A Crisis that’s Enough to Demonstrate that Obama Is Worse than Carter

Weakness and indecision: the president does not seem to have a strategy for the future. And the allies fall into chaos. First the U.S. leader says that Gadhafi must go, but then he says that there is no need to use force.

The question to ask is whether the worst post-war U.S. president is Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama. Like Carter, Obama has shown disastrous weakness and indecision. Combining these “gifts” with considerable pompous rhetoric, he [Obama] has reached comic levels — for example, in the famous speech in Cairo where, with a savior-of-humanity tone, he proposed nonsense such as attributing the discovery of gunpowder and printing to Islam. Such generous concessions would be forgivable if they were accompanied by a morally rigorous and unbiased attitude. But no. You have not heard Obama’s voice on the scandalous presence of rogue states in the U.N. Human Rights Council, nor have you heard him speak of the many Iranian threats to destroy Israel. Nor has he intervened decisively in the fierce repression of popular movements in Iran. Behind confused babble and mediocre realpolitik, no strategy has emerged.

With the democratic movements triggered in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, Obama woke up, assuming tones as if he were the leader of the people of Islam. He asked imperatively for the advent of democracy, giving notice to his ally (of only a few hours before) Mubarak to step aside. If Bush’s idea to establish democracy in countries that have never known it could be considered unwise, to think that the advent of democracy can be guaranteed by the interplay of spontaneous movements, in areas where Islamic fundamentalism is the only organized force, is pure adventurism. On March 1, in a collective act of hypocrisy, Libya was expelled from the U.N. Human Rights Council, as if before Feb. 28 they even possessed the credentials to be part of it and as if many other states did not deserve the same treatment.

Now Obama, ideally while wearing a Che Guevara-esque beret, on one hand says that Gadhafi must go, but on the other says that he should not be evicted by force. He participates in armed intervention — but limited to some spanking. These contradictory impulses have aggravated the chronic inability of European countries to make decisions — countries that are now in complete confusion over guidance and coordination. It is not clear to what extent and how long the United States wants to move forward. It operates without clarifying the end goal and without evidence to decide whether the rebel movement can represent a positive change or hasten Libya from the frying pan into the fire. In contrast, Bush’s Iraq war represented a model of clarity of objectives and consistency of materials used. Yet now the departure of Gadhafi from the scene is an indisputable necessity: The idea of the commander remaining in the saddle, even as a partial interlocutor full of rancor, sets up a chilling scenario. But just the possibility of accomplishing this goal gives rise to the greatest perplexities.

The only clear thing is that everyone — and not just Italy, thanks to its historical record — has ruled out ground intervention. But I do not have to be von Clausewitz* to know that no war can end without defining the situation on the ground; otherwise, we risk producing a state of endemic and long-lasting conflict with devastating consequences. Our country, in particular, would pay an unfair price, as if acquiescence in the face of cruel dictatorships were not (and is not) a common practice in all Western countries.

In this bleak landscape of the West’s crisis, aggravated by the mix of demagoguery and weakness of the American presidency, the energy problem is at a standstill, as evidenced by the Japanese tragedy. For 40 years, the West evaded the challenge of mobilizing its own technological supremacy to become independent from oil. Even if the events in Japan call for an examination of maximum safety conditions in the construction of new power plants, it is not sensible to behave irrationally. Why is there no mention of the enormous damage, even in terms of health, caused by oil pollution or oil-related accidents such as the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico? But it gets worse. The dependence on oil has contributed to the creation of aggressive Islamic elites, such as Iran, and to the financing of active terrorism, as evidenced by yesterday’s attack in Jerusalem. Oil has bought half of Europe and half of the United States. The famous British universities have been reduced to lightning rods for anti-Western propaganda and, in some European countries, the rules of liberal democracy can be adapted to coexist with those of Sharia. The dependence on oil has become the cause and effect of these dramatic processes.

People are wondering when political classes will come to the fore that can see beyond the tip of the nose and manage with decisiveness and far-sightedness, as well as combine dignified realism and moral sense — a development that could have momentous consequences for Europe soon and then for the U.S.

*Editor’s note: Carl von Clausewitz was a military theorist whose book On War is considered to be one of the most important works on the theory of warfare and strategy.