Right Photo: Oldest artist granddaughter, Emma, at Grand Canyon (Emma Darvick.com)
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----Less than favorable review of Obama's Mid East trip. (See 1 below.)
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Obama's daughters living the high life at the expense of tax payers and all those poor Obama's policies have created? Sour grapes or justifiable commentary? You decide. (See 2 below.)
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Turkey and Israel rise above their differences/grievances. (See 3 below.)
Will the CIA wind up mistakenly supporting The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria? (See 3a below.)
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A leaderless world will become a more dangerous world as the vacuum filled, by our withdrawal, will not be one we would wish for and I doubt , even if Obama begins to grow, he can correct the damage his incompetence, naivety and wrong headed pusillanimity has caused.
His crippling spending and precipitous withdrawal and failure to support allies while appeasing our enemies has become far too damaging to reverse. The die is set!
For most Obama voters they will not understand the negative implications of the mistakes he made in his first four years and his continuation of them in his second term until the s--- hits the fan, which it is beginning to do. Thus Obama is backtracking not only on foreign policy decisions which proved disastrous but now his domestic policies are beginning to pinch so he might be forced to limit runaway entitlements.
Pigeons have a way of coming home to roost and the same for turkeys! (See 4 and 4a below.)
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Dick
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1)Peacemaker or Trojan Horse?
By Jerrold L. Sobel
With what must have been the same fanfare and adulation our textbooks relate the people of Troy gave to the Homeric "Trojan Horse," President Obama received when he touched down in Israel last week. To the blare of trumpets in the background, a full military honor guard, and a red carpet strewn up the entire tarmac, the president majestically disembarked.
Barely off Air Force One, Obama was immediately surrounded and embraced by both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's ancient president, Shimon Perez. The smiles, the touching, if ever there was a kumbaya moment between heads of state, this was it. As if not enough to make every Jewish liberal in Israel and the United States kvel (beam with pride), the president brought down the house when he spoke in Hebrew: "tov lihiyot shuv ba'aretz," meaning: it's good to be be back here in Israel. He then finished off his initial remarks with the oft repeated refrain, one which rings hollow to many Israeli advocates: "America stands by Israel."
You might ask, why should such a proclamation be greeted with skepticism? His speech the following day to a gaggle of college students may offer some proof.
To what many, including this writer, think is the zenith of chutzpah, he went over the head of Israel's democratically-elected government and directly appealed to the population to put pressure on their; once again, democratically-elected government to end "the frustration in the international community" to do so, "Israel must reverse an undertow of isolation."
What he failed to mention was, whom are they being isolated by, the EU? The EU is a conglomeration of countries which throughout the centuries haven't exactly been kind to Jews and even today despite overwhelming evidence of decades-long terrorism still refuse to brand Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
Backing off like a boxer having just thrown a punch, to rousing applause, the president reiterated his mantra: "As long as there is a United States of America, you are not alone." You guessed it, the next punch was on its way.
"Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land,"
"Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land,"
Exactly what land was he referring to? Where in history did Palestinian Arabs have a land of their own? Judea and Samaria, which is absurdly referred to as the "West Bank" was, has been, and still is the cradle of Jewish civilization from time immemorial. Except for the willfully blind it's ludicrous to rehash the historical fact that Jews inhabited this land several millennium prior to the advent of Islam.
At no time in the Islamic timeline between the murder of Imam Ali in 661 and the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty, and the formation in 1453 of the Ottoman Empire by Mehmet II, was there a sovereign Palestinian Arab state. This is a fact the president either fails to come to grip with or stealthy ignores.
But why should little things such as facts get in the way of a man on a messianic mission to create a peace from a process proven defunct time and again over the past seven decades.? "Land for Peace" is moribund not because of "settlements" -- there was no settlement issue in 1947 when the Arabs turned down partition and opted to attack Israel the following year.
The proposed internationalization of Jerusalem was likewise refused by the Arabs. From that time frame onward until this very day, every overture of peace based upon land and compromise has been categorically met with refusal and violence by the Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab states as well. Yet incomprehensibly, President Obama, as he has done throughout his first term and under the guise of "undying friendship" still disingenuously places the onus for compromise upon Israel.
