America’s credibility in the Middle East, thanks to the delusions of both parties, is broken, and it cannot be repaired within the time frame required to forestall the next stage of violence. Egypt’s military and its Saudi backers are aghast at American stupidity. Israel is frustrated by America’s inability to understand that Egypt’s military is committed to upholding the peace treaty with Israel while the Muslim Brotherhood wants war. Both Israel and the Gulf States observe the utter fecklessness of Washington’s efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear weapons program.[1]A great cartoon during the Carter years had two beefy, exhausted men with rolled up sleeves briefing a two-foot high Carter looking at a map of Afghanistan. "Oh, I get it," exclaimed Carter. "The Russians are bad guys!"
Our own malevolent naïf's membership in the Choom Gang and his two drop-in senatorial gigs appear to have been an inadequate preparation for the business of conducting serious statecraft as president of what was hitherto considered to be a country to be reckoned with. Clueless – one can only hope – as to the basics of economic growth and fiscal sanity, Mr. Obama has also rushed to intervene in every pestilential backwater south of Sicily and east of Cyprus. He has embraced the hateful Muslim Brotherhood and championed the interests of millions of third-world illegal immigrants over those of his own people. There simply are NO federal policies today that are not remarkable for the absurdity of their goals, the destructiveness of their effects, or the malevolence of their formulation.
This is a president who plays at being president, assuming that another phone call from Percy Sutton, one more tirade from Al Sharpton, or one more presidential speech to some class of rapt fifth graders or liberal suckers will silence all critics and set things back on track. Hillary brought the "reset" button to the wrong world capital. Vladimir Putin for sure didn't have to call a cabinet meeting to name the genius who thought up that painfully naive "idea" for bringing forth a new era of lemonade and candy canes in U.S.-Russian relations.
Obama backed forces in Egypt, Libya, and Syria that were formless, faceless, and amorphous and whose ad hoc, shifting leadership provided no assurances -- and could provide no assurance -- of any advantage to the U.S. in exchange for its support. Mel Brooks was kidding when he used a stage production "Springtime for Hitler" in "The Producers." When Obama fell in love with "Springtime for Egypt," he wasn't.
Frat boys at drunken initiation rites would have done better in devising the foreign or domestic policies of this absurd, tragic joke of a president. The Middle East will go up in flames, Russia and China will surge into the vacuum left by our kiddie president, Iran will be emboldened by its capacity to smuggle a dirty bomb into any U.S. city, or we'll alienate the now-dominant Egyptian army for the foreseeable future. It's a clean sweep for radical leftist Democrat lunacy and Barry's still playing at being a grownup.
Notes
[1] "America’s Problems in the Middle East Are Just Beginning." By David P. Goldman (Spengler), PJ Media, 8/15/13.
I must disagree.
ReplyDeleteI cannot prove it, but incompetence of this level has to be deliberate and malicious.
The US now borrows more than $46 of every $100 it spends. Rome recalled the legions from Britain in AD 410 (the same year Alaric sacked Rome to collect an unpaid debt). Foreign aid and imperial over reach will end whether we approve or not.
ReplyDeleteMy "malevolence of their formulation" captures something of your point, with which I do not disagree. Profound naivete, pig ignorance masked by "education," recklessness, or malevolence all get us to the same point. Of those, recklessness is the least plausible.
ReplyDeleteLeonidas, I will make a guess that the Romans of the 5th century at least had some tiny bit of shame at the accumulation of their debt. Our controllers view it as a positive good. Our fate is the same as theirs, although I don't think they thought of cultural and demographic inundation by inferior cultures as the good that Western elites do. We casually embrace barbarism now.
Robert Nisbet "The Present Age" 2010 the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (p. 39):
ReplyDelete"In human terms, to suppose that the United States can long maintain a political and military machine of containment dimensions without destroying the localism, pluralism, and free enterprise in all spheres that are the true basis of American freedom and creativity, is to suppose utter fantasy. The affinity between militarism and socialist collectivism is, and has been throughout history, a close one. Far closer, let me emphasize, than the affinity between collectivism and, say, the speeches and writings of socialist propagandists."