From the Wall Street Journal.
The president of the United States has completed another outing abroad in his now standard form: as the un-Bush. At one stop after another — the latest in Latin America, where Hugo Chávez expressed wishes to be his friend — Barack Obama fulfilled his campaign vows to show the nations of the world that a new American leadership stood ready to atone for the transgressions of the old.
All went as expected in these travels, not counting certain unforeseen results of that triumphal European tour. The images of that trip, in which Mr. Obama dazzled ecstatic Europeans with citations of the offenses against international goodwill and humanity committed by the nation he leads, are now firmly imprinted on the minds of Americans. That this is so, and that it is not good news for him, is truth of a kind not quite fathomable to this president and his men.
Now, on the heels of those travels, comes his release of the guidelines known as “torture memos” — a decision designed to emphasize, again, the superior ethical and moral leadership the world can expect from this administration as compared with that of presidencies past. This exercise in comparisons is one of which Mr. Obama may well never tire.
……Turning aside the quest for answers to knotty questions — including several on the point that most of what we now know about al Qaeda had been gleaned precisely from these enhanced interrogations — Mr. (Rahm) Emanuel indicated that the Obama administration was guided by higher concerns. He proceeded patiently, to explain. By revealing the memos, with their detailed information on those interrogation techniques (now banned), we had elevated our moral status in the eyes of the world. More important, we had improved our standing in the eyes of potential terrorists. This would undermine al Qaeda, Mr. Emanuel explained, because those interrogations of ours helped to enlist terrorists to their cause. All of which was why the publication of the memos — news of which would presumably touch the hearts of militants around the world — would make America safer.
The old liberal standby: We “created” terrorists by fighting back and using interrogations that saved Americans’ lives. And if we just kissed their asses, they would put away their bombs and AK47s and sing Kumbaya.
There is always danger in repeating propositions like this often, among them the likelihood that their irrationality will begin to make itself clear to anyone hearing it over time.
Any number of people listening to Mr. Emanuel — those acquainted with terror’s recent history, at any rate — would have recalled, instantly, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the attack on the USS Cole, and the rest of the unending chain of terror assaults mounted against Americans long before anyone had ever heard of enhanced interrogation techniques.……He had gone to Europe not as the voice of his nation, but as a missionary with a message of atonement for its errors. Which were, as he perceived them — arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantanamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II.
……None of this display during Mr. Obama’s recent travels could have come as a surprise to legions of his supporters, nor would many of them be daunted by their new president’s preoccupation with our moral failures. Five decades of teaching in colleges and universities across the land, portraying the U.S. as a power mainly responsible for injustice and evil, whose military might was ever a danger to the world — a nation built on the fruits of greed, rapacity and racism — have had their effect. The products of this education find nothing strange in a president quick to focus on the theme of American moral failure. He may not share many of their views, but there is, nonetheless, much that they find familiar about him.
The rest of the article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124035759650041105.html
While THE ONE is busy flogging America for the world’s ‘injustices’—real or imagined—our national security has benefit not one iota. The cost of appeasing the Euro Left and Islamic extremists will be tallied at the end of his 4 year regime, or the next attack on America; whichever comes first.