From time to time I hear President
Obama described as “an evil genius”, but he is neither. He’s not evil. He’s
something much worse. He is a fool who thinks he’s a genius.
This is not about his intelligence. No
one gets to be President of the United States without some degree of
intelligence. One suspects, however, Obama has always relied more on his charm
and, initially, on the illusion of his charisma, based on his depiction by an
adoring press.
His charisma has disappeared, even
among the same press, but most abundantly among the American people of all
political persuasions who now regard him as one recent poll put it, the
worst President the nation has ever had.
Consider just a few of the ways his
lack of judgment has reveal just how foolish he is. It began with foisting
Obamacare on a nation deep in an economic crisis. He did this by telling lies
about keeping one’s insurance or physician. It worsened as the website turned
out to be a disaster and one easily hacked to get the personal information of
those who signed on.
His famous “red line” about Syria’s
Assad and his use of poison gas let Americans and the rest of the world watch
him back off in a day’s time, only to be rescued by Russia that intervened to
remove the poison gas, but missing in that action was the realization that
Russia has been Assad’s main support. Their action was not an accommodation with
the U.S. any more than Obama’s “reset” with them had any effect on their larger
strategic objectives in the Middle East.
The Middle East has been quicksand for
Obama who thought he could go there, give some speeches, and convince everyone
that he was a friend to Islam and his policies would reverse those of George W.
Bush. He got elected in 2008 on that promise. In hindsight we know that
withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq simply created the circumstances for the
Islamic State, ISIS, to emerge. He was surely warned against doing it, but we
have a President who does not want to go to war even against enemies who behead
our citizens and promise to attack us.
Here, though, is where even those
Americans not paying much attention to foreign policy became aware of how vacant
Obama’s was. He told them “I don’t have a strategy” regarding ISIS, letting them
and the rest of the world that he had not given any attention to an emerging
threat. In the Middle East, his decision to side with the Muslim Brotherhood
regarding the ouster of Egypt’s dictator was reversed by Egyptians who demanded
the removal of his replacement. In Libya he chose to “lead from behind” to
topple Gaddafi, leading behind a nation that swiftly fell into divided camps
between its tribes.
He has
secured the support of Congress to spend a half billion dollars to arm the
“moderate” rebels opposing Syria’s Bashar Assad. They will be trained in Saudi
Arabia, but it is all too little too late. In an excellent new book, “The
Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War and America’s Crisis of Leadership” by
Douglas E. Schoen and Melik Kaylan ($27.99, Encounter Books), the authors spell
out the foreign policy disasters that are leading America and the world toward
the very real potential of World War Three.
Significantly, Schoen has been a major
Democratic Party consultant for three decades. Kaylan is a widely respected
expert on international politics and culture. When a Democrat co-authors a book
that criticizes a Democrat President from beginning to end, others pay
attention.
There is no way a rebel force can win
in Syria. It has had to wage war against Assad’s forces and against those of
ISIS, the fanatical self-declared Muslim caliphate. While neither Russia nor
China want to see the jihadists secure control of the Middle East, Russia has
made it clear that its support of Assad is deep.
In their book, the authors quoted a
Russian government spokesman. “We have never changed our position on Syria and
we never will” said Alexander Lukashevich, the Russian Foreign Ministry
spokesman in December 2012. “A major Reuters report in January 2014 reported
that Russia had ‘stepped up supplies of military gear to Syria, including
armored vehicles, drones, and guided bombs, boosting President Bashar al-Assad
just as rebel infighting has weakened the insurgency against
him.”
“Russian (and Chinese) support for
Assad is perhaps the most blatant example of the double game that Moscow and
Beijing have played for years.” It is
one of which Obama has been ignorant. In an October 2012 debate with Mitt
Romney, when Romney said Russia was a major threat, Obama dismissed him saying
“The 1980s—they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” Obama
seems not to have learned anything of the Cold War with Soviet Russia from 1945
to 1991 when it collapsed. What we know now is that President Putin intends to
reclaim its former empire, beginning with the annexation of
Crimea.
Russia has sent warships into the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea with some patrolling waters new Tartus, Syria,
home to its only naval base in the Mediterranean. In recent weeks, Russian
military aircraft have crossed into territory near both Canada and the U.S. to
demonstrate its capacity to do so.
Anyone who has been watching the PBS
documentary about the Roosevelt’s knows that Franklin D. Roosevelt faced a
situation not unlike what exists today. Americans did not want to go to war
again in Europe despite the threat that the Nazi regime represented. Roosevelt,
seeing what was coming, had to carefully entreat Congress to reinstate a draft
and to do what he could to arm Great Britain after it was attacked. Only the
attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese and Hitler’s subsequent declaration of
war thrust America into World War II.
In contrast, Obama has reduced the
U.S. Army to levels that it hasn’t seen since the days leading up to World War
II. Likewise, the Navy, Air Force, and Marines have experienced comparable
cutbacks. If Obama had his way, the U.S. would have zero nuclear
weapons.
Unlike Roosevelt, Obama initially
dismissed the threat from the Islamic State (ISIS), fumbling around for a
“strategy” to deal with it and then, in an astounding piece of stupidity,
declaring that there would be no “boots on the ground” to destroy it, after
saying that its destruction was his goal. Within weeks, he was bombing the
Syrian sites where ISIS was located.
In the September 23 edition of The
Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret
Stephens confirms my analysis. “Every
administration tries to spin events its way; every president gets things wrong.
Mr. Obama is not exceptional in those respects. Where he stands apart is in his
combination of ideological rigidity and fathomless ignorance. What does the
president know? The simple answer, and maybe the truest, is: not a
lot.”
So, no, Obama is not an “evil genius.”
He is an appallingly foolish man completely lacking any knowledge of history,
thoroughly ignoring the intentions of Russia and China, doing nothing for the
past six years to energize the economy, and spending most of his time either
fund raising or playing golf.
© Alan Caruba, 2014
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