Obama & U.S. global decline: Year Two

[Geee]

Washington Times:

The second year of President Obama's foreign-policy and national-security management continued the pattern of decline established in his first year. The unbridled and naive optimism that ill-served the country in Mr. Obama's failed freshman outing gave way to a sense of policy drift in 2010. Even the president began to question whether the United States should maintain its primary global leadership role.

Mr. Obama's first-week-in-office pledge to close the U.S. detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year remained unfulfilled, the upside of which is that it has reduced the number of terrorists being released to continue their deadly vocation against American interests. The administration's related centerpiece policy of trying international terrorists in American domestic courts also hit rough water in the person of Ahmed Ghailani, who was charged with 285 counts related to al Qaeda's 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania but found guilty of only one single crime. Now the White House is on the verge of declaring defeat and issuing an executive order affirming the unlimited detention of terror suspects. Mr. Obama is learning the price a president pays when lofty rhetoric meets hard reality.

Mr. Obama's unprecedented outreach to the global Muslim community has gone bust. Despite continued obsequious gestures in their direction, numerous public opinion polls show marked declines in approval of the United States in the Middle East and North Africa, and in some cases the numbers are lower than when Mr. Obama took office. The effort has had no impact in reducing the threat of international terrorism and has engendered a sense of American weakness in the region. Now the Obama administration's principle sign of outreach to Islam is the Ground Zero Mosque, a wretched symbol of a country that lacks the will to stand up for its own civilization.