First it was former Defense Secretary Robert Gates telling us this about Afghanistan: President Obama “didn’t believe his own strategy.”
Now we have the sitting secretary of state, John Kerry, telling 15 congressmen in private the president’s Syria policy is failing. According to leaked accounts of the meeting, Kerry told the lawmakers that the al Qaeda threat from Syria is growing, that Bashar al-Assad is walking back promises to give up his chemical arsenal and that Russia is arming Assad.
Let’s step back for a minute.
During his 2008 campaign for president, Obama lambasted Bush for taking “our eye off al Qaeda and distract[ing] us from finishing the job in Afghanistan.” But a man who served in his cabinet now says Obama wasn’t interested in finishing the job. As a result, though the number of troops killed in Afghanistan under Obama is more than double the number under Bush, we’ll be leaving there without a clear win and possibly not even a security agreement.
Ditto for Syria. In retrospect, the “red line” Obama drew over chemical weapons and “necessary war” line on Afghanistan shared the same purpose. That is, they were never intended as declarations of American resolve. They were instead statements Obama used to put off difficult decisions by promising tougher action in the future.
In so doing, he has only raised the stakes. On Tuesday, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, confirmed what The Post has said all along: The chemical weapons deal left Assad stronger, not weaker. That comes on top of Clapper’s testimony last week saying al Qaeda extremists swarming into Syria may make that unhappy land what Afghanistan was in 2001: a base to launch attacks on America.
So here we are. An Obama defense secretary tells us Obama didn’t believe his Afghanistan policy. An Obama secretary of state tells us he’s lost all confidence in the president’s Syria policy he’s carrying out.
And this is the administration that now asks us to believe it’s going to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse and stop Iran from developing nukes?