"The president and the vice president wouldn't be knowledgeable about specific
decisions that are made by security professionals," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted while on a diplomatic mission in Peru.
""I take responsibility," Clinton then told CNN. "I'm in charge of the State
Department's 60,000-plus people all over the world (at) 275 posts."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has chosen to be the fall guy for President Barack Obama's failure to defend Benghazi from terrorists and rioters, a violent outbreak which killed one of our ambassadors.
Such an affront to our national sovereignty is an act of war. The President instituted a no-fly zone over Libya last year, but to what effect? Now tribal warfare is breaking out across the Middle East, with Radical Muslim extremists taking power throughout North Africa, now set to dominate Syria, and Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon.
President Harry S Truman put a placard on his desk: "The Buck Stops Here", since he got tired of everyone passing the buck. The Missouri machine politician who became President in a fluke demonstrated an integrity so lacking in the White House.
If Secretary Clinton is responsible for failing to provide security to the US Embassy, then she must step down. Of course, she has not made any move to give up her post. In effect, she is not taking responsibility, but she is serving instead as the scapegoat for a President whose foreign policy has failed on every level.
He failed to broker open markets with South Korea, then he humbles himself and humiliates this country by bowing the Prime Minister of Japan.
He permitted Attorney General Eric Holder to engage in a faulty and foolish gun-running operation – Fast and Furious, which has killed federal peace officers. To this day, Holder is still playing hide and seek with Congress, and Mexico continues to devolved into a failed state.
Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez has just won reelection, and he is establishing ties with Iran. Brazil and Colombia are reaching out to China. South America is turning into hostile territory underneath Obama's nose, and he does not care.
Let's look at the Middle East once again. In 2009, riots broke out in the streets of Tehran following the disputed reelecion of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Our President said nothing, probably because he spent more time apologizing for this country's frayed relationship with other Arab/Muslim states.
President Obama's relationship with Israel is the sorest spot in his foreign policy, the biggest source of blight. He has openly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had to lecture the President about the infeasibility of land-swaps and a reduction of Israeli territory to pre-1967 borders. Instead of meeting with the Prime Minister, President Obama chose to visit the View then spend the night with David Letterman. He is more impressed with his own press than the pressure weighing on Israel in the Middle East.
Would Secretary of State Hillary Clinton like to take the blame for these foreign policy failures?
Then again, the President will crow about killing Osama in Laden. Yet as Congressman Allen West asserted, killing the Al-Qaeda mastermind is not a foreign policy. Everyone in this country rejoices that both Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki are dead, but the explosion of Muslim extremism in the Middle East, from the Arab Spring which has given way to a hard Islamist winter, cannot dissuade even the most optimistic among us that the revolutionary actions and regime changes throughout the Arab world will be for the better.
Let us not forget Afghanistan. Now bogged down in the longest military engagement in American History, the United States armed forces are being attacked by trained Afghan soldiers! The Marine Corps is a peace-keeping entity, not a nation-building conglomerate, yet this administration wants to continue with the inane policy of training and stabilizing the tribal anarchy in this Central Asian country. This nation left Iraq with sectarian violence still raging. Iran is taking closer steps toward nuclear capability, and our sometime ally Pakistan, with its own nuclear capability, displays a growing hostility contrary to the national interests of this country. Besides these growing, grim threats, our troops remain in the Graveyard of Empires, with no discernible goal or meaningful outcomes beyond staying alive in time to withdraw. We need to get our forces out of Afghanistan, and right away. Obama's limited troop draw-down has only put American military personnel at a distinct disadvantage, with the official time-line for withdrawal set for 2014. The Taliban and other terrorist forces need only bide their time before all that this country has "fought for" is thrown away.
President Obama has failed as Commander-in-Chief. No matter what his Secretary of State claims, he owns this nation's faltering foreign policy, and he cannot pass this buck onto anyone else. His repeated failures in foreign policy alone justify his losing the Presidency. Despite Governor Mitt Romney's limited foreign policy experience, a change for real leadership is needed, and Romney can provide it.