One Possible Explanation For Recent Foreign Policy Missteps

President Obama’s foreign policy has been a disaster. President Bush’s foreign policy was slightly better, but was not successful in promoting democracy, freedom, and American interests around the world. President Bush attempted to promote democracy, but any gains were lost when President Obama pulled the troops out of Iraq. Generally speaking, in recent years, when given a choice, America has made the wrong decision.

On Monday, the Middle East Forum posted an article entitled, “Gulliver Tied Down by Lilliputians.” The article details some of the reasons for America’s recent lack of success in dealing with the Middle East.

The article reports:

One in five applicants for jobs at the Central Intelligence Agency have ties to Muslim terrorist organizations, according to the latest round of Snowden leaks. And Israel is a major target of American counterintelligence. Washington is insane.

Three years ago, the Washington Post sketched the elephantiasis in the U.S. intelligence establishment without, of course, access to the detailed numbers leaked by Edward Snowden last week. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend if you can’t hire people you can trust. If you spend $52 billion in the “black budget,” you create so many conflicting bureaucratic interest groups as to cancel out any possible signal with a wave of noise.

I have very mixed emotions about Edward Snowden and what he has done, but this is information that should be made public. Obviously common sense has departed from the CIA hiring process.

The article at Middle East Forum contrasts the fact that America intelligence services cannot find Arab translators and are forced to hire people whose backgrounds they cannot  verify with the fact that Israel routinely teaches Arab languages in high school and thus has more translators than they can use. Admittedly, Israel is in the midst of the danger, but we can still learn a lesson from them.

The article concludes:

The U.S. has relied extensively on friendly Arab intelligence services, above all the Egyptians, to fill the gap — except that the Obama administration did its best to bring down the Egyptian military in 2011 and install the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israelis have plenty to tell, but little that Washington wants to hear: Israel never fell victim to the mass delusion about the so-called Arab Spring, and has warned throughout (along with Saudi Arabia) that Iran’s nuclear ambitions must be crushed. Israel therefore is treated as an intelligence target rather than as a collaborator, while the Arab intelligence services who most might help us — Egyptian and Saudi — must regard us with skepticism in the best of cases and hostility in the worst.

America is flying blind into a hurricane. Americans who write about the Middle East now depend on what other countries choose to leak to us. Washington isn’t in the loop any longer.

Whether we are willing to admit it or not, America is involved in a war for her survival and for the survival of western civilization. Our enemies will fight this war whether we choose to fight it or not. It’s time to wake up and defend our freedom.

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