T. Belman. I was interviewed yesterday and made this exact point i.e., that all the carnage and the refugees are the direct responsibility of Obama’s policies and leadership, not only in Syria and Iraq but also in Libya. Luckily Egypt need not be added to the list due to the heroic al Sisi.
The Left, including the mainstream media, must also share responsibility. Remember how mercilessly they attacked Bush for his foreign policy errors. Compare that with their non-existing condemnation of Obama and his policies.
One more responsible party is the Republican leadership. They also gave Obama a pass whereas the Democratic leadership was a real opposition to Bush’s policies.
As bad as these consequences are, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Imagine what the fallout from the Iran Deal, will be.
By Fred Hiatt, Washington Post Editorial page editor 9-6-15
This may be the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.
Starvation in Biafra a generation ago a movement. Synagogues and churches a decade ago mobilized to relieve misery in Darfur. When the Taliban in 2001 destroyed ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, the world was appalled at the lost heritage.
Today the Islamic State is blowing up precious cultural monuments in Palmyra, and half of all Syrians have been displaced — as if, on a proportional basis, 160 million Americans had been made homeless. More than a quarter-million have been killed. Yet the “Save Darfur” signs have not given way to “Save Syria.”
One reason is that Obama — who ran for president on the promise of restoring the United States’ moral stature — has constantly reassured Americans that doing nothing is the smart and moral policy. He has argued, at times, that there was nothing the United States could do, belittling the Syrian opposition as “former farmers, pharmacists and so forth.”
He has argued that we would only make things worse — “I am more mindful probably than most,” he told the New Republic in 2013, “of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities, but also our limitations.”
He has implied that because we can’t solve every problem, maybe we shouldn’t solve any. “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” he asked (though at the time thousands were not being killed in Congo).
On those rare occasions when political pressure or the horrors of Syrian suffering threatened to overwhelm any excuse for inaction, he promised action, in statements or White House leaks: for the opposition, a safe zone on the Turkish border. Once public attention moved on, the plans were abandoned or scaled back to meaningless proportions (training 50 soldiers per year, no action on the Turkish border).
Perversely, the worse Syria became, the more justified the president seemed for staying aloof; that might have helped in 2012 seemed ineffectual by 2013, and actions that could have saved lives in 2013 would not have been up to the challenge presented by 2014. The fact that the woman who wrote the book on genocide, Samantha Power, and the woman who campaigned to bomb Sudan to save the people of Darfur, Susan Rice, could apparently in good conscience stay on as U.N. ambassador and national security adviser, respectively, lent further moral credibility to U.S. abdication.Most critically, inaction was sold not as a necessary evil but as a notable achievement: The United States at last was leading with the head, not the heart, and with modesty, not arrogance. “Realists” pointed out that the United States gets into trouble when it lets ideals or emotions rule — when it sends soldiers to feed the hungry in Somalia, for example, only to lose them, as told in “Black Hawk Down,” and turn tail.
The realists were right that the United States has to consider interests as well as values, must pace itself and can’t save everyone. But a values-free argument ought at least to be able to show that the ends have justified the means, whereas the strategic results of Obama’s disengagement have been nearly as disastrous as the human consequences.
When Obama pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, critics worried there would be instability; none envisioned the emergence of a full-blown terrorist state. When heannounced in August 2011 that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” critics worried the words might prove empty — but few imagined the extent of the catastrophe: not just the savagery of chemical weapons and “barrel bombs,” but also the Islamic State’s recruitment of thousands of foreign fighters, its spread from Libya to Afghanistan, the danger to the U.S. homeland that has U.S. intelligence officials, the refugees destabilizing Europe.
Even had Obama’s policy succeeded in purely realist terms, though, something would have been lost in the anesthetization of U.S. opinion. Yes, the nation’s outrage over the decades has been uneven, at times hypocritical, at times self-serving.
But there also has been something to be admired in America’s determination to help — to ask, even if we cannot save everyone in Congo, can we not save some people in Syria? Obama’s successful turning of that question on its head is nothing to be proud of.
Read more on this topic:
Michael Gerson: The horrific results of Obama’s failure in Syria
Charles Krauthammer: A new strategy for Iraq and Syria
Labib Al Nahhas: The deadly consequences of mislabeling Syria’s revolutionaries
Marco Rubio: Obama’s strategy for the Middle East has backfired
Everything is somehow related to politics, but sometimes the connection seems more like conspiracy theory, true or not. America’s lack of anger at catastrophic inhumanity across the world has multiple causes. Perhaps a rather strange one is chemical. Herbicide, pesticide, and specific chemicals such as BPA and phthalates are ubiquitous in our environment and are known endocrine disrupters. They are xenoestrogens, having the same effect as barbiturates on fetuses, feminizing males and masculinizing females. Thus, we have the phenomena of angry Lesbians and metrosexual males, unheard of in Europe where most of these chemicals are banned.
And here comes the conspiracy: Since the chemical effects of these substances are well-known, could they have been left on the market for industry with the specific intention to chemically castrate the male population? It takes just one empowered Leftist, convinced that there are too many people in the world to succumb to the demands of the food industrial complex.
If this were a de novo phenomenon, full blown paranoia would be a possible diagnosis for someone who suggested such nefarious motives. However, we have, in the US, the example of leaded gasoline that was known to cause death, physical illness, retardation and general reductions in intelligence as early as the 1920s, with the pure metal’s effects being known as early as 1857. It remained available in America until 1991 despite its known effects on the children, thus giving the gasoline manufacturers one cent more profit per gallon.
And, of course, tobacco use continues to take lives with America selling much of its crop to other countries, because smoking rates have declined in America.
Finally, it is possible, as well, that the governmental relaxation on the use of marijuana serves their purpose of producing a passive population.