Let us get this straight: We were going to bomb Bashar Assad, but then decided at the last minute not to. But then we were going to help the Free Syrian Army. But then the administration did not, and later dismissed its forces as amateurs and a “fantasy.”
But then the administration made them the foundation of our ground strategy both against Assad and his archenemy, the jayvee-like Islamic State, which we are now bombing to the delight of Assad, as the Islamic State gobbles up Iraq, which we abandoned because it was “stable” and “secure” and the administration’s likely “greatest achievement.”
But then again we also apparently inadvertently dropped weapons and aid to the Islamic State, against whom we are now de facto allies with Iran, which we have accused of stonewalling on coming clean about its proliferation, even as we eased sanctions against them. Obama has a “special” relationship with Recip Erdogan (as opposed to our new indifference to the Kurds and Israelis), a big supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, whose hatred of both Assad and Kurdish separatists has heretofore prompted him to turn a blind eye to the Islamic State (which apparently, according to the secretary of state, grew out of the Arab Street’s frustration with supposed Israeli intransigence in dealing with the Palestinians), in the fashion of Qatar’s triangulation, where we base CENTCOM.
Meanwhile the administration is preemptively bombing in Iraq (where nonexistent stockpiles of WMD somehow keep turning up in the Iraqi-Syrian badlands), without consulting the U.S. Congress or the UN, given the administration’s present reliance on the twelve-year old, 2002 congressional authorization to bomb the late Baathist Saddam Hussein, a resolution which Barack Obama in his campaign in 2008 against Hillary Clinton ritually derided. It is all very confusing and lacks the clarity of administration policy in Egypt, where in tripartite fashion we eased out the fossilized Mubarak, welcomed in his replacement, the USC grad, ex-CSU prof and “moderate” Muslim Brother Morsi, only to shrug in exasperation at the subsequent General el-Sisi’s coup, which we publicly resented and privately apparently welcomed.
All this makes our policy in Libya — from leading from behind to bombing the monster in rehab Qaddafi out of power to leaving a Mogadishu on the Mediterranean to the Benghazi murders — seem clear in comparison.