OPINION:
One of Barack Obama’s greatest foreign policy failures — and you’re right, it’s hard to choose — was Syria. Two words: Red. Line.
It was a true laughing stock moment for the world, and red-face time for America — one that really underscored for overseas’ governments, both friendly and not, just how weak this White House under Obama’s leadership would be. Remember the red lines, the vows to remove President Bashar Assad from office, the red lines, the demand to turn over chemical warfare weaponry, the red lines, the warnings, the disingenuous almost-threat of U.S. military, and more red lines?
Honestly, Crayola could’ve made a fortune if Obama drew actual lines in red for every time he sent a warning Assad’s way. Bic, maybe.
And wasn’t it Russia who actually swooped in to facilitate the relinquishing of chemical weapons by Assad — chemical weapons he neither admitted to having nor to using on his own people? Why yes, yes it was. The appearance on the world stage: Obama couldn’t get the job done so Vladimir Putin to the rescue. It was Obama’s Syria Shame.
But that’s the past. There’s another point to be made here. A current one. And it’s this, courtesy of The Washington Post, which just wrote: “Addressing a New York foreign policy salon last week, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley adopted a folksy tone as she hinted that the Trump administration is backing away from years of U.S. insistence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must leave office.”
Take a moment or two to laugh if you need. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Which is worse, you think? The fact that the story opens with a little jab at Haley as a hee-haw type of gal — or the fact that it sidesteps through the murk of failed Obama foreign policy by asking the reader to pretend not to notice Syria is Obama’s albatross?
The spin: “[Y]ears of U.S. insistence” that Assad “must leave office.”
The reality: “Years” of Obama’s failure at getting Assad to leave office.
How is this Haley’s thing?
But here’s how The Post is selling it — here’s how The Post is laying the trap for yet another Trump administration failure.
“[Haley’s] point was that Assad has hung on through six years of conflict, and while the United States would prefer otherwise, he is likely to remain,” the newspaper wrote. “It was the latest example of Haley, a former South Carolina governor with no prior foreign policy experience, acting as a tough-talking bellwether of President Trump’s foreign policy.”
Oh, you mean like the tough-talking tag-teaming of John Kerry and the no-foreign-policy-experience Obama that led to the previous White House administration’s utter failures in Syria?
This is how the spin starts, folks (she said, in a folksy tone). A member of the media here, a member of the media there, a tough-talking Republican and a White House chief the left hates. Mix it together and what comes is a revisionist version of history, pushed as settled science, and presented as an unbiased reflection on a high-ranking political figure — a reflection, that oh so sadly but necessarily, showcases this White House as unable and unfit to govern. Just remember, deception is desperation; when the left lies and spins, it’s simply a sign of their dwindling relevance.
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