New PAC ad destroys Obama-Clinton 'Leading from Behind' foreign policy
If you want to know how to attack Hillary Clinton and blame her for the Obama administration's decrepit foreign policy (blame that is well-deserved), look no further than this video from the America Rising PAC.
Rich Lowry has a scathing summary of why John Kerry's mission to get a cease fire in Gaza failed. It can be summed up in a few words: The United States has no influence.
After six years of resetting, leading from behind, ending wars,
nation building at home, and pivoting to Asia, the U.S. has reduced
itself to a husk of its former influence. When Kerry showed up in Cairo
to meet with the president of Egypt, he was wanded by the guards, as if
he had just wandered in from the airport security line.
Kerry
underlined his dubious relevance by his inability to secure a ceasefire,
and his dubious wisdom by making it his overarching goal. At this
point, after Israel has committed itself on the ground, the U.S. should
be seeking to give it the time it needs to do as much damage as possible
to Hamas’s military infrastructure, instead of effectively bailing out
the terror group.
Kerry held an ill-advised confab in Paris with
Qatar and Turkey, the patrons of Hamas. Even the Palestinian Authority
blasted this as the “friends of Hamas” meeting. With the Egyptians, the
Saudis, the Emiratis, the Jordanians, and the Palestinian Authority all
functionally on Israel’s side in the Gaza War, it should be in a
superior diplomatic position, but its superpower patron evidently didn’t
get the memo.
By the time Kerry returned home, he had been
showered with so much criticism by the Israelis that the U.S. government
was saying it could endanger our relationship. The question raised by
Obama-administration foreign policy again and again is, How can
self-styled “smart power” be so dumb and toothless?
For all
of Kerry’s failings, he is a relative giant among a foreign-policy team
composed largely of political hacks and post-American declinists. At
least Kerry retains some of the old Democratic-party belief in America’s
importance in the world. His condemnation of Syria’s use of chemical
weapons last year was a stirring moral indictment of the Assad regime
– although President Obama immediately undercut him when he abandoned
his own “red lines.”
So far, Kerry’s tenure as secretary of state
is making Hillary Clinton’s undistinguished stint look impressive by
comparison. But that’s mostly a matter of timing. It is his misfortune
to be present at the unraveling, as crisis after crisis unfolds, with
the administration lacking the interest or the tough-mindedness to
effectively respond.
Will the United States of Obama attack Syria, which is an Arab Muslim country? Should it?
The views on this question are all over the map. In my view, whether Obama should attack depends on what he hopes to accomplish, whether he can accomplish it, and whether the price he will pay by attacking (or not attacking) is a price worth paying. I'll elaborate on that toward the end of this post, but first, let's look at how some other people see it.
The reason why this effectively guarantees military action, and why
military action is right, is that the West simply cannot allow a
precedent to be set in which the use of chemical weapons is brushed over
and ignored. This does not, and must not, mean boots on the ground.
Ultimately, the Arab world should sort this out, not us.
But we can do something. Extensive cruise missile strikes against
Assad's military infrastructure (plus a nice little one on his
presidential palace) should be sufficient to make a very necessary
point.
In terms of the calculations, of course, there's the issue of the
humiliation of Barack Obama having set red lines and then allowed them
to be crossed. But that wouldn't be a problem for Obama whose foreign
policy credentials are rightly ridiculed even by many hard core
Democrats.
The problem is that there's just too much at stake, and there are too
many people around Obama in Washington, and in London, Paris, Berlin etc
that know there's no choice but to act.
I absolutely disagree with those who think that the fate of Syria is
any of our business in terms of its possible (fantasy world) transition
to democracy if Assad is deposed. I'd love to see him go, but I'm pretty
certain I'd dislike his successors just as much. No, that's not the
point; which is that we have to adopt a long term strategy that is in
our own interests.
That means making a decisive statement that psychopathic dictators who
think they can "normalise" the use of weapons of mass destruction via
our own apathy or cowardice are proved wrong.
Bret Baier laid it out in his Fox News broadcast this evening: the opposition to intervening in Syria is by far the highest amount of public opposition to any proposed intervention or other military operation in the last 30 years. The numbers against Syria bear no resemblance to the numbers on anything Americans can remember, whether Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti, Panama, or Grenada. Americans aren’t sold on the necessity or wisdom of a military attack on Syria; in fact, opposition to it, in the absence of conclusive proof that Assad used WMD, is a whopping 60 percent.
