"We don't have a strategy....."

President Obama’s recent “We don’t have a strategy in Syria” gaffe has of course gone viral on the web.  I don’t know why, since it is simply an admission of what has been obvious for months now. Of course the White House staff have been trying to do damage control ever since, but not very convincingly.  Clearly we don’t have a strategy for Syria or the Islamic State – apparently the president couldn’t think of one while he was golfing.

But in fact the real issue to worry about is not that we don’t have a strategy in Syria – the real issue is that the administration seems not to have a strategy to counter the blatant Russian aggression in the Ukraine, which is a much, much bigger threat to Europe and the US than the Syrian civil war, bad as that is.  Indeed, for once the Europeans seem to be the ones talking tough (though we will see if they follow through), while President Obama has said almost nothing about the whole crisis, and what little he has said is meaningless.

Those who know the history of World War II will recall much the same unrealistic attitude toward Hitler’s initial invasion of Poland in 1939 as we seem to be seeing today in the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. And they will recall Chamberlain’s infamous “peace in our time” gaffe.

At a time when strong America leadership is desperately needed, our President seems to have gone AWOL. We played and still play no effective role in the Israel-Hamas conflict.  We declined to do anything about Syria.  Obama has now publicly admitted we have no strategy for the Syrian civil war, or for the Islamic State brutality. We have been largely ineffective in Iraq. Large sections of Afghanistan are reverting to Taliban control with no effective response from the US. And now Russia is openly invading the Ukraine (who we promised to defend back in 1994 when they gave up their nuclear weapons – see the Budapest Memorandums of December 5, 1994), and apparently President Obama doesn’t think that requires much response from us, other than a few clearly ineffective “wet-noodle” economic sanctions.

Well, many of us (including myself) voted for this untried junior senator and community organizer back in 2008 on the basis of his lofty rhetoric and glowing promises.  And apparently we got exactly what we voted for - lofty rhetoric and a lot of promises (such as “if you like your health plan you can keep it”).  Unfortunately that isn’t what we really needed to manage the complexities of this world – we needed a strong, wise leader.