Richard Fernandez:
It’s painful to watch President Obama stretched over the Syrian rack. His basic dilemma is that with Russia’s entry onto the scene he can’t afford to cede ground to Moscow or Teheran. But with al-Qaeda affiliated forces now making up 7 of the 9 main rebel groups he can’t afford to win either. Plus no matter who “wins” in Syria Obama will be left to clean up the mess.
An administration that promised voters never to intervene abroad or get dragged into post-conflict stabilization operations may eventually be forced to do both. There’s apparently a price to pay for everything. The promise to control terror groups by intelligence warfare and drone strikes has revealed its hidden cost: a massive surveillance apparatus whose vast extent is only slowly being discovered. And yet the President’s defenders ask, with some justice, ‘what was his alternative?’
The alternative was finish Assad’s hash when Saddam was done. Ok, so never mind. That’s a nonstarter with half the population, but it was worth mentioning just so it could be excluded. Then there’s diplomacy? Well that’s what internationalized the war in the first place. The process of forging regional coalitions with Sunni powers and getting everyone involved resulted in — everyone getting involved — including Russia.
Maybe there was a time when America could have handed everyone a fait accompli in the region. “There you are, take it or leave it”. But that opportunity was lost and there now no good alternatives. What is worse, Obama’s is starting to lose his core base.
“The drop in Obama’s support is fueled by a dramatic 17-point decline over the past month among people under 30, who, along with black Americans, had been the most loyal part of the Obama coalition,” CNN polling director Keating Holland said. He also notes that the president’s approval rating among independent voters had plunged, too, dropping ten points in just one month to 37 percent.
Not only is the President facing immense challenges, he’s also losing the mandate to do anything decisive about it. Becoming a true lame duck. In addition to the financial debt, he’s run up a trust deficit — even among his own supporters. As Glenn Reynolds notes:
But President Obama has been telling us that the war on terror is practically over. In fact, maintaining that argument, pre-election, is why the administration falsely attributed the Benghazi attacks (which were by al-Qaeda) to a YouTube filmmaker who was then hustled off to prison for “probation violations.” So if we’re at war — if it’s still like the months post-9/11 — then why has Obama been saying otherwise? Is he lying?
Lying may be an impolite way to put it. ‘Kicking the can down the road’ sounds a lot better. And that’s what makes Syria so hard to sell either way. After saying the war’s over; after proclaiming a new dawn with the Muslim world; after promising grand bargains with Iran; after touting the glories of the Arab spring and a reset button to Russia then how come Syria? It reminds one of the old Soviet Union where everything steadily got better until it finally collapsed.
Syria, following on the heels of Benghazi, IRS and the NSA — not to mention a whole lot of other unfinished economic business — is reminiscent of multiple organ failure: “infection-> sepsis-> severe sepsis-> Multiple organ dysfunction syndrome”. All the injuries begin to run together. The President’s governance blunders are catching with him pretty much all at once.
Richard Fernandez hit on Obama’s basic fault:
He had always ”voted present,” before he became president.
That won’t work in the job of president of the United States.
He has slid by on dithering for 4 &1/2 years now.
Sometimes he’d take 7 months to ”decide” to back a military action.
Other times he sleeps through emergencies.
It makes perfect sense that all this dithering is catching up on Obama.
Problems fester.
They don’t disappear just because you cover them with a bandage.
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Just today Obama’s highest officials (un-named) admitted we (not ME!) are having direct talks with the Taliban for carving up Afghanistan after the US leaves.
I have to assume Karzai will be teaching at Harvard or some other Ivy League college soon.
Recall the history of the Taliban in Afghanistan:
*UN officials stated that there had been “15 massacres” between 1996 and 2001.
*United Nations accused the Taliban of denying emergency food by the UN’s World Food Programme to 160,000 hungry and starving people “for political and military reasons.”
*The Taliban commanders ran a network of human trafficking, abducting women and selling them into sex slavery in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Especially women from the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other ethnic groups in Afghanistan were Taliban targets.
* The Taliban issued edicts which forbade women from being educated.
*The Taliban banned chess, music, kite-flying, dancing, alcohol, much art.
A HUGE percent of the Afghani people are considered to be apostates from Islam by the Taliban…..the sentence for that is death.
Obama is trying to make a deal with the devil, just so he can go and play golf more often.
Obama is essentially doing in Syria what Reagan did during the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq War where the West supplied weapons to Saddam Hussein to thwart the Iranian Mullah’s zeal for spreading Shiite Islam. We balanced the two opposing sides in their sectarian strife thus creating a stalemate. Like Reagan, Obama has chosen the Sunni Moslem side while the Russians and Chinese are supplying arms to the Shiite (Syria & Iran) side. Since the Europeans have been lackluster in their help of the Syrian rebels, the US is supplementing them.
Here’s a little context, the Sunni and Shiite denominations of Islam have been intolerant of each other since the inception of the Shia belief system in the cult of the Mahdi. They have literally slaughtered each other for over a thousand years. The Mahdi is the Shia’s warrior Christ like figure who will return to rule first Islam and then the world when the world is thrown into complete chaos. It is the duty of all Shiites to create world wide chaos to bring about the return of the Mahdi. As you can see, the Shia sect is a doomsday cult with a violent blood thirsty twist. It is in the West’s interest to quell this doomsday cult. But it is not the West’s interests to help radical religious Sunni’s like al Qaeda either. The Russians and Chinese see a profit opportunity to sell armaments and technology to the Iranians in exchange for money (Russians) and energy supplies (Chinese). I’m sure the double dealing French are quietly selling the Syrians and Iranians arms as well given their past associations and greed.
I don’t believe Obama is actually serious about toppling Assad. He is serious about protecting his own image having told Assad to leave and then Assad having the nerve to stay in power. Obama won’t commit the US to a ground or air operation to topple Assad, he may however make life extremely difficult for both Syria and Iran by indirectly supporting any Sunni group that needles Assad. The point of the US support is to make Syria ungovernable and thus thwart Shiite aspirations of becoming the leading sect of Islam but at the same time tie up radical religious Sunni groups in a never ending war of attrition. So if winning in Syria for the US and the West is losing by having al Qaeda govern Syria then a stalemate is the best possible outcome until the fires of religious fanaticism burn themselves out by getting all the Sunni radicals and Shiite cultists to kill each other off or at least greatly lessen their overall numbers. This is a strategic maneuver that liberals dearly hate as it makes them out to be war mongers and risk being seen as no different than Bush or Reagan thus ceding their anti-war support, i.e. money from the useful idiots of the Peace Movement. Obama’s long time friend, Bill Ayers is already calling for Obama to be tried as a war criminal.