Ace of Spades on Monday’s presidential press conference:
A man who keeps offering the same empty answers — “allies have to step up,” “a warped ideology on the wrong side of history,” “contrary to our values,” etc. — cannot complain this petulantly about being asked the same questions. . . .
He is the apotheosis of progressivism, the avatar and godling that is the living embodiment of all their cowardices, lies, hypocrisies, self-flatteries, and stupidities.
One self-flattery they’re fond of is claiming they have “evidence-based” reasoning, not ideology-based reasoning, and that their minds are supple things that readily incorporate new information and plot new strategies accordingly.
Obama is the ultimate exemplar of this fiction. He claims that he’s always interested in “whatever works” and he’s constantly engaging in high-level cognition about the world, and yet no matter what the news, no matter how badly his strategies and ideological priors have been shown to fail, he clings to them with the devotion of a child to his woobie.
You can read the whole thing. I generally refrain from commenting about things President Obama says, because I generally cannot stand to listen to what he says. But yesterday, I had my office TV on CNN during that press conference and heard enough of it to become irritated by the way he simply asserted that his policy is the only feasible and pragmatic policy, contrasting it with straw-man alternatives. If you believe Obama (and of course, I don’t mean to insult my readers by implying that any of you are stupid enough to believe Obama) every serious military strategist on the planet approves of his policy, as opposed to the Obviously Wrong Policies favored by those Crude and Clumsy Warmongers in the Republican Party. We are expected to believe that the choices are either (a) do exactly what Obama is doing, or (b) it’s back to the Neocon Cowboy days, with a Bush-type massive invasion/occupation thing like the Iraq war. Basically, it was a campaign speech of the kind Obama might have given to an audience of college students in 2007.
What is being ignored, of course, is that the current situation with ISIS is a direct result of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprising that the Obama administration orchestrated as surely as the Kennedy administration orchestrated the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Is there anyone so stupid as to believe that there could have been simultaneous rebellions against the governments of Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc., without the CIA (and Hillary Clinton’s State Department) working behind the scenes to make it happen? This is not a paranoid conspiracy theory. The Obama administration was quite open in its support of the “Arab Spring,” and all I’m saying (beyond what is already public knowledge) is that U.S. covert agencies operated in that situation the way U.S. covert agencies normally operate. The 1953 coup in Iran, the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion — there is a long history of such clandestine operations, and if you think Obama and Hillary wouldn’t use the CIA to overthrow governments they disliked (which is what the “Arab Spring” was really about) you are hopelessly naïve.
Once we recognize the “Arab Spring” as a U.S. policy initiative (rather than buying into the media-manufactured myth of “spontaneous” uprisings in several different countries), then we also recognize that the Obama’s avowed desire to topple the Assad regime in Syria led them to discount the danger posed by Islamic extremists in Syria, which is how ISIS became the serious menace that it now is. But this interpretation of events, as obvious as it seems to me, never gets mentioned when discussing how ISIS — a rather obscure Iraqi militant force prior to 2011 — has emerged as the world’s most dangerous Islamic terrorist group.
Obama’s Middle East policy is a catastrophic failure, and for him to defend it as if it were successful — and imply that there is no feasible alternative — is an infuriating insult. Anyway, now you see why I generally refrain from commenting on what Obama says.
