http://www.slate.com/id/2224026/
- - - You can see a similar pendulum effect in foreign policy, where the object lesson is not Bill Clinton but George W. Bush. Obama, who did not have much global expertise before coming to office, molded his approach around his predecessor's errors. Bush's naive idealism and unilateralism encouraged Obama's realism and multilateralism. Bush's boycott of North Korea, Cuba, and Iran fed Obama's eagerness to engage pragmatically with those tyrannies. Bush's neglect of the Mideast peace process fed Obama's urge to plunge into it. The new president has reversed the old one's prioritization of Iraq over Afghanistan and, in what has become the political cliché of 2009, tried "hitting the reset button" on relations with Russia. In so doing, Obama now faces an inverted set of hazards: getting overcommitted in Afghanistan, putting too much faith in the United Nations, accommodating dictators instead of standing up to them. Most alarmingly, given all that his predecessor did to discredit them, Obama has failed to stand up for the broader ideas of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. Surely if not for Bush, Obama's instinct after the Iranian election would have been to identify with those risking their lives to free their country, not to get back to his attempt at dialogue with Ahmadinejad. - - - Translation: "Obama gently kisses tryants' asses because George Bush rudely kicked them. Somehow, Obama is cosmically forced to do the extreme opposite of George Bush, so now everything that goes wrong is... still Bush's fault." Change you can believe in! Enjoy it! - Bob _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