At Camp David in 2000, what greater compromise could Israel have made other than offering the Palestinians 97% of Judea and Samaria, full control of the Gaza Strip; including a land link between the two areas, and withdrawal from 63 "settlements?" In exchange for the three percent annexation of Judea and Samaria, Israel would increase the size of the Gaza territory by roughly a third. Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem would become the capital of the new state, and refugees would have the right of return to the Palestinian state; receiving reparations from a $30 billion international fund collected to compensate them.
If not compromise enough, the Palestinian Arabs would also maintain control over their holy places, and would be given desalinization plants to ensure them adequate water. The only concessions Arafat would have had to make was Israeli sovereignty over the parts of the Western Wall religiously significant to Jews. Having acquiesced on every main Palestinian concern, these Israeli offers were categorically rejected by the Nobel Peace Prize winning archterrorist. He opted instead to launch the second intafada.
This is not supposition. During a TV interview on April 25, 2002, Dennis Ross, the senior Middle East advisor to President Clinton and chief U.S. negotiator reiterated these points as fact.
Speaking of facts, what did the "land for Peace" paradigm get Israel following her unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon? Or for that matter, Ariel Sharon's abandonment of Gaza during his failed, inexpedient gesture of peace in 2005; dismantling towns and villages, displacing thousands of Jewish families.
Likewise strange, in none of his pontifications before adoring crowds at the Jerusalem Convention Center did Obama make mention of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's plan for peace with the Palestinian Arabs in 2008.
According to this plan, Olmert proposed giving land to a future Palestinian state in the Beit She'an Valley near Kibbutz Tirat Tzvi; in the Judean Hills near Nataf and Mevo Betar; and in the area of Lachish and of the Yatir Forest. Together, the areas would have involved the transfer of 327 square kilometers of territory from within the Green Line. How did Abbas respond to this and what was his counteroffer? In rapid succession; he didn't and there was none. Next stop on this train to nowhere, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the 10-month building moratorium.
In November 2009 after months of incessant cajoling and pressure to halt "settlement" building in parts of her ancient homeland, Netanyahu called Obama's bluff and agreed to a building moratorium.
Initially the freeze was greeted with praise and optimism by the administration. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the pause in construction "helps move forward" the peace process. Through negotiations, she said, the two sides could reconcile Israel's desire for recognized and secure borders with Palestinian hopes for an independent state based upon borders before the 1967 war. This statement, predicating the foundation of negotiations on "borders before the 1967 war," tipped Obama's hat.
Then as now, no Israeli compromise short of land acquiescence seems to satisfy this man's obsession for a peace deal. Having in effect negotiated the Palestinian position, the settlement building freeze not surprisingly was once again met with a recalcitrant Palestinian response.
Offering no new proposals to his adulating audience, the president began wrapping up his two-day visit to Israel. To round after round of raucous applause Obama gave kudos to Israel's 100 high tech companies, her research centers, 10 Nobel laureates, Herzl, Begin, and Rabin. In his well-perfected glibness he fit in every platitude his speechwriter could think of. But to those astute enough and willing to read between the lines, what he didn't say had the most meaning, namely:
The Palestinian Arabs have steadfastly refused what should be the starting point of any peace negotiation: the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
As if in control of the land they so ostensibly yearn so deeply for, their leadership has rejected every overture of peace presented by different Israeli governments, not once responding with a viable one of their own.
On all of their maps and educational material, all of Israel is shown as a Palestinian state. Streets, boulevards, and town squares are continuously named after homicide bombers. Endemic hatred of Jews -- mind you, not Israelis -- is taught to their children at the earliest ages, as is total denial of Jewish connection to this land or recognition of Jewish Holy sites.
