NOT THE SHARPEST KNIVES IN THE DRAWER: Obama Administration's National Security Strategy Gets A Duh-Minus
Financial Times columnist Clive Cook savages the National Security Strategy that the Obama administration sent to Congress last week, writing that “the US president and his team seem so deluded about what they have produced”:
It was run through a management-speak machine. It emerged, repetitious and full of misprints, with added verbiage and reduced intellectual content. Then it was put through a second time.
Imagine 50 pages of this: “To prevent acts of terrorism on American soil, we must enlist all of our intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security capabilities. We will continue to integrate and leverage state and major urban area fusion centres that have the capability to share classified information.” …
This is the “all appropriate measures” school of policy analysis. One should do everything that is appropriate – in an integrated, leveraged, cost effective and sustainable way – while rejecting anything inappropriate, disorganised, ineffective or bound to fail.
According to this paper, the aims of Mr Obama’s national security policy include every desirable outcome. Curbing climate change is an aspect of national security. By similar reasoning, available resources embrace every aspect of his domestic and foreign policy: not just strong armed forces and a prosperous economy but also “access to quality, affordable healthcare”. National security includes everything and therefore means nothing. …
All right goals will be pursued; all available assets will be brought to bear. That is not a strategy.
The Stiletto is reminded of a speech then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made at Rhode Island College in February 2008 (though she was talking about universal healthcare at the time, her mockery of her opponent’s hopium campaign rhetoric is easily transmutable to President Barack Hussein Obama’s national security and foreign policy approach and one can only pray that she realizes it now that she is Secretary of State):
None of the problems we face will be easily solved. Now I could stand up here and say, “Let’s just get everybody together. Let’s get unified. The sky will open. The lights will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”
Obama and the people who surround him are as afflicted with magical thinking as they ever were. In their child-like naiveté they believe that just saying something makes it happen. Or maybe they think the rest of us believe this.
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