The Day Obama's Presidency Died
By Richard Fernandez
PJMedia.com
Almost
nobody in Japan heard about the Battle of Midway
until after the war. The Emperor Hirohito, upon
hearing of the debacle ordered a comprehensive
cover-up. The wounded were isolated on hospital
ships. All mail was censored. Surviving enlisted men
and officers were held incommunicado until they
could be shipped off to distant battlefields from
where it was hoped they would never return. The
sunken ships themselves were gradually written off
over the course of the war until their loss blended
in with the general demise of the imperial fleet. In
order to coordinate this effort Hirohito created a
special office of cabinet rank.
It
worked perfectly. If the US had not won World War 2
Midway would never have existed in Japanese history.
The average man of course read nothing in the
papers, heard nothing on the radio, saw nothing in
the newsreel. But perceptive Japanese ‘felt’
something momentous had happened though they could
not identify its cause. It’s impact, though denied
in the press, shuddered through the whole imperial
fabric. From that day forward events seemed to take
a downward trajectory. Only after the war did the
Japanese know the root of their misfortunes.
Midway.
But the
loss was worse than four carriers sunk. Jonathan
Parshall and Anthony Tully in their classic account
of Midway, The Shattered Sword, argued that
the battle broke the Japanese empire in a
fundamental way. It was the consequences of denial
that really finished the Japanese military.
Cohen
and Gooch propose that all military failures fall
into three basic categories: failure to learn from
the past, failure to anticipate what the future may
bring, and failure to adapt to the immediate
circumstances on the battlefield. They further note
that when one of these three basic failures occurs
in isolation (known as a simple failure), the
results, while unpleasant, can often also be
overcome. Aggregate failures occur when two of the
basic failure types, usually learning and
anticipation, take place simultaneously, and these
are more difficult to surmount. Finally, at the apex
of failure stand those rare events when all three
basic failures occur simultaneously-an event known
as catastrophic failure. In such an occurrence, the
result is usually a disaster of such scope that
recovery is impossible.
The
Japanese did not want to accept what Midway meant
about their strategic assumptions and therefore they
suppressed it. That was more damaging than the naval
losses themselves. It was that failure to adjust to
reality which doomed the empire.
The
curious thing about September 11, 2012 — the day of
the Benghazhi attack — is that for some reason it
marks the decline of the Obama presidency as clearly
as a milepost. We are told by the papers that
nothing much happened on that day. A riot in a
far-away country. A few people killed. And yet … it
may be coincidental, but from that day the
administration’s foreign policy seemed inexplicably
hexed. The Arab Spring ground to a halt. The
Secretary of State ‘resigned’. The CIA Director was
cast out in disgrace. Not long after, Obama had to
withdraw his Red Line in Syria. Al-Qaeda, whose
eulogy he had pronounced appeared with disturbing
force throughout Africa, South Asia and the Arabian
Peninsula. Almost as if on cue, Russia made an
unexpected return to the world stage, first in
Syria, then in the Iranian nuclear negotiations.
Worse
was to follow. America’s premier intelligence
organization, the National Security Agency, was
taken apart in public and the man who took its
secrets, Edward Snowden, decamped to Moscow with a
laptop full of secrets. But it was all just a
curtain raiser to the dismemberment of Ukraine and
the disaster in Eastern Europe.
DONETSK, Ukraine — Ninety percent of voters in a key
industrial region in eastern Ukraine came out in
favor of sovereignty Sunday, pro-Russian insurgents
said in announcing preliminary results of a twin
referendum that is certain to deepen the turmoil in
the country.
Roman
Lyagin, election chief of the self-styled Donetsk
People’s Republic, said around 75 percent of the
Donetsk region’s 3 million or so eligible voters
cast ballots, and the vast majority backed
self-rule.
The
Ukraine has now been effectively partitioned. The
Obama administration talk about inflicting
“consequences” and “costs” on Russia turned out to
be empty. Almost as if to add insult to injury, Iran
has declared victory in Syria over Obama. “‘We have
won in Syria,’ said Alaeddin Borujerdi, chairman of
the Iranian parliament’s national security and
foreign policy committee and an influential
government insider. ‘The regime will stay. The
Americans have lost it.’”
And
still there’s no acknowledgement of anything being
fundamentally wrong.
As with
the Japanese at Midway, we’ve all felt a change in
the beat of the engines; a difference in the
progress of the hull. One person who might
understand why the Obama boat is sputtering is
fleeing the scene while avoiding an explanation is
Hillary. Slate notes that she just had a
fundraiser with a virulent critic of Obama. “De
Rothschild is a multimillionaire who was reportedly
introduced her husband, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, by
Henry Kissinger. She became nationally notorious
during the 2008 election cycle as a Clinton
supporter who refused to throw her support to Barack
Obama after the primaries, vocally backing John
McCain and calling Obama an ‘elitist’ without any
apparent sense of irony. She later said the
president is ‘a loser’ who ‘is going to bankrupt
America’ and observed that ‘being half black’ did
not qualify him to be president.”
The Washington
Post teasingly suggests there is a reason why
Hillary is broadening her circle of friends. “Why
Hillary Clinton will be rubbing elbows with a major
Obama critic this month,” they ask. But the don’t
say. But the New York Times has a theory:
Hillary’s problem is Obama. The public is tired of
seeing Obama’s mug, and ergo they want to see
Hillary’s.