Until these strikingly obvious pitfalls are erased and the nonexistent "land for peace" archetype scrapped, Obama's oratory will accomplish nothing other than provide evidence for Albert Einstein's famous quote: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
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2)Sasha and Malia Obama 'Learn What They Live'
By Jeannie DeAngelis
If it's really true that "children learn what they live," then the First Daughters are learning how to be highbrow aristocrats whose extravagances are enjoyed without embarrassment, in full view and at the expense of the suffering. That's right, "the suffering," because notwithstanding the onslaught of Obamaganda, most people in America today, thanks to Sasha and Malia's Dad, are suffering in one way or another.
Meanwhile, when it comes to showering themselves with the perks of the good life, the Obamas exercise zero restraint. In fact, three months into the second term, they're actually outdoing themselves. Not only that, but the elitist lifestyle the first family lives has a vindictive in-your-face, so-what-if-you-don't-like-it edge to it that smacks of spiteful arrogance. Therefore, Sasha and Malia are learning what their liberal parents teach them, and that is to convey the following message to the unwashed masses: "Do as I say and I'll do what I want, and I'll do it with your money."
And for all of Barack's $900K Florida golf weekends, and more importantly, Michelle's alleged $10 million vacations, haute couture, and overpaid personal staff, the tragic victims of their selfishness and insensitive lack of fiscal restraint are Sasha and Malia.
It's common knowledge that in the Obama household, babies are sometimes considered punishment while abortion is a treasured right. Attending church is a twice-a-year photo op and vacations, since the first of the year, average out to be a once-a-month priority. While Dad and Mom talk the talk about sharing, fairness, and self-sacrifice, in their own lives they exhibit none of these qualities. Consequently, the Obama youngsters are learning through observation that concern over appearing selfish, godless, and hypocritical should be dismissed.
Meanwhile, the girls' mother Michelle spends more time than she should proselytizing parents about their children's BMIs, diet, and exercise. Sadly, what Mrs. Obama doesn't seem to recognize is that plump children who possess the character traits she lacks will fare better in life than slender, vegetable-eating youngsters who are indifferent, self-absorbed, and snotty- the very qualities she exhibits, and are at the core of the example she sets for her daughters.
Although they live in a pampered, fairytale environment, the First Daughters are neither too young nor too insulated to be unaware that 48,000,000 Americans are on food stamps and that 12 million are unemployed, 23% of whom are either black or Hispanic. That's why, rather than flaunt the next 17-day, $4-million family jaunt to Hawaii, Obama should request that Air Force One head out to California - not to visit George Clooney and Eva Longoria, but to school his daughters about the harsh effect 9.8% unemployment is having on the Golden State.
Nonetheless, as a casual observer of a seemingly insatiable appetite for all things swanky and sumptuous, one can't help but wonder, do Mr. and Mrs. Obama ever reflect upon what they are teaching their impressionable children about life? In three months they've gone from the balmy isle of Oahu, Hawaii to the bunny slopes of Aspen, Colorado. Sasha and Malia even watched from afar asDad the Duffer golfed in Florida for a cool million with the philandering Tiger Woods.
Now, in the middle of a fiscal cliff/sequester crisis, without a care in the world the Obama girls have been led to believe that having staffers drag luggage stuffed with designer duds onto Marine One and helicoptering off to Paradise Island for five days is an acceptable choice to make. Moreover, despite an economy on the edge of collapse, the Obama princesses probably can't help but believe that airplanes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour to fly are there mainly to transport them to fun locales.
Last spring, Malia Obama's trip to Mexico allegedly cost taxpayers $115,500.87. This year, the two sisters are at a Caribbean resort being chauffeured around in a motorcade and "escorted to the held elevator," accompanied by "a gaggle of friends." Sans parents, Sasha and Malia are vacationing at the Atlantis, home to the Royal Tower Bridge Suite that goes for $25,000 per night. These tender-aged adolescents are accompanied by Secret Service agents who stand on the sidelines as they dance, giggle, and hang out at Club Crush, which for "teens ages 13 to 17 and tweens ages 9 to 13 vacationing on Paradise Island...[is the] ultimate nightclub."
