Sarah Palin: Leave the Foreign Policy to the Adults

I learned of this Sarah Palin gem just the other day. While being interviewed by Barbara Walters, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgizfYZFPC8), who is an interviewer a few grades above Katie Couric, Palin let slip with this missive regarding Mid-East policy:

Palin: "I disagree with the Obama Administration on that. I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon because that population of Israel is going to grow. More and more Jewish people are going to be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. and I don't think the Obama Administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish
settlements cannot expand."

Walters: "Even if it's Palestinian areas?"

Palin: "I believe the Jewish settlements should be allowed to expand."


This is so distressing simplistic, not to mention outright cruel toward the misery of the Palestinian people and their [usually self defeating] national aspirations, that I really am at a loss for words. Remember, this is a person who wants to be President of the United States. It is also distressing that she has such little regard for the property of others.

Honestly, aside from a quixotic and myopic world view, what is behind this opinion? Why should the settlements be allowed to expand? Further, I cannot square her opinion that the United States has no right to tell Israel what to do in occupied Palestinian territory, even though we all but guarantee its existence with our aid, yet she is four-square behind our very questionable war in Iraq. Can she possibly rectify this?

Of course it goes without saying that the settlements are a political football in Israel, with large swaths of the population not supporting them, or their growth, and rather, look at the settlers as right wing religious radicals endangering Israel with their insistence on occupying what the Palestinian people see as their land.

Her statements about Afghanistan were equally simplistic. According to Mrs. Palin, our goal should be to listen to [Gen.] McChrystal. Ummmm, with all due respect, that's not a goal. When asked again "What should be our ultimate goal?" Mrs. Palin responded:

"Afghanistan, the people there, the government there should be able to take over and to have a more peaceful existence there for the people that live there without American interference, if you will."

Mrs. Palin: Afghanistan has been a hellhole of warring tribes since at least the Soviet invasion of 1979. There are at least four major ethicities and multiple languages, not to mention tribal and clan rivalries. Though NATO is fighting one group of people there numbered in the hundreds, perhaps the low thousands - that's al Qaeda, there has been an ongoing rise in the Taliban since they were toppled in 2001. See: http://www.military-world.net/Afghanistan/2387.html.

And not for nothing, but after inheriting the political brownout that is Afghanistan, within which the Bush Administration did just enough to not succeed over the course of seven (7!!) years, Obama is not "dithering" if he is taking some time - a few days? - to consider what should be done in a land so exquisitely hostile to foreign invasion that it already had a history of defeating two superpowers. Before spouting off at the mouth the most famous quitter in recent memory should perhaps learn a little bit about those subjects she seeks to be in charge of.

And what happened to the conservative principal of not talking ill of a war President? Won't that upset the troops, shaking their confidence in their Commander in Chief? Just saying.......