He MUST hate America!!!
At A recent gathering in New York, a writer with ties to the British government reported that the view from the other side of the pond is that "the leader of the free world doesn't want to lead the free world."
On this side of the pond, a member of the Obama team inadvertently confirms that view. An anonymous official tells The New Yorker magazine that, in Libya, the president is "leading from behind."
There is another word for "leading from behind." It's "following."
Yet to lead or not to lead is not really a choice for an American president. So Obama deigns to lead, but only on his misguided terms. Because America, in his eyes, is not worthy to set the global agenda, it must speak softly and carry a little stick.
The results already are disastrous, especially in the Muslim world. The irony is that Obama's desire to "reset" America's relationship with Islamic countries has helped set the stage for growing influence by the Muslim Brotherhood and other violent fundamentalists.
After waffling on the uprising in Egypt, he clumsily helped to push out Hosni Mubarak without a thought as to who or what would follow.
Similarly, the rush to "do something" in Libya came without a clear goal, was half-hearted and thus wrong-headed. Because military action is a zero-sum game, the Libyan misadventure means there is no saber to rattle at Syria, where a gangster government uses tanks against civilians and where regime change would be far more helpful to peace and our vital national interests.
Meanwhile, Iran, the one true global menace, marches freely toward the nuclear bomb. Nor does it suffer real consequence for spreading terror abroad and repressing dissent at home.
World events have a mind of their own, of course, but in the last 100 years, it was usually left to America to lead the way in giving them shape and providing a sense of order. As Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state, put it, "We are the indispensable nation."
By that yardstick, when a president refuses to embrace the role of world leader, as Obama has, he bears significant responsibility for the resulting global disorder.
Again, take the Libyan mess. By "leading from behind," Obama turned the bulk of air attacks over to other NATO members. But France and Great Britain, used to depending on American protection, have gutted their militaries over the years to the point where together they can't muster the might to defeat the pipsqueak army of Moammar Khadafy.
The stalemate reveals another dimension to the foreign-policy divide. Traditionally, views fall into either the realism or the idealism camp, but Obama's record presents another option: competence versus incompetence.
His early determination to forge a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is instructive. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, tells Newsweek magazine that "it was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze" in contested areas.
Obama repeatedly was warned by Mideast experts that the demand would backfire, and it has. Abbas adopted a settlement freeze as a precondition for negotiations, and because Israel agreed to only limited halts, the result has been the longest period without direct talks in 17 years, a disruption that continues.
Abbas says he felt betrayed when Obama, facing a revolt among Jewish backers and Democrats in Congress, effectively dropped the demand and left him hanging.
"We both went up the tree," Abbas said. "After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it."
That's our president, alright, the not-leader of the free world. |
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