Meanwhile, the rest of America's children, some of whom had humble spring break plans to ride in the family van to Washington DC, watch with their faces pressed against the wrought iron railing surrounding a closed White House. These schoolchildren are the disappointed victims of a sequester decision Barack Obama made while Sasha and Malia were preparing to party their little hearts out on a trip financed mostly with taxpayer money.
If anything, the life Sasha and Malia are living proves a few things - not about them, but about their parents - none of which are good. Most specifically, the First Couple are either profoundly arrogant, profoundly stupid or, most probably, profoundly indifferent to the effect their behavior may have on their daughters. Unfortunately, if Sasha and Malia Obama are truly learning what they live, then while their lives may be good in the material sense, the life lessons they're learning are not.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)Turkey and Israel: interests over grudges
By Smadar Bat Adam - Israel Hayom,
Turkish media reported this week that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's apology has paved the way for a massive joint pipeline project carrying natural gas from Israel to Turkey and from there to Europe. There is no overestimating the influence joint economic interests can have on stable relations between countries.
It is said that during a private conversation, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion once thanked French President Charles de Gaulle for France's help to Israel, attributing it to the strong alliance and friendship between the two countries. To which De Gaulle replied, “France has no friends, only interests.”
Turkey too has interests. Despite Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's seeming attempts in recent years to turn Israel from a friend to an enemy, especially since the Mavi Marmara incident, it turns out that our common economic interests have been maintained and even gained momentum. It would be safe to say that beneath the outward hostility, a lot of positive energy has been flowing between the two countries.
Energy, as in energy markets, that is. Over six months ago a modest ceremony was held at the Azrieli Center, during which the Edeltech Group Ltd. marked the securing of financing for two electricity cogeneration power plants in Ashdod and Ramat Negev. These stations are expected to produce about 200 megawatts, on top of the 830 megawatts to be produced by the Dorad power plant in Ashkelon, which is in the final stages of construction.
Two additional power plants are in the offing, Solad and Tamar, which will add about 200 megawatts to the market. Together, these power plants would increase Israel's electricity producing ability by about 10 percent.
The senior partner of Edeltech, Ahmet Zorlu, is the owner of Zorlu Holding, the second largest holding company in Turkey. Zorlu of course took part in the ceremony, along with his partners and family members. Israel's success is his gain. Every intelligent person knows that Zorlu, like many others who do business in Israel, invests his money in Israel with the permission of the Turkish government. Zorlu Holding is the company that, along with Edeltech Group Ltd., has pushed for the pipeline exporting gas from Israel to Turkey. If and when it is established, the pipeline could carry gas worth $5 billion to $6 billion per year. Turkey would benefit from the ready availability of gas it lacks at present, as well as earn money from the transport of gas to Europe. Israel would benefit from an efficient, quick and cheap solution compared to the alternative, which involves liquefying gas for export.
The economic advantage is clear, as are the strategic and diplomatic advantages. We should remember that the East Mediterranean Gas Company's agreement to sell gas by pipeline from Egypt to Israel is considered the anchor of our relations with that country. The weakness of the agreement from Israel's point of view is that Egypt has control over the gas valve. The great thing about the Israeli-Turkish pipeline is that both countries have control. Israel has the right to open and close the valve while Turkey controls access to Europe. This is a win-win situation.
When President Barack Obama melted our hearts with his statement “you are not alone,” he repeated De Gaulle's lesson to Ben-Gurion: Countries do not have friends or enemies, they have interests. Obama made the phone call, Netanyahu said what was required, and Erdoğan played hard to get. Thank God common interests prevailed, and the new pipeline will transport an abundance of positive energy.
3a)Jordan's King Warns Obama; America Backs Muslim Brotherhood Agent as Syria's Next Ruler
By Barry Rubin -
”Don’t scare anyone. But once you gain ground then move ahead. You must utilize as many people as possible who may be of use to us.”
–Joseph Stalin to future Communist dictator of Hungary Mattyas Rakosi, December 5, 1944.
–Joseph Stalin to future Communist dictator of Hungary Mattyas Rakosi, December 5, 1944.
