Foreign Policy Folly Take 2

To describe Obama and Biden as bumbling amateurs would be to give bumbling amateurs a bad name. Today's monumentaly counterproductive act - Iraq.

Iraq is a nascent democracy whose importance to the world as the only Arab democracy in the Middle East cannot be overemphasized. It could well revolutionize the Middle East and it is a huge threat to the mortal enemy of civilization that is Iran's theocracy. Iraq is a democracy that still faces significant internal challenges, particularly the Kurdish issue, as well as challenges from a host of individuals, groups and nations that want to see Iraq's secular democracy fail. The biggest external challenge comes from Iran's theocracy that wants to see the U.S. out and Iraq turned into a giant Lebanon, where the dominant power is a Shia militia controlled from Tehran. So Obama sends Biden to Iraq and what does he do:

Vice President Biden warned Iraqi officials Friday that the American commitment to Iraq could end if the country again descended into ethnic and sectarian violence. . . .

One official said the vice president made it clear that if Iraq returned to ethnic violence, the United States would be unlikely to remain engaged, “because one, the American people would have no interest in doing that, and as he put it, neither would he or the president.”

Read the entire article.

Obama and Biden may look askance at Iraq since success there is a validation of the polar opposite of Obama's foreign policy beliefs. But like it or not, Obama and Biden now own Iraq. If it fails on their watch, they can give all the excuses in the world, but the bottom line is they will have thrown away the most important development in the Middle East in the past three decades. And the statements from Biden could not highlight that any more.

Biden's statement has to demonstrate to all Iraqis that the U.S. is not a loyal ally. Indeed, in the calculus of the Middle East, where the end of a government traditionally comes in a massive slaughter, Obama-Biden just told Iraqis to hedge their bets.

The only reason Iraq is where it is today is because of Bush's absolute committment to protect the nascent democracy. Obama and Biden just announced the polar opposite. Perhaps most insidiously, Biden's statement is an open invitation to all those who want to see Iraq fall to pick up the violence and mayhem. The last time a public figure did anything this dumb was 1950. Obama says he is a "student of history." I'd love to know what books he has studied from, as his texts apparently do not extend back to Jan 12, 1950, when Sec. of State Dean Acheson, gave a speech indicating that we would not defend South Korea. North Korea, backed by Russia and China, took that as a green light to invade South Korea. Obama and Biden have just given the green light to Iran, al Qaeda, and all others who want Iraq's democracy to fail.

It would be hard to imagine anything more counterproductive from our two idiots in the White House - nor anything more dangerous for our soldiers in the country. These jokers have yet to take one action on any major foreign policy issue that is in America's interests. The bottom line, 2012 cannot come fast enough.