Obama's Middle East Strategy Remains a Failure

Cal Thomas | Syndicated Columnist | Updated: Sep 05, 2013

Obama's Middle East Strategy Remains a Failure

"President Obama's Middle East strategy remains vague and contradictory." That's a quote from yesterday's lead editorial in the Washington Post.

Listening to supporters of military action testify before the Senate Foreign Relations committee Tuesday gave me a sense of deja vu. John Kerry and the others are 100 percent certain Syria's Bashir al-Assad used chemical weapons to kill his own people. He and his late father also used conventional weapons to kill an estimated 100,000 or more of their own people, but that didn't produce military action by the United States.

All the talk Tuesday was about diminishing Assad's capacity to use chemical weapons. Not keep him from using them, but diminish him. That's a strategy? This isn't like punishing a child by sending him to his room without supper. This is serious.

The president has failed at foreign policy. His outreach to the Muslim world has produced disasters in Egypt, Libya, probably Lebanon and now Syria. Iran continues building a nuclear weapon because it doesn't think Obama will do anything about it. Lobbing a few missiles into Syria will change little.

I'm Cal Thomas in Washington.

Publication date: September 5, 2013



Obama's Middle East Strategy Remains a Failure