It really isn't too hard to understand what is happening in the Middle East if you watch the facts.
1. Jordan's King Abdallah, who President Barack Obama just visited, is clearly telling us what's going wrong: that the Muslim Brotherhood is dangerous and so why is the United States supporting it? Presumably, this is what Abdallah told Obama.
2. U.S. policy is now escalating support for a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Syria and the Syrian rebels increasingly have open Brotherhood leadership.
3. Repression is gradually escalating in Egypt with arrests of moderates, Islamists being sent to the military academy, and many more measures.
Regarding Jordan, Jeffrey Goldberg's has done an extremely valuable profile of Abdullah. The Jordanian monarch is telling Western visitors that their countries are making a big mistake by supporting the Islamists. He complains that the U.S. State Department is ignoring his complaints and that U.S. officials are telling him, “The only way you can have democracy is through the Muslim Brotherhood.”
He responds that the Brotherhood wants to impose anti-American reactionary governments and that his “major fight” is to stop them. No margin may be left for relative moderate and pro-American states between a Sunni Islamist alliance led by Egypt and including Turkey versus a Shia Islamist alliance led by Iran says Abdallah and he's right. The only difference, Abdallah explains, between the Turkish and Egyptian regimes are their timetables for installing dictatorships. Egypt's new president, says the king, is obsessed with a hostile view of Israel.
Here's the delicious irony! Last August the Jordanian Prime Minister Fayez Tarawneh launched a ferocious personal attack on me. Why? Because I said that the Sunni-Shia battle was going to replace the Arab-Israeli conflict. Well, that's what his king just said! LOL.
Meanwhile, while President Barack Obama was love-bombing Israel during his visit, U.S. policy was helping to install a Muslim Brotherhood supporter as the putative next leader of Syria. Obama’s strategy is, with appropriate adjustments to the national scene, the same as his disastrous policy in Egypt.
The new leader of the opposition coalition is Ghassan Hitto, an obscure figure who has been long-resident in the United States. His actual election contained two hints:
–He only received 35 votes from 63 members of the Syrian National Coalition. That show of support matches the number of Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters there.
–Only 48 out of the 63 even cast a ballot at all, showing lack of enthusiasm and possible U.S. pressure on groups to abstain rather than oppose Hitto.
During the Cold War, American policy toward Third World countries frequently looked for a “third way” democratic alternative, leaders who were neither Communists nor right-wing authoritarians. Today, however, the Obama Administration doesn’t do the equivalent at all, despite pretenses to the contrary. Rather it seeks leadership from the most seemingly moderate people who represent Islamist groups. Of course, this moderation is largely deceptive.
That was the pattern in Egypt; now it is the same failed strategy in Syria. Hitto is a typical example of such a person. He has lived in the United States and went to university there, so presumably knows America and has become more moderate by living there. He is involved in hi-tech enterprises so supposedly he is a modern type of guy. Remember how now-dictator of Syria Bashar al-Assad was lavishly praised because he studied and lived in London and was supposedly interested in Internet?
In addition, nobody has (yet) come up with an outrageous Hitto statement. His ties to the Brotherhood are not so blatant—even though they are obvious—that the Obama Administration and the mass media cannot deny and ignore them.
Yet the connections between Hitto and the Muslim Brotherhood—and those are only the ones documented quickly following his election—are extensive.
–He is founder of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, largely directed by Muslim Brotherhood people..
–He was a secretary-treasurer of the American Middle Eastern League for Palestine (AMELP), which is closely linked to the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), which supports Hamas and terrorism against Israel.
–He was a secretary-treasurer of the American Middle Eastern League for Palestine (AMELP), which is closely linked to the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), which supports Hamas and terrorism against Israel.
–Hitto was vice president of the CAIR Dallas/Fort Worth chapter and director of the Muslim American Society (MAS) Youth Center of Dallas which was a Muslim Brotherhood front group.
The list goes on and on.
As if to sum up the situation, Hassan Hassan of the United Arab Emirates newspaper The National, wrote an article entitled “How the Muslim Brotherhood Hijacked Syria’s Revolution.”
