March 23, 2016- by Steven E. Greer, MD On March 22nd, yet another major ISIS attack took place in Brussels, Belgium. A few hours later, President Obama was in the middle of his controversial trip to Cuba, at a baseball game laughing leisurely with Communist President Raúl Castro. He spoke to an ABC camera crew while sitting in the stands, and explained that he was essentially defying the terrorists by not allowing them to disrupt his normal schedule. This was just yet another crisis handled by President Obama denying it existed.
With ISIS, he handles that threat by calling them ISIL, denying that they are not even legitimate enough to be called a “state”. No one else calls them ISIL. When Republican candidates Trump and Cruz responded to the Brussels attacks by calling for focused police patrols in the Muslim ghettos of Europe and the U.S., Obama shot back with the same rhetoric, “Those tactics make no sense. That is not what we are as a nation”, but failed to explain how he plans to stop future attacks. He still refuses to acknowledge that “Radical Islam” is even a threat. Again, this is the crisis strategy of denial.
On December 2nd, 2015, when terrorists who were trained in Sunni-run radical Islam camps in Saudi Arabia came back and murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California, Obama took to the airwaves from the Oval Office. His main objective, however, was to lecture Americans about not discriminating against “peaceful loving” Muslims. He was in complete denial about what just had happened. After San Bernardino, President Obama once again said that those types of small attacks are not an “existential threat” worthy of a response by this country. That is his favorite mantra now.
The closer these barbaric attacks come to the U.S., and the more frequent they hit our allies in Europe, the more Obama hunkers down and tells himself that, “This too soon shall pass. These are not existential threats.” In other words, small scale terrorist attacks are the new normal, and we all should just get used to them. And leading by example, the President of the United States had a gay ole time at a Cuban baseball game just hours after the Brussels attacks. The optics were horrible, so the American state-sponsored media protected the president, not uttering a word about President Obama on the March 23rd evening news broadcasts.
With the Syrian refugee crisis, President Obama again denied the risks to taking in thousands of unscreened Muslim men coming straight from ISIS country, and used his other common slogan these days, “This is not who we are (to deny poor refugees a home)”. That plan was so unpopular that his own FBI Direct, James Comey, told congress “If we don’t know much about somebody, there won’t be anything in our data, (we cannot vet them properly)” Congress finally voted in November of 2015 to freeze the influx of the refugees, doing the job of the president.
In 2014, when the Ebola virus spread from Africa and hit the homeland, President Obama was in full-scale denial mode. Defying all basic epidemiology measures that could have stopped the spread. Obama still allowed air travel to and from the hot spots in Africa. When the Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, defied Obama’s domestic policy on the virus and quarantined U.S. troops that had assisted in Africa, Obama quickly fired him.
With North Korea and Iran, President Obama has done very little to stop those nuclear threats from growing. His big deal to lift sanctions on Iran will only buy some time, if even that.
When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Obama reacted by denying the need to react. This led to the capture of Crimea and then Russian troops into Syria.
To be sure, President Obama inherited a jalopy of a country in 2009, as the global depression was at its worst, unemployment was high, and the nation was entangled in costly wars. Most of those problems were indeed caused by the stupidity of the George W. Bush administration, so President Obama adopted another mantra, “Don’t do stupid shit.”, and who could blame him.
However, President Obama has made this his doctrine, and taken it to the extreme. It now means, “We won’t do anything to react to a crisis. We will let it all blow over. All things pass.”
Plenty of American presidents have shared those same predilections. Franklin Delano Roosevelt watched as the sparks turned into forest fires in Nazi Germany. Only after the U.S. was hit at Pearl Harbor did he act, for example.
With President Obama, his strategy of dealing with terrorists threats by denying their very existence, refusing to utter their names, is emboldening them. His denial of the nuclear threats in North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran has allowed those threat to become the epitome of “existential threats”. His denial of the need to oppose Russia has led to more aggression.
One legacy of the Obama administration might be that it was one of denial.