Washington Post; How Obama lost Syria

Jackson Diehl writes in the Washington Post today on how Obama screwed the pooch on Syria. I’m sure hell have nightmares about the fact that he kind of said Bush was right in regards to Syria;

Obama’s Syria policy began in 2009 with the misguided idea of reaching out to the dictator. Within a month of his inauguration, Obama reversed the Bush administration’s approach of isolating Assad. He later reopened the U.S. Embassy and dispatched senior envoys, such as George Mitchell.

The problem with this policy was not just the distasteful courting of a rogue regime but the willful disregard of the lessons absorbed by George W. Bush, who also tried reaching out to Assad, only to learn the hard way that he was an irredeemable thug. Yet Obama insisted on reversing Bush’s policy of distancing the United States from strongmen like Assad and Hosni Mubarak — a monumental miscalculation.

When the uprising against Assad began in March of last year, the administration’s first reaction was to predict that he could be induced to coopt it. “Many .?.?. believe he’s a reformer,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That illusion caused the administration to stand by for months while Assad’s security forces gunned down what were then peaceful pro-democracy marchers; not until August 2011 did Obama say that Assad should “step aside.”

OK, that’s a good place to start. I wish Diehl had qualified who exactly he thought was also responsible for this besides the Obama Administration instead of leaving that hanging out there. But, yeah, the Obama Administration went out of it’s way to reverse most of the Bush foreign policies just, well, because it was a Bush policy. Never mind that those policies had been forged by trial and error. As it turns out, most of the Bush policies have been validated by the Obama Administration either by continuing them or by royally screwing it up. Syria happens to be one of many.

As countless observers correctly predicted, the subsequent U.N. mission of Kofi Annan was doomed from the beginning. When the White House could no longer deny that reality, it turned to an equally fantastical gambit: Vladi­mir Putin, it argued, could be persuaded to abandon his support of Assad and force him to step down. The nadir of this diplomacy may have been reached on June 30, when Clinton cheerfully predicted that the Kremlin had “decided to get on one horse, and it’s the horse that would back a transition plan” removing Assad.

Yeah, because Putin always cheerfully makes things easier for us – said no one ever. But Obama has never been alone in this. Remember in 2007 when Nancy Pelosi that foreign policy genius went to Syria to undo the Bush Administration attempts to isolate Bashar Assad. They were all eager to sabotage our efforts in the region just because it was a Republican’s policies not because they had better ideas.

And today we read in the New York Times that most of the weapons that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are sending the rebels in Syria are ending up in the hands of the more radical (read that jihadists) elements of the rebel movements.

That conclusion, of which President Obama and other senior officials are aware from classified assessments of the Syrian conflict that has now claimed more than 25,000 lives, casts into doubt whether the White House’s strategy of minimal and indirect intervention in the Syrian conflict is accomplishing its intended purpose of helping a democratic-minded opposition topple an oppressive government, or is instead sowing the seeds of future insurgencies hostile to the United States.

Actions (or inactions) have consequences. And, oh, Syria’s war is spilling over to two of our allies’ countries – Jordan and Turkey. Say “Thank you, Nancy”. How long before we have troops facing those weapons that the Saudis shipped to the region?

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Foreign Policy, Terror War