Urbana Foreign Policy

     Forgetting your place as a city might mean creating a parallel foreign policy, as Urbana, Illinois did in the early 2000s.  That bespoke a grandiosity and mistaken importance one might also attribute to President Obama.  Now, of course, unlike Urbana, President Obama has the legal authority to create American foreign policy.  It's just that Obama's foreign policy is as irresponsible and silly as what one might expect from Urbana.
      Before Obama took office, he called Iraq a "dumb" war.  This was before we knew he thought Afghanistan was dumb too;  he just wasn't telling us.  Then he destabilized Egypt, an ally.  Then he destabilized Libya.  Finally, when civil war gripped Syria, Obama played world policeman by vowing he would not tolerate use of chemical weapons.  Because of Bashir al-Assad's client relationship with Russia, Obama was unable to enforce his threat.  Syria would have, no doubt, made Iraq look as though Max Planck and Einstein concieved it.   Urbana does not any longer need to create its own foreign policy.  The official one is crazy enough!
      Update: As of the week of March second, Oh Blah Blah is threatening war with Russia over its actions in Ukraine.  Former Secretary of State Hellery Clinton compares Putin with Hitler.  It is amazing how warlike these peaceniks are.

Hornet's nest

        Thomas Joscelyn at The Weekly Standard indicates that, contrary to previous claims by State Department officials, Al Qaeda was involved in the Benghazi attack that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stephens and three security staff.  Ben Qumu, a onetime inmate of Guantanamo Bay, has now been identified as being among those responsible for the attack, which was claimed at the time to be caused by a YouTube video, but is now thought to be linked to the Obama administration's arms smuggling to Syrian rebels.
         The Syrian nonsense has thus claimed four lives, and would have cost the United States far more had President Obama persisted in his intended goal of military action against Russia-supported strongman Bashir al-Assad.  The United States is overextended, both economically and militarily, and still shows no basic understanding of its limits in the twenty-first century.  We foolishly destabilized Egypt and Libya, and were we not checked, we would have stirred a hornet's nest in Syria.  Benghazi is proof that, even when one forbears smashing the hornets' nest, it may yet be stung.

Update:  Al Qaeda flag once again flies over Fallujah.  So much for Bin Laden's death being the end of the road for Al Qaeda.

Insanity

     There is an old saying, sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, that says :"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results."  President Obama made it clear in 2008 that he was opposed to "stupid wars," a phrase he never elucidated beyond stating that Iraq was a stupid war and Afghanistan wasn't a stupid war.  Estase always suspected that what "stupid" really meant was "unpopular," given the fact that when Obama was running for office there had been two horrific battles of Falujah, which figured prominantly on the TV news, and appeared often in the complaints of G.W. Bush's critics. 
       Estase always thought that one virtue Iraq held that Afghanistan didn't was that Iraq was at least being fought to institute a popular government, which even the most sanguine neo-con knew would be impossible for Afghanistan.  The American Left was fond of comparing Iraq to Vietnam, when the real turkey of a war was being fought to prop up a drug criminal named Hamid Karzai, who was not even fond enough of us to exclude the possibility of himself fighting the United States.  So, twelve years after starting a war in a country whose sin was protecting a now-dead terrorist, we still are fighting in Afghanistan.  And my readers in Russia know well that this is an endless source of irritation for their government. 
       So now, Oh Blah Blah, who in 2007 declared he was against "stupid wars," is set to fight on the side of Al Qaeda against the equally unloveable Bashar Al-Assad.  And who are Bashar Al-Assad's allies?  Iran and Russia!  Oh lovely, we are about to irritate the Russians in yet another part of the world!  And the intrepid Obama, who was so incensed about the cost of the Iraq War, will spend how much money we borrowed from China for this useless misadventure? 
      Obama also made war in violation of the 1973 War Powers Act in Libya.  And the locals anally raped and killed a U.S. Ambassador to show their appreciation.  Obama will not seek Congressional approval for action in Syria, because as deified Emperor, he has no need to follow anything so mundane as the U.S. Constitution.
       Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria.  Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.