[Washington Post] Senior Obama administration officials are debating how to address a potential terrorist threat to U.S. interests from a Somali extremist group, with some in the military advocating strikes against its training camps. But many officials maintain that uncertainty about the intentions of the al-Shabab organization dictates a more patient, nonmilitary approach.

Al-Shabab, whose fighters have battled Ethiopian occupiers and the tenuous Somali government, poses a dilemma for the administration, according to several senior national security officials who outlined the debate only on the condition of anonymity.

The organization’s rapid expansion, ties between its leaders and al-Qaeda, and the presence of Americans and Europeans in its camps have raised the question of whether a preemptive strike is warranted. Yet the group’s objectives have thus far been domestic, and officials say that U.S. intelligence has no evidence it is planning attacks outside Somalia.

Gee, isn’t international waters “outside Somalia?” No matter. Team Obama is “mulling” their response. We can all take comfort in that. As can the families of victims terrorized and captured by Somali pirates. By “mulling” of course I mean weakness, which only encourages more acts of piracy. Obama is making Jimmy Carter look down right hawkish.

“The shores of Tripoli” isn’t just a rhyme in a patriotic song, it’s a solution President Thomas Jefferson offered his era’s piracy problems.

Wonder over what other events the Obama team is mulling?

Iran perhaps?

“Today, with the grace of God, Iran is a country controlling the entire nuclear fuel cycle,” proclaimed Iranian “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Iran now controls the entire cycle for producing nuclear fuel with the opening of a new facility to produce uranium fuel pellets,” according to the Associated Press. It’s reportedly the last step in creating nuclear fuel.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia successfully test-fired a Topol intercontinental ballistic missile on Friday as part of checks needed to extend its service life for up to 22 years, Russian media reported.

So much for Obama’s new arms control era.

And of course North Korea. It’s recent missile launching is “turning into an early test of the Obama administration’s U.N.-focused multilateralism.” In other words, Team Obama isn’t getting any further along with U.N. cooperation than Bush before him (or Clinton before him, and so on), did.

Just a few months ago Obama ridiculed his presidential opponent for needed to do more than one thing at a time. It’s a little harder when one is president though.

“Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

So declared President Obama Sunday in Prague regarding North Korea’s missile launch, which America’s U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice added was a direct violation of U.N. resolutions. At which point, the Security Council spent hours debating its nonresponse, thus proving to nuclear proliferators everywhere that rules aren’t binding, violations won’t be punished, and words of warning mean nothing.

– Wall Street Journal. Read the rest.

There was a time when U.S. Presidents were expected to go overseas and promote the country as a champion of values and ideals. But President Barack Obama has taken mea culpa self-flagellation to new heights with his slight against the Greatest Generation, however inadvertent. Here’s an excerpt from a column by Bret Stephens:

“As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon,” said the president, “the United States has a moral responsibility to act.”

Now there’s a line to linger over. Implicitly, it suggests that the nuclear challenges we now face from North Korea and Iran all stem from America’s original sin of using atomic bombs to bring World War II to the swiftest possible conclusion. Never mind the estimated one million American and Japanese lives saved as result, or the peace kept and the prosperity built for six decades thereafter under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

But what should we expect? President Obama is simply mimicking, albeit in a far more subtle way, his Reverend Wright, who said, “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki,” and “never batted an eye” over it.

Bret Stephens’ notion that we would have lost a million lives without using nuclear weapons isn’t hyperbole either. Indeed, the most dreadful fighting of the Second World War occurred after the fall of Berlin, even when it was obvious that the Japanese were doomed.

The U.S. had 58,000 casualties at Okinawa, just two months before Hiroshima. It had 26,000 casualties at Iwo Jima three months before that, for 84,000 total in the last two battles before the end of the Second World War. There were 1.1 million total U.S. casualties (dead and wounded) in the entire war, which means those last two battles accounted for 7.6% of all U.S. casualties. Of all those battles the U.S. fought in, in two different theaters, just two battles with the Japanese, the last two, accounted for so much. It was a staggering cost, and underscored the Japanese will to fight. One million total casualties for a proposed Operation Downfall? Indeed, that may have been a conservative estimate, and fortunately we didn’t have to find it out.