The fact that most Americans are opposed to a strike is not and will not be dispositive. Obama does not have to face reelection, and he has shown before (see Obamacare) that he is willing to do things that most Americans oppose. If he does that and he's right, it's called leadership. If he does it and he's wrong, he ought to pay a political price.
There are brief, cogent things to say about Syria, about the threat its civil war poses to stability, and about the security problem of chemical weapons use by Assad. But no one in the Obama administration, from Obama himself down through his cabinet-level representatives to Jay Carney, is saying them. We literally do not know the administration’s answer to the most basic question about this whole thing: what would we be conducting a military attack on Syria for?
There is a big difference between proposing to punish Assad, with no decisive end-state in view, and proposing to take action designed to shape or at least promote a particular end-state. The different goals would entail different levels and types of military action. Ideally, they would entail different packages of non-military action as well: principally diplomacy, to lay out, sell, and negotiate any end-state we had in mind.
Yes, there has to be a plan (and the one that Robin Shepherd laid out above sounds reasonable) and no, I'm not convinced there is one. That, unfortunately, is typical of this administration. It makes decisions to get into (Libya) or out of (Iraq) hostile situations in this region with no strategy and no endgame. I'm not sure that there's time for diplomacy, but there's definitely time for Obama to make the case to the American people that it's in America's interest not to allow rogue regimes like Assad's to use weapons of mass destruction with impunity.
The problem is that for Obama, the great communicator, to make such a case, he would first have to respect the American people and believe that their opinions matter. He doesn't. It's plain to me on so many fronts that Obama has no respect for the American people and no empathy for the things with which ordinary Americans have to cope on a day-to-day basis. See, for instance, Obamacare, the Obama family's numerous and exorbitant vacations at taxpayer expense, and the repeated golf games at times when the President's critical judgment is necessary (How many hours a week does this guy work anyway? I'd bet it's less than the average corporate lawyer).
Bottom line on this point: The reason that Obama is not making the case for attacking Syria to the American people is that he has no respect for the American people (nor for their elected representatives). Chew on that one for a while.
Jennifer goes on to outline three ways of looking at an attack on Syria: in terms of how much it will disrupt peace in the region, in terms of the damage to Obama's (largely non-existent) credibility in the region, and in terms of what Obama's goals are and whether they can be accomplished. Jennifer frames it this way:
With these three frameworks laid out, we circle back to the problem that the U.S. administration has addressed none of them before the public or Congress. We don’t know how much or if Team Obama, or our eager allies, have thought about what it will mean to the peace to cross Russia and Iran with a military action in Syria. For all we can tell, it has not even occurred to them.
We don’t know what their thinking is on the choice between evils: the evil of intervening or the evil of failing to after defining a red line.
And we don’t know what the driving objective of an intervention would be. That said, we do have an informative (if disquieting) data point from 2011.
Given all these factors, most of us can form a pretty solid opinion of whether we should intervene, and if so, for what purpose. What I have been unable to predict is what Obama is going to do.
What will happen? First, Obama will not say anything to the American people until the attack (or its initial wave if there's more than one) is over. Since the attack is likely to take place under the cover of darkness in the pre-dawn hours (rumored to be tomorrow), I am looking for the same kind of midnight announcement that Obama made when Osama Bin Laden was killed (which did wonders for my traffic, but not much for anything else). And even then, only if it's successful. If a strike is unsuccessful, look for Obama to try to keep the lid on it for a couple of days until he can figure out what to say.
But yes, I believe that there will be an attack. It won't happen because Obama wants it to - he's long past caring about his credibility (if he doesn't respect the people who elected him, how do you think he feels about the rest of the world?). It will happen because like in Libya and like with the disclosure of the Iranian nuclear plant in Qom, the Europeans will push him to do it, and will largely take responsibility for it. Obama will 'lead from behind' again, possibly even with the same 'responsibility to protect' rhetoric that he used in Libya.
The attack will be inconclusive. Some chemical weapons facilities will be hit, and maybe some symbolic targets like Assad's summer palace in Latakia. But the attack will be low-scale enough to keep Russia and Iran out. With all of his scorched earth talk, Assad will not respond either so long as the attack does not threaten his rule. Israel has already proven that with its raids on Assad's weapons shipments. While an attack like the one I'm describing will not stop Assad from using chemical weapons again, although it might make them weapons of an almost-last resort rather than a primary weapon.
