Young Guns : A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (11 page)

As troubling as the Obama policy toward Iran is, it is of a piece with a larger double standard this administration has when dealing with the Middle East. The Obama administration’s way of showing it’s an honest broker in the Middle East peace process has been to overlook multiple offenses on the part of some in the Arab world while irresponsibly attacking Israel. This is a major policy shift, the ramifications of which will be very serious.

Last March, Vice President Biden made a muchpublicized trip to Israel. While he was there, two separate incidents occurred that illustrate the administration’s shocking double standard toward the Middle East. You may have heard of the first incident, but I doubt you’ve heard of the second, as it received very little coverage in the media.

In the first incident, a middle-level Israeli bureaucrat
announced the approval of sixteen hundred homes in an existing Jewish neighborhood in the Israeli capital of Jerusalem. The decision was a routine bureaucratic one, concerning a part of Israel that is not now nor has ever been in dispute. Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu immediately apologized for the clumsy timing of the announcement. Nonetheless, the Obama administration responded with suspiciously well-orchestrated outrage. Administration officials took to the network news shows to call the announcement an “affront.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent forty-five minutes on the phone with Prime Minister Netanyahu reprimanding him for sending “a deeply negative signal about Israel’s approach to the bilateral [U.S.-Israel] relationship.” The administration’s disproportionate reaction to the Israeli bureaucracy’s act of paper pushing sent our relations with Israel to a new low.

Now consider the second incident, which also occurred during Vice President Biden’s trip to Israel in March. On one of the last days of the vice president’s visit, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party held a ceremony dedicating a public square in Ramallah to Dalal Mughrabi. In 1978, Mughrabi led the bloodiest terror attack in Israel’s history. She and her confederates attacked a bus full of civilians on an outing, killing 38 Israelis, including 13 children, and an American photojournalist. During the ceremony, Fatah representatives unveiled a statue in Mughrabi’s honor and hailed her as a hero. “We are all Dalal Mughrabi,” a senior Fatah official told
The New York Times
. “For us she is
not a terrorist” but “a fighter who fought for the liberation of her own land.”

The administration’s response to this outrage? Not a word.

From the president’s much-hyped speech to the world’s Muslims in Cairo to repeated provocations of Israel, the current administration’s goal has been to ingratiate itself with the Arab world at the expense of our best friend in the Middle East. This strategy makes a kind of twisted sense for an administration that equates currying favor with international elites with advancing the national security interests of the country. But what has this kid gloves treatment of the world’s despots gotten us? North Korea and Iran continue to seek nuclear weapons capabilities. When Russia isn’t helping them, it is backsliding into authoritarianism. And Al-Qaeda seems unconvinced by the administration’s promises to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. It keeps sending suicide bombers—including one last Christmas day—to kill innocent Americans.

Our leaders need to recognize who our enemies are and remember who our friends are. America stands with Israel for both moral and strategic reasons. Israel is not only a democratic ally and our only true friend in the Middle East; it is also a vital pillar of U.S. national security strategy. When it is strong—its borders secure, its people free from the threat of Iran and its terrorist proxies—the Middle East is a much more stable and peaceful place.

On the other hand, if Iran and the terrorist organizations
Hamas and Hezbollah are allowed to grow stronger at Israel’s expense, the resulting victory for radical forces would deal a blow to U.S. antiterrorism efforts. Terrorism gains legitimacy and momentum when it is shown to work.

Instead, we must demand that the Palestinians stamp out anti-Israel incitement and stop dragging their feet on fighting homegrown terrorism. And we also ought to insist that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan move the Arab world toward a normalization of relations with Israel. If the administration’s goal is to ingratiate itself with the Arab world at the expense of our democratic ally Israel, perhaps it has achieved mild success. But if its goal is to hasten the peace process and shore up a united front against terrorism and a nuclear Iran, the administration has lurched in the opposite direction and put our national security interests in jeopardy.

House Republicans have also offered better solutions for keeping America safe from terrorists here at home. From day one, the Obama administration has been hell bent on closing the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay—without any idea what it will do with the dangerous men being held there. It was a policy without a solution, a bone for the liberal base, and a dangerous position for a new commander in chief to take on the world stage.

And their crusade to close Gitmo was just the opening act in their strategy of transforming the military safeguards that had kept America safe since 9/11 into a bad episode of
Law © Order.

