Trickle Down Tyranny (24 page)

In overriding the president and changing U.S. policy so that we could justify intervening in Libya’s internal affairs, Power, Rice, and Clinton based their rationale not on our nation’s vital security interests but on an obscure doctrine—championed by international leftist financier and political agitator George Soros—called “responsibility to protect.” It’s the way eggheads conduct military policy, and it shows how misguided America’s military priorities have become in the Age of Obama.

In this case, their rationale was this: It was possible that civilians in Libya might be at risk for being killed by Moammar Ghadafi’s military forces when Ghadafi responded to the rebels who threatened his regime, so the United States needed to intervene to make sure that didn’t happen.

That’s not the way I see it.

Let me make it clear what the “responsibility to protect” doctrine really means.

Here it is in plain English: America’s national interests aren’t about protecting ourselves or our allies, keeping the sea lanes open and the oil flowing for our economy, or even stopping dangerous radicals like the Iranian mullahs from getting the atomic bomb. What matters is preventing the deaths of people with whom we have no tie and no treaty.

If we get any possible benefit from a military intervention, then the policy must be selfish and wrong. On the other hand, if it costs hundreds of millions of dollars and risks American lives for no long-term gain, then it is a “responsibility to protect” and we must do it.

I told you that these Ivy Leaguers have everything backwards.

In reality, the doctrine is a convenient excuse to selectively intervene in the internal affairs of our Middle Eastern allies in order to hasten their downfall and hasten the formation of Islamist governments.

In other words, Obama doesn’t see our “allies” like I do.

As I’ll explain in the next chapter, for Obama our old friends are now our enemies and our former enemies are our new friends.

Getting back to the “responsibility to protect” and how it came to be the principle on which we entered another war: Samantha Power was a strong proponent of this misguided doctrine, and it was she who convinced Hillary Clinton to change her position on entering the combat in Libya. Like the president himself, the three women who declared war on Libya are all products of the leftist academic incubator that passes for an educational system in the United States.

The first thing you need to know about Power is that she’s married to Cass Sunstein. I explained to you in chapter 6 about Sunstein. He’s the wacko leftist Harvard Law School graduate and former University of Chicago professor who was appointed by Obama to the position of regulatory czar. He hates gun owners and the Second Amendment, which protects the right of individuals to own firearms. He also opposes hunting, a legal pastime of some 12 million Americans. He’s described the suffering of animals inflicted by hunters as “morally equivalent to slavery and the mass extermination of human beings.”

In a public speech in 2007, he dismissed the Second Amendment as a sign of the paranoia of the Founding Fathers against standing armies. He seems to imply that because the United States has a standing army and a national guard, it doesn’t need to have guns in the hands of ordinary citizens. He talks as if the meaning of the Second Amendment, which guarantees the rights of citizens to “keep and bear arms”—or in modern words, “own or carry” guns—has been twisted by the National Rifle Association and other civil rights groups. He argues that since the United States has a standing army of its own, the Second Amendment is meaningless.
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Samantha Power shares Sunstein’s and Obama’s leftist credentials and their political views. She also graduated from the bastion of leftists that Harvard Law School has become. Power was part of the Obama presidential campaign until she called Hillary Clinton “a monster” and had to resign. After the election, she took a position as an Obama foreign policy advisor.
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She has been a longtime proponent of Soros’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine. In fact, her position on the issue won her a Pulitzer Prize. Her prize-winning book,
A Problem from Hell
, is an academic’s view of genocide. It was financed in part through a grant from Soros’s Open Society Institute. Power, as she explains in the acknowledgments section of her book, interviewed “hundreds of men and women” who had survived genocide. It is from this perspective that Power became a strong advocate of the “responsibility to protect” justification for intervening in the internal affairs of a nation despite the fact that there is no vital interest for the United States.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, another Ivy League law school egghead—she went to Yale—is the second member of this unholy trio. During her husband’s presidency, the Clintons requested that the subject of Hillary’s senior thesis not be made public. That’s because the thesis—titled “THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT—An Analysis of the Alinsky Model”—was highly favorable to the methods of radical leftist political organizer Saul Alinsky, who Hillary described as “a man of exceptional charm.”
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As I explained in chapter 5, Alinsky is known as the father of community organizing, and we have him to thank for our community organizer president’s views on many issues. Both Clinton and our president are Alinsky disciples, and they’ve never forgotten the lessons they learned from the master.

The influence of the radical left doesn’t stop there.

Susan Rice, our ambassador to the United Nations, was mentored by Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. When Albright was recently confronted in an interview by Lesley Stahl about the fact that the U.S. military did not intervene to save the lives of half a million children who died at the hands of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, she replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”
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In other words, the “responsibility to protect” applies to some victims but not all?

Confusing, isn’t it?

I’ve figured out why Hillary changed her tune, too. She remembered how much her husband was pilloried for leaving the poor Rwandans to die in a genocide. A single radio tower in Rwanda broadcast the locations of the people marked for death. If Clinton had bombed that tower, thousands would have been saved. He did nothing and has been criticized ever since. So she was not going to make that mistake again. She immediately began using the magic phrase a “responsibility to protect.”

Once Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice joined Samantha Power in the fight to intervene in Libya, Obama was helpless to object.

He’s no match for three women.

