The portions of the President’ recent State of the Union Address dealing with national security (and foreign policy, more broadly): 941 words out of 7,311. This translates into 6 minutes and 30 seconds of a 69-minute speech, or roughly 9% of Obama’s presentation that night.
The President said that he is not interested in “re-litigating the past” but clearly does cite the past administration at every opportunity available to avoid responsibility for his own national security policies. Of those precious few minutes, the President willfully misrepresented the following:
- A blatantly incorrect characterization of President Ronald Reagan’s philosophy on nuclear weapons and arms control. While Reagan’s views on the terror of a nuclear exchange is well known and is copiously chronicled in his diaries, speeches and interviews, the 40th President did everything he could to ensure the modernization and strategic posture of our nuclear deterrent. As Barack Obama no doubt knows—because of his own sophomoric college writing at the time—Reagan was anything but a proponent of the type of unilateral disarmament favored by this Administration.
- An improvement in the ongoing farce of Obama’s engagement North Korea and Iran. Even his Secretary of State has conceded that toothless diplomacy has gotten them nowhere. Iran and North Korea enjoy a steady unchallenged march towards nuclear weapons capability and in no way fear the United States. In fact, today, the government of Iran executed two activists, sending a clear message of defiance to our President’s empty words.
- The banning of “torture.” Torture was already illegal and this administration had no effect on the issue—except to aide our enemies in their propaganda campaign against us. This campaign was launched by the world’s left during the Abu Ghraib scandal, and has continued with snowballing ferocity since then. As usual, critics of American interrogation policy superimpose their hatred for the previous Administration onto our enemies. Listening to the terrorists’ own rationalizations—which are couched in centuries of accepted Islamic jurisprudence and theory on Jihad—would disabuse anyone who believes enhanced interrogation techniques are a recruiting tool for terrorists.
- Lip service was made in passing to the support of human rights and women’s rights in Iran. The President and his Administration has not stood with the women marching in the streets of Tehran. His domestic political opponents, on the other hand, have. Shamefully, no actions to date have been taken to promote the success of the Green Movement in Iran.
- Signal to Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan that the American military would be gone in 2011. Roughly paraphrasing Christopher Hitchens on two points, (a) the most powerful psychological weapon the Taliban has is to go into Afghan villages and say to the people there, “we will still be here when the Americans leave,” and (b) telling your opponent when you are going to fold is a poor strategy for winning a game of poker, no less a war against transnational terrorist groups.
The President’s final sentence, though, on matters dear to us here at Secure Freedom Radio—security and freedom—was true and accurate: “America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity. Always.”
Well, talk is cheap. Our president still has three years to live up to his own words. In the mean time, Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy will be fighting for freedom and human dignity every day.
