WHENCE OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY?

Using sources in the Washington Post, Richard Fernandez analyzes Obama's unwillingness to never admit a mistake.


Washington Post editorial editor Fred Hiatt hopes that president Obama will re-think his foreign policy after a series of failures, though deep down he conceded that Obama probably wouldn’t. Hiatt asks the rhetorical question: “defeat can lead to defeatism, or it can lead to constructive rethinking. Which path will President Obama take after setbacks overseas?” And he provides his own answer. Neither. It will lead to complete denial and more wishful thinking.

The instinctive White House response will be to head into the political bunker: to deny that it ever displayed isolationist tendencies while painting critics as wild-eyed warmongers. This reflexive belligerence is understandable given that Obama’s political enemies will happily use overseas setbacks to score points.

On Saudi Arabia:


Of course the pose of omnipotence and omniscience must be helped along by a little smoke and mirrors. Eli Lake at the Daily Beast notes the State Department is hiding what the Saudi’s teach their kids. “The most comprehensive study of Saudi textbooks ever commissioned by the U.S. government was completed at the end of 2012, but to this date the State Department has kept it from the public”, probably because it refers to Christians and Jews as “apes and pigs”.