As more and more time passes, it becomes clearer and clearer that Barack Obama, as so many of us feared, simply isn't ready for prime time. He not only does not grasp so many fundamentals about being president, but refuses to acknowledge it and has surrounded himself with sycophants who can't or won't tell him when he's wrong.
One of his flaws that keeps getting him in trouble is how he's in love with his own voice, and is convinced that he can get his way on any subject if he can just talk enough about it. That, I am convinced, is at the core of two of his bigger blunders of late.
First up, his placing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a Taliban leader and an American citizen, on a "hit list" went public. Now, I have no problems with Al-Awlaki's getting sent to his divine reward, but I am uncomfortable with our government deciding that it has the right to kill an American citizen -- even one as openly traitorous as Al-Awlaki -- without any legal due process.
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In a similar vein, Obama's showing his amateurness with how the crisis on the Korean peninsula is unfolding. Right now, the best analysts are saying that the first real step in the current tensions was last year, when a North Korean warship intruded into South Korean orders and ignored warnings and warning shots. The South Koreans ended up shooting the hell out of that ship, sending it limping home barely afloat.
Then, this year, the North Koreans apparently struck back, with one of their subs sinking a South Korean corvette, killing 46 sailors.
Now, the traditional way of dealing with this is again sub rosa. A quiet tit-for-tat game would play out -- a North Korean submarine would simply fail to return to port, and South Korean or American anti-sub weapon inventories would be juggled to conceal a shortage. Or a North Korean military facility would suffer a rather spectacular "work accident," and we (the US and South Korea) would offer our sympathies in an exceptionally timely fashion.
But no. Obama (after consultations with the South Koreans, and I strongly suspect who was taking the lead on that -- Obama is exceptionally tough on our allies, while downright obsequious to our foes) decided to make the whole thing public, to announce that we had an open-and-shut case, and take it to the United Nations for adjudication.
Excuse me, Mr. President? There is a huge difference between crimes and acts of war. We aren't prosecuting North Korea. We aren't interested in trying and convicting them. We don't need to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that they did it.
And we especially don't need to try to sway a "jury" at the United Nations. Here's a hint, sir: they don't like us. They might like you, because you seem to agree with them about how terrible the US is (especially during the previous administration), but they aren't going to give us a "fair shake." And they're certainly not going to "convict" North Korea and impose some kind of sentence on the dictatorship.
There's one rule that you don't learn in law school, but you do in pretty much any kind of war-game and in the real world. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: "If you shoot at a king you must kill him."
In situations like this, you have to be very careful with how you handle your opponent. You must always leave him a way out, an escape, some way of salvaging something -- until you're ready to finish him off. An enemy backed into a corner is utterly unpredictable, utterly desperate, and will do anything he can to survive. Which is why you don't do that until you've done everything you can to minimize the harm he can inflict.
And I happen to live on the coast the North Koreans will bomb first. (So, I think, does Jay Tea.)
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