Is Obama really a genius leader?

The National Journal has a blog on national security affairs that I contribute to and this week’s question had to do with Obama, nuclear proliferation, and how to make America secure therefrom. As discussed here last week, I fear the nuclear problem is out of control and that international agreements to secure WMDs are needed but about 20 years too late. For America, as a result, only effective border control has a chance — if slim one —to stop a nuclear or other WMD attack in the United States.

The NJ discussion ended up talking in part about whether President Obama was a talented, far-sighted leader or a naive 1960’s kid in way over his head. I took the later view and was upbraided by long-time Washington “expert” who asked what world I lived in and suggested that I am too dumb to recognize the brilliance of our current genius leader. Well, I must admit that I am none-too-brilliant, but Obama’s genius has yet to become apparent to me.

Below, for what it is worth, is my response to my upbraider.

Poor Mr. _____. He has reached the point that all living in Washington risk reaching — an absolute in ability to distinguish between motion and movement, and between skill and artifice.

The world I live in is the one all non-delusional Americans live in; that is, one where our recent presidents in both parties have failed utterly to defend America. Obama has little to do with the issue, except that he, like his three predecessors, is unwilling to do the hard things needed to protect the country and works only for re-election. The nuclear conference was a hoax, and to even dream that Obama is in the same league as the other presidents whose ultimate aim was no nukes suggests a pressing need for anti-hallucinatory medication. Poor Pollyanna Obama is just fresh red meat for Medvedev and Putin to munch on at their leisure. Anyway, too much nuclear stuff has been loose for too long. A nuclear device is on it’s way to CONUS from somewhere, and the one, slim chance to stop it is to control our borders, but Obama, like his predecessors, will not do that, and so — BOOM.

What else? Well, Obama is content to lose wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — as was Bush — but he hates the military as good 1960’s child must. As a result, our soldiers and Marines will die in Afghanistan until at least the midterm elections so he and his party can look like they give a hoot about winning. If Obama and his party lose the Congress, then our kids will stay in Afghanistan and die so he and his avisers can figure a way to exploit their pointless sacrifice to win in 2012.

He has made our war with Islam worse by kissing Mubarak’s butt and issuing his grandstanding promises at Cairo which he has no intention — or, given his subservience to Netanyahu, no capability — of keeping. He continues to wage war against the U.S. Intelligence Community in the name of his own “moral compass, which simultaneously guides him to surround himself with socialists, America-haters, and “experts” who in everyday America would accurately be regarded as political and/or social lepers.

Like his predecessors, he spends us into the poor house, sells our debt to our enemies, and talks as if American power and will is respected in the world as it was under Reagan, never recognizing that most of the world sees the U.S. Federal government for what it is — a corrupt, elitist, avaricious, delusional, tapped out, and used up old Madam whose wondrous and compelling allure is apparent only to her own mind.

This then is the world I live in, and my children and grandchildren — and yours — are very likely to live in worse.

Author: Michael F. Scheuer

Michael F. Scheuer worked at the CIA as an intelligence officer for 22 years. He was the first chief of its Osama bin Laden unit, and helped create its rendition program, which he ran for 40 months. He is an American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst.