Christopher Dickey and John Barry write:
From Washington’s vantage, every Friday is becoming Black Friday in the Middle East. Muslim prayers turn to protests that keep building toward full-scale uprisings faster than anyone had predicted, and with potentially cataclysmic consequences nobody dares imagine. This Friday, the shock came in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad runs one of the Middle East’s most repressive regimes. Across the country, protesters have grown ever more emboldened in recent weeks, and on Friday they poured into the streets by the tens of thousands to face the deadly fusillades of Assad’s security forces. More than 70 died. What did the White House have to say? From Air Force One: “We call on all sides to cease and desist from the use of violence.”
Surely President Obama can do better than that. Or perhaps not. The drama—the tragedy—increasingly apparent at the White House is of a brilliant intellect who is nonetheless confounded by events, a strategist whose strategies are thwarted and who is left with almost no strategy at all, a persuasive politician and diplomat who gets others to crawl out on limbs, has them take big risks to break through to a new future, and then turns around and walks away from them when the political winds in the United States threaten to shift. It’s not enough to say the Cabinet is divided about what to do. Maybe the simplest and in many ways the most disturbing explanation for all the flailing is offered by veteran journalist and diplomat Leslie H. Gelb: “There is one man in this administration who debates himself.” President Obama.
These patterns of behavior and their consequences have been on horrifying display in the blood-drenched streets of Misrata, Libya, where the population has begged for more support from NATO and the United States. But they did not begin with Libya, or with the surprise uprising in Tunisia in January or the stunning fall of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in February. They were evident from Year 1 of the Obama presidency in his excruciating deliberations over the Afghan surge, in the hand extended ineffectually to Iran, and the lines drawn in the sand, then rubbed out and moved back, and further back, in the dismal, failed efforts to build a Palestinian peace process. But in Libya the crisis of American tentativeness has grown worse almost by the day. Muammar Gaddafi holds on, despite Obama’s demand for him to leave, and the civilians that the Americans, their allies, and the United Nations vowed to protect are being slaughtered.
I’ll add my two cents worth. “O” doesn’t deserve to be P.O.T.U.S. and certainly doesn’t deserve to be reelected either. That doesn’t mean that the present crop of wannabes from the Right should even be considered. Somewhere there is written “give me your old, tired, huddled masses”, or some thing like that, but definitely not the present bunch that want to be the front runner to replace “O”. I will take it one step further, AIPAC needs to go, along with all those who support it. This is the U.S.A., not Israel. The Empire is failing, before we know it, it will be over. The U.S. may be fomenting some of the Arab uprising, but they can’t control the outcome, no matter how big the ego in Washington is. We are on the cusp of not world domination, but world destruction, all for the short term profit of the few.
The U.S. and other countries have to do something to stop this destruction and killing in Syria otherwise the Syrian forces will so many people who fight against them so the Syrian government leaders should be punished.