Showing posts with label Bashar al-Assad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bashar al-Assad. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Obama's bad foreign policy from the start shows little sign of improving, as Washington Post Editorial Board lashes out Sunday : "Mr. Kerry’s empty words on Syria": "So what does the Obama administration propose to do to stop this barbarism? The simple answer is: nothing, other than issue strongly worded statements..."; #stonecoldfacts, @washingtonpost

Obama's bad foreign policy from the start shows little sign of improving, as Washington Post Editorial Board lashes out Sunday : "Mr. Kerry’s empty words on Syria" 
In case you were still on your summer hibernation when this happened a few weeks ago, the only time that President Obama has brought the country together this year on a policy is when nearly the entire country stood-up in opposition to his ill-considered ideas, plans and policies over Syria, one of his major weaknesses since coming into office in January of 2009.
That hasn't changed.
Think about that for a minute.

The Washington Post
Washington Post Editorial: Mr. Kerry’s empty words on Syria
By Editorial Board
Published October 28, 2013
ACCORDING TO Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad now is waging “a war of starvation” against his own people. In a robustly worded op-ed column posted Friday on ForeignPolicy.com, Mr. Kerry denounced what he said was “the systematic denial of medical assistance, food supplies and other humanitarian aid to huge proportions of the population.” The regime’s tactics, he said, “threaten to take a humanitarian disaster into the abyss.” They are “intolerable,” and “the world must act quickly.”
So what does the Obama administration propose to do to stop this barbarism? The simple answer is: nothing, other than issue strongly worded statements. 
Read the rest of the editorial at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mr-kerrys-empty-words-on-syria/2013/10/28/d422b6c4-3feb-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html

Friday, August 30, 2013

Syria: Plain and True, Fact and Fantasy, Past and Present, but ever since it's artificial creation by the French and the British, it's always been an artificial 'Line in the Sand'. For President Obama, though, it's now 'a red line' in the sand




Awesome Sean Lee @humanprovince! "An open letter on Syria to Western narcissists."
http://humanprovince.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/an-open-letter-on-syria-to-western-narcissists/">http://humanprovince.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/an-open-letter-on-syria-to-western-narcissists/</a>





















































































Monday, August 26, 2013

On Syria, this week I think Obama is going to redefine yet another word and that word is "imminent," as per our purported upcoming bombing of Syria. Per what George F. Will has said previously about Obama's over-blown rhetoric on the campaign and at The White House, now I think even normal words will start losing their true meaning if he says them too often

Not that you asked, but on the issue of Syria, I think that this week, President Obama is going to redefine yet another word and that word is "imminent," as per our purported upcoming bombing of Syria because of the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons to clear areas of Syrian rebels who want Bashar al-Assad out of power, dead or alive.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/

Just like MLB's so-called "imminent" decision on suspending Alex Rodriguez that was two weeks that seemed like two months!
And thus far, meaningless, since he continues to play.

Laura Ingraham interviews George F. Will. Uploaded March 2, 2013. 

Per columnist George F. Will's recent spot-on comments that Obama's over-blown rhetoric was having a negative effect on both American citizens and the American lexicon, a line of thinking that for all sorts of reasons I admit will always have appeal to me, regardless of whom it is being said about
I think Obama is going to redefine yet another word and that word is "imminent," the
word of choice for newspaper headline writers and U.S. Senators.

Under him imminent is going to come to mean the combination of "one-of-these-days 
when I get around to it,PLUS, "I really wish you hadn't done that because now I have
to do something I really don't want to do but will because you gave me no choice."

I am now starting to come around to the idea, more than ever, that anything Obama does
makes things worse, regardless of intentions, regardless of the issue.

In that sense, he's like like many South Florida pols I could name, who don't properly prepare for public meetings and seem to have no remorse for NOT fighting harder for their own residents and taxpayers, and are are chronically unprepared to engage in genuine oversight and accept some personal responsibility for asking hard questions when necessary, not just roll-over for city or county mangers and their staffs.
You know the names!

Friday, October 19, 2012

Vacillating Obama: Washington Post's Jackson Diehl zeroes-in on fundamental weakness of Obama's dithering Mid-East policy and multilateralism: Obama’s greatest failure - "His miscalculations on Syria have led to a wider war" that threatens to bring in more dangerous players and more unpredictability, NOT more stability and democracy; @JacksonDiehl, #syria


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I've been wanting to post this excellent analysis by The Washington Post's veteran foreign policy hand Jackson Diehl since reading it online early, early Sunday morning, while listening to some hard news online via the BBC.
Soon thereafter, I sent it out to a couple dozen well-informed friends and acquaintances across the country and around the world, who follow U.S. foreign policy as closely as I do, and who also like me, shake their head at what President Obama is doing. 

Though we all disagreed on lots of matters whenever we were together, we're all in agreement about this Diehl column -it's spot-on analysis from the get-go about Barack Obama's unwillingness to stop digging the foreign policy hole he has put the United States in.
He just keeps digging, utterly convinced that he's right and that everyone else is wrong.

