WORDS WITHOUT MUSIC:

Is She Selling the Wrong Plan? (Reza Aslan, 3/31/09, Daily Beast)

President Barack Obama finally unveiled his administration’s Afghanistan strategy last week and in some ways the new plan looks a lot like the old plan: vigorously pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban militants holed up in the forbidding mountains and valleys of the Northwest Frontier Province, build up Afghanistan’s police and security forces, invest heavily in reconstruction projects, secure Kabul and help the weak federal government to extend its reach to rural areas, and reach out to Afghanistan’s neighbors to help secure and stabilize the country. [...]

Beyond all this, however, there is a glaring difference in emphasis, if not in policy, between Bush’s and Obama’s conception of “victory” in Afghanistan. This president appears to have no interest whatsoever in anything akin to “democracy promotion.” His outline for the war effort makes no mention of nation-building and contains no serious commitment to bolstering the country’s lagging democratic institutions. Indeed, Obama barely mentioned the word democracy when presenting his new strategy to the press.

The Unicorn Rider is fortunate in being able to just ape the successful policies of his predecessor, but due to the differences betrween the two men he drains them of their vital moral content.

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Jimmy Carter's Spirit of Notre Dame (Jeffrey Lord, 3.31.09, American Spectator)

So what did Carter say at Notre Dame, where he was invited by the university's president, the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh? What signal did he send that wound up getting him, the country and the entire world in such trouble over the next four years and well beyond that? More to the point, how does it compare with the direction already being signaled by President Obama as he approaches his own already controversial appearance at Notre Dame?

The most notable single sentence in Carter's Notre Dame speech was this one:

We are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.

Carter went on to insist that it was time to govern with a "wider framework of international cooperation" because "the world today is in the midst of the most profound and rapid transformation in its entire history."

He also added this about the American approach to the Soviet Union in the Carter era: "Our goal is to be fair to both sides, to produce reciprocal stability, parity, and security." In other words, in Carter's view, a view widely held among leftward-leaning elites, both the United States and the Soviet Union had genuinely competing claims. They were morally equal to each other.

The speech was the lead story in the news the next day. By the time Carter left the White House after four years of promoting moral equivalence, the world was in murderous chaos. The unintended consequences of Carter's policies as enunciated at Notre Dame were both considerable and long lasting. Some would argue they are reverberating right up until today. [...]

If this approach of Carter's sounds vaguely familiar these days, it should. Carter's words at Notre Dame bear a striking resemblance to the substance if not the actual words of President Obama.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 31, 2009 7:24 AM