Woodrow Wilson (D-Faculty Lounge) our first president from the academy said famously in 1915 when the Lusitania was sunk by Germany There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.
President Obama our second is not too proud to fight just too proud to be seen doing so to announce his war aims or to lead. Of the three reasons behind the decision to institute a no-fly zone in Libya -- to avert a massacre to effect regime change upon its murderous ruler and to warn off other tyrants -- he chose to emphasize only the first which had nothing to do with the national interest.
In his brief announcement after which he went off to Brazil as if nothing had happened he stressed how minor it was; how others would run it; how others had planned it; how soon he would leave. Starting what might be his third war in the region he took pains to appear as passive as possible. Assertions of power are somehow beneath him it seems.
Obama is a professor but he is not without conscience which means he does the right thing after much stress and anguish and prolonged inner wars with himself. He sends troops to Iraq and Afghanistan but talks about leaving; aims at regime change while refusing the name.
Small countries dream of great things; he wants to lead a small European social democracy. The president is obsessed with pretending that we are not running the operation says Charles Krauthammer. Administration officials insist we are not trying to bring down Gadhafi even as the president insists that he must go.
Like many professors Obama objects to power in general and to power exercised by Americans as being even less moral but power and morals can sometimes be friends. It was war that made England a limited monarchy and America a republic; the threat of war that kept the Soviet Union from oppressing and murdering even more millions and war on unprecedented levels of horror that ended the infernal ambitions of Hitlers Germany and Hirohitos Japan.
The Civil War ended slavery and the National Guard helped destroy segregation. And if segregation and slavery (which we ended ourselves) destroyed forever our right to wield power then who is more suited than we?
The French? The ancien regime the guillotine and the Terror collaboration anti-Semitism and Huguenot massacres. The Spanish? The Inquisition (which no one expected). The British had imperialism and the class system and the Irish might give you an argument.
The small Third World states with their own private bloodbaths? The Russians the Japanese and the Germans? Surely you jest.
The fact is that every country that ever had power has abused or misused it in one way or another and those who did neither had nothing to use. It is ex-sinners reformed sinners and moderate sinners people whose sins pale in comparison to those of those they are fighting who carry the banner of civilization at least for the moment against those whose sins know no bounds.
The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory President Franklin Roosevelt said after Pearl Harbor though his America was a segregated society. (Should he not have fought Hitler? And Strom Thurmond not been there on Omaha Beach?) Twenty years after V-E Day segregation was dead and so were the Nazis partly because of the changes the war set in motion.
Now more than ever we are fit to use power. Professor Obama should think about that.
Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.
Woodrow Wilson (D-Faculty Lounge) our first president from the academy said famously in 1915 when the Lusitania was sunk by Germany There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.
President Obama our second is not too proud to fight just too proud to be seen doing so to announce his war aims or to lead. Of the three reasons behind the decision to institute a no-fly zone in Libya -- to avert a massacre to effect regime change upon its murderous ruler and to warn off other tyrants -- he chose to emphasize only the first which had nothing to do with the national interest.
In his brief announcement after which he went off to Brazil as if nothing had happened he stressed how minor it was; how others would run it; how others had planned it; how soon he would leave. Starting what might be his third war in the region he took pains to appear as passive as possible. Assertions of power are somehow beneath him it seems.
Obama is a professor but he is not without conscience which means he does the right thing after much stress and anguish and prolonged inner wars with himself. He sends troops to Iraq and Afghanistan but talks about leaving; aims at regime change while refusing the name.
Small countries dream of great things; he wants to lead a small European social democracy. The president is obsessed with pretending that we are not running the operation says Charles Krauthammer. Administration officials insist we are not trying to bring down Gadhafi even as the president insists that he must go.
Like many professors Obama objects to power in general and to power exercised by Americans as being even less moral but power and morals can sometimes be friends. It was war that made England a limited monarchy and America a republic; the threat of war that kept the Soviet Union from oppressing and murdering even more millions and war on unprecedented levels of horror that ended the infernal ambitions of Hitlers Germany and Hirohitos Japan.
The Civil War ended slavery and the National Guard helped destroy segregation. And if segregation and slavery (which we ended ourselves) destroyed forever our right to wield power then who is more suited than we?
The French? The ancien regime the guillotine and the Terror collaboration anti-Semitism and Huguenot massacres. The Spanish? The Inquisition (which no one expected). The British had imperialism and the class system and the Irish might give you an argument.
The small Third World states with their own private bloodbaths? The Russians the Japanese and the Germans? Surely you jest.
The fact is that every country that ever had power has abused or misused it in one way or another and those who did neither had nothing to use. It is ex-sinners reformed sinners and moderate sinners people whose sins pale in comparison to those of those they are fighting who carry the banner of civilization at least for the moment against those whose sins know no bounds.
The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory President Franklin Roosevelt said after Pearl Harbor though his America was a segregated society. (Should he not have fought Hitler? And Strom Thurmond not been there on Omaha Beach?) Twenty years after V-E Day segregation was dead and so were the Nazis partly because of the changes the war set in motion.
Now more than ever we are fit to use power. Professor Obama should think about that.
Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.
