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.
Yep. The ones who had any sense or grew up are on here and prepping.
By the evil designs of dear leader.
This is intentional.
See tagline
Because he loves communism and because he hates our allies like UK, Germany, Israel, Canada, etc., and especically because he wants to build up the global IslamoNazi caliphate (dictatorship) at our expense and the expense of everybody else in his way.
Question answered, see above.
Yep. And we can add onto that the incredibly inept handling of foreign policy by her successor, an unashamed traitor to the United States.
Bush left Iraq in better shape than it had been in since WWII. 0bama squandered it. Bush overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan in three weeks, the direct upshot of 9/11 and fully deserved. Unfortunately, neither man was able to come up with a policy guaranteeing that they'd stay out of government. That's not really too surprising; foreign powers have been trying something like it there for most of history with equal lack of success.
But for the absolute, bloody shambles in the Middle East we have to blame progressives who simply could not conceive of the U.S. as anything but unbearably imperialistic under Bush and "all better now" that a Nobel Peace Prize winner was in office to reverse not only all his predecessor's policies but most of the country's for the last four decades. The result we see before us, and it isn't pretty, and hearing an idiot like Josh Earnest bleat that all is well only rubs salt in the wounds.
I’ve been simultaneously ramping up both my ability to grow food for my own family and ability to defend it by various means.
With any luck, before everything goes to crap, I’ll have my own small water tower, biocomposting toilet, and solar panels, so I can go completely off the grid.
Crazy Joe, I have the short simple answer for you. It was the misguided policies of Kennedy (Cuba), LBJ (Vietnam), Carter (the entire Middle East, Iran and the USSR) Clinton (the Middle East) and 0bama (everything he touched). The adults in between we’re stuck with picking up the pieces.
I could say it began with James Earl Carter, but I have to put the onus on one Barack Hussein Obama....ummm...ummm...ummm.
That's part of it, but the fact that the State Department plainly has had no competent orientalists on the Middle East desk since at least the administration of Bush the Younger started the disaster. How do I know they didn't have any? If they had, someone would have warned that the invasion of Iraq was ripping the bandage off the Sunni-Shia fault line and that measures would needed to deal with this. If someone had given that warning and been ignored, they would have, by now, written a tell-all memoir. No such book has appeared, ergo, there was not a competent orientalist at State.
Awesome. We’re about to build a greenhouse.
Putting ANY Democrat in charge of foreign policy is like putting Yogi Bear in charge of the picnic baskets.Never a good idea.
Bush’s democracy project was a cover of the real politics, which was to block Iranian expansion. It was thwarted by the failure to install an Iraqi government in place of Saddam’s, one which included the Sunnis, and by dissolving the army. It seems that there was division inside the Bush administration about what that government was to look like. We put in a viceroy instead, We needed a McArthur but didn’t have one on tap.
Obama knows what he is doing but is lying about it until events make it hard for us to reverse the course he has set. He wants detente with Iran.
Disarray is too mild of a word.
Scarborough was a sellout even before Bush though, so it all computes...I think...
Hey Joe, there’s some girl sleeping on your office floor. Oh, wait...
AFP is FUBAR
FUBO
Ismael's descendant's......"He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be 'against everyone' and everyone's hand against him,.... and he will live in hostility toward all 'his brothers'."
Much has been written about the Middle East crisis from a 'political' perspective,... but it will never be understood apart from its spiritual roots,... for it is from start to finish a spiritual conflict – which is why it will never be settled politically.
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