Missile strikes make weak presidents feel strong, but accomplish little else.
The president who claimed he would end “Bush’s wars” is preparing to start one of his own — in Syria. U.S., British and French naval forces are being gathered in the Eastern Mediterranean to punish Syrian despot Bashar Assad for crossing the Obama “red line” — again.
The carnage in Syria — 100,000-plus dead, 250,000 wounded, 2.3 million mostly civilian refugees — is a direct result of the O Team’s abysmal, feckless foreign policy.
It began with the president’s 2009 utopian speech in Cairo about an “Arab Spring” that did nothing to improve the condition of anyone in the “Arab World.” In fact, in all these countries, people are worse off.
Mr. Obama has consistently insulted and badgered the Israeli government. His demands that they abandon their right of self-defense and pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a “peace deal” with people who won’t even acknowledge Israel’s right to exist have encouraged our enemies, dismayed our allies, exacerbated tensions and driven up the price of oil.
The administration’s naive belief that “free and fair elections” are possible in countries totally devoid of any democratic traditions or institutions is lunacy. Test cases of this theory in Iran, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Zimbabwe have proven disastrous for the people of these nations, and particularly so for Christians — Maronites, Copts, Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Protestant missionaries.
The administration’s hasty 2011 retreat from Iraq emboldened the ayatollahs in Iran. The Malaki government in Baghdad is now an Iranian satrapy. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps uses Iraqi highways and air bases built with American blood and treasure to export militants and weapons to Syria and Lebanon and import equipment for Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Radical Islamists and jihadis — armed and trained by the Saudi government and various gulf emirates — are flooding into Syria through Turkey. Instead of acting as a NATO ally, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, now controls all aid flowing to the Syrian opposition.