It wasn’t until nine days after he had unconstitutionally committed us to a third Middle Eastern war that Obama bothered to address the nation as he made his own “mission accomplished” speech. He made sure to schedule the speech for 7:30 in the evening, because ABC told the White House it wouldn’t carry the speech if it conflicted with
Dancing with the Stars
. At least ABC has its priorities right.

In the speech, he insisted that “when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act.”
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As I’ve told you repeatedly, in reality, we had no national interest in the Libyan conflict.

By “responsibility to act” Obama meant “responsibility to protect.”

It’s the same “responsibility to protect” doctrine that was nowhere to be found when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was murdering civilians in the 2009 Iran uprising, yet it magically appeared, forming the basis of the Obama feminists’ rationale for going to war in Libya.

The doctrine was dreamed up by two leftist intellectuals, Ramesh Thakur and Gareth Evans. Like everyone else Obama listens to, they’re academics with no real-world experience to back up their theories. Thakur was Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations for nearly a decade, and he’s now employed as a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Evans is a politician and academic who currently serves as Chancellor of the Australian National University. He was active for 21 years in Australian politics, serving as a liberal cabinet minister from 1988 to 1996. He’s also been active in the United Nations, and recently released a book titled
The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All
.

Both Thakur and Evans are cronies of Soros. Evans is a former president of Soros’s International Crisis Group. The ICG describes itself as “the world’s leading independent, non-partisan, source of analysis and advice to governments, and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations, European Union and World Bank, on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict.”
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Soros’s partner in the ICG is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a committed Israel hater and former National Security Advisor to another Israel hater, former president Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski supervised the Carter administration conspiracy that resulted, in 1979, in the fall of the Shah of Iran and the implementation of the Islamist dictatorship that currently threatens Israel and the stability of the entire Middle East, and that remains an existential threat to the United States itself.

The true purpose of the ICG is exactly the opposite of its stated purpose. It seeks nothing less than the political downfall of regimes in Muslim countries that maintain friendly relations with the United States, with the ultimate purpose of reducing U.S. power and influence and promoting the power and interests of Islamists.

What happened based on Thakur and Evans’s theory is criminal. First, the United States had made its disguised declaration of war on Libya without congressional approval. Then it sent CIA agents into Libya and committed U.S. warplanes to shut down Ghadafi’s air force.

Although the president had falsely maintained that our “interests” were at stake, Defense Secretary Robert Gates explained that Libya is not “a vital interest” for the United States.
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And where Obama declared that going to war in Libya also depends on our “values”—by which I assume he means our “humanitarian values”—he neglected to point out that we routinely turn our backs when tyrants murder their citizens to keep order.

Only one person, New York congressman Charles Rangel, had the courage to speak out about the fact that Obama’s ordering U.S. involvement in Libya was unconstitutional.
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As they have in so many other matters of concern—from taking real measures toward balancing the federal budget to defunding health care—Congress ignored the constitutionality issue, abdicated its sworn duty to uphold the Constitution, and ceded unchecked power to the president.

A month after Obama had initially chosen to ignore the conflict in Libya, and based on a suspect policy promoted by all the president’s women that relegates U.S. vital interests to secondary status, the U.S. joined a coalition of NATO nations to establish a no-fly zone over Libya.

About a week after the U.S. had joined the NATO coalition in creating the no-fly zone over Libya, Defense Secretary Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen announced without warning that the U.S. was pulling its planes out of the operation and handing complete control of the mission over to NATO. The announcement came as Ghadafi’s military completed a fourth straight day of forcing the rebels into retreat and regaining much of the territory that had been lost as a result of the no-fly zone going into effect, despite the best NATO efforts.
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Gates washed his hands of the matter, saying, “My view would be, if there is going to be that kind of assistance to the opposition, there are plenty of sources for it other than the United States.” At the same time, the U.S. sent CIA operatives into Libya to assess the situation and determine the feasibility of further action, including arming Libyan rebels. This apparently didn’t count as our having “boots on the ground,” something the Obama administration had repeatedly said would not happen.
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In the meantime, things became so muddled among the leaderless NATO forces that they couldn’t even decide which side they were on. Since they too were committed to the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, which says to attack whichever group kills civilians, it wouldn’t be long before NATO had to declare war on itself. It caused “collateral damage” in the form of dozens of civilian deaths at its own hand when it bombed and strafed Ghadafi’s forces as part of establishing a no-fly zone over Libya.

U.S. Army General Carter Ham, who initially led NATO forces in the Libya mission, explained, “I cannot be sure that there have been no civilian casualties. What I can be sure of is that we have been very, very precise and discriminate in our targeting.”
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“We’ve been conveying a message to the rebels that we will be compelled to defend civilians, whether pro-Ghadafi or pro-opposition,” said a senior Obama administration official. “We are working very hard behind the scenes with the rebels so we don’t confront a situation where we face a decision to strike the rebels to defend civilians.”
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Behind the scenes, while all this was going on, Ghadafi sent a letter to our president, in which he addressed Obama, “Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu oumama.” The letter goes on to say, “We have been hurt more morally [than] physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this, you will always remain our son whatever happened. We still pray that you continue to be president of the U.S.A. We Endeavour and hope that you will gain victory in the new election campaigne.”
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