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Our last post covered the president and some of his foreign policy failures. We were looking for other subjects, but events intrude. Of course our favorites have found fault, but today’s post is bookended by Ron Fournier of the National Journal and David Remnick of The New Yorker. Two more reliably left/liberal types could hardly be found. So we post again on the empty suit in the White House.
Fournier is first with his essay titled – Leaderless.
In his memoir, Leon Panetta argued that for all of Barack Obama’s strengths, he is missing an essential ingredient of leadership. He lacks “fire,” wrote Obama’s former CIA director and Pentagon chief. “The president relies on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”
Obama has proved Panetta right again and again during his presidency, but never more dangerously so than with his shoulder-shrug approach to ISIS. Obama called it a “J.V. team” before it started beheading Americans. He said it was “contained” before it attacked Paris. Now he’s calling it “a bunch of killers with good social media.”
That’s how you describe a street gang—a bunch of killers with good social media. The Islamic State is no street gang.
Objective observers from across the political spectrum took exception to Obama’s tone. This from Frank Bruni, a liberal-minded New York Times columnist: …
… On ISIS, Obama breaks every rule. He minimizes the threat and dismisses our fears, which raises doubts about his candor and capability. An overwhelming majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of ISIS, a new poll shows, and 81 percent think ISIS will strike the United States.
In July 2013, six months into his second term, I wrote a column that questioned whether Obama would fulfill his enormous potential, whether he even cared anymore about his promises to change Washington, whether he could write the modern rules of the presidency and build a new bully pulpit. I asked, “What if Obama can’t lead?”
I now have my answer.
Next we have the weekly USA Today column by Glenn Reynolds who is a law professor in Tennessee and blogs at Instapundit.
When President Obama spoke in Washington about the terrorist attacks in Paris, he was curiously unable to raise much passion. The passion came out only later in Turkey when he started attacking Republicans. Those attacks continued throughout that week, with charges that people who oppose resettling Syrian refugees in America are somehow xenophobic haters who are not in touch with American values.
There are two problems with this line of attack for President Obama. The first is that it isn’t true: The opponents of refugee resettlement aren’t xenophobic haters, but ordinary Americans — and, in fact, include roughly a fourth of the House Democratic Caucus, who voted with Republicans to limit refugee resettlement.
The second problem is that Obama himself is the source of the Syrian refugee crisis. But don’t take it from me. Listen to foreign-affairs expert Walter Russell Mead, an original Obama supporter himself: “To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue,” Mead wrote in The American Interest, ”one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?”
Mead continued, “Obama’s own policy decisions — allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones — were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American president has made in a long time.” …
… In 2008, a substantial chunk of American voters chose to take a holiday from history and go with “hope and change.” In 2012, they chose to ignore Mitt Romney — whose warnings about everything from Russian adventurism to terrorism in Mali have borne fruit — in order to continue that holiday.
The holiday is over now, and the bills are due. The next president will find undoing this damage a tough job.
And David Goldman in his Spengler guise at Asia Times essays on Vladimir Putin – the Leader of the Free World.
… In 2008 I endorsed Putin for the American presidency, in jest, of course. Now he is leading America’s president by the nose and directing the anti-terror efforts of France and Germany. No-one could have anticipated Putin’s sudden ascent to global leadership during the past several weeks. Russia is in the position of a vulture fund, buying the distressed assets of the Western alliance for pennies on the dollar. Faced with an American president who will not fight, and his European allies whose military capacity has shrunk to near insignificance, the Russian Federation seized the helm with the deployment of a mere three dozen war planes and an expeditionary force of 5,000 men. One searches in vain through diplomatic history to find another case where so much was done with so little. As an American, I feel a deep humiliation at this turn of events, assuaged only slightly by Schadenfreude at the even deeper humiliation of America’s foreign policy establishment.
The world runs by different rules than it did just a few weeks ago. Putin has answered the question I asked in September (“Vladimir Putin: Spoiler or Statesman?”). President Obama declared at the Nov. 17 Antalya summit, “From the start, I’ve also welcomed Moscow going after ISIL…We’re going to wait to see whether, in fact, Russia does end up devoting attention to targets that are ISIL targets, and if it does so, then that’s something we welcome.” After this week’s Russian and French airstrikes on ISIS’ stronghold in Raqqa, that is a moot point. It seems like another epoch when Mitt Romney declared that Russia was America’s greatest geopolitical threat. Russia, on the contrary, is pulling America’s chestnuts out of the fire. Obama is utterly feckless; by the time the next American president is sworn in, the world will be a difference place. Ukraine? Never heard of it. …
More from David Greenfield in his Sultan Knish blog.
… When reporters ask Obama how he plans to win the war, he smirks tiredly at them and launches into another condescending explanation about how the situation is far too complicated for anything as simple as bombs to work. Underneath that explanation is the belief that wars are unwinnable.
Obama knows that Americans won’t accept “war just doesn’t work” as an answer to Islamic terrorism. So he demonstrates to them that wars don’t work by fighting wars that are meant to fail.
In Afghanistan, he bled American soldiers as hard as possible with vicious rules of engagement that favored the Taliban to destroy support for a war that most of the country had formerly backed. By blowing the war, Obama was not only sabotaging the specific implementation of a policy he opposed, but the general idea behind it. His failed wars are meant to teach Americans that war doesn’t work.
The unspoken idea that informs his strategy is that American power is the root cause of the problems in the region. Destroying ISIS would solve nothing. Containing American power is the real answer.
Obama does not have a strategy for defeating ISIS. He has a strategy for defeating America. …
… Obama responded to ISIS by denying it’s a threat. Once that stopped being a viable strategy, he began to stall for time. And he’s still stalling for time, not to beat ISIS, but to wait until ISIS falls out of the headlines. That has been his approach to all his scandals from ObamaCare to the IRS to the VA.
Lie like crazy and wait for people to forget about it and turn their attention to something else.
This is a containment strategy, but not for ISIS. It’s a containment strategy for America. Obama isn’t trying to bottle up ISIS except as a means of bottling up America. He doesn’t see the Caliph of the Islamic State as the real threat, but the average American who watches the latest beheading on the news and wonders why his government doesn’t do something about it. To the left it isn’t the Caliph of ISIS who starts the wars we ought to worry about, but Joe in Tennessee, Bill in California or Pete in Minnesota.
That is why Obama sounds bored when talking about beating ISIS, but heats up when the conversation turns to fighting Republicans. It’s why Hillary Clinton named Republicans, not ISIS, as her enemy. …
Today the New Yorker published David Remnick’s report on a group of Syrian refugees who are fighting ISIS. This nugget was in the report. And if the president was a Republican, you can bet this would have far more detailed and elaborate.
… The members of R.B.S.S. are utterly frustrated with the efforts of the West to defeat both Assad, who has fended off the opposition so far, and ISIS, which has suffered recent losses in Iraq and Syria, but which has proved capable of exacting suffering from Sinai to Beirut to Paris.
“The problem the Syrian people have with the United States is that we are suffering for five years with barrel bombs,” one R.B.S.S. journalist said. “Assad has killed so many innocents, and many people have lost hope. After Assad’s chemical attack, when he crossed the so-called ‘red line,’ the U.S. just took the weapons. It made America look like a liar and weak. …
The cartoons are good too.