Consider three events over the past few days:

On Monday, Barack Obama was quoted as saying the following:

Obama told Reuters in an interview that the United States had made more progress toward global nuclear non-proliferation in the last several months than in the past several years.

“But it is going to take time, and part of the challenge that we face is that neither North Korea nor Iran seem to be settled enough politically to make quick decisions on these issues,” he said at the White House.

This set Iran expert Michael Ledeen off to write a brilliant piece recognizing the deep and wide character of the budding Iranian revolution and the colossal opportunity it presents for changing the world – if only our president would take steps to encourage that revolution rather than coddle the regime representing the most acute threat to America’s interests on the planet.

Obama’s quote came just a day after Gen. George Casey had regaled the Sunday talk show circuit with sweet-sounding statements about the precious quality of multiculturalism in the military, the preservation of which is apparently more important than the actual lives of its members. “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength,” he said, parroting the it’s-a-small-world-after-all bilge apparently required of all high officials in modern times. “And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Casey’s comments set off a whirlwind of commentary, including a depressing and probably wrongheaded, but still thought-provoking piece by Michael Filozof at The American Thinker suggesting that if this is the level of commitment to winning the war against jihadist Islam the United States is currently enmeshed in, it’s time to surrender and withdraw to our own borders. Most would agree that Filozof’s prescription goes too far, but it’s difficult to argue with the conclusion that America is insufficiently engaged in the fight. Word yesterday that Obama has now decided to reject all current proposals on Afghanistan and start over, though he said today that a decision is coming soon, would seem to bolster Filozof’s point. After all, it has been over a year since Obama announced a need for a new approach in Afghanistan and more than six months since he appointed Gen. Stanley McChrystal to run the operation there. McChrystal has offered up his recommendations as to strategy in the theater over five months ago. And our president, who couldn’t allow the Apollo Alliance to write a bill to shovel $800 billion to left-wing advocacy groups fast enough upon his inauguration, needs more than a year to craft a policy on the most important issue facing the country.

And then today came the news that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and several other al-Qaeda monsters are now going to be brought to New York so they can have civilian trials complete with ACLU/Saudi-funded defense attorneys and a full discovery process to allow the enemy access to CIA sources and methods. This prompted National Review columnist Andy McCarthy to lament that the current governing class possesses a mentality even more detrimental to America’s security than what prevailed in the country on September 10, 2001.

The decision to bring the Guantanamo detainees, including Muhammad, to New York for a full-fledged civilian trial when he and several of his codefendants have already confessed guilt and requested they be executed defies any logic. You have to think the Constitution really is a suicide pact to think of the hardened, self-avowed al-Qaeda jihadists warehoused at Gitmo as civilian defendants. These people aren’t criminals. They’re enemies. They didn’t break American laws because they’re not Americans. To put them on trial for waging war as unlawful combatants against the United States is idiotic. Capture them, get what intelligence you can get out of them, then shoot them and bury them in shallow graves and be done with them.

It was bad enough that the Bush administration struggled through a seven-year morass in trying to craft a policy toward al-Qaeda and other jihadist prisoners which served American interests. Simply declaring them enemy prisoners of war, which the administration recognized was insufficent though perhaps the simplest approach, would have restricted their intelligence value and perverted the Geneva Convention to the disadvantage of civilized nations around the world. But Bush rejected the more traditional treatment of unlawful or irregular combatants – namely, that Geneva didn’t cover them and as such they were afforded no protections – and by doing so set the tone for these animals to become political footballs.

Or maybe political boomerangs. The crazy Left in America has made hay out of the supposed “torture” of poor Muslims for better than half a decade when most of the individuals in question deserved summary executions and no more thought at all; well, for a year they’ve managed to set the administration and the Speaker of the House against the CIA and the American people over whether the people tasked with the protection of the country from those who would slaughter us should be forced to defend themselves from its lawyers. And now those people have determined to set our defenders and in fact the country as a whole alongside the al-Qaeda animals in a circus political trial, with little to be gained and much to lose.

The knee-jerk reaction to these events would be to say that Obama, attorney general Eric Holder and their compatriots in these adventures are clowns and imbeciles. But they are no such things; you don’t rise to a level these people have without a plan and the ability to carry it out. The answer must come from elsewhere. And if they’re not doing these things out of incompetence or stupidity, why are they doing them?

After a week like this one, is it so loopy to question the commitment – or even affinity – Obama and his people have for America? Obama’s worldwide apology tour, his degradation of our alliances, his supplication to our enemies, his wholesale repudiation of past foreign policies and strategies and his increasing emphasis on suborning our sovereignty to international bodies would indicate an overall lack of commitment to America as an exceptional or even particularly worthy nation. With that as a backdrop, seeing the willful failure of his decision-making in Afghanistan, the refusal to address the issue of jihadist Islam as a threat within our military and society and now the return to the failed approach of treating a jihadist war against America as a series of crimes requiring full civilian trials for barbarians should make one wonder…

Are these people on our side at all?

It seems absurd that one could even ask such a question. But after a seemingly unbroken pattern of activities which can only be considered as unfavorable to our interests, the evidence does call that question into the realm of reasonability.

After all, if the Obama regime was in pursuit of America’s humiliation in geopolitical terms – would their policy approach be different than it currently is?