While much of the country is focused on the lies told about ObamaCare from our President many have overlooked another huge failure. His foreign policy goals.
Recall he was going to bring peace to the entire middle east, destroy al-Qaeda, end the proliferation of nuclear weapons and all the other unicorns and lollipop dreams that liberal hippies have.
Not anymore. Now he is admitting defeat without saying so (as usual):
At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.
…Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.
Peace between Israel and Palestinians? Not gonna happen. Ending the war in Syria? Not going to happen. Preventing Iran from getting the bomb? Not gonna happen.
More questions from his speech:
- What are the consequences for downgrading — some might say, neglecting — Egypt?
- If one of the few remaining priorities is cutting a deal with Iran, don’t we weaken our negotiating hand by distancing ourselves from Saudi, UAE, etc?
- If the administration is willing to disavow the Saudi partnership, how will it hope to shape regional responses in the wake of failed negotiations with Iran? The answer cannot be, “failure is not an option,” since it is a very real possibility notwithstanding some hopeful atmospherics around the early negotiations. A prudent strategy must hedge against such foreseeable problems.
- What about the erstwhile partnership with Turkey that Obama-Erdogan trumpeted a couple years ago? How does this strategy leverage that relationship?
- Does telegraphing weakness in the Middle East really strengthen our position in Asia or does it simply compromise our position there? What is the record of success for an administration locking in losses in one region in the hopes of recouping them elsewhere?
- If the Obama administration is so quick to reject its own statements of two years ago (e.g., on supporting democracy in Middle East), what assurance does anyone have that they won’t just as quickly reject this latest new strategy?
- What is the strategy’s assumption about the fruits of “ending the wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan? Of course, President Obama did not end those wars, he only ended U.S. involvement in those wars. If security continues to unravel in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the premise of the strategy — that the United States has no national security interests at risk there — still valid?
- How is the administration going to mitigate the conflict in Syria when it is signaled quite clearly that it is reluctant to intervene in Syria?
The man has no idea what he is doing.
Meanwhile he has pissed off an ally once again:
Israel is fuming with the White House for confirming that it was the Israeli Air Force that struck a military base near the Syrian port city of Latakia on Wednesday, hitting weaponry that was set to be transferred to Hezbollah.
…Channel 2′s military analyst, Roni Daniel, said the Obama administration’s behavior in leaking the information was unfathomable.
Daniel noted that by keeping silent on whether it carried out such attacks, Israel was maintaining plausible deniability, so that Syria’s President Bashar Assad did not feel pressured to respond to the attacks.
But the US leaks “are pushing Assad closer to the point where he can’t swallow these attacks, and will respond.” This in turn would inevitably draw further Israeli action, Daniel posited, and added bitterly: “Then perhaps the US will clap its hands because it will have started a very major flare-up.”
The narcissist in chief doesn’t like what Israel is doing so lets just leak information out, that’ll show em’
Acting before considering the end result seems to be the modus operandi of this President.
Lets not forget about al-Qaeda:
During a press briefing on Wednesday, Oct. 30, a “senior administration official” updated reporters on recent meetings between an Iraqi delegation, headed by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, and their American counterparts, including Vice President Joe Biden. The official’s main focus was the “reemergence” of al Qaeda in the region, especially under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham, or Levant (ISIS).
ISIS is now “really a transnational threat network,” the official warned. “This is really a major and increasing threat to Iraq’s stability, it’s [an] increasing threat to our regional partners, and it’s an increasing threat to us,” the official continued.
Earlier this month, a senior Republican congressman offered a similar assessment. Al Qaeda’s affiliates inside Syria are “talking about conducting external operations, which is exactly what happened in Afghanistan, which led to 9/11,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee.
“The only thing we think is stopping it now is the fact that there is this struggle between al Qaeda core leadership saying, ‘hold off, don’t do it yet’,” Rogers said at the 2013 Foreign Policy Initiative Forum in Washington. Rogers also said that there are more than 10,000 “committed” al Qaeda fighters in eastern Syria alone.
10,000 al-Qaeda fighters in Syria…I’m guessing those are those “rebels” Obama supported. What about those weapons we shipped over?
It “is a fact now that al Qaeda has a presence in western Iraq, and it has a presence in terms of camps and training facilities and staging areas that the Iraqi forces are unable to target effectively,” the official continued. “Now, that’s just a fact that goes to their capabilities.”
The Iraqis are unable to effectively target al Qaeda’s presence in western Iraq. Some of the “al Qaeda networks that are coming in from Syria and that are based in Iraq now really have heavy weapons.” Al Qaeda is targeting “Iraqi unarmored helicopters” with “PKC machine guns.”
He has pretty much made everything he has touched worse in the world. But hey! Ghaddafi and Mubarak are gone so who cares that al-Qaeda is as strong as ever, that tens of thousands of civilians are dying in Syria, that Iran will have the bomb soon.
Way to go Obama!
*facepalm*
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