Understanding Obama

Editorial: Understanding Obama

By Herald Staff|Yesterday

The interviews that President Obama granted to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine reveal a man dangerously convinced of the rightness of his views of world affairs regardless of facts.

The nature of his views is best shown by a couple of examples.

Obama is "very proud" of erasing the 2013 "red line" - the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his own civilian population - that Obama said would trigger U.S. intervention. Obama does not believe it has damaged U.S. credibility or encouraged other countries to act irresponsibly.

Russia's seizure of parts of Ukraine in 2014 can't be pinned on his Syria climb-down because Russia had acted similarly a few years earlier, Obama believes. In 2008 [Russian President Vladimir] "Putin went into Georgia on [President] Bush's watch right smack dab in the middle of us having over 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq," Obama said.

Obama apparently hasn't considered that the large U.S. commitment in Iraq might have encouraged Putin to think he could detach the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions of Georgia without opposition, but no such distraction was needed to cover his action in Ukraine.

Obama ignored an important difference in the two seizures: Russia agreed with Western countries at Budapest in 1994 to respect the territorial and political integrity of Ukraine.

Potential adversaries do study these things and draw conclusions.

Goldberg sums up: "Obama does not believe a president should put American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States."

Thus Obama's comment about President Reagan's seizure of Grenada from Cuban-allied forces in 1983 (action requested by Grenada's neighbors) and the rescue of American students there: It "is hard to argue [Grenada] helped our ability to shape world events, although it was good politics for him back home."

That slur on President Reagan illustrates what we need to know about Obama's abdication, putting important U.S. interests in grave jeopardy - and damaging this nation's reputation for years to come.