A Very Short 'Spring'

George Jonas has a good one on what delusional Westerners (I mean you, Thomas L. Friedman!) have dubbed the "Arab Spring" and on Obama's (incoherent) role in it all:

Come on, someone might argue, look at Obama's America doing the heavy lifting in Afghanistan. Hmm. In Afghanistan, Obama is still on George W. Bush's mission. By the logic of Obama's current policies, Afghanistan would play out in reverse. Bush went in to replace the one-eyed Taliban leader, Sheikh Omar, with Hamid Karzai. Based on what Obama has been saying and doing in the region this year, he would have gone in to replace Hamid Karzai with Sheikh Omar.

But look -a reader might counter -this is crazy. You're talking about Captain Ahab Obama! He's the one who harpooned the Moby Dick of terror last month. Remember Osama bin Laden? Who eliminated the archfiend, the engineer of 9/11, the monster Bush couldn't even sight long enough to say "Thar she blows?" Obama had him stuffed and mounted.

True. Except what's the use of having the former head of al-Qaeda as a trophy in your den, while your policies are spawning new leaders for al-Qaeda from Yemen to Libya? Hello! It isn't democrats who are spearheading the opposition to the ruling Arab strongmen in the region; it's jihadists. Replacing the killer kings, colonels and ophthalmologists of the Arab world is dandy, but replacing them with Taliban types, not so much...

Well said, George. But everyone knows it's all in the lingo. If you calls them "rebels" instead of "jihadists," you can still close your eyes and pretend that spring has sprung.