The foreign-policy elite is aghast at President Obama’s mishandling of the Syria situation. Most of the outrage has been confined to Labor Day weekend parties in Washington and the Hamptons, but a few people are going public.
On his CNN show on Sunday, Fareed Zakaria, a columnist for Time and the Washington Post who has frequently sat down with Obama for off-the-record conversations on foreign policy, issued this blistering assessment of the president’s performance:
The administration’s handling of Syria over the last year has been a case study in how not to do foreign policy . . . the manner in which the Obama administration has first created and then mismanaged this crisis will cast a long shadow on America’s role in the world.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and ex officio dean of the foreign-policy establishment if there ever was one, tweeted on Saturday that Obama ”has gone from ‘leading from behind’ to not leading,” and said the president’s apparent reversal of policy on Friday ”raises doubts about U.S. reliability [and] determination.”
Judith Miller, a former New York Times reporter with excellent sources in the Middle East, told Fox News, “Obama has managed to make everyone — left , right and center — mad at him.” Columnist Charles Krauthamer made the most pithy comment: ”It has the feel of amateur hour.”