Our Clueless President Misses The Point

Here is a brilliant op-ed piece by Andrew J. Bacevich:

“We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq,” New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks recently wrote.  There, in the Land of the Two Rivers, he continued, the United States confronts the “core problem” of our era — “the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam.”

Brooks is wrong. For starters, he misconstrues the core problem — which is a global conflict pitting tradition against modernity.

Traditionalists, especially numerous in but not confined to the Islamic world, cling to the conviction that human existence should be God-centered human order. Proponents of modernity, taking their cues from secularized Western elites, strongly prefer an order that favors individual autonomy and marginalizes God. Not God first, but we first — our own aspirations, desires and ambitions. If there’s a core problem afflicting global politics today, that’s it.

This conflict did not originate in nor does it emanate from Iraq. So to say that we live in the Age of Iraq is the equivalent of saying we live in the Age of Taylor Swift or the Age of Google. The characterization serves chiefly to distract attention from more important matters.

To the limited extent that we do live in the Age of Iraq, it’s because successive U.S. presidents have fastened on that benighted country as a place to demonstrate the implacable onward march of modernity.

This much is certain, however: Even if Obama cobbles together a plan to destroy the Islamic State, the problems bedeviling the Persian Gulf and the greater Middle East more broadly won’t be going away anytime soon.

Destroying what Obama calls the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant won’t create an effective and legitimate Iraqi state. It won’t restore the possibility of a democratic Egypt. It won’t dissuade Saudi Arabia from funding jihadists. It won’t pull Libya back from the brink of anarchy. It won’t end the Syrian civil war.  It won’t bring peace and harmony to Somalia and Yemen. It won’t persuade the Taliban to lay down their arms in Afghanistan. It won’t end the perpetual crisis of Pakistan. It certainly won’t resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

All the military power in the world won’t solve those problems. Obama knows that. Yet he is allowing himself to be drawn back into the very war that he once correctly denounced as stupid and unnecessary — mostly because he and his advisers don’t know what else to do. Bombing has become his administration’s default option.

Rudderless and without a compass, the American ship of state continues to drift, guns blazing.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/09/10/obama-is-picking-his-targets-while-missing-the-point/

As they say in the Navy, red over red means this boat is dead. Obama ad-Dajjal is clueless.

His Secretary of State cannot get the nations of the Middle East to support a war against the Caliphate:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2014/0914/Islamic-State-101-Why-are-Arab-countries-so-reluctant-to-help

That "global conflict pitting tradition against modernity" is also a battle of Islam against a godless America. Should we be surprised that they don't want to let the enemy into their houses?