NP - It's Not About Syria

[alice wellintown]

Well, I can't speak to or for the president either, so my advice here is
just like the author's, of little use but to let me say something about the
hot topic Syria. The Carter Doctrine is cited but the Clinton one is not.
And, as any idiot knows, Obama, whose Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton,
only recently passed the baton to Kerry, is a Clinton man. His
administration is, ironically, more Clintonized now, than is was when
Hilary had Kerry's job. If anyone hasn't figured it out, Clinton inherited
a Bush mess and managed it well. Obama inherited a Bush mess, much bigger,
and much dirtier, from the banking crisis to he wars and he WMD fiasco to
the stupid economy. And Obama has been using the Clinton play book, so
yesterday when he spoke after the G-20, it was Clinton he claimed to be
following, not Bush, not Carter. But Obama is failing. If we grant that
Clinton was successful, Obama has failed before the military part. This is
the question: how can Obama do what Bill did? The answer: he ca not. Why?
Because history does not repeat itself. Times have changed, and this
problem in Syria can't be solved with the Clinton play book. And, Obama is
no Bill Clinton. Though both lacked international credentials, forget about
he Nobel albatross, Though both were weak inside the beltway, stron out on
the campaign, Obama lacks the slickness, the political savvy, the
cleverness of Bill. He is an intellectual of a different stripe and this
has, sadly, hurt him. He is, like Carter in this sense, too honest and too
determined to be a great humanitarian. To everything there is a time. Now
is not he time for such a president. This makes him almost tragic. For we
see in his incremental discovery of his weakness, in his Nobel, and
noble  weakness, what he can't and won't discover until all the world knows
it is too late for him to recover and be great, but in his tragic part.


On Saturday, September 7, 2013, David Morris wrote:

> http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/attack-donohue-bacevich.html
>
> ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I mean, if I could have five minutes of the
> president’s time, I’d say, “Mr. President, the issue really is not Syria. I
> mean, you’re being told that it’s Syria. You’re being told you have to do
> something about Syria, that you have to make a decision about Syria. That
> somehow your credibility is on the line.”
>
> But I’d say, “Mr. President, that’s not true. The issue really here is
> whether or not an effort over the course of several decades, dating back to
> the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in 1980, an effort that extends
> over several decades to employ American power, military power, overt,
> covert military power exercise through proxies, an effort to use military
> power to somehow stabilize or fix or liberate or transform the greater
> Middle East hasn’t worked.
>
> “And if you think back to 1980, and just sort of tick off the number of
> military enterprises that we have been engaged in that part of the world,
> large and small, you know, Beirut, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and
> on and on, and ask yourself, ‘What have we got done? What have we achieved?
> Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more Democratic? Are we
> enhancing America’s standing in the eyes of the people of the Islamic
> world?’
>
> “The answers are, ‘No, no, and no.’ So why, Mr. President, do you think
> that initiating yet another war, ’cause if we bomb Syria, it’s a war, why
> do you think that initiating yet another war in this protracted enterprise
> is going to produce a different outcome? Wouldn’t it be perhaps wise to ask
> ourselves if this militarized approach to the region maybe is a fool’s
> errand.
>
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