While I have sympathy for President Obama in coping with the many problems that the Obama administration faces in dealing with Middle Eastern problems, my sympathy is limited because the administration has long acted in the belief that these problems were actually caused by America rather than being Middle Eastern problems. And with the new not-Bush Obama sensitive foreign policy, President Obama could reach out to the Moslem world and cure everything.
But the problems--whether sectarian slaughter and worries of WMD proliferation in Syria (or Iraq, in the day), Iranian nuclear ambitions, or Egyptian anti-Americanism--have not been cured by the existence of President Obama. And we are justified in judging the Obama administration's Middle East policies based on their claims of what they could do in their ignorance of the problems that had nothing to do with so-called cowboy, unilateral American policies:
Even if you are willing to grant, as I do, that (a) governing is harder than giving speeches and (b) America’s capacity to shape events is limited, the president’s Middle East failures, especially when juxtaposed with his unearned arrogance, are staggering. And it’s certainly reasonable to judge Mr. Obama by his own words and standards.
Yes. We can criticize the Obama administration both for failing to make things better and for believing that they uniquely had the ability to "remake" our relations with the Moslem world for the better.
This framework has been working out just swell, eh? Although to be fair, it is momentous.
