February 29, 2012 • Vol. 7, No. 9   

No Apologiesby Newt Gingrich
Dear Fellow Conservative,
President Obama's apologies keep getting more outrageous and more destructive.
They started in the summer of 2008, before he was even elected president. Then-Senator Obama travelled to Berlin to introduce himself as "a citizen of the world," and said, "I know my country has not perfected itself…We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions."
Next came the Apology Tour of 2009, when President Obama travelled to France to apologize for our "failure to appreciate Europe‘s leading role in the world," saying "America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." (It's hard to know where to begin with that one.)
He told the Turkish Parliament that "the United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history."
He apologized to Central and South America for the United States having "at times been disengaged and…having sought to dictate on our terms."
In Cairo, he explained American actions after the Sept. 11 Attacks by saying, "The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals," and said tensions between the U.S. and Muslim world were due in part to "a cold war in which Muslim-majority countries were often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations."
An illegally leaked diplomatic cable from Japan to the U.S. even seems to suggest President Obama wanted to visit Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II, until Japan nixed the idea.
For all this apologizing the president was rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize, but his actions weakened the United States diplomatically and made America less secure.
As damaging as President Obama's compulsion to apologize has been, however, it was not until last week that we saw its true potential to put American lives and military objectives at risk. By apologizing unnecessarily to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the inadvertent burning by U.S. forces of Korans which had been confiscated from imprisoned extremists, the president made the situation in Afghanistan even worse.