The tale of three presidents: the Playboy, the Cowboy, and the Wonder Boy

Dr. Michael Youssef – Guest
Columnist – 3/2/2011 10:20:00 AM
Most social scientists would agree that world events do not happen in a vacuum. Political forces,
whether they are accidental or deliberate, in succession or a single action,
give rise to political and social movements.

After the fall of the
Shah of Iran, Islamic expansionists began looking for ways and means by which
to accomplish their religious dreams. Empowered by “divine mandate”
and fueled with lots of oil, they believed the world must be dominated by Islam
and the Sharia. Yet, in order to claim victory, they had to overcome their
greatest obstacle: the power of the United States.

A common belief among these extremists was that American power is more
perceived than real, and in the 1990s they began to test their theory. It did
not take long to realize that President Bill Clinton’s “interests”
would distract him from acts of international terrorism. To the extremists, he
was simply a 60′s generation man who clearly wanted “love, not war.”
Thus, a series of tests began. Embassies in Lebanon, Kenya, and Tanzania were
bombed. The response of the “Playboy President” confirmed their
suspicions. Clinton issued many verbal threats but nothing happened.

Then the tests became more daring. The bombing of the USS Cole was designed
to reveal the vulnerability of the U.S. military. The response from the White
House was from the same chapter, same verse — “the perpetrators of these
heinous acts must be brought to justice.” And again, nothing happened. But
what was really telling to these Jihadists was that, if Clinton’s plan to
deflect the scandal of Monica Lewinski meant throwing a million-dollar bomb on
a ten-dollar tent in Afghanistan and bombing an aspirin factory in the Sudan,
they were free and clear to plan, plot, and scheme for bigger things.

Make no mistake about it: all of the long-term planning and maneuvering that
led to September 11, 2001, was going on during the Playboy President’s watch.
But these Islamists misread the domestic focus of the incoming “Cowboy
President” as weakness. All in all, the final exam took place on the
Cowboy President’s watch. Did they really know that he would respond with such
force in Afghanistan? I highly doubt it. They had become accustomed to verbal
threats without action. They assumed that the Texas governor promoting
education and a couple of other issues would not be willing to decimate their
centers of power. As they say “Give the devil his due,” he disrupted
their hornets’ nest and kept America safe for the remainder of his presidency.

All the while, the Islamic groups pressed their wealthy Muslim brothers to use
their investments in the West for Jihadi purposes. They pressed them to
strategically use their billions of dollars invested in Europe and Britain with
strings attached. What were these strings? Demand from European governments for
more mosques, more acceptance of Sharia law, more Islamic districts, more
visible Islamic symbols (including Islamic banking principles and openness to
immigrants from Islamic countries). Clearly, this strategy worked — and now
the Muslim expansionists smelled the air of success for the first time.

When our Cowboy President hit Afghanistan, many Muslim countries objected, but
not as strongly as when Bush’s neo-conservative team naïvely thought that they
could remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq and create an “Exhibit A” of
Islamic democracy. Bush and his team totally miscalculated the complication of
that place. They also failed to understand the very deep desire of the Shiites
in Iraq to unite with their brethren in Iran. They did not realize that
democracy and Islam cannot coexist. Islamic theocracy and Western democracy are
natural enemies. Allah rules through his prophet and his successors. The people
do not empower their political leaders as in a Western democracy.

Bush’s team also failed to understand that the Butcher of Bagdad was holding
the balance of power between the Shiites’ desire for domination and the Sunni
Muslims’ revulsion toward the Shiite’s design. They also wrongly believed that
pro-Western authoritarian regimes such as Hosni Mubarak’s of Egypt could
survive being lectured to publicly by American officials. Of course I am
referring to the speech given by Condoleezza Rice at Cairo University in 2005.

Finally, Bush’s neo-con team did not understand that there is an Islamic
principle which calls for an agreement with your enemy until you get the upper
hand — then you renege on your agreement. And that is why the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt welcomed the Cowboy President calling for democracy,
knowing full well that, like Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Iran in 1978, once they
are elected to power, they will discard democracy like a used paper napkin.

And now we come to the current reign of the “Wonder Boy” President.
This young man who has no tangible achievements that have not been handed to
him, swept into power with a teleprompter and a desire to be liked. Wanting to
be adored by the masses is a very dangerous characteristic in any leader, let
alone the leader of the free world. Such leadership often waits to see which
way the wind is blowing and then jumps on the bandwagon. That would explain the
seemingly conflicting statements that came from the Obama administration during
the recent Egyptian youth uprising.

But let’s step back
for a moment. During Obama’s 2008 campaign, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, in a
speech in France, tried to open a window into Obama’s soul, exposing his
“lukewarm-ness” toward Israel and his love for Islamic
revolutionaries. As soon as these comments leaked into American media, the
Obama campaign operatives clobbered Rev. Jackson, making it clear that he
“has nothing to do with us or our campaign.” This was immediately
followed by a hastily arranged visit to Israel by candidate Obama which was
never repeated as president, despite the fact that he went to the region at
least four times.

To make things worse, Muslim expansionists not only took comfort from President
Obama’s 2009 speech in Turkey during which he declared that America is no
longer a Christian country, but also from his Cairo speech in which he gave all
the possible signals that if the Islamic revolutionaries would rise up, he
would hold hands with them and sing “Kumbaya.”

This unmistakable signal to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was followed by
both well-publicized and secret meetings between the American ambassador in
Cairo and the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. There can be no doubt: the
Muslim Brotherhood is a radical, global-dominating, Sharia-implementing,
Jihad-oriented, Israel-hating group. I think if I were Hosni Mubarak, I would
have known right after Obama’s speech in Cairo, and all of the signals that he
gave to the Muslim Brotherhood, that my goose was cooked.

The tragedy is that each of these three presidents contributed to the rise of Islamic
expansionism and to the total failure of Diplomacy 101. That all-important work
of diplomacy should have taken place behind the scenes, in back rooms,
forcefully but quietly.

In many ways, when history is written we will discover that the Playboy set the
stage, the Cowboy danced on it, and the Wonder Boy brought it all down