JVLV: “WE ALSO GAVE THOSE WHO WISHED TO DESTROY, SPACE TO DO THAT;” UNLEASH THE MOTHERS! By Jiri and Leni Friedman Valenta, 4-30-15

“Space”— to riot, burglarize, and burn our cities at home, but also space for terrorists to destroy, murder, crucify and behead abroad.  

Indeed, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake’s subsequently retracted comment that, “we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well,” applies not only to President´ Obama’s domestic policies, but to his foreign ones as well.  Sadly, neither the  photogenic but unseasoned  mayor, dealing with the furious aftermath of a black man who died in police custody, nor the attractive president  who had to learn his ropes on the job, possess the fortitude  to deal with serious threats. “Strategic patience” and leading from behind are surely poor guiding concepts in discouraging either rioters-turned criminals at home or Islamist terrorists abroad.

For conceptual guidance there is Richard Haas’s book, Foreign Policy Begins at Home, elucidating the linkages between America´s domestic policy and foreign affairs. Only those with blinders on do not understand how Ferguson and Baltimore feed into the lack of respect for our country and our system of government in Moscow, Teheran and the Islamic State, while breeding confusion and uncertainty among our NATO and Middle East allies.

 Both attractive charmers, the mayor and our president, have one thing in common, dithering instead of iron determination to preempt and deal decisively with deadly threats. In Baltimore, the president started by blaming police insensitivity and progressed to reproaching Congress and the press, before finally turning his juiceless ire on the hoodlums and looters exploiting the peaceful demonstration granted by our precious constitution

Mayor Blake´s mistake was to virtually give stand down orders to the police in Baltimore when the rioting began over the death of 25-year old Freddy Gray in police custody. What finally stopped the rioting was not stand down orders or providing space however, but a curfew bolstered by a massive show of police and state troopers.  

The mayor’s and the president’s errors painfully recall the reports of three on-site military contractors in Benghazi,  that stand-down orders were issued when our embassy was attacked by Islamic terrorists. Thus, there was no attempt to rescue four now dead Americans.  Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary were the only ones with authority to give such orders.  Slowly the linkage emerged between the president’s need to win an election at home, his prevarications  about  “decimating” Al Qaeda, and his and Hillary´s phony story of a  terrorist attack being  just a “spontaneous demonstration” over an anti-Muslim video.

 Ever since then the same policy of inaction, hesitation and improvisation covered by the euphemism of “strategic patience,” has been evident not just at home, but abroad.     

After Ferguson, it was natural for Mr. Obama, to importune law enforcement leaders in our large cities not to engage in unnecessary violence or profiling of blacks. Emotionally, he perhaps could not help repeatedly inserting himself into high profile racial cases before the facts were in.  But we also expected him to speak up for officers of the law, particularly when police officer Darin Wilson, was found to have used force properly in the Michael Brown case to preserve his life.  With the majority of police risking their lives daily, it showed poor judgment for Attorney General Eric Holder to announce his findings of racist comments in a Ferguson police department e-mail at almost at the same time the officer´s innocence was established by the court.  Unfortunately, Holder’s attempt at a “balanced” presentation only helped to produce new violence in Ferguson and Baltimore. 

The riots also happened because neither Obama nor Holder has ever admitted that tens of thousands of supporters throughout the nation had it all wrong.  There was no “hands up, don´t shoot!”  Just a pure attack by a hoodlum on an officer of the law.   And now Baltimore, where “hands up” is still echoing among the protestors with potential spill over into other American cities.  It has become yet another disaster that threatens to have serious repercussions on the perceptions of the Kremlin in its management of the Ukraine crisis and Teheran´s endgame on the nuclear negotiations.  We must prevent the making of hot summers that now, threaten to paralyze large America cities. Last time when we faced a similar appalling   situation in 1968, a period of racial explosions at home, we ended up by ignoring a Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and years without superpower arms control or Vietnam War negotiations.  

What should be done?  Clarity begins at home as Haas has suggested. Naturally, force is not always appropriate.  It is a last choice, either in domestic or foreign affairs.  Moreover, each case is different. Whereas the shooting of Michael Brown was justified, surely the treatment of Freddy Gray, who died from an unexplained spinal injury, must be thoroughly investigated. Did he hurt himself by banging his head against the walls of the police van?  Or is that a cover-up of police brutality?   Meanwhile, we have not heard the president’s voice inveighing against the kind of lawless gang activities that have emerged in Ferguson and Baltimore and now threaten to spin off throughout the nation.   

 Most instructive for the president and the mayor was the action of Toya Graham, the mother of a would-be rioter, who stopped her 16-year old son from joining the fray with her tough response.   The president could learn from the decisiveness and courage of this brave mom of the day, perhaps of the year.  She recognized what he does not; judicious force or the threat of force is often necessary for protection of human life and the pre-emption of conflict and this applies both at home and abroad.  Only then can we start discussing community outreach programs, police sensitivity training, and dealing with ecology and poverty at home and abroad.

“Send in the Mothers.”  It is our belief that there are many like that mother who are sick and tired of watching the I-pod generation of young people – of all races—being taught little or nothing about the exceptionalism of our nation, our proud history and our GI´s liberation of many peoples from brutal regimes – including this writer’s former Czechoslovak homeland from Hitler with the Red Army in 1945.

While defusing our situation at home, we as voters must   also insist not just on the “downgrading” but the destruction of the international Islamic terrorist thugs, using not only air force bombing and drones but also our Special Forces on the ground.  For too long this administration has provided a “space” for the destruction of parts of the Middle East.

Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum.  Leading from behind, lacking strategic  courage ,  allowing the rise of a caliphate in the Middle East, ignoring the message enshrined by the Pope of the growing genocidal attacks on  Christians there and the anti-Semitic attacks on Europe’s  remaining post-Holocaust Jews, is the very reflection of our inept and misguided  policy at home.   The time has come not only to reverse our economic, military, but above all our spiritual decline. 

Perhaps the one positive note in this administration is the appointment of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, whom I got to know in 1984. To me he was one of the last Mohicans of Jackson-type Democrats, a man who, having served in a variety of senior national security positions, accumulated invaluable experience in dealing with foreign threats.  To Obama he has been a sort of Toya Graham .

Kudo to his pressure upon the White House to leave more deployed forces in Afghanistan, to re-deploy some troops in  Iraq, to  indict deserter Bowe Berghdale, and to finally  send  a naval task force to help deny space to Iran and its Houthi proxies in South Yemen. May Ashton’s voice be heard in the wilderness of the by and large incompetent White House.   He is someone who understands that to solve our problems requires more than the “soul searching” advocated by the president at home, or the “strategic patience” he pushes abroad.  Above all it requires strategic courage, for as  Winston Churchill pointed out, “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

Leni Friedman Valenta is a Yale grad and writer of jvlv.net.  Dr. Jiri Valenta, who earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, wrote numerous columns for the Baltimore Sun, at times three or four a week during 1980-81 Polish crisis and Afghan war in the 1980’s.

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