India is an ALLY, fool.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in remarks Thursday, ranked U.S. ally India with China as a rising threat to the U.S. in Asia. The Pentagon quickly sought to roll back the remarks.

“We face the threats from rising powers — China, India, others — that we have to always have sufficient force protection out there in the Pacific to make sure they know we’re never going anywhere,” Mr. Panetta said during a visit to a shipyard in Groton, Conn., where he toured a submarine, the Mississippi, in the final stages of construction.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) It is quite bad enough that Panetta’s equal fool of a colleague Attorney General Eric Holder has damaged our relationship with Mexico to the point where their Attorney General apparently no longer trusts us to try gun runners on our own (and AG Holder had better hope that AG Morales doesn’t decide that she wants to put out a few arrest warrants on American law-enforcement officials); so I would appreciate it if the Secretary of Defense did not utterly muck up our relationship with India, which was one of the previous administration’s most useful long-term diplomatic projects. If this proves to be beyond the Secretary’s feeble powers, then the Secretary is invited to simply stay in his office and turn off the phone; he’s got only thirteen months’ worth of service left (maximum) anyway.

The terrifying part? Foreign policy is the area where the Obama administration does arguably best. Which apparently means that they only catastrophically mess things up every other month.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: A colleague of mine wonders whether this gaffe actually represents either: an admission that Malthusian thought processes form the basis for our current foreign policy; the revelation that this administration directly equates population size with threat level; or some demented combination of both. For the sake of the country, I’m hoping that this was instead just standard, pig-ignorant Ugly Americanism.

(pause)

You know, I’ve noticed that I’ve had to hope that “blindingly stupid incompetence” was the true reason for a lot of what the Obama White House has done recently…