"So Obama let Syria burn"

Obama's New Middle East:

So Obama let Syria burn. He let Iran and Hezbollah transform the country into their colony. And he let Putin transform the Mediterranean into a Russian lake. Obama enabled the ethnic cleansing of Syria’s Sunni majority, and in turn facilitated the refugee crisis that is changing the face not only of the Middle East but of Europe as well.

And as it turns out, the deal with Iran that Obama willingly sacrificed US control of the Mediterranean to achieve has not ushered in a new era of regional moderation and stability through appeasement as Obama foresaw.

"Unexpectedly," as they say.

It will not do to say again that Obama has zero strategic understanding or strategic sense and has surrounded himself with worldview-endorsing sycophants who have none, either (sadly including these guys, though one hopes to a lesser level). No, the reason Obama is letting Syria burn is the same reason he abandoned Iraq rather than lean on Malaki for the agreement for US troops to remain. (Obama was very happy to use Malaki's stubbornness as his excuse to declare the end of the Iraq war and pull all troops out. He needed it as a talking point for the 2012 election, consequences be damned. And today there are almost 10,000 US troops in Iraq anyway, with no agreement anyway. "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," of course.)

The reason is simple: Obama, raised from his mother's milk to abhor American power, prowess, wealth and influence, believes in the marrow of his bones that anything America does in the rest of the world is worse than America's inaction would be. There is nothing he can envision this country doing in Syria that would be better than doing nothing because everywhere around the world the United States has acted, it has always been for the worse, not the better.

So what if the Russians become the predominant power in the Middle East? That's not worse than the United States formerly occupying that position.

So what if Aleppo is reduced to a parking lot and its people suffer horrors beyond description? That's not worse than what would happen if the United States had become engaged earlier in the war to bring it to a close.

So what if the non-Islamist, anti-Assad rebels are destroyed by Assad, by ISIS and by the Russians? That's not worse than if the United States had taken effective steps to empower them.

It goes on and on.

And of course, this is an underlying part of it, too: "Why Liberals Don’t Care About Consequences," by David Goldman (short answer is because liberalism is about liberals, not the rest of the country).