U.S. presidents shouldn’t apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They should educate the world, and celebrate the decision that saved so many more Japanese and American lives.

A world without nukes? Bill Kristol below writes ‘been there, done that, and it wasn’t so great either.’ But I find it amusing that the liberals only solution to end the abuse of weapons — whether a Glock pistol or an MX missile — is by removing them from those law abiding persons who would use them strictly for self defense. Thus, banning handguns only harms the law abiding citizen, not the criminal who already had no issues with breaking laws; so too an arms control agreement that is only followed by the U.S., never by the former Soviet Union, or Iran, or North Korea, et. al.

In Prague on Sunday, President Obama committed his administration to putting us on a “trajectory” toward “a world without nuclear weapons.”

Of course, we had a world without nuclear weapons not so long ago — say, in 1939. The war that began in that nuclear-free world led to a crash project to develop nuclear weapons. It ended with America’s use of them — something Obama alluded to: “As a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.”

It is not clear whether this statement implies disapproval of our use of nuclear weapons in 1945. It’s telling, however, that Obama never referred in his Prague speech to the Second World War. Instead, he called the existence of thousands of nuclear weapons “the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.” This framework makes it possible to think of the elimination of nuclear weapons as a logical response to the end of that conflict: “Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not.”

Yet to justify a world without nuclear weapons, what Obama would really have to envision is a world without war, or without threats of war. That’s an ancient vision. It’s one reason American presidents have tried to encourage the spread of liberal democracy and responsible regimes around the world.

Of course, there are all kinds of practical things we can do about the nuclear problem — seek agreements to regulate the deployment of nuclear weapons, reduce their number and limit their production, regulate the export of nuclear materials, secure vulnerable nuclear material, and the like. We should pursue such agreements as long as they are sensible, verifiable and enforceable, as long as they promote stability and reduce the risk of war.

But we have a long way to go before achieving a world of pacific liberal regimes. George W. Bush’s hope for a world without tyranny is the necessary — though perhaps still not the sufficient — precondition to a world without nuclear weapons. The danger is that the allure of a world without nuclear weapons can be a distraction — even an excuse for not acting against real nuclear threats.

Consider Obama’s speech. Referring to North Korea, which a few hours earlier had taken a break from six-party talks to test a rocket that could be used for long-range missiles, Obama said: “Now is the time for a strong international response. . . . All nations must come together to build a stronger, global regime. And that’s why we must stand shoulder to shoulder to pressure the North Koreans to change course.”

In other words: We’ll all huff and puff about North Korea, and standing shoulder to shoulder we can pat ourselves on the back for our commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. In the meantime, the United States will do nothing to destroy North Korea’s nuclear or missile capability, or to topple its political regime.

Obama also addressed Iran, saying that country’s “nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat,” which justifies some (limited) missile defense efforts in Europe. But Obama’s real hope is for dialogue with Iran, in which he will present the regime with “a clear choice”:

“We want Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations, politically and economically. We will support Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy with rigorous inspections. That’s a path that the Islamic Republic can take. Or the government can choose increased isolation, international pressure, and a potential nuclear arms race in the region that will increase insecurity for all.”

Obviously, Obama recommends the first path. But notice what he didn’t do:

He didn’t say that a nuclear-armed Iranian regime is unacceptable. He didn’t express a commitment to preventing such an outcome, or confidence that the United States and international community would prevent such an outcome. He simply suggested that it wouldn’t be optimal for Iran to choose that outcome. And if the rulers of the Islamic republic disagree? In the very speech in which Obama outlined his vision of a world without nuclear weapons, he weakened America’s stand against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

So while Obama talks of a future without nuclear weapons, the trajectory we are on today is toward a nuclear- and missile-capable North Korea and Iran — and a far more dangerous world.

