Even though he's convinced that we're not really at war -- and that the enemy we are not at war with does not comprise all Islamic extremists, and certainly not the entire Muslim world -- he felt compelled to apologize to the entire Muslim world anyway.
Last year, he told millions of Muslims in an interview with Al-Arabiya that America must re-establish with the Muslim world "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."
Obama's perspective was notably one-sided -- in favor not of the United States, but the Muslim world. As others observed at the time, our track record for the previous 20 years had been one of continually coming to the aid of Muslims all over the world, from Bosnia to Kosovo to Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq.
As part of his worldwide tour to apologize for the shameful America that predated his inauguration, he went to Cairo, where he reached out to the people in the Muslim world to make sure they understood that he understood their extraordinary contribution to America and his acute sensitivity and remorse for America's past colonialism and imperialism.
As for his progress in addressing "the challenges of nuclear proliferation," he set a year-end deadline for Iran to start behaving. The deadline passed with no Iranian concessions -- just more insults and defiance from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Obama's denying he'd ever set a deadline in the first place. Now that's leadership.
Not only that but China has just announced that it would not support another round of sanctions against Iran. Guess that deep bow in Shanghai didn't quite do the trick.
But never mind those details. Obama has already accomplished what needed to be accomplished on this front. Rhodes tells us how: "In April, the President delivered a landmark speech in Prague where he stated America's commitment to seek the security of a world without nuclear weapons." We can rest easy now.
Besides, why should Obama unduly agonize over this "contingency operations" thingy when he has much bigger fish to fry, such as cataclysmic, catastrophic, apocalyptic anthropogenic global warming, which is going to incinerate us all, including al-Qaida, anyway -- unless he transfers all this nation's wealth to "underdeveloped nations" and sends us back to the Stone Age?
And he plans on doing just that, as he has made clear with his efforts to pass cap-and-trade legislation, his trip to Copenhagen, and his Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory edict outlawing CO2 emissions.
Meanwhile, in the real world, terrorists still hate us just the same and feel they've been given the green light to prove it, while ours remains fixed on yellow.