Saturday, June 14, 2014

Mr President: How is that 'de-Bushing' of the world working out?

(My new American Thinker post)

Try this later today. Go back and watch some of those "You Tube" videos from the 2008 campaign. It certainly sounds so silly now to watch then Secretary of State Clinton in 2009 promise a "smart foreign policy" in contrast to "the cowboy approach."

The Obama world is here and it's very scary, to say the least.   

What does that world look like?    The Commentator explains:
"From Ukraine, through Afghanistan and Iraq all the way to the East China Sea, the world's dictatorships and terror groups smell weakness in Washington. They have adjusted their posture accordingly.   
To be sure, any one of those conflict zones, and all the others besides, were problematic to start with. On that most toxic of all modern conflicts, the Iraq war, we have long been of the opinion that reasonable people can disagree about whether the 2003 intervention was the right course of action or whether aggressive containment might have been a better option.   
But simply washing one's hands of Iraq would have been as irresponsible in 2003 as it is today, when the increasingly hopeless Obama administration appears to have been taken by surprise at the consequences of its own incompetence.  
There were never going to be any easy options in Iraq, or for that matter in Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere.  
Leadership is not about things being easy. It's about taking the really tough decisions, and sometimes getting things wrong. But above all else it's about being there, having your hand firmly on the rudder, and letting everyone know what you stand for and what you won't stand for.  
Sound like Barack Obama? No, actually, it doesn't. And that's the core problem. No-one is blaming Obama for the existence of ISIS, the Islamist terror group now running riot in Iraq, where we did intervene, and in Syria where we didn't.  
It's not that ISIS exists, it's what they have become in response to the power vacuums that Obama has allowed to be created. Maybe there is nothing we could have done. But throwing one's hands in the air and shrugging one's shoulders is a sure fire way to guarantee the ascendance of the bad guys.  
That applies to ISIS. It applies to the Taliban. It applies to Vladimir Putin's Russia, and it applies to China. 
Again, don't expect a world with strong American leadership to be easy. Don't expect straight lines or an absence of complexity.  But without American leadership, do expect things to deteriorate rapidly.
Don't take our word for it.
Just look around you."
By the way, let me direct this word to those Americans who say "so what" and "it's none of our business."  I hope that those Americans realize that there is an increase in their gasoline prices around the corner.  Iraq is an oil state and you can't have this kind of radical change without impacting oil markets or the price in your neighborhood pump.

From the US-Mexico border, now full of kids from Central America, to Iraq, about to be taken over by ISIS, President Obama has shown an incredible dereliction of duty and disregard for common sense.

The amazing thing to me is that there are still many who believe that he is doing a good job.  What planet are they living on? What are they smoking?

P. S. You can hear CANTO TALK here & follow me on Twitter @ scantojr.


Tags: President Obama's foreign policy  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the My View by Silvio Canto, Jr. Thanks!

Search This Blog