Photo: Pretty colors, but almost beside the point
Dick Cheney is speaking out against the policies of the Obama administration, saying they leave this country more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. The Wash Times reports:
Mr. Cheney said that [the Obama] administration's dismantling of many of the policies and protections instituted by President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — including the planned closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba and halting controversial prisoner interrogation techniques — have made the country more vulnerable to future attacks.
"That's my belief," Mr. Cheney said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "I think to the extent that those [Bush-era] policies were responsible for saving lives, that the administration is now trying to cancel those policies … means in the future we're not going to have the same safeguards we've had for the last eight years."
More vulnerable, definitely. To terrorist attack? Well, strictly speaking, yes. But reading Obama's policies in the narrow terms of more-vulnerable-to-terrorist-attack vs. less-vulnerable-to-terrorist-attack , as the former VP does, is just more of the same narrow thinking on the "terror" threat that has informed our woefully, negligently deficient policies since 9/11.
Consider this: What "terrorist" with even a rudimentary notion of strategy would possibly want to strike at. say, the heart of Washington, DC with Barack Hussein Obama in charge? From Day One we've seen an accelerated elevation of of the Islamic world by this administration with its repeated mantra of "mutual respect," its pattern of Islam-first in presidential phone calls (#1 went to the PA), interviews (# 1 went to al-Arabiya), and audiences (no time for Netanyahu?). We've seen the weirdest succession of Islamic symbolism so laughably crude that it has to be coincidental or it has to be not-at-all hidden messages: Candidate Obama saying he'd been to "all 57 states (the OIC has 57 member states); President Obama giving his economic policy speech containg "five pillars" (there are 5 "pillars" of Islam); talking about a new "foundation" (Al Qaeda translates as The Foundation). Meanwhile, Obama, ably assisted by the anti-Israel likes of James Jones and Baker-ite Bob Gates and Giggles Clinton, is openly planning to sell Israel down the river for "peace." And I haven't even mentioned the administration's position on the interrogation of "terrorists," its Guantanamo policy, or its gigantic Muslim "outreach" strategy that will take Obama to Egypt for yet another speech from and to the Islamic world, the first being his address is Turkey.
Why would our Islamic/ist/ofascist/ismist enemies do anything that could possibly derail this extremely Islam-favorable process? In other words, it may well be the case that Americans are physically safer from Islamic terrorists at the moment, even as our very security protection is being officially dismantled. Obama's white-flag policies would seem less likely to provoke attack than an admiinstration on the offense. This theory doesn't allow for the rogue operator, who could strike anywhere, anytime. But as far as organized jihadist networks go, it seems unlikely that they would seek to do anything to stop America's capitulations to islamic law and strategic interests.
So on that count Cheney is wrong. And he has no appreciation -- certainly, no articulated appreciation -- of the existential danger to the United States that, first, his own Bush administration and now the new Obama administration has certainly made the US increasingly vulnerable to: the so-far inexorable spread of Islamic law (sharia) across the Western world. Yes, the Bush administration went to (costly and ill-conceived) war, gave us Gitmo, and waterboarded three scumbags; but the Bush team never, ever, ever provided the American people with a defense or even a rationale against sharia.
Poor America: The Clinton administration treated jihadists as criminals; the Bush administration treated them as military targets; and the Obama administration treats them as a new kind of a constituency with outreach and speeches and other political appeals. But none of these administrations has guarded this country against the existential threat contained in the spread, through violence, money or demographics, of their ideology.