bold and sacrificial personal
diplomacy would rearrange planetary
politics.
Of course, lurking behind this megalomania
are two hideous assumptions that are the passionate garbage of anti-Americans
everywhere. The first one is the lesser lie -- the U.S. and specifically the
Bush Administration “don’t talk” to rogues like Iran. Recall Ambassador Ryan
Crocker’s testimony in September 2007 when he related, in stoic detail, the
results of low- and mid-level diplomatic meetings with Iran: Iranian posturing
and rhetorical thrashing.
The U.S. talks to everyone including rogues.
Spies chat with spies. The State Department employs “third parties” and “the
grapevine.” The trick is to avoid giving a propaganda coup to a thug. Denying
gangsters and vitriolic liars equal footing with an American president isn’t
stupid or backward or change frustrating behavior -- it’s savvy
procedure.
The second lie, the greater lie, is that the
U.S. is somehow directly or indirectly at fault when a crisis occurs. This was
the agitprop line of anti-Americans throughout the 20th
century, stoked by Nazis in World War II, Communists from Stalin and Mao to
Gorbachev, and America haters in general. Obama’s forgotten spiritual guide, the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, echoed this theme in his noxious sermon that said with the
9-11 terror attacks America’s chickens were “coming home to roost.”
So
what is coming home to roost with what Biden assures us is Obama’s imminent
test? Obama’s blatant naiveté is a strong candidate for the triggering incident,
and in that light Biden’s speech is a “pre-emptive” inoculation. “I
guarantee you,” Biden said, “it's going to happen. I can give you at least four
or five scenarios from where it might originate."
His scenarios included Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Say what? Osama bin Laden challenged America from Afghanistan in 1998
when he declared war on the U.S. Pakistan? That’s where Obama called for a
pre-emptive invasion earlier this year. What about Iraq? The certain trigger for
debacle in Iraq is wavering U.S. commitment -- and Obama is committed to
quitting based on his political schedule, not conditions on the ground. Perhaps
a war with Iran over Iraq or the Persian Gulf or in the aftermath of an Israeli
strike on Iranian nukes?
Suddenly Obama will face change -- changing
conditions that require blood, sweat, toil and tears to sustain
hope.
