An interesting piece from PJMedia’s Richard Fernandez: Ring of Fire. Excerpt:
Peter Beinart’s widely quoted article in the Atlantic, “Actually, Obama Does Have a Strategy in the Middle East,” has the tagline “the president is neither a dove nor a hawk. He’s a fierce minimalist.” Nowhere in the article does Beinart explain the meaning of this cryptic catchphrase, except as an allusion to the president’s exquisite judgment. It seems an article of faith that Obama will neither bathe the world in blood like his predecessor nor remain passive, as conservative critics accuse him of doing. He will avoid excess and get it just right, like the Three Bears; neither too hot nor too cold. A fierce minimalist.
Unfortunately Beinart avoids defining what is just enough. Where is the Pole Star in this murk? No answer is attempted except that Obama will point it out and not because Beinart can explain where it is. He ends on a note of touching faith: “Barack Obama didn’t become president by tilting at windmills.”
No, Obama became president because people like Beinart believed he would take them to a different place than where they now stand, with each hour bringing a new humiliation and crisis. Roger Simon wrote on Twitter: “Not a single #liberal friend of mine wants to discuss politics now. They’re humiliated by Obama.”
Can we salvage the mess that is the Middle East today? It’s easy enough to say that ISIS may have arisen because of our interventions in Iraq and Syria, and it may even be true; perhaps ruthless thug-dictators are the only ones capable of holding Islamist shitbags at bay in Mesopotamia, and however bad a guy Saddam Hussein was (and this is speaking as someone who saw Kuwait City in February of 1991) he was mostly content to be a bad guy in his own country. Ditto for his Ba’athist scumbag partner Assad in Syrian.
But the fact it, ISIS has arisen, and all too many of them have British and U.S. passports. They want to kill Westerners in general and Americans in particular, and they make no bones about their plans to do it right here, on our own soil. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin continues kicking up his heels in Ukraine.
We may be very close to the kind of global conflagration we haven’t seen the like of since 1945. Will President Obama continue to dither while the world burns?
Mr. Fernandez concludes:
What happened? Somehow yesterday’s gentle campfires are now raging conflagrations. It would seem that of the two presidents, Franklin Roosevelt may have had the better understanding of fire. The president may think he’s in control. But maybe he’s not. The important thing is for the president’s supporters to stop kidding themselves. They’ve wasted enough time already without getting lost in catchphrases like “fierce minimalist.”
Fierce minimalist. If there ever was a contradiction, that’s one; and as anyone familiar with Aristotle’s Laws of Thought knows, contradictions don’t exist.