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4)Looking for Leadership
A disordered world devoid of U.S. leadership is not going to produce peace and prosperity.
By Daniel Henninger
The upwelling of support for the new pope, Francis, was about more than the Catholic Church. It reflected a felt need that what the secular world could use now, but does not have, is leadership. It is a yearning born of experience: When poorly led, the world tends toward disorder.
The one we've got just now looks to be coming under an unhealthy amount of negative pressure all at once—from the Middle East to the South China Sea to the Korean peninsula, atop a never-ending European financial crisis and a building fiscal crisis in the U.S. Scan the political horizon for a significant head of state willing or able to lead in this moment and you will see no one.
President Obama, for reasons of policy and personality, is inclined not to step forward, but to step back. Germany'sAngela Merkel presides over a great nation whose people have little stomach to lead anything ever again. In Tony Blair and David Cameron, Britain has had two recent prime ministers who've been eloquent on the goals of world leadership; but persistent national economic drift diminishes their authority, as it does Japan's.
Hopes for a leadership role from post-Soviet Russia have vanished amid what looks to be Vladimir Putin's genetic authoritarianism. Last week, Mr. Putin without irony rolled out uniformed men on horseback to greet new President Xi Jinping of China, the latest head of the world's oldest Communist party. Patching cracks in the party's legitimacy occupies the best energies of what one may loosely call China's leadership.
Does it matter, or can the world muddle through? A fair portion of the U.S. population spent many evenings recently watching "Downton Abbey" on PBS and "Parade's End" on HBO. Both British series resurrected the savage, senseless slaughter called World War I. In last weekend's Wall Street Journal, the reviewer of a new history of World War I, which plumbs the continuing mystery of why that war seems to have just happened, described how nations across Europe were led by men with feckless ambitions or diminished authority.
This isn't to suggest that a leadership vacuum inevitably fills with wars that spread across many borders. Let's just say there's not much precedent for the assumption that a global vacuum of leadership will fill with peace and prosperity.
The pope, however terrific this one may become, can't go it alone. John Paul II resisted Soviet communism, but he had Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher riding shotgun. Even non-fans of Reagan and Thatcher will admit that whatever else, they led. And because they were willing to lead in the 1980s, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl rose in stature to stand with them. Leadership at the top begets leadership below. And its opposite.
We are led today in a different way. Barack Obama has dedicated his presidency to revising the internal political and economic order of the United States. He wants to create a permanent progressive majority. Whatever one thinks of this, it is a heavy lift. When something as pedestrian as a budget sequester arrived, the president left Washington to fly around the country delivering speeches whose purpose, as widely reported, was to marginalize his opponents.
Populism is a full-time job. The payoff is the possibility of accumulating great political power. But a populist movement led by an American president runs two big risks. It alienates the other U.S. party. And it ignores the rest of the world, for which a busy populist has little time or interest. Barack Obama is in the red zone with both risks.
Syria's war, kept on Mr. Obama's back burner, is destabilizing an already disordered region. North Korea's Kim Jong Eun is escalating tensions with South Korea and the U.S. to a startling degree. Iran's bomb program spins forward. And it is disturbing to see a flyspeck like Cyprus so unsettle Europe's financial leadership at this late stage of the challenge to the euro-based system. All these matters have been treated so far with degrees of U.S. diffidence.
If in the next four years one of them falls over into a world crisis demanding big leadership, Mr. Obama is going to need the support of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and the rest of the Republican Party in Washington. Conventional wisdom holds that at crunchtime, it will always be there. But the Rand Paul filibuster challenging the president's authority, its merits aside, makes clear that this bipartisan bond is broken, and at an increasingly dangerous moment. (Of course the bipartisan breakdown began in the previous presidency.)
Barack Obama may be smart, but he isn't very wise. A wise or shrewder president would change course on his relations with Republican leaders because if the left-alone world blows and goes looking to him for leadership, he's going to need them, like it or not.
But he doesn't like it, so he probably won't.
