For Obama, Global Warming Trumps National Security

For Obama, Global Warming Trumps National Security
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, January 06, 2010

On Christmas Day, a Nigerian-born terrorist named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger airplane. Only the bravery of a fellow passenger prevented the catastrophe. President Obama called the terror attempt a "systemic failure" on the part of American national security agencies. In particular, he blamed the CIA for the foul-up.

There is no doubt that the CIA should have done something more to prevent this attack. But, then again, President Obama has been keeping them busy.

With global warming.

Seriously.

According to the New York Times on Jan. 5, just a few days after Obama excoriated the CIA publicly, "The nation's top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government's intelligence assets -- including spy satellites and other classified sensors -- to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change." This project, the Times reports, "has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends …"

While missing a potentially catastrophic terror attack is problematic, it's good to know that we've got the inside dossier on the mating habits of polar bears.

This isn't a shock coming from the "watermelon" Obama White House -- green on the outside, red on the inside. The simple truth is that the Obama administration believes that the solution to global warming is the same as the solution to terrorism: Marxist-style global redistributionism.

When it comes to global warming, Obama feels that "as the world's largest economy … America bears our share of responsibility in addressing climate change." Therefore, America must pay for the "financing that helps developing countries adapt, particularly the least-developed."

Similarly, when it comes to terrorism, Obama sees global economic leveling as the answer. On Jan. 2, Obama described the Christmas Day bombing attempt: "[T]he investigation into the Christmas Day incident continues, and we're learning more about the suspect. We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty …" Yemen's poverty is obviously irrelevant to the situation; Abdulmutallab wasn't from Yemen, and he certainly wasn't poor. In fact, when he lived in London, Abdulmutallab lived in a $4 million flat.

But to Obama, Yemen's poverty is precisely the problem -- if Yemen were a rich country, no terrorist could have trained there. Poverty, in his view, causes terrorism. As Obama puts it in his Bill Ayers-written memoir, "Dreams From My Father," on 9/11 history "returned … with a vengeance," because of the "underlying struggle … between worlds of plenty and worlds of want." Terrorism, he says, springs from "the desperation and disorder of the powerless." The solution? Destroying America's economy in the name of a one-world utopian flat economic earth.

To Obama, a dollar spent rectifying the economic imbalances between America and poor countries is a dollar spent on a safer world, whether we spend that dollar on climate change or national security. Or, as a like-minded thinker once wrote, "The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism."

Sadly for Obama, the world is not that simple. No grand unifying theory of politics can provide a cure-all as easy as "give away your wealth." A dollar spent on the global warming hoax is a dollar not spent on national security, because redistributionism cannot buy national security. Curing all economic imbalances will not end the plague of Islamic bombers hoping to establish a Shariah-governed world, nor will it buy their love. But killing as many of them as possible can and will help our national security.

On Dec. 24, the U.S. launched an airstrike against radical U.S.-born cleric Anwar Awlaki. We missed him. The next day, Abdulmutallab, an Awlaki disciple, boarded an airliner with a bomb in his undershorts. There is little doubt that Awlaki directly authorized Abdulmutallab's strike.

A few CIA satellites might have come in handy the evening of Dec. 24. Killing Awlaki might even have stopped the Dec. 25 bombing attempt. But at least we now know at what rate the Arctic glaciers are melting. And according to President Obama, that should be enough to make us feel safe.