Liz Cheney for Secretary of State?

**Posted by Phineas

Heck, why not? After President Obama admitted that the last 40 years of bipartisan American policy in the Middle East, through presidents Republican and Democratic, is literally going up in flames, why not? In today’s Wall St. Journal, the former Vice President’s daughter mercilessly chronicles just a portion of the incompetence of Team Smart Power:

It has certainly been a terrible 48 hours. In Libya, violent extremists killed American diplomats. In Cairo, mobs breached the walls of the U.S. Embassy, ripped down the American flag and replaced it with the al Qaeda flag.

In response to the attack in Cairo, diplomats there condemned not the attackers but those who “hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” The president appeared in the Rose Garden less than 24 hours later to condemn the Libya assault and failed even to mention the attack in Egypt. The message sent to radicals throughout the region: If you assault an American embassy but don’t kill anyone, the U.S. president won’t complain.

Though the administration’s performance in the crisis was appalling, it wasn’t surprisingβ€”it is the logical outcome of three-and-a-half years of Obama foreign policy.

Cheney starts in 2009, recalling Obama’s performance at a multilateral summit in Mexico City, in which, after an insulting tirade by once-and-future Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega, Obama hastened to dissociate himself from the policies of his predecessors — an early example of his penchant for “It’s not my fault.”

Then she recounts Obama’s analysis in France that the US could have “moral authority” to criticize rogue states seeking nuclear weapons only if we severely reduced our arsenal first. And there’s more: stabbing Poland and the Czech Republic in the back to appease Moscow; the infamous apology tour that culminated in his Cairo speech (that turned out well, didn’t ?) that was more like an exercise in American breast-beating; and the UN speech that, without explicitly saying so, strongly implied that American prominence was a cause of the world’s problems, not a force for good.

Cheney, perhaps bound by space constraints, left out much else: the war-on-a-whim in Libya, arguably illegal and certainly not thought-through, now bearing poisoned fruit throughout the region (ask Mali if they’re happy we intervened in Libya); the laughable “reset” with Russia that’s earned us what, besides Putin’s contempt? Let’s not forget, either, the utter gelded fecklessness in dealing with Iran, from their silence over the Green Revolution in 2009 to revealing key national secrets to the New York Times in order to look good. And then there’s their general “hug your foes, slap your friends” approach to international relations. Forget the Churchill bust, how do you think Britain feels when we blow their intelligence secrets and give the Russians vital information about the UK’s nuclear arsenal?

After her tour de farce of Obama’s foreign policy record, Cheney describes the inevitable consequences — our allies can no longer rely on us, and our enemies no longer fear us:

If you really want to know whether our adversaries fear us, ask the Russians, whose thuggish President Putin essentially endorsed Mr. Obama recently. Perhaps Mr. Putin is banking on the missile defense “flexibility” Mr. Obama promised he would have after the election.

Boom.

And it’s not just Russia. Thomas Joscelyn at The Weekly Standard looks at evidence that the recent attacks in Cairo and Benghazi were part of a coordinated effort by jihadist groups to force the release of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the β€œBlind Sheikh,” the key conspirator in the 1993 Word Trade Center bombing. These attacks are meant to intimidate us into releasing him.

In other words, thanks to President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and the entire Unicorns and Rainbows Team, our enemies no longer fear us, so they feel safe to attack us.

And kill our people. Again.

Memo to Governor Romney, if you do win the election and John Bolton isn’t available, maybe you should take a long look at Liz Cheney. Like her Dad, she has more intellectual clarity and more spine than the entire Democrat establishment rolled into one.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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