Add teachable moments to the list of casualties from President Obama’s misbegotten Middle East policies. As disaster piles on catastrophe in his administration’s flaccid battle against the radical jihadists of IS, Obama’s in no position to deliver his favored means of attack, the righteous lecture.
It is hard for even the most imperious of presidents to look down his nose at detractors when mired in the wreckage of years of foreign policy errors. Nevertheless, instincts die hard. Obama got in a right roil snit the other day over resistance to his policy of accepting Syrian refugees in the United States in the aftermath of the November 13th slaughter of innocents in Paris.
The president directed his wrath at his favorite target, Republicans, accusing them of aiding IS in recruiting terrorists by favoring a pause in admitting refugees. Obama in public continues to maintain his unruffled reaction in the face of each harrowing setback. If he possesses any powers of self-examination, Obama must be baffled at how his lofty intentions could have inflicted so much misery on so many innocents.
Just when the nation could use a brainy explanation, the president’s credibility makes him an unpersuasive candidate to deliver it. He never should have erased that red line over chemical weapons. Obama has a taste for declaring which policies he favors are imbedded in virtuous universal values. One of those universal values was the world’s intolerance of the use of chemical weapons.
Civilized nations cannot ignore the use of sarin gas. When the president refused to act against Syria in the aftermath of dictator Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons on rebellious Syrian civilians, disaster was destined to follow. It has. The grim consequences have not been limited to Syria and Iraq.
Freedom’s retreat in the face of totalitarian brutality always inflicts horrifying repercussions on a wide range of victims, near and distant from the center of violence. Here is where the world could use a resolute leader with the ability to deliver a speech that was once Obama’s calling card.
Americans–Democrats and Republicans–resist the admission of Syrian refugees to the United States because they’ve lost confidence in the government’s ability to detect the difference between the casualties of chaos and the perpetrators of it.
The president ought to speak to the American people with a traditional Oval Office sit-at-your-desk speech. The age of foreign policy by hashtag came and went when Boko Haram jihadists proved immune to #BringBackOurGirls appeal for the Islamist brutes to return more than 200 Nigerian girls they kidnapped in 2014.
Obama needs to explain how he and his administration can be sure no terrorist will find a way to gain entry to the United States by taking on the guise of a fleeing refuge. It’s not an unreasonable concern, particularly as evidence mounts that at least two of the militants who murdered 129 people in Paris made their way to Europe this year among the masses of refugees journeying from Syria.
The president could acknowledge how he will reverse policies that have encouraged a resurgent Russia to get away with bombing lonely, revolting Syrian moderates. Obama needs to say more than there will be setbacks and successes. The successes have not been obvious. The setbacks continue to shock. Vast expanses of territory falling to IS. Billions in the militants’ bank accounts. Their reach extending to a Russian passenger jet exploding in Egypt. Paris soaked in blood. Brussels, the home of European government, paralyzed by days of lockdown.
The world needs assurance that the dithering will stop. Those ferocious Kurds cannot carry the fight with just our good wishes and admirations. They need a niagara of arms to start flowing from us to them. Pin prick air strikes will not carry the day.
President Obama spent the start of his first term on an unseemly apology tour for the policies of his American predecessors through the ages. He should turn that experience to good by admitting his mistakes in Syria and explaining how he will correct them. Vacillation never conquers maniacal zealots. Stop telling us what we should think. Show us what you will do.
