“Why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force?” Obama recently and plaintively asked about Ukraine. In reality, nobody is. What actual earthlings are eager for is sending military assistance to Ukraine’s woefully equipped forces.
That’s what the interim prime minister asked for when he visited here in March — and was denied. Two months later, military assistance was the first thing Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s newly elected president, said he wanted from the United States. Note: not boots on the ground.
Same for Syria. It was Obama, not his critics, who went to the brink of a military strike over the use of chemical weapons. From which he then flinched. Critics have been begging Obama to help train and equip the outmanned and outgunned rebels — a policy to which he now intimates he might finally be coming around.
Three years late. Qusair, Homs, and major suburbs of Damascus have already been retaken by the government. The battle has by now so decisively tilted toward Assad — backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, while Obama dithered — that Assad is holding triumphal presidential elections next week.
Amid all this, Obama seems unaware of how far his country has fallen.
Read the whole thing, of course.
After five-plus years of watching Professor Ditherton Wiggleroom’s endless Hamlet act, there’s but one safe conclusion to draw. It isn’t that he makes bad decisions — every president makes mistakes. It’s that he takes so long to come to a decision, and that decision is so often at odds with his previous pronouncements, that our allies have decided Wiggleroom isn’t to be trusted and our adversaries know he isn’t often to be feared. He’s good for a drone strike, and the occasional outburst of leading from behind, but about the only thing you can rely on is that chaos will follow in his wake.
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