There is some major confusion pervading the senior layers of the Obama administration when it comes to defining and understanding who our enemies are. At least that’s the only conclusion one can draw from a couple of recent quotes a friend pointed out to me.
Exhibit A: In this interview with my Council colleague Les Gelb, Vice President Biden had this to say: “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.” That’s quite a statement to make about a terrorist/guerrilla group U.S. forces have been fighting since the fall of 2001–a group that is closely aligned with al-Qaeda and other trans-national extremist groups and that is making a violent assault on every liberal, decent value that Americans hold dear.
Exhibit B: Wendy Sherman, the No. 3 official in the State Department, had this to say of the late Kim Jong Il: “He was smart and a quick problem-solver. He is also witty and humorous. Our overall impression was very different from the way he was known to the outside world.” That’s quite a statement to make about one of the most odious dictators to rule any country since World War II–a man who presided over the deaths of millions of his own people from an artificial famine and who developed nuclear weapons that could yet wreak devastation on American soil or the soil of one of our allies.
I would not want to read too much into two stray comments. And I would not want to suggest that Biden is a fan of the Taliban or that Sherman was an acolyte of Kim Jong Il. (Biden did cover himself somewhat, at the risk of intellectual incoherence, when he said in the very next sentence after the one I previously quoted: “If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.”) But at the very least, these statements reveal a troubling tendency to see the best in our foes–which prevents us from making an accurate assessment of the threats we actually face and mobilizing the appropriate resources and determination to confront those threats.
