But you really only need to read the beginning of the article to get a sense for the debacle that is the Obama non-doctrine:
...he has presided over an exceptionally dysfunctional and un-visionary national security architecture -- one that appears to drift from crisis to crisis, with little ability to look beyond the next few weeks. His national security staff is squabbling and demoralized...
1. Get a Strategy. No, really. We don't currently seem to have one, grand or otherwise. We've got "the long war" -- but we don't seem to have a long game. Instead of a strategy, we have aspirations ("We want a stable Middle East") and we have laundry lists (check out the 2010 National Security Strategy). But as I have written in a previous column, there's no clear sense of what animates our foreign policy. And without a clear strategic vision of the world, there's no way to evaluate the success or failure of different initiatives, and no way to distinguish the important from the marginal...
Another of Brooks' recommendations is for Obama to get out of his bubble and talk to experts, not cronies, campaign aides and yes-men. But RedState reminds us that, ironically, Obama has moved backward in that respect, not forward.
The problem is actually much deeper than merely getting out of the bubble. The locus of the problem is in Obama’s personality and inflated self image. As former aide Neera Tanden said in a recent NY Magazine interview.
Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is that it’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers.”
Someone who doesn’t like people isn’t going to seek out people for informal meetings. People who know they are poseurs don’t talk to smart people because nothing is worse that revealing yourself as a poseur.
Somehow, over the years of coddling and social promotions, Obama has come to believe he is actually talented. As he has said:
“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
I think Ms. Brooks is missing another obvious reason why Obama is in the bubble: he thinks things are going just swimmingly and sees no reason to change.
Honestly, folks, we don't need six things changed. We need one.
And his name starts with the letter 'O' and ends with an 'A'. And all we need to do is to pull the right lever on November 6th along with as many friends, family members and colleagues we can muster.









You don't have to ride on a treacherous, unlit cow path from the north-side of Boston to Lexington as the King's Regulars attempt a surprise attack on the Sons of Liberty.
You don't have to board a frigate, sail for weeks across the Atlantic and then sack a city in Tripoli to rescue your imprisoned countrymen.
You don't have to kill a British soldier in a desperate, hand-to-hand struggle after leaping out of a boat on the beach at York during the War of 1812.
You don't have to hold the line against Pickett's desperate charge at Gettysburg as thousands of wounded men shriek bloody murder around you.
You don't have to resist a vicious attack by the Hun with fixed bayonets at Belleau Wood.
You don't have to survive a terrifying duck-boat run onto Omaha Beach as men around you are being chopped to bits by fortified Nazi gun emplacements.
You don't have to liberate the Nazi Death Camps, capping months of brutal fighting and desperate marching through the dirt roads of Europe.
You don't have to withstand a surprise attack by the Chinese 'People's Volunteer Army', fighting to hold the line in 35°-below-zero temperatures for days on end near the Chosin Reservoir.
You don't have to defend the city of Huế from a surprise attack by Viet Cong and PAVN regulars, fighting block-to-block as the entire country is set afire by the Tet Offensive.
You don't have to race across the desert, waiting for a chemical attack or a Scud missile to hit, baking in 130° temperatures, so that you can expel Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard from Kuwait.
You don't have to patrol a patch of hard-scrabble earth in Aghanistan or Iraq, waiting for the inevitable IED by the side of the road -- or signs that you've rolled right into an ambush by heavily-armed 'insurgents' equipped with Iranian RPGs.
















