Not good news:
On September 22, Barack Obama’s hand-selected advisor coordinating global efforts to combat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, retired General John Allen, announced his intention to resign the post. Within a week, Evelyn Farkas, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, also handed in her resignation. Given the ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East into which the West is increasingly committing resources, these resignations are alarming.
Noah Rothman more or less concludes that this is all due to the fact that the excrement is hitting the rotary blade in the Middle East and Europe, and that the professionals who have been stuck trying to convert Barack Obama’s vague desires into a coherent foreign policy are increasingly uninterested in taking the blame. It’s hard to argue with either point; in fact, I agree with Noah Rothman. I have one free piece of advice for Left-leaning think tanks and orgs: don’t hire any of the current administration’s foreign policy partisan appointees. They’re just going to wreck your operations*.
H/T Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.
Moe Lane
*We will have another Democratic President after this one. Some day. It would be helpful if he or she was getting foreign policy advice from people who weren’t completely useless. I mean, just look at what’s happening with Barack Obama!
Advisors tend to leave when their advice is not taken so that the resulting (as they see it) debacle does not reflect on them.
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“Man, I told you not to do that stuff.”
Last rat off, turn out the lights.
*SNORT* I doubt that there’ll be an operating power supply to run any lights by then.
So people are starting to place their bets and hedge. I suspect a lot of them are expecting another shoe or two to “unexpectedly” drop and hit the floor and they no longer want to risk their credibility. After all some may have aspirations for higher positions in the next D administration. Hopefully some future Senate staffer will remind his boss that so-and-so served in this administration and thus have uncomfortable questions raised at a future hearing.
My opinion is, without extensive written evidence to the contrary, that all approved of this policy and should never have a position of responsibility in government again.
Hopefully some future Senate staffer will remind his boss that so-and-so served in this administration and thus have uncomfortable questions raised at a future hearing.
Bah. You will recall that Eric Holder was the Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton who pushed through commuted sentences for sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists (who hadn’t requested them) and a pardon for Marc Rich in 2001. Did that stop Congress from approving him as AG in 2009? Nooooooooo …
Hence, hopefully.
Somebody could probably write multiple Phd theses on the death of a bipartisan foreign policy in the late 20th and 21st centuries.
There was a chance for its resurrection post 9/11 imho, but it was killed when the Democrats decided that they could sacrifice it for power.
We will now live with the results for the foreseeable future.
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry ‘Hold, hold!’
What experts?
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Anyone acute would have known what Obama was in 2008. Even the most naive would have figured out before now the negligible odds that an adviser might change the course of this administration.
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Those who remain are those without a foundation in foreign policy, those who let emotions sway their judgement, and those of poor character.
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Obama deserves the peace prize because of the literal meaning of its requirements. You can cause many peace treaties by causing many wars. Obama has sowed the fields for the big wars of the twenty first century.
True Believers .. those that are left *after this* are the True Believers.
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Mew
I just think of Obama as “Chancellor Palpatine” and his advisers as “Jar-Jar Binks” and everything makes sense…
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Or maybe that should be reversed…
Obama is Prince George. His advisers are Baldrick and Blackadder.
Is that Falstaff in the corner muttering?
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Mew
Or maybe that should be reversed…
So is Obama the inept comic relief, or is he the Evil Jar Jar éminence verte of the new conspiracy-oriented interpretation?
Private Baldrick: I have a plan, sir.
Captain Blackadder: Really, Baldrick? A cunning and subtle one?
Private Baldrick: Yes, sir.
Captain Blackadder: As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?
Private Baldrick: Yes, sir.