And I agree with the Israeli intelligence assessment that Israel will not be hit either. The last thing Assad needs right now is Israel destroying what's left of his weapons - both conventional and unconventional.
As noted above, the establishment view today is that America has been
a bully in the past, acting unilaterally and not respecting the views
of others. Obama has said this directly when speaking to foreign —
including Middle Eastern — audiences.
But how does one stop being a bully? By showing that one isn’t tough and
doesn’t protect one’s interests fiercely. Thus, in the Benghazi case,
the U.S. government didn’t send the ambassador to Benghazi with
Americans to guard him, nor did the consulate have Americans to provide
security. To do so would be to show disrespect for the Libyans, to act
in a way that might be perceived of as imperialistic.
Similarly, the president would not call in an airstrike against the
attackers or send an armed rescue team to the consulate because to do so
would have signaled an arrogance and aggressiveness, putting Americans
first and not acting as a citizen of the world.
Is “leading from behind” an unfair monicker for this? Then call it
the light footprint doctrine. It’s a strategy that supposes that patient
multilateral diplomacy can solve problems like Iran’s pursuit of a
nuclear weapons capability; that drone strikes can do as well at
preventing another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland as do ground
forces in Afghanistan; that crises like that of Syria can be left to the
U.N. Security Council.
For the last couple of years, the light footprint worked well enough to
allow Obama to turn foreign policy into a talking point for his
reelection. But the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi,
Libya, on Sept. 11 should have been a red flag to all who believe this
president has invented a successful new model for U.S. leadership. Far
from being an aberration, Benghazi was a toxic byproduct of the light
footprint approach — and very likely the first in a series of
boomerangs.
...
But ultimately the disaster in Libya derived from Obama’s doctrine.
Having been reluctantly dragged by France and Britain into intervening
in Libya’s revolution, Obama withdrew U.S. planes from the fight as
quickly as possible; when the war ended, the White House insisted that
no U.S. forces stay behind. Requests by Libya’s fragile transition
government for NATO’s security assistance were answered with an
ill-conceived and ultimately failed program to train a few people in
Jordan.
There are similarities in these two critiques. (There are also
significant differences. Diehl sees Obama's misreading of the situation
in Libya as a tactical failure that likely will be repeated elsewhere,
not necessarily as part of a larger conceptual failure to understand the
Middle East as Rubin does.) Both however fault the Obama administration
for not comprehending the dangers to America interests in Libya.
Diehl's critique is notable for another reason. Diehl is a member of the
Washington Post's editorial board, which enthusiastically endorsed
President Obama for another term. Unfortunately his critique did little
to dampen the enthusiasm of the endorsement.
2) Friedman vs. Israel
Thomas Friedman used the occasion of President Obama's re-election to
return to his favorite topic: bashing Israel, in his Sunday column My President is busy. Aside from demonstrating his ignorance about suing Google, Friedman makes a couple of mistakes.
You should be so lucky that the president feels he has the time,
energy and political capital to spend wrestling with Bibi to forge a
peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I don’t see it anytime soon.
Obama has his marching orders from the American people: Focus on
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, not on Bethlehem, Palestine, and focus on
getting us out of quagmires (Afghanistan) not into them (Syria). No, my
Israeli friends, it’s much worse than you think: You’re home alone.
...
Is this good for Israel? No. It is unhealthy. The combination of
America’s internal focus, the post-Arab awakening turmoil and the
exhaustion of Palestinians means Israel can stay in the West Bank
indefinitely at a very low short-term cost but at a very high long-term
cost of losing its identity as a Jewish democracy. If Israelis want to
escape that fate, it is very important that they understand that we’re
not your grandfather’s America anymore.
Since he has nothing substantive to criticize Israel for, he returns to
the trope about the demographic threat. But the occupation has, for the
most part, been over since late 1995. The only remaining need is to
establish the boundaries of a Palestinian state. However now Fatah, due
to Abbas's mismanagement, is too weak to make a deal and Hamas cannot be
trusted to make one, what is Israel to do? Obama could insist on a
deal, but it would never work. It is good not "unhealthy" that he ignore
the Palestinian issue right now.
To begin with, the rising political force in America is not the one
with which Bibi has aligned Israel. As the Israeli columnist Ari Shavit
noted in the newspaper Haaretz last week: “In the past, both the Zionist
movement and the Jewish state were careful to be identified with the
progressive forces in the world. ... But in recent decades more and more
Israelis took to leaning on the reactionary forces in American society.
