GAFFNEY: Our enemies sense weakness

Well, yeah! What else would they be thinking?

Frank Gaffney, in a piece in the Washington Times lines it out succinctly. Here are a few of the money paragraphs:

President Obama's stewardship of the national security portfolio to date amounts to a wrecking operation, a set of policies he must understand will not only weaken the United States but embolden our foes. After all, the communist agitator Saul Alinsky, a formative influence in Mr. Obama's early years as a “community organizer,” made the following Rule No. 1 in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals” — “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

According to this logic, the various steps Mr. Obama is taking with respect to the armed forces, the foreign battlefields in which they are engaged, our allies as well as our adversaries will not only diminish our power. They will encourage our enemies to perceive us as less powerful - with ominous implications. Consider some illustrative examples:

• The Obama administration is cutting the defense budget by 10 percent. The result will preclude much, if not virtually all, of the modernization that will be required to prepare the U.S. military to contend with tomorrow's wars. Most of what the Pentagon spends goes to fixed - and growing - personnel-related costs (pay, bonuses, health care, etc.) and operations. As a result, at Obama funding levels, there will not be much available even to “reset” today's forces by refurbishing the equipment being used up in present conflicts.

• The president is on a path to denuclearizing the United States by refusing to modernize the arsenal or even to fund fully the steps necessary to assure the viability of the weapons we have. He hopes to dress up this act of unilateral disarmament by seeking to resume arms-control negotiations with Russia, as though such throwbacks to the old Cold War and its bipolar power structure apply today - let alone that there are grounds for believing the Kremlin would adhere to new treaties any better than the previous ones it systematically violated.

• For good measure, Mr. Obama is mounting a frontal assault on the armed forces. The president plans to repeal the law prohibiting gays from serving in the military. It is absolutely predictable that significant numbers of servicemen and -women - including many of the most experienced commissioned and noncommissioned officers - will retire rather than serve in conditions of forced intimacy with individuals who may find them sexually attractive. The effect will be to break the all-volunteer force.

Please read the entire piece and weep!

Will America EVER wake up to this insanity?