Obama’s WikiLeaks Wake Up Call

This is a pivotal moment in the larger foreign policy debate. During Bush’s second term, realists (i.e. Baker/Hamilton) and leftists (Obama’s crew) joined forces and presented what seemed like a coherent critique of Bush foreign policy and neoconservatism. Cheney’s influence was replaced with Condi’s. The realists/leftists agreed that we needed to negotiate with Iran and Syria, leave Iraq, and focus on creating a Palestinian state. Then Obama was elected and turned this agenda into policy.

On the peace process, Obama made these ideas the basis of his approach. He got tough with Israel and made settlements the centerpiece of the conflict while refusing to ever criticize or pressure the Palestinians.

So the peace process has quickly fallen apart, and now, just as this reality is setting in — that Obama mishandled it from day one, in thrall to bad ideas — we get Wikileaks, which is quickly obliterating the Gulf-side Middle East worldview of the leftist-realists.

They said the Palestinians are the key to pleasing the Arabs — but in private, we now know that the Arabs barely ever mention Palestine. They said that the Israelis manipulate our foreign policy — but we now know that the Arabs were the ones openly calling for the U.S. to start a war with Iran. They said that America’s closeness with Israel alienates the Arabs — but we now know that what’s really alienating the Arabs is America’s reluctance to use its power to confront Iran and enforce a security architecture in which Israel is America’s most capable client.

In both halves of the Middle East — Levant and Gulf — the realist-leftists have gotten their way for the past few years. And the collapse of the peace process plus Wikileaks shows that their way is a fantasy that is scaring the daylights out of our allies and risking catastrophe.

As I see it, the meaning of Wikileaks is that we are at a moment when a bookend is being placed on a brief period of ascendancy for the realist-leftist foreign policy movement. It’s going to be a bruising downhill ride for these guys from here on out. (I hope.)

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Huckabee: Obamas Should Experience Pat Down

National Journal reports:

The first family should publicly submit to the new scanning device and “enhanced” pat-downs before requiring Americans to do the same, suggested rumored Republican presidential hopeful and ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee while blasting President Obama this morning over controversial new airline security measures.

“If he thinks this is an appropriate way for us to deal with security as he has defended, then I’ve said, ‘OK, Mr. Obama, take your wife, your two daughters and your mother-in-law to Washington Reagan National Airport?and have them publicly go through both the body scanner and the full enhanced pat-down in front of others,’” Huckabee said in an interview on Fox and Friends. “‘If it’s OK for your wife, your daughters, and your mother-in-law, then maybe the rest of us won’t feel so bad when our wives, our daughters and our mothers are being put through this humiliating and degrading, totally unconstitutional, intrusion of their privacy.’”

Huckabee instead suggested TSA officials adopt “profiling” as a less costly and intrusive alternative.

The one-time Arkansas governor also said he believed that financial motives were at the heart of the new procedures: “This is more about people making millions and millions of dollars off the machines that they manufactured and then lobbied to sell to the government,” he said.

The White House has had to contend with a media furor over the new Transportation Security Administration measures in recent days. Some Republicans like Huckabee have seized on the issue as evidence of government overreach, while White House and Homeland Security officials have pushed back, saying the measures help prevent terrorism.

“I understand people’s frustrations,” Obama said at a press conference in Lisbon this weekend. “But at this point, TSA, in consultation with our counterterrorism experts, have indicated to me that the procedures that they’ve been putting in place are the only ones right now that they consider to be effective against the kind of threat that we saw in the Christmas Day bombing.”

Obama noted in his response to a question about the TSA methods that he does not personally have to go through security checks — the inspiration, perhaps, behind Huckabee’s challenge.

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