Obama Ignores the Lessons of History
The Obama administration has all the whimsy of "Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure," but none of the film’s humor or intelligence.
In the movie, to pass a history class, teen-age "time-travelers" meet and learn from historic figures. The administration ignores or rewrites history to suit their ideological purposes and, ironically, to fashion President Barack Obama’s "legacy."
Ironically, because, by disregarding history’s lessons, Obama’s legacy won’t be one he covets.
Indeed, Obama may not grasp history. Recently, while hosting Saudi princes in the Oval Office, Obama said "…the United States and Saudi Arabia have an extraordinary friendship…that dates back to Franklin Roosevelt and King Faisal…" Politico observed that "King Faisal…ruled the kingdom between 1964 and 1975… And Roosevelt…died in…1945."
Few of Obama’s historical blunders are as harmless. Obama’s lone historical apprehension may be to "avoid another Iraq."
Accordingly, he overreacted, withdrew American troops from the region and created a vacuum filled by ISIS/ISIL whose brutality now stretches from Afghanistan to Libya.
Tragically, Obama never learned the lessons of Munich. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was lauded as a peacemaker following his 1938 Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler, a naked attempt at appeasement, but was later ridiculed and disparaged when, inevitably, World War II erupted.
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson predicts that Obama’s recently concluded nuclear agreement with an ambitious, aggressive, apocalyptic, theocratic Iranian regime will produce "a world of nervous and angry allies, the end of dissent inside Iran, the spread of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, more nuclear states, a growing contempt for alliances with the West, and a new Middle East that may have to adopt appeasement to deal with a haughty Iran, flush with new cash and arms."
Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry so desperately sought an Iranian deal that they accepted a devil’s bargain, yielding to — appeasing — Iran on every substantive point: Iran will receive immediate sanctions relief and U.N. legitimacy; continue nuclear research at multiple highly-reinforced underground sites, keep thousands of centrifuges and the right to acquire advanced enrichment technologies; and Iran may purchase conventional weapons, including ballistic missiles. The regime "conceded" inspections, but will, effectively, police itself, limiting, delaying or denying direct inspections.
A nuclear Iran represents an existential threat to Israel — America’s ally and the Middle East’s lone democracy – and to the world.
Winston Churchill recognized the foolishness of Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement: "The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from England and France amounts to the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat… Such a collapse will bring peace or security neither to England nor to France."
So Iran’s ascendency will play out for the Middle East, Europe and America, yet American partisans blindly applaud Obama’s false promises of "peace in our time" from a man who seeks only "peace" during his presidency.
Hanson: "In 2015, we naively hail peace with honor, but by 2020, sadder and wiser, we will lament war and shame."
Following, arguably, modern memory’s greatest diplomatic blunder, history will not be kind to Barack Obama.
http://www.pottsmerc.com/opinion/20150731/jerry-shenk-obama-ignores-the-lessons-of-history
