Mea culpa foreign policy

Let’s just suppose President Obama’s mea culpa overtures to the Muslim world succeed in winning some friends and influencing people there. Would that be a repudiation of the War on Terror policies of the Bush-Cheney administration?

Hardly. Rather, any real results from Obama’s Carrot approach will only come because of the Big Stick, not despite it.

Managing affairs in the Middle East has never been rocket science. President Reagan proved that with Libya, which began to see the light about supporting and financing terrorism after feeling the heat of a punishing 1986 U.S. air attack called Operation El Dorado Canyon. President Bush demonstrated the effectiveness of the Big Stick yet again when Libya was induced to give up its weapons of mass destruction in response to the War on Terror. And the world became a little safer.

Simply stated, weakness invites attack. President Carter demonstrated this with his limp-wristed approach that allowed the collapse of America’s other great ally in the Middle East, Iran under the Shah. And President Clinton demonstrated it repeatedly with his see-no-evil non-response to the first attack on the World Trade Center (1993) and terror attacks on the Khobar Towers (1996) and the USS Cole (2000).

It was left then to George Bush to respond after the grand-finale Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. And respond he did, with offensives in Afghanistan and Iraq and busting up terror networks attempting to operate domestically. And America was safe again for the next eight years.

All of which now allows freshman statesman Barack Obama to play good cop to Bush-Cheney’s bad cop. You won’t hear it in the mainstream media—much less from President Obama–but make no mistake: If Obama the Good Cop meets with any success, it will be primarily because of the Bad Cop who persuaded the world that America was no longer a paper tiger.

If he fails? His mea culpa foreign policy will invite renewed attack on the homeland by thugs who sense the return of Jimmy Carter. Having learned nothing from history, we will then be forced to take up the Big Stick all over again. In that event, let us hope there are more Bushes and Cheneys waiting in the wings to clean up the mess.

Veteran Colorado Springs journalist Stephen Adams is author of the book The Middle East Conflict, Alpha Books, 2003.