President Barack Obama delivers remarks during a meeting with people that wrote him letters explaining how they benefited from the Affordable Care Act in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, on Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2015, in Washington. Obama also condemned the execution of Jordanian Air Force pilot First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh by the Islamic State group. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Media meatheads are describing President Obama’s plan for confronting Islamic State as a “balance” between doing nothing and all-out war. They remind me of an old friend’s insight that “balance” can be meaningless to the point of parody.
Said he: “If I have one bare foot in scalding water and the other bare foot in ice water, then, on balance, I’m comfortable.”
Obama’s “balance” in foreign policy is just as ridiculous, and a helluva lot more dangerous.
The ramifications of the president’s vision show how warped it is.
Recent events show a disturbing picture of the emerging world order he favors. It starts with bringing Iran in from the cold, a plan Obama has been working on since taking office in 2009.
The ramifications of the president’s vision show how warped it is.
His concessions to the mad mullahs’ nuclear program are alarming, but that is only a piece of his strategy. As national defense veteran Michael Doran writes in Mosaic magazine, Iran is key to Obama’s “thinking about the role of the United States in the world, and especially in the Middle East.”
He argues persuasively that the president wants a grand bargain that would, in Obama’s own words, “integrate Iran into the international community” and “make it a very successful regional power.” The president even suggested Iran, a Shia thugocracy, could help fight against Islamic State, the Sunni terrorist group that created a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria and is now expanding to Libya.
The ramifications of the president’s vision show how warped it is. It means, Doran writes, that we have accepted Iran’s ally, Syrian butcher Bashar Assad, remaining in power despite crossing Obama’s red line of using chemical weapons. It means we won’t contest Iran’s brutal control of Lebanon or its domination of the parts of Iraq not controlled by Islamic State.
Click to read Michael Goodwin’s entire column in the New York Post.
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