Testing 1-2-3 -- Weekly Standard
Biden predicted Obama would be tested by our adversaries. He was right.
Yes. Joe Biden was right.
That's not a sentence we expect to type too often over the next four years, but it's proper to give credit where credit is due. And, on October 19, at a fundraiser in Seattle, the vice-presidential candidate explained:
And here's the point I want to make. Mark my words. Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama. . . . Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. . . . I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate. . . . They may emanate from the Middle East. They may emanate from the sub-continent. They may emanate from Russia's newly emboldened position.
Various unsavory characters do seem to have marked Biden's words.
The Iranian regime, having spent the first couple of weeks of Barack Obama's presidency preemptively scorning his overtures, mocking his weakness, and assuring the world its nuclear program is nonnegotiable, last Tuesday reported it had launched a satellite into orbit, making clear that Iran intends to have a missile launch capability on which to deploy its nuclear warheads.
Sounds like a test by the mullahs.
Read more ....
My Comment: The Vice President is right. The only surprise is that it is happening now .... not a few months from now.
With all of President Bush's faults, there was always a perception in the international community that people like Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the scores of under secretaries, diplomats, and generals ... that as a group these men would insure the safety and protection of the American people and its allies.
The impact of 9/11, followed by the invasions of Afghanistan, later Iraq and then the war on terror .... these actions by these men dispelled any doubts on their will and resolve to fight and to win.
But these men and women are now gone .... replaced by a different group of men and women.
I wrote a few months ago that the world trouble makers will perceive the results of the American election as a decisive shift away from the past .... and I have been right so far. President Obama is no President Bush. Vice President Biden is no Cheney. Secretary of State Clinton is no Powell. Soon to be CIA Director Panetta is like .... well .... he is like no one else.
The military option is off the table, the intelligence war is off the table, and the will to use any of these resources is no longer there .... even in clear cut cases like Afghanistan and the war on terror, the willingness to follow-up on rhetoric and to use force is absent.
The results of this perception are now obvious .... a leadership vacuum is present on the world stage, and President Obama and his team are unsure of how to proceed. After spending years running for office, they are having trouble shifting gears to govern. This in turn has the potential to be disastrous in the short to medium term to both us and to our allies.
William Kristol in his Weekly Standard post outlines all of the trouble spots .... pop-quizzes before the real thing. The real test is going to happen in the next year to two .... with economic upheavals, oil, resource, and energy fluctuations impacting rogue states and their populations, coupled with the proliferation and distribution of WMDs .... the real test will come in 2010 and 2011 .... and from what I am seeing, team Obama is not ready.