Obama's Massive Foreign Affairs And MIddle East Failures

It is very difficult to find many success stories of the Obama administration. Despite spending $800 billion on an economic stimulus package, an energy revolution that dropped consumer and business energy costs, and a Fed that printed trillions of dollars, this administration engineered an economic recovery that was the weakest recovery in our history that has left us with a very weak job market in both quality and quantity of jobs, stagnant household income, and an additional $8 trillion in national debt.

Its “war on drugs”  effort has resulted on a heroin epidemic in this country, enriched international drug cartels, and not much, if any, drop in the use of illegal drugs in this country.

Its educational policies and programs have resulted in falling SAT scores and continued failures to educate our kids relative to the rest of the world despite spending more on education per student than just about every other country in the world.

Its energy policies has resulted in an all time high electricity rates for most of the country and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars wasted on crony infested alternative energy failures that produced no societal benefit.

Its health care policies have resulted in the abomination known as Obama Care which has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans, has caused insurance premiums and deductibles to rise, has exposed millions of Americans to an increased risk of identity fraud, will add almost $2 TRILLION to the national debt, and has caused many other disasters that are too numerous to list here.

Its policies, actions, and lack of transparency has resulted in numerous and illegal operations and efforts including Fast and Furious, IRS harassment of certain voter blocs, disregarding of judicial orders, and many other acts of criminality.

But nowhere has this administration failed so miserably than with its foregin policies in general and specifically in its Middle East foreign policy. When Obama came into power, Libya was a stable country, led by a dictator, but a dictator that had sworn off weapons of mass destruction and which had become friendly to the U.S. Egypt was also stable and an ally of the U.S. Iraq was safe, secure and democracy, or so said Obama when he hurriedly withdrew U.S. troops from that country. The Taliban were on the run in Afghanistan. Arabs were not going around stabbing Israeli citizens at random within Israel. Syria had not yet disintegrated. Iran had been blocked from becoming a nuclear weapons player.

Now, Libya is no longer a viable country, Egypt has been in upheaval since Obama came to office, Iraq has broken into three warring factions, the Taliban are getting so strong that Obama had to reverse his cherished withdrawal date and decide to leave U.S. troops in country, and the Israelis and Palestinians hate each other more than ever. Syria is no longer a country, resulting in millions of refugees heading for other locales. And Obama and Kerry signed a deal that will make it very easy for Iran to become a nuclear weapons player which will set off a nuclear arms race throughout the Persian Gulf.

What a mess, I do not think you could do more damage if you actually tried to screw things up. But on top of all of this, the Obama administration has allowed the worst terrorist organization the world has ever known to arise, ISIS. ISIS is brutal, evil, wealthy, and growing stronger as the Obama administration falls all over itself trying to get anything right. The following stories of incompetence back up this assertion:

1) John Hayward, recently writing for Breitbart, reviewed the findings of a recent Rasmussen public opinion poll:

• Forty six percent of 1,000 likely voters said that Middle East terrorists were winning the fight against terrorism. 
• The percentage of Americans who think we are winning the war on terrorism has dropped from 49% just before Obama got reelected to a consisitently low 30% or so since then.
• This is the most pessimistic feeling among Americans relative to this topic that Rasmussen has polled in over a decade.
• Specifically, Rasmussen stated in their findings that: “More voters than ever think terrorists have the advantage over the United States and its allies.” 
• These bad trends exist despite the promise that Obama made a year ago that his policies would eventually destroy ISIS. But those policies have done basically nothing to stop the violence and carnage that ISIS has wrought despite the American taxpayer paying billions of dollars for a war strategy that they now recognize is not working.
• Failure, failure, failure. Mr. Hayward sums up Americans’ feelings nicely in his closing paragraph: “The sense that terrorists have the initiative, while our government plays defense and scrambles to respond to their actions, makes us think the battle is out of our control. Even the remarkable string of recent law-enforcement successes against incipient terror attacks provides little comfort; it is the menacing specter of bloody massacres averted at the last moment by FBI agents that lingers in the public imagination. The next President will face a tall order in restoring Americans’ confidence in the War on Terror.” 

From where we were when Obama took office to where we are now almost seven years into his term tells you how big a disaster his foreign policy has been in the Middle East.

2) According to Andrew Stiles, writing for the Washington Free Beacon on October 6, 2015, all is not well within Obama’s foreign policy team:

• On September 22, 2015, John Allen, a retired general who the President had handpicked to lead the U.S. war effort against ISIS resigned.
• On September 29, 2015, Evelyn Farkas, who was a top Defense Department official responsible for managing the relations between the U.S., Russia, and the Ukraine, resigned after serving five years in that position.
• Ari Schwartz, the President’s top advisor on cyber-security, resigned on October 1, 2015. This is a foreign relations effort since it seems every month or so some Russian or Chinese hack is breaking into some Federal government computer system, definitely putting this topic into the foreign relations arena.

Three weeks, three key resignations, three critical foreign policy areas. Something is amiss when you lose that kind of expertise in such a short time in three areas where the Obama critical foreign policy effort has been an utter failure.

3) Helle Dale, writing for the Heritage Foundation on October 6, 2015, described how two recently published analyses of Obama’s foreign policy shows that the U.S. approach to terrorism across the globe has been a disorganized failure:

• According to the two analyses, fourteen years after 9-11, the U.S. Federal government still has not figured out how to coordinate its global anti-terrorism efforts around the world.
• This conclusion was reached by both a bipartisan task force of the House Homeland Security Committee and by the “2015 Comprehensive Annual Report on Public Diplomacy” by the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD).
• The U.S. has not been able to stop the flow of people flocking to terrorism organizations around the world or countering a very effective propaganda effort by those same terrorism organizations.
• In just the past four years, over 25,000 people have gone to Syria and Iraq to become fighters for terrorism organizations including over 200 U.S. citizens.
• Quoting from the Congressional study: “There appears to be no comprehensive accounting of terrorist-travel programs in the U.S. government or any systematic government-wide efforts to identify gaps between them. . . . We found that hundreds of programs, projects, and initiatives have sprouted up to combat terrorist travel since 9/11, but without an overarching strategy to coordinate them, the United States may be wasting taxpayer dollars and failing to allocate resources where they are needed most. Indeed, lack of a strategy not only increases the risk terrorists might exploit weaknesses in the U.S. travel system, but also raises the prospect of waste, overlap, and duplication between agencies.”
• The ACPD report and analysis states: “For public diplomacy professionals to effectively advance U.S. foreign policy efforts to counter violent extremism, there needs to be clear CVE (anti-terrorism) strategy across the U.S. government.” 
• Fourteen years since 9-11 and the Feds and Washington political class have still not gotten anything right in the war against terror. Pathetic.

No overarching strategy against terrorism, top anti-terrorism experts and foreign policy experts resigning one after another, and an America that is finally realizing that those people in the White House and Congress have dealt us a losing hand when it comes to fighting terrorism. Strike one, strike two, strike three. Again, as we mentioned above, probably could not have done any worse than if these same people tried to screw things up in foreign policy.

That is why Step 39 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” is so important. Step 39 calls for the enactment of term limits for all Washington Congressional and Presidential offices because really, how much worse could it get if we replaced all of the losers currently in office who have created all of the messes listed above.? You can join this term limits effort by going to:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

In reality, at least with the foreign policy disasters of the Obama administration, not much worse at all.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w