At this point, most Americans agree that Barack Obama isn’t a great president.
But there is a vocal minority who takes their opposition too far. The Obama-haters think that he is the worst president in history and that he is destroying America.
They blame the president for everything that goes wrong. Weak economy? Obama. Bad race relations? Obama! Ebola? Obama snuck into the country from Africa and brought it with him because he’s a communist or a jihadist or both.
The irrational demonization of the president is funny and sad. However, the Obama-haters’ worst fears have come true when it comes to the administration’s Middle East policy. It has been a spectacular failure.
President Obama made his first blunder at the beginning of the Arab Spring. Out of nowhere, Obama publicly took the side of the Tahrir Square protestors and asked Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to resign.
Mubarak had been a force of peace and stability for 30 years and he was a loyal ally of the United States and Israel.
The speed with which Obama turned his back on Mubarak sent a clear message to current and potential allies in the Middle East: don’t cooperate with the United States; this administration won’t have your back and can’t be trusted.
No one can defend Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad. However, no one can argue that his embattled regime is a threat to the United States.
Foolishly, Obama drew a symbolic line in the sand in 2013 – vowing to attack Syria if the military used chemical weapons against the rebels.
The only thing more foolish than publicly threatening to attack a country that is in no way your enemy is to go back on your promise when your bluff is called.
When Assad’s generals ordered a chemical weapons attack and the United States did nothing, it sent another clear message to potential Middle East evil-doers: you can wreak more mayhem than an Allstate ad and the Obama Administration will do nothing about it.
President Obama ensured that he is neither loved nor feared. Machiavelli would not approve.
The fact that Obama has no coherent Middle East strategy was confirmed this summer when he decided that we are going to war against Assad’s arch-enemies: ISIS.
I am not defending ISIS, obviously; they are murderous misogynistic monsters.
But fighting a half-hearted war against ISIS is like fighting against the tide of history. ISIS didn’t start this war. The conflict began a century ago when the British and French created Syria and Iraq after WWI.
This was another case of arrogant westerners drawing a myopic line in the sand. What they should have done is split the region into three countries: Kurdistan in the north, a Sunni state in the middle, and a Shiite Arab nation in the south.
There will never be lasting stability in the region until Iraq and Syria are dissolved and replaced by three homogenous nation states.
The tide of history is on ISIS’s side; it won’t be easy to stop them. They certainly can’t be defeated without an army. And since Obama won’t send ground troops, the administration is doing nothing but killing people and angering Arabs with all of those bombs.
Barak Obama is not a communist and he’s not a Muslim. He doesn’t hate America and he clearly isn’t the worst president in U.S. history. But, good grief, his Middle East foreign policy is unfocused and incompetent.