OPINION:
I am increasingly bewildered as to which politician, Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, or President Obama, is seeking recognition in this year’s Neville Chamberlain award competition (“Calls grow louder in Congress to make good on threat, cut aid to Egyptian military,” Web, Aug. 18).
Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama are battling for the title of most naive in the realm of Middle East politics. In every single outbreak of violence from Yemen to Libya to Egypt to Syria, these self-professed brain trusts have chosen the wrong side based on some deluded belief that thugs in the streets from other countries represent democracy and the will of the people. Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama are just plain foolish to think that democracy, in any true form, could take hold in a region that for 4,000 years has been at war with itself and the rest of the world.
In Mr. McCain’s case, it may be just the creep of senility. In the case of Mr. Obama, there can only be two avenues of motivation. In the first, he is actually ignorant about the true picture of events in North Africa and the Middle East. In the second, his passive approach is clearly designed to give the Muslim Brotherhood and other lunatic-fringe groups free rein in the area — to the detriment of the civilized world.
Instead of bringing pressure to bear on the so-called autocrats in charge by using the power of the United States, both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama have thrown in with Muslim organizations. For Mr. Obama to cut aid to the Egyptian military would clearly show his own complicity in a design so evil as to chill the soul. Mr. Obama is not the Manchurian Candidate, but instead the Middle Eastern Candidate.
WILSON FARIS
Gaithersburg
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