Obama's Chickens are Coming Home to Roost!

It is hard to imagine our closest ally, the United Kingdom, telling the president of the United States to get lost, but that is what happened a few hours ago.  President Obama has already made clear that he intends to send American forces against the Syrian regime of Assad, and the British Parliament was asked to authorize British forces to participate in that military action as an ally of the USA.  Despite the pleas of prime minister David Cameron, whose alliance controls the majority of seats in Parliament, the request for authorization went down to defeat.  Much of the rhetoric used in Parliament against the resolution said essentially that there was no need for British forces to get involved just because the American president shot his mouth off about red lines and painted himself into a corner.  I am not making this up; comments this harsh and worse were hurled at Obama and his attempts at foreign policy.  How can it be that our closest ally for the last 100 years who fought with us in World War I, World War II, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, has now not only refused to help but also mocked the president for his inept handling of international relations?

The truth is something that really hurts:  Obama has undermined our relations with Britain since he took office, so there are many in London who no longer feel that there is a special relationship between the two countries anymore.  When he took office, Obama sent back a bust of Churchill that had been in the Oval Office as a special gift from Britain.  Maybe Obama thought he was just redecorating, but sending back Britain's singularly greatest figure of the last century was seen in London as a snub.  Then we had silly things like Obama sending the Queen a gift of a batch of movie DVDs that would not even work on European machines.  As Iraq wound down and as Afghanistan fighting went on, Obama never attempted to involve the Brits in strategy for moving forward.  They had thousands of troops fighting in these wars, but they were treated as poor relations who had no say in the destinies of their own troops.  The Brits kept on despite the snub.  Then came the new Argentine threats to the Falkland Islands.  The UK went to war in the 1980s to honor the wishes of the islanders and to keep rid the territory of the invading Argentines.  When the Argentine government began, once again, to rattle sabers over the fate of the islands, Obama quickly announced that we were neutral in the dispute between our special ally the UK and the Argentines.  Then he used the Argentine name for the islands (or at least he tried to--he got it wrong) rather than the British name in a move that many thought was a snub to the Brits.  Certainly, the London tabloids all took Obama's statements as a major snub.  So after five years as a dutiful ally of the USA, all that the Brits had gotten in return from our president had been insult after insult.  We have now reached the point where they've lost that special feeling in London.

Obama brought this on himself by mishandling America's foreign policy.  Just watching the policy unfold this past week through leaks but without a presidential speech or even a Congressional vote illustrates how poorly Obama is doing on the domestic front.  No better indicator of Obama's failures could be seen than this latest vote in Parliament.  To paraphrase Obama's old pastor, Jeremiah Wright, "Obama's chickens are coming home to roost."  Sadly, it is America that pays the price.