I read the text of the speech to the nation that President
Obama gave last night. I couldn’t
bring myself to listen to it live, because I am tired of his rhetoric (but to
be fair, by this point in the Bush presidency I couldn’t stand to listen to
Bush any more either). If I were to
paraphrase the speech, it would run like this:
Introduction:
Hey, I know I have been getting a
lot of flak lately for being a do-nothing, indecisive, lead-from-behind, golf-playing
president in foreign policy, but we have managed to do a few minor things, like
find Bin Laden and waste him. Give me a
little credit here.
Central Point:
We still have no idea what to do
about Syria, Iraq, or the Islamic State, so we are going to continue to do the
only thing we can think of, which is to drop a few bombs on them any time we
can find a worthwhile target, and maybe pass out a few MREs (Meals, Ready to
Eat) to a few of the Syrian rebels. We certainly don’t intend to do anything
really effective, like putting American troops on the ground. By some hard arm-twisting
over the past few days we have managed to assemble a coalition of nations who
are willing to at least give lip service to the idea of helping us (though of course
they see that we don’t intend to invest much in the effort, so they won’t either).
This effort will be a long one (meaning that I intend to dump this whole
problem off on my successor just as soon as I can).
Conclusion:
Lots of meaningless platitudes
about how great we are.
Is this really the best the administration can do?
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