It was convenient to lean on them. The evangelists didn’t ask difficult
questions about the settlements, the Tea Party people didn’t say a word
about excluding women and minorities or about Jewish settlers’ attacks
and acts of vandalism against Palestinians and peace activists. The
Republican Party’s white, religious, conservative wing was not agitated
when the Israeli Supreme Court was attacked and the rule of law in
Israel was trampled.” Israel, Shavit added, assumed that “under the
patronage of a radical, rightist America we can conduct a radical,
rightist policy without paying the price.” No more. Netanyahu can still
get a standing ovation from the Israel lobby, but not at U.C.L.A.
Seth Mandel wrote an excellent rejoinder
to the Shavit argument that Friedman embraces. Frankly, I don't know if
Shimon Peres would have been warmly received at UCLA during the 1990's.
The problem isn't Israeli policy or politics, but the vicious hatred of
Israel perpetuated in certain precincts during the past several
decades. Friedman, with his bashing of Israel provides cover for this
ugliness. (If his reference here to the "Israel lobby" is a sly
reference to Congress, then he is part of the vast anti-Israel crowd.)
The other day, in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2, President
Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority declared: “Palestine for me
is the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital. This is
Palestine. I am a refugee. I live in Ramallah. The West Bank and Gaza is
Palestine. Everything else is Israel.”
This was a big signal, but Bibi scorned it. The Israeli novelist David
Grossman wrote an open letter to Netanyahu in Haaretz, taking him to
task: “This is a bit embarrassing, but I will remind you, Mr. Netanyahu,
that you were elected to lead Israel precisely in order to discern
these rare hints of opportunity, in order to transform them into a
possible lever to extricate your country from the impasse in which it
has been stuck for decades.”
The most charitable explanation for Abbas's statement was that it was a public relations gambit to change Israeli public opinion. However, as Khaled Abu Toameh pointed out, Abbas's own campaign to define the right of return as "sacred"
meant that there's little support among the Palestinian public for any
sort of compromise. There is plenty of blame to assign to the
Palestinians for the lack of a final agreement; one only criticizes
Israel exclusively if one is willfully ignorant.
Even in Tunisia, where secularists have a stronger voice and Ennahda
has espoused more temperate views than most Islamist parties, women had
to take to the streets in protest over efforts by some of the more
conservative assembly members to dilute protections for women contained
in a 1956 law. The Islamists wanted language in the constitution to say
that the roles of men and women are “complementary.” The secularists,
fearful of ceding any ground, insisted that men and women should have
“the same rights and duties” and added an assurance that the state will
guarantee women’s rights. Ennahda leaders say that the final document
will unambiguously endorse gender equality and universal rights. But
until the constitution is formally adopted, no one can be sure.
Still, the Arab Spring has allowed Muslim girls and women to dream big
dreams. “For young girls to now tell me they want to be the future
president, minister of defense, these are things I never imagined,” Ms.
Murabit wrote in an e-mail. But enshrining rights in a constitution and
making sure they are carried out are big challenges.
How's that working out in Egypt?
An article at the Muslim Brotherhood's website last week tells us:
On family and women, article 68 states equality between men and women
without prejudice to the provisions of Islamic law; so international
treaties that call for violating Sharia in any way cannot achieve such
purposes, like attempts to legalize homosexuality or sexual relations
outside wedlock, and so on.
The constitution itself deals with religion somewhat inconsistently;
while it says "Islam is the state religion" and "the principles of
Islamic Sharia are the main sources of legislation" it also calls for
equality of various groups depending on which draft is being used. For example, the language saying that women are equal to men has recently been dropped from the document. Other drafts seemed to allow freedom of religion only to Christians and Jews, and no others.
Fortunately the astute folks at the New York Times know where the real
problem with gender equality is. A recent opinion article More Women, but Not Nearly Enough, argues:
Does this mean the next Congress will be more attentive to the needs
of children, single mothers and Americans who are vulnerable because of
low income, poor health and other disadvantages? Sadly, no. Our research
shows that female lawmakers significantly reshape policies only when
they have true parity with men. In other words, while Tuesday’s
electoral gains should be celebrated, we’ve got a very long way to go.
Glad to know that the New York Times has its priorities straight.
