A good question but I would put forward that it is America, not just Obama, that doesn’t understand the full scope of the war we face. Obama’s noncommittal toe in the water approach to warfare is a symptom of the Fortress America fantasy that sees America as so powerful that we can actually give away much of our power and still be safe from the world. It is not just the left but many on the fringe right think that Islamism, Communism, eco-terror and a host of other threats to us cannot effectively destroy America so they simply aren’t worth confronting. Worse they adopt a pose of indifference to these enemies in the vain hope that sans “provocations” from us (like buying oil and exporting those gauche ideas of liberty for all and free market economics) everyone would simply love us too much to ever want to harm us.

Such Lotus-Eater like insouciance concerning America and her place in the world is not a product of Barack Obama so much as President Obama and his election is the culmination of the ascendancy of this school of thought. It will be at least three years until we have leadership that takes our defense seriously and in the mean time we will suffer a withering barage of attacks from enemies that cannot even be named:

On the other hand, if we are now at war, as Obama belatedly concedes, against whom are we warring? “We are at war against al-Qaida,” says the president.

Really? But what does that mean? Was the previous month’s “isolated extremist,” the Fort Hood killer, part of al-Qaida? When it came to spiritual advice, he turned to the same Yemeni-based American-born imam as the Pantybomber, but he didn’t have a fully paid-up membership card.

[…]

What did the Pantybomber have a membership card in? Well, he was president of the Islamic Society of University College, London. Kafeel Ahmed, who died after driving a burning jeep into the concourse of Glasgow Airport, had been president of the Islamic Society of Queen’s University, Belfast. Yassin Nassari, serving three years in jail for terrorism, was president of the Islamic Society of the University of Westminster. Waheed Arafat Khan, arrested in the 2006 Heathrow terror plots that led to Americans having to put their liquids and gels in those little plastic bags, was president of the Islamic Society of London Metropolitan University.

Doesn’t this sound like a bigger problem than “al-Qaida,” whatever that is? The president has now put citizens of Nigeria on the secondary-screening list. Which is tough on Nigerian Christians, who have no desire to blow up your flight to Detroit. Aside from the highly localized Tamil terrorism of India and Sri Lanka, suicide bombing is a phenomenon entirely of Islam. The broader psychosis that manifested itself only the other day in an axe murderer breaking into a Danish cartoonist’s home to kill him because he objects to his cartoon is, likewise, a phenomenon of Islam. This is not to say (to go wearily through the motions) that all Muslims are potential suicide bombers and axe murderers, but it is to state the obvious – that this “war” is about the intersection of Islam and the West, and its warriors are recruited in the large pool of young Muslim manpower, not in Yemen and Afghanistan so much as in Copenhagen and London.

But the president of the United States cannot say that because he is overinvested in a fantasy – that, if only that Texan moron Bush had read Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his Miranda rights and bowed as low as Obama did to the Saudi king, we wouldn’t have all these problems. So now Obama says, “We are at war.” But he cannot articulate any war aims or strategy because they would conflict with his illusions. And so we will stagger on, playing defense, pulling more and more items out of our luggage – tweezers, shoes, shampoo, snow globes, suppositories – and reacting to every new provocation with greater impositions upon the citizenry.

We’re so strong we can afford to be weak many say. It is the exercise of our strength that causes problems. This is the progressive version of the meek will inherit the earth which while a nice theological point to debate is a foolhardy defense policy. Unfortunately America will have to learn that the hard way.