The Obama Circle-Jerk: Middle East

Spengler:

We end up with a nuclear-armed Iran to which both Afghanistan and Iraq orient. It’s astonishing. Why did America care about central Asian Muslims to begin with? We had an interest in Persian Gulf oil. Then we decided to “democratize” Iraq and Afghanistan and deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Now we supposedly have to appease Iran in order to protect the soldiers who were there to democratize Iraq because we had an interest in the oil — and we end up with Iranian nuclear weapons controlling the Persian Gulf! It is as insane a progression as ever has been presented in political logic.

Our author is a little frustrated.

I’ve been screaming about this for more than two years: Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.

Rush is right: the methodology is simply to create chaos (and economic distress) here, and chaos everywhere else.

HT: FirstThings

And more from Ace/Drew, referring specifically to the Karzai brouhaha:

As Ajami points out, the real pros in the region, the ones whose lives literally depend on reading the tea leaves and navigating the competing power centers, aren't impressed with Obama's straddle. They see the writing on the wall and are acting accordingly...they can't count on the US so they will make deals with our enemies, nations that are in it for the long run.

This is typical of Obama's 'above it all', passive-aggressive crap. By not fully committing to the effort, he forces others to walk away from us. He will then use that 'abandonment' or 'lack of progress' as his excuse to pull out. He'll pretend it was forced on him, nothing he could have done about it. The fact is by his actions and inaction, he will have set the stage and manipulated the outcome.

Lives will be lost, we will be less secure and America will be weaker.

Precisely the approach LBJ used in VietNam. As I recall, it wasn't real popular.