Jackson Diehl discusses how President Obama's 'leading from behind,' which Diehl overly generously refers to as a 'light footprint,' is likely to plague the President in the second term.
A new report
by the Rand Corporation concludes that “this lighter-footprint approach
has made Libya a test case for a new post-Iraq and Afghanistan model of
nation-building.” But the result is that, a year after the death of
dictator Moammar Gaddafi, Libya is policed by what amounts to a mess of
militias. Its newly elected government has little authority over most of
the country’s armed men — much less the capacity to take on the
jidhadist forces gathering in and around Benghazi.
The Rand study
concludes that stabilizing Libya will require disarming and demobilizing
the militias and rebuilding the security forces “from the bottom up.”
This, it says, probably can’t happen without help from “those countries
that participated in the military intervention” — i.e. the United
States, Britain and France. Can the Obama administration duplicate the
security-force-building done in Iraq and Afghanistan in Libya while
sticking to the light footprint? It’s hard to see how.
Obama’s
team may be betting that it can control the jihadist threat in North
Africa the way it has countered al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula — with
drone strikes and training for local special forces. But the drone leg of Obama’s strategy is looking shaky, as well. Opposition to drone strikes is growing steadily domestically and among U.S. allies — not to mention in the countries where the attacks take place.
A paper
by Robert Chesney of the University of Texas points out that if strikes
begin to target countries in North Africa and groups not directly
connected to the original al-Qaeda leadership, problems with their legal
justification under U.S. and international law “will become
increasingly apparent and problematic.” And that doesn’t account for the
political fallout: Libyan leaders say U.S. drone strikes would destroy
the goodwill America earned by helping the revolution.
At best,
Libya will be a steady, low-grade headache for Obama in his second term.
But the worst blowback from his policies will come in Syria. What began
as a peaceful mass rebellion against another Arab dictator has turned,
in the absence of U.S. leadership, into a brutal maelstrom of sectarian
war in which al-Qaeda and allied jihadists
are playing a growing role. Obama’s light footprint strategy did much
to produce this mess; without a change of U.S. policy, it will become,
like Bosnia for Bill Clinton or Iraq for George W. Bush, the second
term’s “problem from hell.”
It's come to this: Libyan 'protesters' dragged dead body of US ambasador through the streets of Benghazi
This is how low President Hussein Obama has dragged the once proud United States of America. The man whose body (he might have been alive at this point but he might not) is being dragged through the streets in this picture is none other than Christopher Stevens, the United States Ambassador to Libya. Although the early reports said his car was hit by a rocket, it now appears far more likely that he and three embassy employees (two of them US Marines) were dragged from their embassy car and lynched by the 'protesters' (Hat Tip: Brana L).
Yes, that's how low President Hussein Obama has dragged the dignity of the United States of America. An American diplomat was murdered by a mob in the streets of a two-bit backwater country on Tuesday night, and I can guarantee you that so long as Hussein Obama is in power, there will be no meaningful response - military or otherwise from the United States of America.
Here's video of what happened last night at a consulate of the former 'world's only superpower.'
Let's go to the videotape.
My friend Jim Hoft, who has much, much more on this story, reports that both Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton are claiming that the Libyans were dragging Ambassador Stevens to the hospital. Read the whole story, look at the pictures (there are more) and watch the video (there is more) and decide for yourselves. I think Hussein and Hillary are full of bull dung.
Miniter, a two-time New York Times best-selling author, cites an unnamed source with Joint Special Operations Command who had direct knowledge of the operation and its planning.
Obama administration officials also said after the raid that the president had delayed giving the order to kill the arch-terrorist the day before the operation was carried out, in what turned out to be his fourth moment of indecision. At the time, the White House blamed the delay on unfavorable weather conditions near bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
But when Miniter obtained that day’s weather reports from the U.S. Air Force Combat Meteorological Center, he said, they showed ideal conditions for the SEALs to carry out their orders.
“President Obama’s greatest success was actually his greatest failure,” Miniter told The Daily Caller Friday. ”Leading From Behind,“ he said, traces the arc of six key Obama administration decisions, and shows how the president made them — and, often, failed to make them.
"Assad must transfer power and depart Syria," Clinton told a news conference in Istanbul after meeting foreign ministers from Arab and Western nations to discuss counterterrorism.
