The Obama Administration and the Mideast

This is from a website I frequent that is timely and interesting, please check it out yourselves.

http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ww2010.weblog.htm

The Obama Administration and the Mideast

From the point of view of politics, the most important paragraph was the following, reported by the New York Times:

"The United States, the officials said, was caught by surprise: Egypt and the Emirates [UAE], both close allies and military partners, acted without informing Washington or seeking its consent, leaving the Obama administration on the sidelines. Egyptian officials explicitly denied the operation to U.S. diplomats, the officials said."

Even a few weeks ago, anyone bombing Libya would have coordinated with or at least notified the United States. But the bumbling, farcical foreign policy of President Barack Obama and his clownish Secretary of State John Kerry has made the Obama administration untrustworthy and irrelevant.

Probably the last straw for anyone occurred during the early days of Gaza war. Kerry went to a "peace conference" in Geneva, where he met with Hamas's allies, Qatar and Turkey, and drew up a "peace proposal" which was no more than a list of Hamas's demands. He then sent this proposal for comment to Israel and Egypt, who found it absolutely appalling.

This comes after years of overt hostility to Israel and to the secularists in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and overt friendliness to the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran, including veiled support for Hamas. The first major step in that direction, from the view of the Mideast, was throwing Egypt's long-time leader and ally Hosni Mubarak under the bus in 2011, particularly infuriating the Saudis, who simply do not trust Obama on any issue any more. The New York Times referred to Egypt and the UAE as "close allies and military partners," but that's wishful thinking.

There's been a lot of talk recently that President Obama seems "detached," plays golf all the time, doesn't enjoy his job, doesn't like governing. This is not surprising.

I'm going to retell something I've mentioned several times. When Obama was campaigning in 2008, he said a number of things that were truly crazy, the most famous of which was that when he was elected the earth would heal and the tides would recede. I thought statements like that were amusing, because they were the sorts of ridiculous empty promises that any politician would make during a campaign.

But I remember how truly shocked I was, after the election, when he kept saying the same things. It was then that I realized that he actually believed what he'd been promising, and I said to myself that he and the nation were in trouble.

It's hard to overestimate how disastrous Obama's experience has been to him personally. After 20 years of listening to Reverend Jeremiah Wright scream, "God Damn America! God Damn America! God Damn America!", Obama really believed that America was the source of all evil in the world, and that he could heal the world by apologizing and making things right. He also expected to become a national hero by implementing universal health care. According to some reports, he was expecting, as late as a few days before the Obamacare launch in 2013, that he would be hearing calls for him to run for a third term.

What has happened goes well beyond an ideological failure. This is a disastrous personal failure for the president. Obamacare has been a disaster, with the worst yet to come, and he knows it. Every foreign policy initiative has been a disaster or near-disaster, as the Libyan situation shows. And now, the worst disaster of all: Obama is being dragged back into the war in Iraq.

It's not surprising that he spends as much time as he can on the golf course, and openly couldn't care less what people think of his doing so. He's governing in a world that's completely foreign to him, where everything he's ever believed is turning out to be completely wrong and upside down. It's hard to identify a single policy area where Obama was not "wrong." So it's not surprising that he's "detaching" himself from his job. The golf course is the only place that makes sense, where he can escape from the intense depression and confusion that he must be suffering.

I recall that president George W. Bush said that prior to 9/11 he had no idea what he was going to do as president, and he was confused about how he was supposed to lead the nation. But after 9/11, he suddenly knew why God had made him president. He was going to lead the nation through this time of peril. His confusion had turned to certainty, and pursuit of a clear direction.

President Obama has gone through the opposite experience. He became president knowing exactly what he had to do and how he would do it. But every policy has turned back to indirection and confusion. Obama still has two and one-half years as president, and so far he's doubled down on many bad decisions that he's made. If he keeps doing so, he's going to make things a lot worse, for himself and the nation. National Post/NYT and Salon