From giving terrorist masterminds civilian trials in
New York City to reading the Christmas 2009 “underwear bomber” his rights after fifty minutes of interrogation to suggesting that the Times Square bomber was motivated by his mortgage problems, the Democrats in charge in Washington have revealed a fundamental failure to understand the enemy we face. The mechanics of our civilian law enforcement system, with its defense attorneys, discovery rights, and admirable openness, are designed fundamentally to respond to crimes; to react when a wrong has been committed. Terrorism represents a fundamentally different kind of danger. We can’t afford to wait for terrorists to strike and then use our civilian system to react. Our leaders owe us more than making sure the perpetrators are caught and tried in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that leaves thousands of Americans dead. They owe us the protection of these American lives from terrorism in the first place. In overlooking this, the Obama administration has shown itself to be disconnected, not just from the most effective ways to keep America safe, but from the American people themselves.

President Obama deserves credit for not following up on his campaign promise and recklessly leaving Iraq to slide back into chaos and terror. And while we wish he did not put a timetable for his surge in Afghanistan, the president also deserves credit and our thanks for doubling down on our efforts to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. Preventing both these countries from becoming safe harbors for terrorists is critical to our safety and security.

Still, the president and his advisers seem more driven by the opinions of the global elite than the American people when it comes to dealing with individual terrorists here at home. For so many of us, our first thoughts the morning of September 11, 2001, were, “Is my family safe? Do I have a friend at work in the Pentagon this morning? What about lower Manhattan?”

Our leaders in Washington may have moved on from this overriding concern, but we have not. Americans want solutions to keep our country safe. And the applause of international elites? That we can live without.

The stakes of what has been involved in the debate we’ve been having in this country over the past eighteen months came home to me in a shocking way in the waning days of the health-care debate. It was then that the FBI informed me that a man in Philadelphia had posted a video online threatening to kill me and my family.

I am deeply grateful that law enforcement officials found this man and arrested him before he could do any harm to my family or myself. Following the health-care debate, I spoke out forcefully against, not just extremists, but the activists and media who used acts and threats by extremists to advance their political agenda. There is unequivocally no
place for violence or threats of violence in a nation governed by the consent of the governed.

But the exploitation of these threats following the health-care debate did a great harm to the America people: it served as a distraction from the great majority of peaceful, democratic Americans who are deeply upset and yes, even angry, about government health-care reform and the way it was passed.

Sadly, I believe that for some activists and mainstream journalists, this distraction was deliberate. Their goal was to paint every American who disagrees with the president and the Democratic majority as violent extremists, even racists. But calling your fellow American a racist, a proto-Nazi, or a bigot is just about the worst thing you can say about someone in today’s society. This isn’t just overheated rhetoric. It’s is a vicious affront to decent, law-abiding, and dissenting Americans.

Beginning even before this administration came into office, Americans have had a growing feeling that the game is rigged against them in Washington. Politicians of both parties have ruled like machine bosses, cutting deals for favored groups, bailing out corporate cronies, and disregarding the voices and the concerns of the American people. While millions of Americans are out of work and struggling, Washington’s answers have been bridges to nowhere, corporate cronyism, cap and trade, housing bailouts, and government-run health care. Hardworking Americans don’t feel like the playing field is level; they
don’t think they have a fair shot anymore. When they’re not feeling condescended to, American are feeling shut out of the process. Washington has some hard work to do. You will see in the coming chapters how Paul, Kevin, and I have a plan for winning in November and tackling the tough choices we’re going to have to make to preserve the greatness of America for future generations.

America is at a crossroads. We have real challenges and Americans are looking for solutions. But we believe in the wisdom and decency of the men and women who put us here. Americans have encountered rough times in the past, and we’ve always emerged stronger than before. What our country needs today is leadership to see us through the tough choices ahead—responsible, adult leadership that listens to and respects the American people.

The current majority in Congress has refused to listen to the people. But Paul, Kevin, and I have a message for our fellow Americans: we hear you. We hear you loud and clear.

PART TWO
 
 
CONGRESSMAN
PAUL RYAN

CHAPTER FOUR
Health-Care Reform and the New Way in Washington
 
 

It was my fortieth birthday.

The President of the United States was talking to me.

And here’s the kicker: he was
complimenting
me, my family, and my ideas.

It happened in Baltimore, early in 2010, at the House Republicans yearly, members-only get together. When we were planning the meeting, we decided to do something different. We invited President Obama to come and talk to us—not something opposing parties usually do. But then the president, to his credit, did something different, too. He accepted.