FP: Victor Davis  Hanson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I’d like to talk to you today about radical Islam and the Obama
administration’s ability and inclination, or lack thereof, to confront
it.

What’s the best way to begin this discussion?

Hanson: Thanks Jamie.

The paradigm of discussing radical Islam is entirely different after
January 20. Jihad has been institutionalized now as a benign personal
odyssey rather than explicatory of the sort of murderous attacks we
have seen since 1979 directed at the West, most recently with the four
Islamic plots to kill Americans by radical Islamists since Obama has
taken office.

Obama’s interview with al Arabiya and his Cairo speech had two clear
themes: his own personal heritage makes him uniquely qualified to undo
the Bush damage; and we in the West have been equally culpable for the
strained relations.

This sort of moral equivalence is little concerned with any redress
of pathologies that in fact led to 9/11: Western appeasement of, or
indifference to, radical Islam, whose extremism was the natural
dividend of a region torn by enormous oil wealth, and age old statism,
tribalism, gender intolerance, and dictatorship. In the era of Obama,
radical Islam and the West merely have different narratives, rather
than a fascistic creed trying to destroy the notion of Western freedom
and tolerance.

Abroad as both sides refocus on the Afghanistan theater, somehow
Obama is more demoralized by our victory in Iraq than the Islamists are
by their defeat; and we have forgotten in the Bush ‘reset’ button
rhetoric that support for bin Laden and suicide bombing–given the
terrible dividends they earned–had plummeted in polls in the Middle
East. In addition, in the “Bush did it” Obama narrative there was no
mention of the arrest of Dr. Khan, the Syrian exit from Lebanon,  the
surrender of the Libyan WMD stockpiles, or the absence of another 9/11.

The result is that many in the radical Islamic world–especially
after Obama’s serial trashing of the Bush-era security protocols like
retaps, intercepts, and Guantanamo– may well be emboldened to think
that either America questions its successful efforts at thwarting
another attack since 9/11, or in some strange way sympathizes with some
of the writs against itself.

FP: What explains the Obama administration’s behaviour and  viewpoint in this context?

Hanson: a) Obama is a product of his education and
early life, in which America being culpable for  a variety of sins was
the gospel , as we see from his associates like Ayers, to his minister
like Wright, to the general force of his community organizing in
Chicago, to his most partisan voting record in the Senate;

b) Obama, like many elites on the left who thrived in the academic
and organizing/grant-giving world, understood that his exotic name, his
mixed heritage, his father’s Muslim roots could all be combined to
present some sort of revolutionary aura within the confines of the
university that would pay career dividends, and then among the general
public, if packaged with a charismatic and conciliatory persona, could
make one feel comfortable and good about one’s supposed liberality; he
thrived on being a ‘revolutionary’ lite figure in a non-threatening
manner, and it’s hard to give up a winning hand at this late stage;

c) Obama has almost no real experience with an America outside the
victim politics of Chicago and the melodramas of the university. He has
never run a business, never worked hard with his hands, never had to
meet a budget, never understood how money is made, but instead
essentially pleaded his cause to win fellowships and grants, dispensed
someone else’s money as a board member, made claims against government
(”organizing”), and written his autobiographies at a young age.

Life, in other words, was pretty easy, as the path from Harvard
Review to Nobel Prize Winner was characterized by smoothing rhetoric
and a host of people who, for a host of psychological reasons of their
own, wished to give him something for something he didn’t earn. Now he
oddly seems surprised that not all those abroad are as wowed as the
2008 American electorate.

FP: What is at stake if Obama continues along this  path?

Hanson: We have an eerie resemblance to Carterism
circa 1977: the sermons, the apologies, the trashing of predecessors,
the moralizing, the transnational utopianism—all manifested in naiveté
about Khomeini, the selling out of the Shah, the downplaying of a
communist threat, which, in 1-2 year’s time (it takes a while for
others to size up an American president), earned communist expansion in
Central America, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the hostage taking in
Teheran, uncertainty in Korea, the rise of radical Islam and a weakened
US military.

In Obama’s terms that would mean earning a nuclear Iran, a Russia
convinced that we will not object to corrections in its regional map, a
China eyeing opportunities everywhere, South America reverting back to
a sixties credo, Europe oddly remorseful that it got what it wanted (a
soft-power, Europeanized America), Israel without an ally, and many in
the Mideast convinced that America is now sympathetic to its expansive
and non-ending grievances. We may well see a new era of nuclear
proliferation as never before.

FP: How  would you compare Obama to Clinton and Carter in terms of damaging American and  Western security?

Hanson: It is still early, but the two are
instructive. Carter’s self-righteousness ended in disaster and was
corrected by Reagan. Clinton, for all his appeasement of radical Islam,
the defense cuts, Mogadishu, Haiti, and dithering in the Balkans, at
the end became finally somewhat Trumanesque: he removed Milosevic
without a lot of bipartisan support, he enforced the no-fly-zones and
called for regime change in Iraq, and he tried to project a centrist
bipartisan foreign policy, albeit replete with the normal apologies and
liberal flourishes. But he was not Jimmy Carter.

Obama? He has a choice; he can correct as Clinton did domestically
in 1995 and save his presidency, or he can go the finger-wagging,
sanctimonious route blaming the public and the “right” for not
appreciating his moral genius. That will lead to political oblivion in
2012. It’s his choice at this point, and predicated on how large the
midterm correction and what will be his attitude to political rebuke.

FP: And the  American people stand where?

Hanson: Us in the meantime? The people will have to
go through a period of national uncertainty and hope that the prior
strength of the United States still offers a deterrent to would-be
aggressors. I omit the foreign policy effects of borrowing $2 trillion
per year to dispense on constituents, but when we hit $20 trillion in
aggregate debt at a 8-10% service fee, the US then will have very few
options at home or abroad. So, let us hope that either Obama or the
voters, get wisdom in the meantime.

FP: Victor Davis Hanson, thank you for  joining Frontpage Interview.

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