Lee Smith says that Obama is playing to Iran’s strength:
It is a given that anything Obama says or does will be an improvement over the Bush administration’s inept efforts at Muslim outreach. And yet it is worth recalling that the Bush administration also sought to appeal directly to Muslims. Bush’s freedom agenda, after all, was intended to give Muslims a democratic voice in their own governance. Nonetheless, Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s one-time point man for Middle East democracy, is one among many across the political spectrum who are concerned that by choosing an authoritarian police state for his podium, Obama may be signaling that the United States is ditching democracy promotion. But the real problem is that Obama has not learned from Bush’s errors. In seeking to speak to the Muslim masses over the heads of their rulers, Obama, as columnist David Goldman (who usually writes under the name Spengler) explains, is undermining an important U.S. ally on his home turf.
Note that (for the trolls) I don’t claim that he’s a traitor. But he’s frighteningly naive. It’s Jimmy Carter II.
Without the military or business experience.
Not that Carter learned anything from his military and business experience.
A nit:
While Middle Easterners have complained for more than 80 years that these borders were imposed on them by the Europeans, the fact is that the region’s rulers—if not always their subjects—are happy with their holdings.
I guess he never heard of the Iran-Iraq war.