Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Conduct Unbecoming: 8 Questions About New Obama Blockbuster

September 7th, 2010

The Daily Caller

Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson is the author of the new book, Conduct Unbecoming: How Barack Obama is Destroying the Military and Endangering Our Security, to be released on Sept. 7.

During his 20 years on active duty, the former lieutenant colonel participated in combat operations in Grenada, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Bosnia, and as senior military aide to President Bill Clinton, was responsible for the “Nuclear Football.” Since retiring from the Air Force in 2001, Patterson has authored two New York Times bestsellers, Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security and Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security.

Patterson recently agreed to answer eight questions from The Daily Caller about his new book:

1) Why did you decide to write this book?

I wrote my first book, Dereliction of Duty, detailing my experiences working as a military aide at the side of President Bill Clinton as a warning from a commissioned military officer to his nation. I was an eyewitness to the contempt the Clintons had for the military, his indifference to national security issues except insofar as they served his own political and personal purposes and his failures to accept his responsibilities as our commander in chief. As I outlined in Dereliction of Duty, I lay the blame for the attacks of September 11, 2001 fully at the feet of Bill Clinton, and I felt an obligation to tell that story.

Now, I see history repeating itself in the presidency of Barack Obama. Only this time the misconduct and the dereliction of duty of Obama and his administration could lead to far worse devastation than we suffered in the wake of Clinton and 9/11. I wrote my new book – Conduct Unbecoming: How Barack Obama is Destroying the Military and Endangering Our Security – because I’ve seen this all before only this time it’s worse, much worse. Our nation and our military deserve so much more, so much better. I believe Obama’s foreign policy record so 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.

2) Did you expect President Obama to do better on national security matters than you believe he has to date?

I certainly hoped he would be better then he has been to date. From my perspective 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. Obama appears to believe that by the sheer force of his own personality and his serial apologies for the behavior of his predecessor he can encourage our enemies to drop their hostility towards us. So far, that doesn’t seem to be working and he seems to be failing miserably. In fact, if anything, his performance to date seems to have only increased our enemies’ contempt for us as is seen in the dismissive reactions of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

I also hoped he would be a strong commander in chief, a leader worthy of our military, and one that not only empathized with our servicemen and women but actually understood them. Quite frankly, to this point he doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what it means to lead the nation or our armed forces during wartime. In fact, he is only the second American president in the last sixty years not to have served in the armed forces, the other being Bill Clinton, and it shows. He’s a politician, a “community organizer,” who now commands the greatest and most powerful military in the world and he seems very uncomfortable with that responsibility.

As someone who used to train Air Force officers, I would judge him, from his public record, as someone unqualified to command even a squadron of a few hundred airmen – that is if he’d ever considered serving his nation as an Air Force officer, which of course, he never did. He’s in way over his head and it shows. When the airmen and the privates in the trenches can see it, and they do, he has some serious leadership challenges that, so far, he has failed to meet.

3) Your book discusses how President Obama and his administration have failed to appropriately identify the enemy America is fighting. How so and how do you think this has affected our global fight against Islamist extremism?

You can’t win a war if you’re unwilling or unable to identify the enemy. We have a president that, during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, wanted to kick the “ass” of British Petroleum but doesn’t want to kick the ass of an ideological enemy sworn to defeat us, which murders innocents and suppresses human rights around the globe. Obama has a thin skin. He has shown a tendency to lash out angrily at his opponents — Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Tea Partiers, BP, Republicans, “fat cats” on Wall Street, and the state of Arizona, to name a few. But when it comes to identifying America’s real enemies — the ones fighting and killing Americans every day — he just can’t muster an interest in the fight.

When Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot forty-three fellow soldiers, killing thirteen and wounding thirty, at Fort Hood, Texas while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Obama could only surmise that it was a “senseless act of violence.” The Department of Defense’s 86-page report following the massacre did not contain a single reference to “Islam,” “Muslim,” “Sharia,” or “Koran” although Major Hasan had a history of making anti-American statements based on his radical Islamic beliefs and is a known follower of Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, himself an American terrorist inciting jihad from his hole in Yemen.

The Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the 128-page report that lays out America’s future military strategy and the force structure necessary to fight the nation’s wars, contains not a single mention of “Islam,” “Islamic,” or “Islamist.” Similarly, the Obama administration’s official National Security Strategy released in May, 2010 targets “climate change” as a national security priority, while making no references to radical Islamic terrorism.

How can you win a war when you are unwilling to identify the enemy? The simple answer is: you can’t.

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