Monday, November 9, 2015

Itemizing Obama's Manifold Mideast Failures

P. David Hornik, citing Ephraim Karsh's latest book, The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East, provides the litany of failure here:
It was evident in Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, where he “depict[ed] Muslims as hapless victims of the aggressive encroachment of others, too dim to be accountable for their own fate,” a view that is “not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth.” 
That view, in Karsh’s telling, led Obama—among other missteps—to endorse hard-line Palestinian positions so that their leadership “dropped all pretences of seeking a negotiated settlement with Israel”; betray the United States’ longtime Egyptian ally Hosni Mubarak out of belief that the largely Muslim-Brotherhood-driven agitation augured democracy; back Britain and France’s mad-bomber campaign against the nonbelligerent Gaddafi regime that reduced Libya to jihadist chaos; display utter fecklessness in Syria with dissolvable “red lines”; and, most gravely, doggedly treat the regime in Tehran as a potentially constructive force up to (after this book was written) the signing of the calamitous nuclear deal last July.
Quite the "legacy," no?

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