Bush critics trapped by reality

The Washington Time‘s Rowan Scarborough notices the same things that we’ve been noticing for years – that the Obama Administration came in to office with high minded ideals, but they’ve since discovered that ideals don’t always work so well in the real world;

Mr. Obama today finds himself the brunt of Republican, and sometimes Democratic, attacks on his policies in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Ukraine and other hot spots.

Mr. Bush launched combat operations in two countries in the war on terrorism, but Mr. Obama has boasted about troop withdrawals. “I was elected to end wars, not start ‘em,” he said.

As the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Secretary of State John F. Kerry characterized President Bashar Assad as a leader the U.S. could deal with. Months later, after Mr. Assad’s forces killed thousands of civilians, Mr. Kerry called him a “thug and a murderer.”

The administration was split on the issue of providing arms to the Free Syrian Army to fight both Mr. Assad and Islamic jihadists.

So, the Obama Administration was frozen by fear of acting in any meaningful way towards Syria, and they got the current situation in Iraq as a reward. They could have intervened in Syria early in the civil war, probably even negotiated a regime change, like the one in Iraq last week. But instead they twiddled their thumbs hoping it would all sort itself out.

As I’ve said before, they could have begun help for the Iraqis when Fallujah fell to the ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State, but instead they dawdled, hemmed and hawed, made empty promises to Iraq and now we have boots on the ground in Iraq and pilots getting flight time.
Mr. Hagel has labeled the Islamic State a threat to the United States. Still, Mr. Obama’s stated policy is that Iraq must defeat the group, with limited assistance from America.

Mr. Obama’s foreign relations are guided by a principle, some would say slogan, “Don’t do stupid stuff.”

Doing nothing falls into the “stupid stuff” category, too.

But the [National Defense Panel] last month issued a strong rebuke of Mr. Obama’s basic premise for sizing the force, saying it needs to be scrapped and replaced by one that acknowledges all the new global threats to the U.S.

P.J. Crowley, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman at the State Department, said the criticism of Obama policy underscores a basic fact: “The world is complex and difficult to manage.”

“In our bumper-sticker political culture, there is always a temptation to take complicated issues and offer oversimplified solutions, or suggest that one discreet action would have solved everything,” he said. “You hear that now with respect to Iraq and Syria. If we had just left a residual force in Iraq, [the Islamic State] would never have advanced. Or if we had just bombed Assad in 2011, 2012 or 2013, his government would have collapsed. The reality is different.”

Yeah, well, a community organizer is better at working on domestic issues than with foreign policy. That’s why they’re so enamored with the “political solution not a military solution” meme. Politics they understand, reality is a little tougher.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden