INDIGESTION AT THE WHITE HOUSE – AT 8:42 A.M. ET:  And it isn't coming from the state dinner for the visiting head of China.  It's coming from a hard-hitting piece by the great Fouad Ajami in today's Wall Street Journal, linking Hillary Clinton with the policies of...George W. Bush, and dissing President Obama at the same time: 

"In too many places, in too many ways, the region's foundations are sinking into the sand," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Arab autocrats in a remarkable speech in Qatar last week.

The Arab landscape all around her provided ample confirmation. In Tunisia, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, a despot who has been in power for nearly a quarter-century, was reeling. His people had conquered their fear and had taken to the streets. In Cairo, the Pharoah the Pax Americana has indulged through five American presidencies appeared to be losing his touch, his once-tolerant country engulfed by sectarian troubles between Muslims and Copts. Lebanon, which had once been a showcase of American success in the region, was once again in the throes of a political crisis.

But there was a truth that our secretary of state glided over. Sinking into the sand, too, is the worldview that informed President Obama's approach to the Middle East.

Ouch.  Major ouch. 

...the word went forth to the despots in the region that the American campaign on behalf of liberty that Mr. Bush had launched in 2003 had been called off. A new Iraqi democracy, midwifed by American power, was fighting for its life. The Obama administration would keep Iraq at arm's length.

This break of faith with democracy was put on cruel display in the summer of 2009, when the Iranians rose in revolt against their rulers. True, American diplomacy was not likely to alter the raw balance of power between the regime and its democratic oppositionists. But the timidity of American power, and the refusal of the Obama administration to embrace the cause of the opposition, must be reckoned one of American foreign policy's great moral embarrassments.

And...

It took the embattled Muslim liberals a while to catch on to the moral indifference of the Obama administration. But catch on they did, and in their unequal struggle with the tyrannies in their midst they have operated on the reasonable assumption that the leading liberal power in the world order had no interest in the promotion of their liberty.

But...

For a fleeting moment in Qatar, George W. Bush seemed to make a furtive return to the diplomatic arena. He was there, reincarnated in the person of Hillary Clinton, bearing that quintessential American message that our country cannot be indifferent to the internal arrangements of foreign lands. The Arab world presents a great strategic and moral challenge. These are states with a broken compact between rulers and ruled. The rulers produce the very terror and rage they propose to hold back. The oppositionists, meanwhile, are a great, troubling unknown.

COMMENT:  Fouad Ajami is a national treasure, a professor at Johns Hopkins who refuses to bend to the trendy thinking of the moment.  His whole column, one of the most important pieces of recent months, is worth reading.

The question, of course, is whether Hillary's speech in Qatar marks a change of policy, or was merely a case of her speaking out of turn.  We're being told this week that Mr. Obama will be taking a tougher line with China, during that country's leader's current visit, than he's taken before.  We'll see, and we'll see how long it lasts.

Obama is gearing up for the 2012 election, and his previous appeasement policies will not help him with the great American center.  Further, the far left in his party, which adores appeasement, really has nowhere else to go.

But if Obama is reelected, and no longer needs the voters...then what in foreign policy?  Do you feel a chill?

January 19, 2011