Arthur Herman makes an interesting point:

To understand the nature of this challenge, consider that the distance between Baghdad and Tbilisi is barely 578 miles, less than the distance between New York City and Chicago. Iraq and Georgia, both of which have democratic governments, are sandwiched between Iran and Russia, two of the most authoritarian governments in the world. Russia has been collaborating with Iran to strengthen the latter’s nuclear program and its military. It is also steadily arming Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia came exactly one month after Iran test-fired its Shahab III intermediate ballistic missile in order to intimidate neighbors like Israel and Iraq, and two weeks after Mr. Chávez traveled to Moscow to formalize a “Strategic Alliance” with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev. Meanwhile, Iran’s proxies remain the principal threat to peace in Iraq — while on the other side of the world, evidence mounts of Mr. Chávez’s links to the terrorist group FARC, which threatens neighboring Colombia.

Coincidence? Iraq, Georgia and Colombia are battlegrounds in a new kind of international conflict that will define our geopolitical future. This conflict pits the U.S. and the West against an emerging axis of oil-rich dictatorships who are working together to push back against the liberalizing trends of globalization. One of their prime objectives is toppling or undermining neighboring, pro-Western democracies.

The term “axis” has been overused in recent years, and in misleading contexts. But Russia, Iran and Venezuela are acting very much as Japan, Italy and Germany did in the 1930s, when each took advantage of each other’s aggressive moves to extend their own regional power at the expense of liberal democracy — and, as a result, propelling the world to the brink of war.

Contrary to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s revisionist history lesson (America Must Choose Between Georgia and Russia, Aug. 20), it is NATO and the West that continue to make friendly, yet unreciprocated, overtures towards Russia.

Examples include the admission of Russia into the G-8, an offer of NATO assistance to rescue Russian sailors trapped on the sunken submarine Kursk, and even a 2002 decision to give Russia a vote in NATO for setting counter-terrorism and peacekeeping policies.

For its efforts, the West received a Russian regime that reverted to Gulag-era totalitarianism.

Nonetheless, this year the Bush administration repeated its invitation for Russia to become a partner in a European missile shield designed to defend itself from rogue states with ballistic missile capability. Yet, Lavrov and his Russian apologists claim that the Kremlin is threatened by this.

The retort is bad caviar. Were Russia truly a benign, reformist, democratizing nation then its leaders would feel no threat by the arming of ideologically similar nations.

The apologists for Russia are out in full force, making their ridiculous comparisons and justifications. (Indeed, history does repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. This same variety of fools once blamed Ronald Reagan, not Soviet imperialism, for defending Western Europe with Pershing II missiles. How we’ve come full circle.)

Here’s Matt Welch from Reason Magazine, citing one egregious example:

There is much one could say about this claim by L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks:

Th[e] U.S. also insisted this summer on the deployment of an almost certainly useless missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, virtually on Moscow’s doorstep.

I’ll just focus on this: How “virtual” is that doorstep? Here’s how far the eastern-most big city of the Czech Republic is from the Russian capital:

That’s 1,000 miles. The Czechs aren’t even neighbors of any of mainland Russia’s neighbors. If 1,000 miles is the new “doorstep,” then Russia’s on the doorstep of the United States [via Alaska], more than half of Europe, much of Asia, and almost all of the Middle East. Run for your lives!

I’ve heard this a lot too — that Russia’s invasion of Georgia is (but of course!) all Bush’s fault because Eastern European nations are accepting of our *defensive* technology. The argument is asinine. What threat is Poland to Russia? Why would the Russians — if they’re truly this benign, reformist, democratizing, post-Gulag nation as they’ve been claiming since 1991 — feel threatened by a missile shield in Eastern Europe unless Russia had a motive for military aggression against Poland?

If the U.K. put a missile shield in Bermuda the U.S. wouldn’t give a flip because the U.S. and U.K. are both liberally-constitutional democracies! Ergo, that Russia feels threatened by one liberally-constitutional democracy providing the defense of another liberally-constitutional democracy only proves that Russia isn’t one, is in fact and by its actions the opposite, and validates our necessity to assist protecting the Eastern European states.