MORE MUSH FROM THE WIMP

Last March, President Obama fired the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, replaced him with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and announced "a comprehensive new strategy."

"So it was a little startling to hear Mr. Obama suggest in several televised interviews Sunday (9/20) that he had second thoughts," the Washington Post said in an editorial Tuesday (9/22).

 "Until I’m satisfied we’ve got the right strategy, I’m not going to be sending some young man or woman over there," the president told NBC’s David Gregory.

Mr. Obama is waffling on Gen. McChrystal’s urgent request for more troops because Democrats worry that if he provides them, Mr. Obama may meet the fate of Lyndon Johnson, whose ambitious domestic agenda was overshadowed by the war in Vietnam.

But it’s a more recent president Barack Hussein Obama more closely resembles.

On March 14, 1980, Kirk Scharfenberg of the Boston Globe wrote a mock headline over an editorial the Globe was planning to run on a speech President Jimmy Carter had made, planning to replace it with a serious headline before publication.

To Mr. Scharfenberg’s horror, the mock headline was inadvertently printed in 161,000 copies.  The headline was: "More Mush from the Wimp."

The headline resonated with millions of Americans because of Mr. Carter’s perceived weakness on foreign policy.  Iranian militants were holding Americans hostage in our embassy in Tehran, and Mr. Carter didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it.  He said he was surprised by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and he didn’t seem to be able to do anything about that, either.

The Carter administration, Henry Kissinger said, had achieved at one and the same time "the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) said in a radio interview last week Jimmy Carter was the worst president in the 20th Century, perhaps ever.  That may soon no longer be true. 

The hallmarks of the Obama foreign policy have been craven — and thus far futile — efforts to appease America‘s enemies, and callous treatment of our allies.

The most recent outrage was the administration’s unilateral abrogation of treaties with Poland and the Czech Republic to put anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) and radars in their countries.  The announcement of the capitulation to Russian demands came, with bitter irony for the Poles, on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union‘s invasion of Poland.

The ABMs were no threat to Russia.  They were to guard Europe against the threat of nuclear blackmail from Iran.  Russian strongman Vladimir Putin railed against them in part because he needs an external enemy to divert Russian attention from deplorable economic conditions at home, in part because he has dreams of reabsorbing Eastern Europe into a new Russian empire.

"The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back," said the Polish newspaper Fakt in a front page editorial.

"An ally we rely on has betrayed us, and has exchanged us for its own, better relations with Russia, of which we are rightly afraid," said the Czech newspaper Hospodarske Novine.

President Obama received exactly nothing for selling out America‘s friends in Eastern Europe.  Russia continues to oppose sanctions on the mullahs in Iran, and continues to sell advanced weapons to them.

Nothing is also what the administration received from North Korea for agreeing to North Korea‘s demand to scuttle the six party talks on North Korea‘s nuclear program in favor of the direct talks the Norks have long sought.

The hostile tone the Obama administration has taken toward Israel has not made the Palestinians or the Saudis more willing to recognize the right of Israel to exist.  Peace in that region remains as chimerical as ever.

"Regimes in Moscow, Pyongyang and Tehran simply pocket his concessions and carry on as before," wrote Edward Lucas in the London Telegraph Monday (9/21). "The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. Some say he is the weakest president since Jimmy Carter."

In Afghanistan and elsewhere, we need decisive leadership.  But all we get is more mush from the wimp.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.