Hot Spots
04/14/2016
Obama's Failures
So I was reading this column in the Sydney Morning Herald by Paul McGeough on President Barack Obama’s “mistakes” following his Fox News interview this past Sunday and Obama had mentioned Libya as his worst.
Late in 2015, in an interview with GQ, Obama said the failure to market ObamaCare was his worst, which is really unbelievable.
But McGeough mentions a recent piece in Foreign Policy by Harvard professor Stephen Walt who concludes Obama’s presidency will be known for “a sizable number of depressing failures.”
McGeough’s summary of Walt’s piece:
“Afghanistan: Obama agonized in his first year, before agreeing to send 60,000 extra troops in a surge that was to be ‘temporary’ and would turn the Taliban tide – but today the Taliban controls more territory than at any time since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Obama was warned the policy would fail – and it did.
“Israel-Palestine: Obama was well-intentioned, [did someone say naïve?], but all he got was serial humiliations – Israeli settlements expanded, Gaza kept getting pummeled; moderate Palestinians were discredited; Hamas grew stronger; and the two-state solution that, nominally at least, was the policy keystone of the Clinton, Bush and Obama White Houses, now is dead.
“Arab Spring: Not successful. Obama helped to push Hosni Mubarak out in Cairo and backed the new elected government of Mohamed Morsi, but then turned a blind eye when a military coup installed General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the region’s newest thuggish dictator which, pretty well, was the end of the campaign for change in a region in desperate need of reform.
“Russia: Low marks here too – Washington’s mistake was in openly siding with demonstrators seeking to oust Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych without considering how Russia might respond to such a blatant intervention in its sphere of influence.
“Walt writes: ‘It pains me to say so, but the Middle East will be in even worse shape when [Obama] leaves office than it was when he arrived. The U.S. is not solely responsible for this unfortunate trend, but our repeated meddling sowed additional chaos and alienated both friends and foes alike.’”
I, on the other hand, have said for years there is no doubt what Obama’s biggest failure is...Syria. I’ll have more on this in my next “Week in Review.”
Hot Spots will return in a few weeks.
Brian Trumbore
