Robert Gibbs Can’t Defend the Indefensible
By Larry Johnson on September 23, 2012 at 11:03 PM in Current Affairs
Some fun from today’s Fox News Sunday on the issue of the Obama meltdown in Libya. After a feeble attempt to insist that a terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9-11 was not a terrorist attack, the Obama team finally did backflips that would shame an Olympic gymnast:
I was among the few early on insisting that this was no simple matter of spontaneous riots. This was a planned terrorist attack and the Obama Administration was negligent.
The implosion of US policy in the Middle East is creating a major security risk for the United States and the rest of the world. No one is even trying to pretend they are in charge or have a strategic vision.
Even the New York Times weighed in today with an important piece outlining the failure of Obama’s policy in Iraq:
Marshaling his best skills at persuasion, Mr. Obama asked Mr. Talabani, a consummate political survivor, to give up his post. It was Nov. 4, 2010, and the plan was for Ayad Allawi to take Mr. Talabani’s place.
With Mr. Allawi, a secular Shiite and the leader of a bloc with broad Sunni support, the Obama administration calculated, Iraq would have a more inclusive government and would check the worrisome drift toward authoritarianism under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
But Mr. Obama did not make the sale.
“They were afraid what would happen if the different groups of Iraq did not reach an agreement,” recalled Mr. Talabani, who turned down the request.
The failure of Obama in Iraq is real and significant:
In the case of Iraq, the American goal has been to leave a stable and representative government, avoid a power vacuum that neighboring states and terrorists could exploit and maintain sufficient influence so that Iraq would be a partner or, at a minimum, not an opponent in the Middle East.
But the Obama administration has fallen frustratingly short of some of those objectives.
The attempt by Mr. Obama and his senior aides to fashion an extraordinary power-sharing arrangement between Mr. Maliki and Mr. Allawi never materialized. Neither did an agreement that would have kept a small American force in Iraq to train the Iraqi military and patrol the country’s skies. A plan to use American civilians to train the Iraqi police has been severely cut back. The result is an Iraq that is less stable domestically and less reliable internationally than the United States had envisioned.
Obama has increased the likelihood that a major war will breakout in the region. Quite a success.
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