Robert Patterson - Conduct Unbecoming: How Barack Obama is Destroying The Military and Endangering Our Security

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When I was tapped to accompany President Bill Clinton and carry the nuclear football, which contains the top-secret codes (among other things) the president needs in case of nuclear war, I was proud and grateful. As a career Air Force officer and pilot, Id served literally around the globe, operating in and out of sixty-nine countries, and Id flown combat support missions in Grenada, the Persian Gulf, Rwanda, Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. I was honored to take on this new and awesome responsibility.

But my experiences in the Clinton White House turned my gratitude and awe into shock, revulsion, and sorrow as I saw first-hand the careless and utterly selfish way in which Clinton and his administration ran our country. So, once out of uniform, retired and able to tell my story within the constraints of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I wrote Dereliction of Duty, documenting our former presidents contempt for the military, his indifference to important issues except insofar as they served his own political or personal purposes, and his failure to accept his responsibilities as our commander in chief.

Indeed, I lay the blame for the attacks of September 11, 2001, fully at the feet of my former boss, Bill Clinton.

Now, tragically, I see history repeating itself in the presidency of Barack Obama. Only this time the misconduct and dereliction of duty of Obama and his administration could lead to even worse devastation than we suffered on September 11, 2001. Our armed forces have done great work combating the terrorist threat, but the prospect of a nuclear Iran and some of the egregious policy decisions and priorities of the Obama administration have, in my estimation, dramatically raised the level of threat to the United States. In only a year and a half in office, Barack Obama has not only reversed much of the successful accomplishments of his predecessor George W. Bush that have kept us safe, but hes done it at lightning speed. In doing so, Obama is clearly placing the United States in an increasingly vulnerable and threatened condition. With todays struggling global economy weighing down the economies of the United States and Europe, with Chinas burgeoning influence and military capability, and with Islamist terrorist groups gaining footholds in regions around the world, this is obviously a dangerous timeso dangerous that it is a legitimate fear that a combination of economic and foreign policy reverses could render moot the dreams, sweat, and toil of our founding fathers and all Americans who have gone before; we could be living in a different America, a less prosperous America, a less confident America, a less dominant America.

In Barack Obama we have elected a foreignerI dont mean in the sense that he is not a United States citizen; nor do I mean it in the sense that he is half Kenyan and spent some years growing up in Indonesia. No, it is that he seems a stranger in our midst, someone whose gut reactions are not those of an American, but of someone raised with different touchstones. We have elected in Barack Obama a man who is comfortable bowing to the Japanese Emperor Akihito, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and Chinese President Hu Jintaosomething that I think most Americans, with their democratic instincts, consider wrong and even un-American, and certainly conduct unbecoming of the leader of our proud Republic. But then, how proud is he of our Republic? Barack Obama is a man who made a point of disdaining to wear an American flag lapel pin; he said he believed in American exceptionalismonly to add that all nations think they are exceptional; his wife on the campaign trail said her husbands popularity with voters made her proud of America for the first time in her adult life. I dont think many of us would consider these mainstream American opinions or actions.

Perhaps before we elected him president, we the people should have been more concerned about his relationships with the radical leftist and former terrorist William Ayers or the radical black-power preacher Jeremiah Wright. Perhaps we should have delved more into his education, his body of work as a community organizer, and his fondness for the radical teachings of Saul Alinsky.

But now Obama is in the White House, the most powerful man in the world, a man who can leave an imprint on American history forever. We need to pay far more attention to him now, to see how he is conducting our nations foreign policy, and what his plans are to keep our country safe. I believe his foreign policy record thus far and his agenda for the future are extremely deleterious to our national security, and need to be reversed in the elections of November 2010 and 2012.

Barack Obama, I fear, remains little understood and under-analyzed. How many know, for instance, that his key California fundraiser and money bundler, Jodie Evans, is a leader of the radical organization Code Pink that delivered cash and materiel support to the terrorists killing Americans in Iraq? How aware are the American people that the administrations promise of change is being carried out by many of the same personalities I served with at the Clinton White House, such as Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Harold Ickes, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Susan Rice, Leon Panetta, and Erskine Bowles? The only difference now is that they feel liberated to move even farther to the Left. How much did the American people follow what we might call Obamas Global American Shame Tour, in which he offered apologies for American foreign policy in such locales as Cairo, Prague, Moscow, Berlin, Ankara, Oslo, and the United Nationsgiving the impression that America had been a rogue nation on the world stage, but that he would set America right?

But theres much more, if one wanted to create a bill of indictment of Obamas national security policy failures, including:

From my point of view as a military analyst, it seems that a unifying theme of Democrat presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama is a consistent underestimating of foreign policy dangers. Carter, after warning the American people of their inordinate fear of communism, was shocked to find the Soviets invading Afghanistan; he was equally shocked by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and to find Iranian radicals holding American hostages in Tehran. Bill Clinton was shocked by the radical Islamists in Somalia, and never understood the full danger of al Qaeda, even as it attacked American targets overseas.