"The regime-sponsored violence that we witnessed again in Hama yesterday is simply unconscionable. Assad has doubled down on his brutality and his duplicity and Syria will not, cannot be peaceful, stable or certainly democratic until Assad goes."
United Nations observers have been prevented from reaching the village of Mazraat al-Qubeir, near Hama where anti-Assad activists say Syrian troops and militiamen loyal to the president massacred at least 78 villagers, the head of the monitoring mission said on Thursday.
The reported carnage came hours before a divided UN Security Council discusses Syria.
The latest killings will heap pressure on world powers to act, but they have been stymied by divisions pitting Western and most Arab states against Assad's defenders in Russia, China and Iran.
But wait... no... not yet....
[Clinton] suggested that peace envoy Kofi Annan's plan, whose central plank was a ceasefire that never took hold, needed to be given a last chance, saying other nations - presumably Russia and China - would not support stronger action unless its failure was incontestable.
"We think it is important for us to give Kofi Annan and his plan the last amount of support that we can muster because, in order to bring others into a frame of mind to take action in the Security Council, there has to be a final recognition that it's not working," Clinton said.
How much more recognition do you need? Isn't it nice to be in a post-American world where everyone does what is fit in his own eyes? And by the way, to whom does Clinton propose to transfer power in Syria? The Muslim Brotherhood? Al-Qaeda? What could go wrong?
Cantor: 'There is no substitute for American leadership in the Middle East'
The contrast between Representative Eric Cantor (R-Va) and the Obama administration could not be more striking.
Beyond the strategic challenges posed by the Arab Spring lies an urgent threat -- Iran's determination to achieve nuclear weapons capability. Iran's effort, if successful, could destabilize the Middle East, spur a regional nuclear arms race and undermine America's influence in this pivotal region.
Unfortunately, the window to solve this problem without conflict gets smaller with each passing day as Iran attempts to master the enrichment of uranium. Several administrations have tried engaging Iran and offering security guarantees, but that has not prevented the country from pursuing the bomb or patronizing the world's most dangerous terrorist groups. Economic and diplomatic pressures haven't worked either, but they have been episodic, gradual and largely unilateral. While the U.S. left Iran's market years ago, we can still exert great pressure through financial sanctions, and President Barack Obama should do so.
...
The latest round of European sanctions is designed to compel Iran to come back to the negotiating table. If the Iranians do so, the desire for a deal at any cost should not be permitted to overshadow our long experience in negotiating with rogue states. We must focus on the results rather than the process of negotiations.
With its nuclear centrifuges continuing to spin, Iran cannot be allowed -- as it has been in the past -- to further delay this process. Mere promises cannot be rewarded with a loosening of pressure. Iran's leaders must feel dramatic pressure that imperils their very hold on power until their abandonment of nuclear program can be verified.
...
In addition to sanctions, we must actively combat Iran's influence throughout the Middle East.
Our partners are perplexed at what they perceive as our lackadaisical response to Iran's support of extremist proxies. And in Iraq, our partners believe that America's abandonment of that country has left a vacuum that Iran is only too eager to fill. It is hard to see why the Obama administration has not expended more effort in trying to keep Iraq -- a potentially rich and influential country at the heart of the Middle East that was liberated at such great cost -- more firmly in the American camp.
Finally, there is the low-hanging fruit of Syria.
Bashar al-Assad's regime may be Iran's most important strategic partner. Instead of aggressively combating Syria's support to Hamas and Hezballah and interference in Lebanon and Iraq, the Obama administration came to office seeking to engage al-Assad. It failed.
Now the president has finally acknowledged that it's time for al-Assad to go. America should not defer to obstinate Russian diplomats at the United Nations about Syria. Instead, we should lead an international effort to apply tremendous pressure on Syria and provide demonstrable support to its growing political opposition. The longer the Syrian crackdown is allowed to continue, the greater the risk of chaos and the harder it will be to put Syria back together. If Syria goes down, it would be a serious blow to the Iranian regime.
There is no substitute for American leadership in the Middle East. It is time for the Obama administration to show it.
Can the world survive until next January? What happens if God forbid Obama is reelected?
Clearly, the administration’s preference is for the Israelis to be sufficiently cowed by U.S. pressure into standing down. Obama and Panetta would like Netanyahu to believe the U.S. would cut off the Israelis the way the Eisenhower administration did in 1956 when it abandoned Israel during the Sinai Campaign. But, as Ignatius points out, an open breach with Israel during an election year would be political suicide for Obama.
