…the White House fiddles:
The combination of grave and growing dangers in the Middle East with a lightweight policy response in Washington is genuinely frightening. We have no doubt that the administration wants a peaceful and stable Middle East that is moving toward greater democracy and greater respect for human rights. We share its desire to see this happen without massive US intervention. But the evidence is mounting that America’s present course in the Middle East is leading to a very bad place; real trouble looms unless the administration can begin to engage in a much more serious and thoughtful way.
Serious and thoughtful ways are not a hallmark of this administration. And this sort of fecklessness is no less than any intelligent person would have expected from the neophyte’s campaign rhetoric in 2008.
“I have too done something successfully other than community organizing … I’ve run a successful primary campaign!”
Winnar.
Too bad Obama didn’t use his community organizing skills.
Maybe Islamic militants in control from sea to sea is exactly what Obama wants. Arming and training AQ affiliates like he has done in Libya, Syria, and who knows what other countries certainly seems a good way to see it happen.
Maybe he thinks America needs more checks and balances in world powers. So he builds up China and Russia and helps form an Islamic caliphate all while alienating our allies. This should make it sufficiently hard for future colonialist presidents to bully other countries for their resources.
Toward the end of John Milius’s Morrocan-set masterpiece The Wind and the Lion, the film’s main character, the Berber leader Raisuli, says to a comrade, “It’s been a bad year. The next one is likely to be worse.”
The other day I read a piece about a “moderate” militia (mostly local unemployed people and petty thieves) that at one point numbered about 2,000. Then the radicals showed up (from the al Nusra Front, I think) denounced them as a band of thieves (which they were), and ordered them to turn over all their weapons and disband, which all but about 100 of them did.
It doesn’t matter how much we vet the recipients of our arms if that kind of thing goes on because moderate or more secular Muslim fighters will give in when faced with denunciations from radicals, and very likely members will join the more radical organization, taking their US supplied weapons with them. Much of it will end up in the hands of Al Qaeda, who will then have guided anti-tank missiles and US built shoulder fired SAMs.