Posted on 03/29/2015 6:57:46 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Yemen is in flames, ISIL is on the march, Syria is apocalyptic, Iran is racing through Iraq, anarchy reigns in Libya, Jordan is on the brink, Turkey is slipping away, and America’s relationship with the Middle East’s only democracy has hit an all-time low.
When academics look back to survey the wreckage of U.S. foreign policy at the start of the 21st century, many will wonder how a superpower with unrivaled military, economic, and cultural dominance lost that historic advantage so quickly. The answer? George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
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Liberal historians will trace much of the region’s turmoil to President Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq. That war of choice was our turbulent era’s original sin — a misguided response to the horrors of September 11. Mr. Bush’s march to Baghdad squandered the international goodwill Americans enjoyed after bin Laden’s terror attacks, and doomed not only Iraq, but also Afghanistan, because of the neglect brought on by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Conservative historians may concede that Bush’s Wilsonian foreign policy was disastrous, but still argue that Barack Obama inherited a bad hand from Mr. Bush but made it even worse. Unfortunately for Americans of all ideologies, both liberal and conservative critiques of these two presidents will prove to be correct. In the end, Bush and Obama were clearly overmatched by the events of their day.
Like George W. Bush, Mr. Obama’s foreign policy was driven more by blind ideology than sound reason. Bush’s neoconservative fantasy of exporting freedom to all four corners of the globe set loose a chain of events that brought chaos to the heart of the Middle East, cost Americans 4,000 lives, and taxpayers over a trillion dollars.
Bush’s ideological foreign policy was tragically followed by Obama’s delusional belief that America could erase the sins of the Bush-Cheney era by simply abdicating the U.S.’s role as indispensable nation.
According to this liberal fairy tale retold often during the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama’s enlightened approach to foreign policy would once again make the United States beloved across the globe. It’s just too bad that long-term geopolitical strategy proved to be as far above the 44th president’s pay grade as it was for George W. Bush. As Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin notes, the only countries who arguably have a better relationship with America today than they had before Mr. Obama became president are Cuba and Iran.
Despite the sectarian meltdown that gripped Iraq in 2006 and 2007, the Petraeus Surge and the Sunni Awakening transformed the war ravaged country to such a degree that war correspondents like the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins told me that by 2008, Iraq’s security situation had improved so much as to make the country unrecognizable from what it had been just a few years before. Barack Obama, who opposed the surge in 2007, told Americans in September 2008 that it had actually “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
Sadly, the stability brought to Iraq was short-lived because after candidate Obama became President Obama, the Democrat became more obsessed with reversing Bush administration policies than maintaining a stable Middle East. By retreating too quickly from Iraq, ignoring mass murder in Syria, abandoning Iranian reformers being shot in Tehran’s streets, blowing up Libya and then leaving it to burn, ignoring ISIL until it the terror group metastasized across the Middle East, antagonizing the Sunni world by launching a desperate bid for an Iranian nuclear deal, and stiff-arming America’s two most important regional allies in Jerusalem and Cairo, Barack Obama has somehow inherited a dangerously unfocused U.S. foreign policy and reduced it to rubble.
If historians are to find mitigating factors in Bush and Obama’s foreign policy failures, it may be this: that Al Qaeda has failed to launch another attack on U.S. soil over the past 14 years. While that may have sounded like an impressive policy success in the months following September 11, let us hope that America’s next commander in chief does more than react reflexively to a terror attack or the excesses of the president he replaced.
Boomers that never grew up are now running the asylum.
because the stupid bastard (literally accurate) in charge of US foreign policy thought the world would swoon at his feet because he’s just so incredibly awesome.
in other words, he’s a dangerous, self obsessed newbie with nearly terminal naïveté.
It’s a puzzle. Like a dead young female staffer in a Congressman’s office.
This would be directly Joe’s fault.
Or put another way, America is losing commonality of thought and values. The population is fragmenting in their views and ideology, spinning off in different directions. It means that policy will wind up being based on ever-changing PC requirements or ideologies, or on the whims of America's oligarchs for pure profit.
Hillary was Secretary of State for four years and left the Middle East literally in flames.
That’s what happened.
Yep.
Oh. So it’s all Bush’s fault and Obama inherited the mess.
Sure.
So true. And the sad part is that the powers that be are actually encouraging it. The old "melting pot" concept is what made this nation strong, and gave it a future. Now that idea is seen as outdated, mistaken, and probably racist.
I once heard a silly liberal say that we don't need a "melting pot". We need a "tossed salad". Well, that's just asking for Balkanization.
Bush had things pretty well in hand, a situation Obama was anxious to undo and Obama was successful in reversing every gain Bush had made. We are now in the middle of an Obama world and just wait until Iran emerges victorious.
Bush in 2003 was faced with choosing the lesser of two evils. If he had done nothing, Saddam would still be in power and perhaps would have nukes. The rants like Scarborough's that attack Bush for his decision never ask what would have happened if Bush had done nothing.
It was my feeling at the time that if Bush let Saddam stay in power, Bush would be defeated in 2004. Of course there is no way to prove or disprove that. Kerry in 2005 could have started the Clinton-Obama demolition of American interests in the Middle East 4 years earlier.
Bill Clinton didn't exactly have much success in the Middle East either and his forgotten errors (like refusing to accept Osama bin Laden when offered him) caused a lot of our later difficulties.
This must be a trick question. You have an elected President who hates the United States like the Devil hates Holy Water or Allah hates infidels.
Gee Joe, I think it might be the person YOU VOTED FOR ..!!
I will agree with Joe that taking out Saddam now appears to have been a mistake. Everything else is Zero’s fault of mismanagement.
Bush over time was methodically surrounding the center of world terrorism in Iran. Øbama is fundamentally transforming that situation, enlarging the power of Iran so it surrounds those that remain instead. Just turning the tables a tad.
Future historians will look back and wonder why the U.S. transferred enormous amounts of their wealth to Muslim countries to pay for oil when the U.S. could have and should have simply taken it.
It is pretty simple.
Weakness encourages aggression. And this President is the biggest wimp to have ever inhabited the Oval Office.
Even squinty-eyed terrorists with pea-brains can spot weakness that apparent.
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