So rather than take responsibility for dealing with a problem that threatens the peace of the world, once again the Obama administration is trying to lead from behind. Except this time it isn’t hiding behind France as it did in Libya but behind tiny Israel, who will face the risks of Iranian counter-attacks alone and under the threat of being cut off by its own ally. It is unlikely Israel can be convinced to back off by vague American promises of more negotiations or stepped up covert attacks. Neither plan offers much hope of success. That is why the Israelis may be on the verge of deciding to strike on their own.
Under these circumstances, Ignatius is right that Israel’s leaders probably feel they are better off on their own in this enterprise rather than being shackled by Obama. But with Iran once again vowing to destroy Israel, Netanyahu and Barak realize allowing Ayatollah Khamenei to have his finger on a nuclear trigger simply cannot be tolerated.
Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Barry Rubin about the Arab Spring (updated here):
KJL: How would you rate U.S. leadership on all of this?
RUBIN: Terrible! For a number of reasons: mishandling Egypt; empowering the Muslim Brotherhood; failing to support democratic oppositions in Turkey and Lebanon, and waiting too long to call for the downfall of the Syrian government; failing to consult with moderate Arab allies and totally dissing Saudi Arabia; not giving Israel strong support at a time when its security situation is worsening; ignoring the increasing Islamization and repression in Turkey; actually acting to help the survival of Hamas in the Gaza Strip by forcing reduced sanctions and supplying funds indirectly; and being far too slow and weak to respond to the Palestinian Authority’s unilateral independence bid.
It is really amazing how badly they’ve done. And the above paragraph is not at all a partisan critique. Each of these factors is very obvious and visible even if they aren’t being covered in the main media very much. It can be summed up as failing to recognize the revolutionary Islamist threat; failing to support allies; being too soft on enemies; and not showing American leadership.
Obviously, jobs and the economy will be the number-one issue in the 2012 elections. But if crises in the Middle East blow up — as I think they will — and make Obama’s foreign policy look like a disaster, might that be the number-two issue?
I guess Barry's not a big fan of 'leading from behind.'
Foreign policy ought to be an issue in 2012. The way in which Obama has squandered US advantages and disparaged American exceptionalism ought to be thrown at him again and again. Here's hoping the Republican candidate - whoever that might be - takes advantage of it.
The Washington Post (no, you won't see this from the New York Times) is demanding that the Obama administration step up and lead the charge to get Bashar al-Assad to stop murdering his own people and quit.
It is therefore worrying that the international response, though improving, remains inconsistent. Turkey is the leading example: Its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has condemned Mr. Assad for “pointing guns at his own people,” offered refuge on Turkish soil to civilians fleeing from the regime’s military offensives and pressed hard to stop the assault on Hama.
But Mr. Erdogan continues to offer leeway to a dictator he assiduously cultivated until a few months ago. On Wednesday, he said he expected that Mr. Assad would end the violence “within 10 to 15 days” and then “take steps for reform.” That seems to offer plenty of time for further murderous pacification of Syrian cities — and no specifics about what “reforms” the Turks believe are necessary.
This is the sort of situation in which the United States has historically stepped in to exercise leadership. But Mr. Obama has been passive throughout the Syrian crisis. He has spoken about it in public only twice in five months, while the State Department has performed an excruciating rhetorical striptease. It started with describing Mr. Assad as “a reformer”; a month ago the rhetoric finally progressed to calling the dictator “illegitimate.” But the last handkerchief — a demand that he leave office — has yet to drop. The time for those words is long overdue — and Mr. Obama should utter them, in person and in public.
He won't utter those words without a Security Council resolution, and at the moment, all the Security Council can muster is a statement, and a weak one at that. After all, look what happened when he said that Mubarak must go. You think he wants to see the anti-American Assad in the dock like Mubarak? He's leading from behind. What could go wrong?
To those of you who - like me - have had Ryan Lizza's epic New Yorker article open in your browser all week and have not found the time to read it, Charles Krauthammer is a Godsend (Hat Tip: Stephen D).
Take proposition one: We must “lead from behind” because U.S. relative power is declining. Even if you accept the premise, it’s a complete non sequitur. What does China’s rising GDP have to do with American buck-passing on Libya, misjudging Iran, appeasing Syria?