I suspect that in about a dozen years or so, people who voted for Obama in 2008 will actually shake their head in wonder that they ever allowed themselves to willfully ignore his inexperience and weaknesses and elect someone as president who was foolish enough to convince himself -and them- that his carefully-constructed personal/media narrative would somehow allow him to solve longstanding problems.
It hasn't and it doesn't and it won't.

Despite all the accumulated evidence on U.S. foreign policy that shows he has made already bad situations worse, sometimes, much worse, Obama still remains utterly convinced that the sheer star power of his personality will lead to positive results.
It's the ultimate act of -and sign of- his amazing hubris.


The Washington Post
How Obama bungled the Syrian revolution
By Jackson Diehl
October 14, 2012
Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans are doing their best to portray the assault on the U.S. mission in Libya and its aftermath as a signal foreign policy disaster for Barack Obama. But my bet is that when historians look back on Obama’s mistakes in the last four years, they will focus on something entirely different: his catastrophic mishandling of the revolution in Syria.
The deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi were a calamity — but those losses were mainly the result of poor security decisions by mid-level State Department officials, not policy choices by Obama. The president’s handling of Syria, on the other hand, exemplifies every weakness in his foreign policy — from his excessive faith in “engaging” troublesome foreign leaders to his insistence on multilateralism as an end in itself to his self-defeating caution in asserting American power.
Read the rest of the column at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jackson-diehl-how-obama-bungled-the-syrian-revolution/2012/10/14/13c492d2-13b2-11e2-be82-c3411b7680a9_story.html


Read previous Diehl columns at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/jackson-diehl/2011/02/24/ABccMXN_page.html
I subscribe to his RSS feed and get his columns as sson as they go online.
http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/linksets/opinions/jackson-diehl

Also see his Twitter page: https://twitter.com/JacksonDiehl

The National Journal
Obama’s Quagmire: Syria and the Islamist Arc, Hammered on leadership, the president struggles for a Middle East policy.
By Michael Hirsh
Updated: September 21, 2012  1:55 p.m., 
September 21, 2012  1:07 p.m.
U.S. and Western diplomats are concerned that the longer Bashar al-Assad hangs on to his failing regime in Damascus, the more likely it is that the aftermath of the Syrian rebellion will be dominated by Islamist elements, completing an arc of newly empowered radical groups along the southern half of the Mediterranean from Libya to Syria. 
Read the rest of the column at: http://nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/obama-s-quagmire-syria-and-the-islamist-arc-20120921?mrefid=site_search

As I've noted here several times over the past two years with videos of him speaking forthrightly about Syria, Florida Senator Marco Rubio has been much more realistic than Hillary Clinton's dog-chasing-its-tail State Dept. on the reality of what has been going on the Middle East and what is likely to happen if President Obama's dithering foreign policy is given four more years to make things worse.

And seriously, how does U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice still even have a job? 
Is there no penalty for her abject failure, serial lying to the American public and Congress and her calculated and willful ignorance?
Rice's performance the past month has validated all the criticism of her as nothing more than a political hack with foreign policy pretensions, not a serious foreign policy professional, no matter what her actual experience is.
Susan Rice is the female version of Rahm Emanuel -a fixer.
And a Grade B fixer at that.

How can we reasonably expect representatives of other countries to trust her and take her seriously if average Americans have learned from watching her for themselves, after paying attention to her own words and actions, NOT to trust her?


SenatorMarcoRubio video: U.S. Senator Marco Rubio on Foreign Aid to Libya, Egypt and Pakistan and what America and American taxpayers have a right to expect from these countries in exchange for U.S. dollars. Uploaded September 20, 2012. http://youtu.be/SFOBW7xkz7g Reminder, this video is a month old.

Articles and columns on Syria in The Washington Post, in chron order:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/newssearch/search.html

By the way, if anyone reading this post knows anyone at Foreign Policy magazine, tell them that their YouTube Channel is the very picture of irrelevant.
One original video in the past nine months during a presidential election year?
That's embarrassing!
http://www.youtube.com/user/ForeignPolicyTV

Friday, April 29, 2011

Marco Rubio is crystal clear in Foreign Policy magazine - "How America Must Respond to the Massacre in Syria"

Foreign Policy
How America Must Respond to the Massacre in Syria

It’s time for President Obama to back up his rhetoric with firm action.
The first step: Recall the U.S. ambassador from Damascus.

By Marco Rubio

April 28, 2011


In recent days, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime has used its army to murder hundreds of innocent civilians as part of a vicious campaign of violence against unarmed Syrian demonstrators. What we are witnessing in Syria is another tragic outrage in the Middle East that requires immediate condemnation backed by specific measures from the United States and the international community. U.S. President Barack Obama needs to make clear whose side America is on, back up our rhetoric with action, and clearly articulate why Syria matters to the United States.
Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/28/how_america_must_respond_to_the_massacre_in_syria