4a)The (Longest) Road to Damascus
Obama begins to see the cost of doing nothing in Syria.
So now—24 months, 70,000 deaths and 500,000-plus refugees later—President Obama is contemplating a Syria policy that amounts to something other than determined inaction. The Administration's initial argument was that U.S. involvement would intensify the violence within Syria, strengthen the hand of extremists, extend Bashar Assad's political lease on life, and turn a civil war into a regional crisis.
That being exactly what has come to pass, Mr. Obama wants a course correction. A small one. In nautical terms, we're talking a half-point to starboard.
Specifically, the President is said to favor slightly beefing up the not-so-covert CIA assistance to secular Syrian rebels, which so far has amounted to some military training, to include actionable intelligence sharing. He also wants the State Department to coordinate overall regional assistance to the rebels, and to help with governance in Syrian areas under rebel control.
But Mr. Obama remains firmly opposed to providing arms to the rebels, much less involving U.S. military forces directly. His greatest fear, according to someone whose job it is to publicize authorized leaks from the government, is that too much involvement will require Mr. Obama to "own" the Syria problem in a way that will come to define the remainder of his Presidency.
We hate to break it to the Administration's Boswells, but Mr. Obama has owned the Syria debacle from Day One of the uprising, and even before it. The President came to office determined to improve relations with the Syrian dictator. That effort was unofficially led by then-Senator John Kerry, who once praised Mr. Assad as a man who had been "very generous with me." It took five months for the Administration to call for Mr. Assad to go, though it has since done nothing to make that happen.
As we warned last July ("The Syrian Civil War," July 19, 2012), "the cost of U.S. inaction carries a fast-rising price. . . . The longer we fail to step in, the harder it becomes to shape the outcome in Syria."
At the time, the war had resulted in 112,000 refugees and an estimated 17,000 fatalities, a fraction of the current figures. Mr. Assad had not yet begun firing ballistic missiles against Syrian cities. Iraq was only beginning to slide into its current de facto pro-Assad/pro-Iran posture. The al Qaeda-linked al Nusra Front was only six months old and hadn't gained its current strength or popular cachet as a Syrian rebel force. Israel hadn't yet been drawn in with air strikes against weapons moving from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
All these trends will worsen, perhaps dramatically, without a serious U.S. effort to overthrow the Assad regime. Yet the Administration continues to point to the risks of any involvement, such as the fear that U.S. arms might fall into the hands of bad guys. That's a real risk, but the weapons are flowing anyway. The difference is that today we have little sway over where any weapons go.
The U.S. could boost its diplomatic leverage with the rebels and their regional allies by enforcing no-fly zones over portions of Syria. That would help prevent the regime from using its attack jets and helicopter gunships against civilian targets while allowing insurgents to consolidate and extend their territorial gains. It also means we could use limited force in a way that strengthens the hand of rebels we support at the expense of those we don't.
The U.S. could also follow last week's call by Senators John McCain and Carl Levin for targeted air strikes against Mr. Assad's air force and Scud missile batteries. We should add that such a use of force would require Mr. Obama to persuade Congress and the American public that it is in the national interest, something he has rarely tried to do even when 100,000 U.S. troops were in Afghanistan.
Nobody is arguing for American boots on the ground, but the sooner Mr. Assad falls the easier it will be to prevent the various nightmare scenarios that are becoming more likely. Among those scenarios: the disintegration of the Syrian state into warring ethnic enclaves; revenge killings amounting to genocide against Mr. Assad's Allawite sect; the spillover of war into Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq; the further empowerment of al Nusra and similar jihadists; the seizure by parties unknown of Syria's chemical weapons stocks; or the breakout of a pan-regional Shiite-Sunni conflict.
Mr. Obama may imagine that his only foreign policy problems are those he chooses to touch. If he were Prime Minister of New Zealand, that might be true. But that's not how the world works. Sooner or later the world's biggest problems always land on an American President's desk. The catastrophe in Syria is unfolding on his watch, and history will judge him not merely on how he acts, but on how he has refused to act.
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