True, China is rising. But first, it is the only power of any significance rising militarily relative to us. Russia is recovering from levels of military strength so low that it barely registers globally. And European power is in true decline (see Europe’s performance — excepting the British — in Afghanistan and its current misadventures in Libya).
And second, the challenge of a rising Chinese military is still exclusively regional. It would affect a war over Taiwan. It has zero effect on anything significantly beyond China’s coast. China has no blue-water navy. It has no foreign bases. It cannot project power globally. It might in the future — but by what logic should that paralyze us today?
Proposition two: We must lead from behind because we are reviled. Pray tell, when were we not? During Vietnam? Or earlier, under Eisenhower? When his vice president was sent on a goodwill trip to Latin America, he was spat upon and so threatened by the crowds that he had to cut short his trip. Or maybe later, under the blessed Reagan? The Reagan years were marked by vast demonstrations in the capitals of our closest allies denouncing America as a warmongering menace taking the world into nuclear winter.
“Obama came of age politically,” explains Lizza, “during the post-Cold War era, a time when America’s unmatched power created widespread resentment.” But the world did not begin with the coming to consciousness of Barack Obama. Cold War resentments ran just as deep.
It is the fate of any assertive superpower to be envied, denounced and blamed for everything under the sun. Nothing has changed. Moreover, for a country so deeply reviled, why during the massive unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan and Syria have anti-American demonstrations been such a rarity?
Who truly reviles America the hegemon? The world that Obama lived in and shaped him intellectually: the elite universities; his Hyde Park milieu (including his not-to-be-mentioned friends, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn); the church he attended for two decades, ringing with sermons more virulently anti-American than anything heard in today’s full-throated uprising of the Arab Street.
It is the liberal elites who revile the American colossus and devoutly wish to see it cut down to size. Leading from behind — diminishing America’s global standing and assertiveness — is a reaction to their view of America, not the world’s.
Washington's Syria Lobby is a bipartisan mindset. "The road to Damascus is a road to peace," said Nancy Pelosi on a 2007 visit to Syria as House Speaker. Former Secretary of State James Baker is a longtime advocate of engagement with the House of Assad. So is Republican Chuck Hagel, who in 2008 co-wrote an op-ed with fellow Senator John Kerry in these pages titled "It's Time to Talk to Syria." The Massachusetts Democrat has visited Damascus five times in the past two years alone.
Yesterday, the New York Times quoted a senior Administration official saying the U.S. was reluctant to criticize the Syrian President because he "sees himself as a Westernized leader" and that "he'll react if he believes he is being lumped in with brutal dictators." This was meant as a defense of U.S. policy.
The argument made by the Syria Lobby runs briefly as follows: The Assad family is occasionally ruthless, especially when its survival is at stake, but it's also secular and pragmatic. Though the regime is Iran's closest ally in the Middle East, hosts terrorists in Damascus, champions Hezbollah in Lebanon and has funneled al Qaeda terrorists into Iraq, it will forgo those connections for the right price. Above all, it yearns for better treatment from Washington and the return of the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau held by Israel since 1967.
The Syria Lobby also claims that whoever succeeds Assad would probably be worse. The country is divided by sect and ethnicity, and the fall of the House of Assad could lead to bloodletting previously seen in Lebanon or Iraq. Some members of the Lobby go so far as to say that the regime remains broadly popular. "I think that President Assad is going to count on . . . majoritarian support within the country to support him in doing what he needs to do to restore order," Flynt Leverett of the New America Foundation said recently on PBS's NewsHour.
Now we are seeing what Mr. Leverett puts down merely to the business of "doing what he needs to do": Video clips on YouTube of tanks rolling into Syrian cities and unarmed demonstrators being gunned down in the streets; reports of hundreds killed and widespread "disappearances." Even the Obama Administration has belatedly criticized Assad, though so far President Obama has done no more than condemn his "outrageous human rights abuses."
Maybe this is all part of the Administration's strategic concept of "leading from behind," which is how one official sums up its foreign policy in this week's New Yorker. But the deeper problem is a flawed analysis of the Syrian regime's beliefs, intentions and capacity for change. Run by an Alawite minority, the regime was never going to break with its Shiite benefactors in Tehran and join the Arab Sunni orbit. A regime that builds its domestic legitimacy on hostility to Israel is also unlikely ever to make peace, even if it recovered the Golan.
Read the whole thing. It's spot-on. One cannot help but wonder what hold the Assad regime has over Washington.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
