Monday, September 01, 2014

The Refrain on the denouement of Barack Obama: “If he can’t do it no one can”

UPDATE AT BOTTOM

For any of you like me who can hardly STAND to turn on the news, and cringe as a headline break is announced, expecting anything from terrorists in our swimming pools (today in Libya), to a dirty weapon in Houston, or on Wall street ….and are relieved when it turns out to be naked pix of Ms Lawrence ..
It is going to be claimed that the USA is now ungovernable, attacking the basis for the nation itself rather than admit the party nominated a ‘light skinned black with no negro dialect’ (thanks Harry Reid) in a GIGANTIC ERROR with good intentions, and that 53% of the voting public was FOOLISH.
It is already being claimed that Obama failed in the foreign domain because we can’t solve the world’s problems and no one can manage our responsibilities, and neither the USA nor the world was ready for such as Barack Obama.
Brett Stephens from the cover article of Commentary:
If anything, the international situation Obama faced when he assumed the presidency was, in many respects, relatively auspicious. Despite the financial crisis and the recession that followed, never since John F. Kennedy has an American president assumed high office with so much global goodwill. The war in Iraq, which had done so much to bedevil Bush’s presidency, had been won thanks to a military strategy Obama had, as a senator, flatly opposed. For the war in Afghanistan, there was broad bipartisan support for large troop increases. Not even six months into his presidency, Obama was handed a potential strategic game changer when a stolen election in Iran led to a massive popular uprising that, had it succeeded, could have simultaneously ended the Islamic Republic and resolved the nuclear crisis. He was handed another would-be game changer in early 2011, when the initially peaceful uprising in Syria offered an opportunity, at relatively little cost to the U.S., to depose an anti-American dictator and sever the main link between Iran and its terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza.
Incredibly, Obama squandered every single one of these opportunities. An early and telling turning point came in 2009, when, as part of the Russian reset, the administration abruptly cancelled plans—laboriously negotiated by the Bush administration, and agreed to at considerable political risk by governments in Warsaw and Prague—to deploy ballistic-missile defenses to Poland and the Czech Republic. “We heard through the media,” was how Witold Waszczykowski, the deputy head of Poland’s national-security team, described the administration’s consultation process. Adding unwitting insult to gratuitous injury, the announcement came on the 70th anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet pact, a stark reminder that Poland could never entrust its security to the guarantees of great powers.
And this was just the beginning.
This is more than a replay of Obama’s greatest foreign policy hits ..
 Relations would soon sour with France, as then-President Nicolas Sarkozy openly mocked Obama’s fantasies of nuclear disarmament. “Est-il faible?”—“Is he weak?”
And there was Israel: “We thought it would be the United States that would lead the campaign against Iran,”
As for Syria, perhaps the most devastating assessment was offered by Robert Ford, who had been Obama’s man in Damascus in the days when Bashar al-Assad was dining with John Kerry and being touted by Hillary Clinton as a “reformer.”
“I was no longer in a position where I felt I could defend the American policy,” Ford told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in June, explaining his decision to resign from government. “There really is nothing we can point to that’s been very successful in our policy except the removal of about 93 percent of some of Assad’s chemical materials. But now he’s using chlorine gas against his opponents.”
Often the damage has been vivid, as in the collapse of the Israel–Palestinian talks in April followed by the war in Gaza. More frequently it can be heard in the whispered remarks of our allies. “The Polish-American alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of security,” Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister and once one of its most reliably pro-American politicians, was overheard saying in June. “It’s bullshit.”
But perhaps the most telling indicator is the collapsing confidence in the president among the Democratic-leaning foreign-policy elite in the United States. “Under Obama, the United States has suffered some real reputational damage,” admitted Washington Postcolumnist David Ignatius in May, adding: “I say this as someone who sympathizes with many of Obama’s foreign-policy goals.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, warned in July that “we are losing control of our ability at the highest levels of dealing with challenges that, increasingly, many of us recognize as fundamental to our well-being.” The United States, he added, was “increasingly devoid of strategic will and a sense of direction.”

Zbig, leader of that set of policies which was blind to the ENTIRE situation that lead to mujahideen, and Al Qaeda says this?

And right on cue 8 hours later….Joan Walsh whining at Salon?

2 comments:

Always On Watch said...

It is already being claimed that Obama failed in the foreign domain because we can’t solve the world’s problems and no one can manage our responsibilities, and neither the USA nor the world was ready for such as Barack Obama.

I am so sick of this kind of "making excuses" for BHO. Those excuses are a colossal load of shit.

Pastorius said...

That last part, about Zbignew, is astounding.

But let's name some things Obama is good at,

1) he can get along with Michelle Obama better than any man alive

2) He looks good in a slim-fit suit

3) he can do a very good Al Green impression for a world leader

4) he throws a rockin' party on our dime

5) he's pretty good at reading the newspaper and coming to grips with the import of the content therein, though he might be a little slow to act on said import

6) he knows A LOT about HBO and Showtimes TV shows, and could probably win considerable money on the Trivia Circuit