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Townhall
Obama's Delusions Dispelled? Well, we Can Hope for Change
Michael Barone
Sep 09, 2014
"If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling
apart," President Obama told Democratic mega-contributors last month in
one of the 400-plus fundraisers of his presidency.
But not to worry. "The world has always been messy," he said. "In part,
we're just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see
in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through." Like
being beheaded by Islamist terrorists. Or having your country invaded
by Russian soldiers.
The president gives the impression of trying to reassure not so much
his audience, as himself. For this is not what he expected for his
presidency. The world was not supposed to fall apart. It was supposed
to come together, as he assured thousands at Berlin's Tiergarten in
2008 that their wall had come down because "there is no challenge that
is too great for a world that stands as one."
So one hopes that, as Obama left the fundraiser trail and headed to
NATO ally Estonia and the NATO summit in Wales, he arrived stripped of
the delusions he carried into his presidency. They include, in no
particular order, the following:
-- The delusion that the world would love the United States once the
first black president -- a "citizen of the world," as he called himself
in Berlin -- took office. But symbolism important to American voters
has less purchase overseas. The elites and chattering classes of other
nations, even allies, are always going to resent the enormous
asymmetrical power of the United States and complain about its policies.
-- The delusion that once the United States withdrew all its troops
from Iraq, tranquility would reign in the Middle East. The idea was
that Middle Eastern Muslims were provoked by Americans' bossiness and
blunders. That takes no account of the longstanding hatreds, desires
for revenge and religious fanaticism present in the region before 2003
and flaring again now that U.S. forces have left.
-- The delusion that the key to solving the problems in the Middle East
is to arrange a peaceful settlement between Israel and the
Palestinians. The problem here is that there are no Palestinian
interlocutors willing to make or able to deliver on a promise to live
in peace with Israel.
-- The delusion that the hatred of Islamist Muslims for the United
States would disappear once Barack Hussein Obama (as he referred to
himself in his June 2009 Cairo speech "to the Muslim world") was its
leader. Like an American politician recalling his Italian or Polish
grandmother, Obama assumed that having a common background would be
appealing. The fact that his father was a (very unobservant) Muslim and
that he attended Muslim schools cut no ice with Islamists, who consider
apostasy a capital crime and are willing to die to make others submit
to their version of the faith.
For the rest of this article and more, go to Townhall
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