Obama’s Jimmy Carter moment
Belatedly — but, we hope, finally! — we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Carterization of Barack Obama’s presidency. It has come not a moment too soon. We can only hope that it is real and not too late.
President Obama is scrambling to halt a new genocide in which suddenly powerful Sunni Islamist fanatics are slaughtering victims simply because they are Christians or non-Muslim Yazidi sect members. And the reality of that led Obama to give at least two orders this month he probably thought he’d never give.
First, the president who proudly boasted that he’d withdrawn the last U.S. combat troops from Iraq reluctantly ordered U.S. warplanes back into the skies over northern Iraq. Their mission: bomb rampaging, genocide-bent Islamic State of Iraq and Syria fighters who had taken over strongholds of Iraq’s pro-western Kurds. Thousands of terrified families had fled and were trapped on Mount Sinjar. About 100 U.S. civilian staffers and military guards at the U.S. Consulate in Erbil also were in danger.
Obama’s announcement caused his critics the discomfort of actually liking something he’d done. But of course Washington’s politicians of the left, center and right, always quick to cover their aspirations, hastened to proclaim themselves absolutely and irrevocably against ever again putting American “boots on the ground” in Iraq.
Yet, in the real world, commanders in chief eventually learn there are consequences for failing to do a job when lives of women and children are at stake. So, while echoing the refrain of “no boots on the ground,” Obama gave his second order: He dispatched 130 U.S. military “advisers” into Iraq to come up with a way of rescuing those potential victims of the ISIS genocide.
Now, all who chronicle these events know the code: Sending modest numbers of advisers often means many more may soon follow — to ensure an ISIS genocide of nonMuslims can be thwarted. If those U.S. military advisers get the job done, history may never remember what shoes they wore.
What Obama’s military rescue mission shows is that yet another commander in chief has bowed to the reality that he cannot make good outcomes happen just by uttering wishful words. A surprised and disapproving world took Obama’s measure back when he confidently assured the planet Syrian President Bashar Assad would soon be gone, then famously drew his “red line” against Assad’s use of chemical weapons but took no military action after Syria used them — and failed to even send vital weapons to Syria’s moderate rebels who desperately needed them.
Obama’s national security A-Team — Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates, Leon Panetta and Gen. David Petraeus — recommended arming Syria’s most trusted rebel factions. We learned that from Clinton’s new book, “Hard Choices.”
Predictably, the moderate rebel factions flounderedwithoutweapons; and ISIS raced in to fill the vacuum. Pathetically, ISIS today is excellently armed — with U.S. weapons they simply picked up when Iraqi soldiers fled and dropped the arms America gave them.
Unfortunately, few world figures today are willing to boldly lead simply because it’s the right thing to do. Earlier this year, the world had warnings of ISIS’ genocidal bent. News reported ISIS troops demanded Arab Christians convert to Islam or be killed. But the stories were often buried. World leaders shrugged and went about their daily grinds, even when Pope Francis condemned ISIS actions a month ago after the rebels captured the city of Mosul and Christians fled. Seven decades after the Nazi Holocaust, the world’s news deciders seem to have forgot- ten the ecumenical lesson of “Never again!”
Now we are racing back into Iraq. Racing to save non-Muslim Arabs from being victims of a genocide we knew was about to happen but never cared enough to wake up the world and make it care.
We are racing back, with no great plan in hand, because now we cannot permit Iraq to disintegrate into global jihad’s next haven.
Although the world gets it when we talk about a president’s Carterization — it’s Jimmy Carter’s image as a flawed leader swept along by events — there is a larger lesson the world overlooks.
Jimmy Carter indeed seemed powerless after Iranian revolutionaries held his U.S. Embassy staff in Iran hostage, but he also accomplished one of the boldest leadership achievements of any president. Carter’s Camp David summit and his unscripted personal shuttle diplomacy produced an Israeli-Egyptian peace that endures in that tumultuous region.
A bold, courageous personal presidential involvement — a “roll up your sleeves and quit fretting about legacy images” effort — may once again be what that exploding region and the world need right now.