{"id":654,"date":"2010-06-08T07:00:23","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T14:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/?p=654"},"modified":"2010-06-10T10:19:01","modified_gmt":"2010-06-10T17:19:01","slug":"potential-casualty-of-gulf-oil-rig-crisis-our-most-critical-global-relationship-06-07-10-hughhewitt-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/2010\/06\/08\/potential-casualty-of-gulf-oil-rig-crisis-our-most-critical-global-relationship-06-07-10-hughhewitt-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Potential Casualty of Gulf Oil Rig Crisis: Our Most Critical Global Relationship | 06.07.10 | HughHewitt.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

The biggest long-term casualty of the administration\u2019s mishandling of the Gulf oil rig crisis may turn out to be our most critical global security relationship.<\/p>\n

As Hugh has been on top of from the first hour, the administration has fumbled every aspect of the environmental disaster. \u00a0The president took days to even seem to notice what had happened. \u00a0Then he delayed and delayed on the one clearly constructive step he could take to stem the damage to shores and wetlands: a quick yes to Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal\u2019s request for permission to build barrier dunes.<\/p>\n

To compensate for their own ineptness, Mr. Obama and his colleagues have taken to bashing BP. There has been talk of prosecuting the company. \u00a0Administration spokespeople have huffed and puffed with such pronouncements as, \u201cWe will keep our boot to their neck.\u201d \u00a0The president has vowed that he will make them pay every penny of the costs long after the company pledged to pay every penny of the costs.<\/p>\n

In this fuming and fussing, the mainstream media has been egging him on. \u00a0As one network reporter asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs last week (there are times you have to pity anyone who holds Gibbs\u2019 job) if he had \u201creally seen rage from the president.\u201d \u00a0Could he \u201cdescribe it\u201d?<\/p>\n

In the years leading up to the disaster, British Petroleum clearly made major mistakes, most damagingly, perhaps, allowing a fragmentation of the chain of command for operations such as Deepwater Horizon. \u00a0No one was clearly in charge. \u00a0Still, since the rig exploded and sank, it is hard to think what the oil giant could have done that it hasn\u2019t done as quickly as it has done it. \u00a0It has been days and weeks ahead of Team Obama at every turn.<\/p>\n

But here is the problem. \u00a0BP is not just any oil company. \u00a0As reported in Sunday\u2019s New York Post<\/em> (http:\/\/tiny.cc\/0nveb<\/a><\/strong>), \u201cBP is Britain\u2019s largest company and the biggest holding in most British pension funds.\u201d \u00a0It pays out one-seventh of the dividends paid in the FTSE 100, the UK\u2019s equivalent of the Dow Jones average. \u00a0So large parts of the British population feel it personally when the administration listens to its left wing and major media friends and talks as if the company were a criminal conspirator.<\/p>\n

Of the mood in London, The Post<\/em> reports, that even The Independent<\/em>, \u201ca left-wing environmental newspaper,\u201d has run nearly hysterical columns defending BP and worrying if it will survive. \u00a0And at the conservative London Telegraph<\/em>, another columnist has summed up that, \u201cThis crisis has injected an animus into transatlantic relations unseen since the days of George III.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has been clear for a long time that one thing Mr. Obama and those around him do not get is the centrality of the UK relationship to our nation\u2019s effectiveness on the world stage. \u00a0As British historian Andrew Roberts has written of the U.S. and U.K. in his magisterial A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900<\/em>, it was not until that 1940s that:<\/p>\n

\u201c[T]he realization finally dawned on both that they would be infinitely stronger together than the sum of their constituent parts\u2026. [T]heir reverses \u2013 Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, Suez, and Vietnam among them \u2013 have come when they were divided from one another. \u00a0By contrast, their many victories \u2013the 1918 summer offensive, North Africa 1942, Italy, the liberation of Europe 1944-5, the Berlin airlift, the Korean War, the Falklands, the collapse of Soviet communism, the Gulf War, the liberation of Kosovo and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein \u2013 all came when they were united.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it happens, at the moment we have a major joint global security operation going: Afghanistan. And at just this moment \u2013 as a new government is taking office in London \u2013 the British are wondering if that operation is worth its price.<\/p>\n

This past week European Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and journalist Daniel Korski wrote in the British journal The Spectator<\/em>:<\/p>\n

“Having returned from Washington DC, where I spoke to a range of senior policy-makers about Afghanistan and Pakistan, I am struck by how much confusion there is about what President Obama meant when he said that he wanted US combat troops to return home in 2011.”<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is Plan B\u201d? Korski asked.<\/p>\n

Vice President Joe Biden has said famously and wrongly that Iraq may prove one of the Obama Administration\u2019s great achievements. \u00a0But he would have been right to say it about Afghanistan \u2013- achievements or failures. \u00a0For the UK to abandon us in that effort would be, to use Andrew Roberts understated term, a \u201creverse\u201d.<\/p>\n

Less finger pointing, more diplomacy, greater competence \u2013 all of this from the White House would go a long way, both to dealing with the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis and to keeping relations with our most critical ally from deteriorating further.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The biggest long-term casualty of the administration\u2019s mishandling of the Gulf oil rig crisis may turn out to be our most critical global security relationship. As Hugh has been on top of from the first hour, the administration has fumbled every aspect of the environmental disaster. \u00a0The president took days to even seem to notice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-issues","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=654"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":661,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654\/revisions\/661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}