Seriously, Fareed?
As America navigates a changing world, the people who seem to be having the greatest difficulty with the adjustment are the country’s pundits. Over the past few weeks, a new conventional wisdom has congealed on the op-ed pages: The United States is in retreat, and this is having terrible consequences around the world.
The Giant Brain will have none of this talk! President Obama is freaking awesome! You aren't even worthy to give him the Presidential Daily Briefing!
Wait. What? never mind.
Fareed leads his defense of The One with an attack on the Iraq versus Syria comparison:
Forget the Federal Reserve’s “taper,” Niall Ferguson tells us in the Wall Street Journal, the much greater danger is Washington’s “geopolitical taper.” He presents as evidence of Obama’s disastrous policies the fact that more people have died in the “Greater Middle East” under Obama than under George W. Bush. But there is a huge difference in the two cases. In the Bush years, the numbers were high because of the war in Iraq, a conflict initiated by the Bush administration. In the Obama years, the numbers are high because of the war in Syria, a conflict that the Obama administration has stayed out of. If this logic were to be followed, Bush is responsible for the tens of thousands of deaths in Sudan and Congo during his presidency.
Zakaria's defense rests on the notion that doing nothing when you could means you bear no responsibility for any deaths.
Fareed Zakaria--who so obviously could not find his own buttocks with both hands and a GPS signal--clearly still wants a position in the Obama administration foreign policy team.
Neglected is that the death toll caused by the Iraq War was not some sudden change from pre-war deaths. Saddam was already a killing machine and to use the Zakaria defense you have to assume that if Bush hadn't led the invasion effort, no deaths would have followed.
Also neglected is that the overthrow of Saddam itself was won at low cost. The real death toll took place when Iran and Syria essentially invaded Iraq by supporting Baathists and Sadrist death squads while funneling in al Qaeda suicide bombers and killers. So Bush really didn't start the insurgency, now did he?
But if you want to argue that the chain of unintended events that Bush initiated with his decision to remove the bloody Saddam dictatorship fall on him? Well, that applies to President Obama, too. So nice try.
But more to the point, the comparison of carnage is appropriate because the Obama administration very explicitly claimed that their inaction in Syria was a response to the "lessons" of Iraq.
They believed, as Zakaria does, that our intervention caused the death toll in Iraq. So refusing to intervene in Syria would prevent the death toll from rising by letting the Syrians sort out their problems without our presence provoking jihadis and making things worse.
So in a few years of war, we have the casualty toll approaching 150,000 in Syria. In Iraq, in 11 years of war--including recent surges in killings by al Qaeda--the casualty count has not reached that level.
The Washington Post put it well:
FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”
That's it. Syria is merely one place in the world where the fantasy plays out.
Obviously, President Obama isn't responsible for the decisions of others to be evil. But he is responsible for the policies that he put in place because he believed (still believes?) that the evil was provoked by our actions and by fear of our power.
After five years, our enemies increasingly realize this is how he thinks. So they act. They act evil. And Belmont Club writes that our allies finally noticed:
The capitals of Europe have gone from complacency to a near panic in the last 72 hours, not simply over the crisis in the Ukraine but in the growing awareness that for at least the last half decade they’ve been standing on a trapdoor.
At least president Obama, the leader of the Free World, has.
Yeah, when the frontier ranch is under attack by a murderous gang, you want cowboys and not community organizers.
I'm sure Barack Obama is a fine man. A good man. I have no doubt that he intends good things. But he is not the leader of the free world.
But it's our own fault. Our nation voted for him twice. President Obama has never pretended he wanted that title. At best, he wanted to personify the hopes of "the world" for a better future. But much of the world has hopes only for an America unable or unwilling to thwart their aims.
The reality is, we once stood in the way of evil. We didn't prevent all evil. And we did some things wrong, in the process. But we kept the evil to a dull roar. Now we just want to watch. And our allies will watch--in horror.
The evil has returned to Europe.
And we send Kerry. The evil is not impressed.
UPDATE: To be clear, I am not blaming President Obama for the deaths in Syria (or the invasion of Ukraine, for that matter). I am using the left's own reasoning to also defend President Bush of the charge that because he destroyed the murderous Saddam regime that he is responsible for the subsequent deaths in Iraq.
Remember, too, that it was from the left that we got the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine that so obviously died in Syria. Zakaria clearly rejects that doctrine in his defense of the president.