The
latest investigation into the Benghazi attack
reminds us that the issue isn’t going away any time
soon. Pundits are already speculating about
potential damage to Hillary Clinton’s presidential
prospects, but don’t believe the hype: Scandals
rarely matter much in presidential election
campaigns.
A far
more significant threat to her potential candidacy
is Americans’ desire for new leadership after eight
years of the Obama administration. A Pew Research
Center/USA Today poll found this week that 65
percent of Americans would “like to see a president
who offers different policies and programs.” Only 30
percent said they wanted ones “similar to those of
the Obama administration.”
Note
the reappearance of Benghazi once again in the
familiar New York Times “nothing happened”
mode. Just move on and remember that what the voters
want is Hillary’s fresh face. But since the NYT is
offering a conjecture of surpassing thinness, why
not offer another, so long as it is understood that
it is merely guesswork. Here goes: the day the Obama
presidency died.
Benghazi had its roots in an alternative theory of
foreign policy formed in Obama’s team at around the
time of the Surge in Iraq. From that experience,
Obama’s advisers persuaded him that it would be
possible to “turn” America’s enemies by taking
control of them instead of fighting them. It was a
dazzling prospect which offered victory on the
cheap.
It was
to be built on three pillars: covert action,
targeted assassinations and diplomacy. The idea was
simple, instead of relying on the regular military,
the Obama administration would take over the most
dangerous jihadi groups through intelligence
agencies. Through this mechanism they would become
their patrons and cement the relationship with
diplomatic deals with their Gulf funders. Drones and
hunter killer squads would be employed to promote
chosen intelligence assets — American agents — to
positions of responsbility in the terror cells. The
drones would clear the way for designated jihadis to
rise within the ranks. Eventually America would own
the jihad and neuter it from within.
America
would out ISI the ISI.
But of
course there had to be a genuine political component
as well. A bone needed to be thrown to genuine
Muslim aspirations. Why not give the Muslim
Brotherhood Egypt and hand over Syria to al-Qaeda?
And why not use American diplomatic muscle to force
a deal between Palestine and Israel. That way
al-Qaeda could have their own countries and
presumably be satisfied with that.
This
scheme has a certain superficial attractiveness. It
sounds wildly daring, incredibly smart and its
formulators must have felt like Cortez on a Peak in
Darien. “Boy are we cool to have thought of this.”
There
is only one problem with this scenario. It could
never be sold to a public who had given their sons
to fighting the Jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan. It
could never be peddled to crusty old guys who’d see
it as a crazy-ass scheme. The solution to meeting
the objections was simple. Don’t tell anyone and
conduct a secret foreign and counter-terrorist
policy, which when it succeeded could be unveiled as
proof of Obama’s genius.
All of
this is conjecture, but conjecture in the same way
that the New York Times’ argues there is
nothing to Benghazi. Absent testimony and the
disclosure of records, Benghazi remains a null
value, something unmeasured. We don’t know what it
is, any more than a blank address field in a
database; we only know we don’t know what it is.
So let
me insert a guess into the field. Suppose Benghazi
was the night when the administration’s secret
policy fell apart. In one devastating attack Obama —
and Hillary — realized they had been double crossed
and their whole theory had been a dream. In an
instant it was plain they could not control the
jihad from the inside.
That
setback, by itself, was not necessarily a bad thing.
Commanders in Chief can make mistakes so why
couldn’t Hillary and Obama just admit they had this
theory but it didn’t work in practice and just learn
from it?
Because
they had pursued the policy secretly and possibly
illegally. Because of 2012. Because like Hirohito,
Obama could do no wrong, so there was nothing but to
protect the Throne of Heaven from the accusation of
fallibility and the guilt of cover-up. So they lied.
Let us
now return to Parshall’s observation that ”all
military failures fall into three basic categories:
failure to learn from the past, failure to
anticipate what the future may bring, and failure to
adapt to the immediate circumstances on the
battlefield. ” It’s possible that Obama did exactly
that on the night of September 11, 2012. He didn’t
see the double cross coming; he had no Plan B for
Syria, for al-Qaeda, having bet the farm on Plan A
and he covered failure up.
He went
and committed all three categories of failure.
”Finally, at the apex of failure stand those rare
events when all three basic failures occur
simultaneously-an event known as catastrophic
failure. In such an occurrence, the result is
usually a disaster of such scope that recovery is
impossible.”
And now
he’s living with the consequences of having to
pursue a strategic assumption he knows is wrong but
does not dare denounce.
Suppose
Benghazi was a catastrophic failure, made all the
more dangerous by the possibility that Russia had a
hand in it. If Putin, having studied how Reagan used
the Jihad to bring down Soviet Union, played the
same game on Barack Hussein Obama, it would explain
many otherwise inexplicable things. The role of
Snowden. The disgrace of Petraeus. The exile of
anyone and anything to do with Benghazi. The
kid-gloves treatment of the Ansar attackers. The
strange enmity between Hillary and Obama. Each is
bound by the same secret. Each lives in fear of the
same smoldering fire burning in the bowels of the
administration.