If only bad regimes feared Obama as much as regular Americans
Charles Krauthammer: Obama's Syria Debacle And A Powerless U.S.
"If it had the wit, the Obama administration would be not angered, but appropriately humiliated. President Obama has, once again, been totally outmaneuvered by Vladimir Putin.
"Two days earlier at the United Nations, Obama had welcomed the return, in force, of the Russian military to the Middle East — for the first time in decades — in order to help fight the Islamic State.
The ruse was transparent from the beginning. Russia is not in Syria to fight the Islamic State. The Kremlin was sending fighter planes, air-to-air missiles and SA-22 anti-aircraft batteries. Against an Islamic State that has no air force, no planes, no helicopters?
"Russia then sent reconnaissance drones over Western Idlib and Hama, where there are no Islamic State fighters. Followed by bombing attacks on Homs and other opposition strongholds that had nothing to do with the Islamic State.
"Indeed, some of these bombed fighters were U.S. trained and equipped. Asked if we didn't have an obligation to support our allies on the ground, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter bumbled that Russia's actions exposed its policy as self-contradictory." . . .
. . .
"He knows he'll never again see an American president such as this — one who once told the General Assembly that "no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" and told it again last Monday of "believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion."
"They cannot? Has he looked at the world around him — from Homs to Kunduz, from Sanaa to Donetsk — ablaze with conflict and coercion?
"Wouldn't you take advantage of these last 16 months if you were Putin, facing a man living in a faculty-lounge fantasy world? Where was Obama when Putin began bombing Syria? "
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