Harshest criticism yet for Obama comes from - the Washington Post?By T. Becket Adams (@becketadams) • 9/8/15 11:00 AM
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2571636/?utm_content=buffera9b59&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=bufferPresident Obama's foreign policy has drawn harsh criticism from conservative newsrooms, including the Weekly Standard and National Review, but none of these groups come close to leveling the type of scorn shown the Obama administration last weekend by the Washington Post.
"This may be the most surprising of President Obama's foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy," Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt wrote in a post Sunday titled "Obama's Syria achievement."
Hiatt's chief claim is this:
that the Obama administration has dealt so fecklessly with world crises, passing off its incompetence as some sort of mature "realist" worldview, that the average American has become infected with the idea that things like genocide and famine are not issue that should concern the United States.This is obviously a sharp break from the past when Americans felt it their duty as a free and powerful people to ease suffering and put a stop to injustices abroad.
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Obama — who ran for president on the promise of restoring the United States' moral stature — has constantly reassured Americans that doing nothing is the smart and moral policy," the op-ed reads. "He has argued, at times, that there was nothing the United States could do, belittling the Syrian opposition as 'former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth.'""He has argued that we would only make things worse, Hiatt wrote, calling back to the time in 2013 when the president told Chris Hughes' New Republic that he was "more mindful probably than most of not only our incredible strengths and capabilities, but also our limitations."
Hiatt accused the president of repeatedly responding to crises abroad by promising action, such as his administration promised to address the Syrian civil war by training opposition forces, only to abandon these plans once the public's attention had shifted."Most critically, inaction was sold not as a necessary evil but as a notable achievement: The United States at last was leading with the head, not the heart, and with modesty, not arrogance," Hiatt wrote.
These disasters include the mounting death toll in Syria, mass displacement of Middle Eastern residents, the persecution and slaughter of Christians and the rise and spread of the Islamic State — and all the while with little pushback from the American public.
There are no signs calling on Washington, D.C. to "Save" Syria in the way that Americans called on the nation's leaders to "Save Darfur," he noted.
"Even had Obama's policy succeeded in purely realist terms," Hiatt concluded, "something would have been lost in the anesthetization of U.S. opinion. Yes, the nation's outrage over the decades has been uneven, at times hypocritical, at times self-serving.""But there also has been something to be admired in America's determination to help — to ask, even if we cannot save everyone in Congo, can we not save some people in Syria?" he asked. "
Obama's successful turning of that question on its head is nothing to be proud of."