Disarming the Troops

When it comes to warfare the new Obama doctrine places a special value on not hurting feelings.

You see, war has now become a therapeutic exercise. We do not want to defeat the enemy. We want to therapy them.

Obama’s America is a sensitive nation, full of empathy for our foes. We don’t want to win wars; we want to win hearts and minds. We don’t want to win territory; we want to occupy the moral high ground.

Hopefully, after our announced exits from Iraq and Afghanistan those nations will move closer to liberal democracy.

Andrew McCarthy explains that Iraq is fast becoming a sharia state and close ally of Iran. Just last week our Iraqi allies stoned more than a dozen teenage boys to death for having bad haircuts wrong haircuts.

Since Obama has chosen to respect Muslim sensitivities about being occupied by non-Muslims, the people of these countries will naturally feel grateful to America for letting them do what they like to do to each other when we’re not around.

Then America can turn its diplomatic muscle against what it seems to consider a greater abomination: housing for Israelis.

McCarthy writes on the National Review site that our exit from Iraq and Afghanistan does not come a minute too soon.

If you do not have the will to fight you should not be fighting.

In its latest foray into the fever swamp of sensitivity, the American political leadership just forced American Marines to disarm before hearing a speech by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

No one missed the symbolism. The Obama administration has been disarming our troops, limiting their actions, because it fears offending the sensitivities of an Afghan populace that hates us.

It refused to allow American marines to carry their weapons into a speech by Leon Panetta because it wanted American troops to follow the same rules it applies to our Afghan allies.

The administration does not want our notoriously unreliable and untrustworthy Afghan allies to feel badly by being treated differently from American soldiers.

That’s right. We don’t want the notorious two-faced Afghan troops to feel any worse than our troops. This implies that the administration believes that Afghan troops become terrorists and murder American troops because we are not nice enough to them.

And we also do not want our own troops to feel that they are better, that they have better moral character, than their Afghan confederates.

It’s a new, ugly version of moral equivalence.

McCarthy described the scene well:

  

After dodging the assassination attempt, he [Panetta] was to address American forces and their Afghan trainees in a tent where the only security would be the United States Marines. Yet the Marines were ordered to disarm before entering. From on high came the directive: They were to check their automatic rifles and pistols outside the tent. Only then would Panetta appear.

It is hard to decide which explanation for this is more infuriating. There is the one the Marines were given: Since it would have been insane to allow Afghan soldiers, whose treachery is notorious, to be armed, the always faithful Marines had to be disarmed in order to show that our government considers them no better than their Afghan “partners.” The Marines would know this rationale is fraudulent: It is entirely ordinary for them to remain armed, and for Afghans not to be armed in the first place, during a visit from the secretary of defense to a combat theater.

Hence the explanation the Marines were tacitly left to ponder: As shameful Afghan officials castigated the American troops on whom they depend, and the Taliban hurled charges of “genocide,” American commanders — taking their cues from the apologizer-in-chief — disarmed the Marines to show that we take such bloviating seriously.

That’ll show them.