Obama's Middle East Muddle

Two events of the last few days show just how muddled the Obama policies in the Middle East truly are.

The first event is the withdrawal of the US ambassador from Syria. According to the news, this withdrawal was based upon credible reports of threats to the ambassador's safety. The end result is that there is no American ambassador to Syria, nothing more and nothing less. Of course, Syria is the country whose dictator has been killing his people indiscriminately for many months in order to try to thwart the protests that have arisen against his rule. The latest news on that front is that Syrian hospitals are now torturing patients brought in with injuries related to the protests. Not only does the regime kill many and wound many more, but it now tortures those protesters who survive the attacks. In all the months that the Assad regime has been slaughtering Syrians, president Obama has done next to nothing. Obama could have withdrawn the US ambassador as a sign of displeasure with the barbaric behavior of the Syrian regime towards its own people. That would have been a move made from strength. Instead, Obama snuck the US ambassador out of the country in order to hide from a potential threat. The only statement made by that move is that the USA is weak and cannot protect its own ambassador. Meanwhile the killing and torture in Syria continues and the Obama administration does and says nothing.

Second, we have the announcement from Obama that all US troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year. This announcement led me to question why we had gone into Iraq in the first place. We were told that we wanted to remove a terror threat, namely, Saddam Hussein, and replace that threat with a peaceful and democratic country. Then Senator Obama opposed the war vehemently. That, of course, is Obama right as an American. Nevertheless, once Obama became president he continued the Bush policies towards Iraq. Since the war in Iraq was essentially over before Obama was sworn in, it was no big deal for Obama to continue on with the Bush policies. Nevertheless, Obama recognized that there was a need for a continuing American presence in Iraq in order to guarantee the peace and to keep out Iran. One month, two months and four months ago, we were told by the Obamacrats that the plan was to keep about 15,000 troops in Iraq after the end of the year. Some pushed for even more troops to remain in Iraq, but no one in the administration said that all American troops would be gone. They recognized that the absence of US troops would create a vacuum that Iran would fill, a terrible result for the world.

Obama failed to come to any agreement with the Iraqi government about how to keep US troops in place. Now, Obama is suddenly touting his great "success" in having all US troops out of the country. So nothing changed with regard to the need for troops in Iraq. Indeed, all that happened was that Obama failed miserably in his efforts on this point, so he decided to call his failure a big "success". It is just the latest example of Obama thinking that what he says is more important than what he does.