◼ Networks Push Obama's 'Broad Coalition' as Britain, Germany Drop Out
All three network morning shows on Thursday highlighted Barack Obama's primetime speech from the night before, promoting his talk of a "broad coalition."...
◼ Can we agree that President Obama’s Wednesday night “war speech” against ISIS, far from being the foreign-policy grand slam his sycophants rushed to portray it as, was one of the greatest failures of his presidency? - John Hayward/Human Events @Doc_o
What an astonishing embarrassment, not just for Obama but for the nation he’s led into ruin. The weakness of American influence after six years of this man’s arrogance and incompetence is plain for all to see....
First we had the United Kingdom and Turkey bail on Obama within hours of his speech. Then it was Germany’s turn to say no dice, expressly because they haven’t heard anything that sounds like a real strategy yet from Obama. ◼ International Business Times has the faceplant round-up:
Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier questioned whether Obama’s plan of airstrikes and equipping moderate Syrian rebels was adequate. “We haven’t been asked, nor will we do it,” he said of the airstrikes. “We need to be honest with ourselves in the current situation, we don’t yet have a final, blanket strategy which guarantees that we’ll be successful against ISIS and similar groups.“If Obama can’t put a coalition together against a pack of slave-taking, woman-raping, prisoner-torturing lunatics with about 30,000 men under arms (which is about twice what the intelligence community previously estimated – whoops!) then he’s not going to be leading any global efforts to take out the Iranian nuclear weapons programs. By the way, the same intelligence community that can’t get anything about ISIS right, and which Obama blames for all of his foreign policy failures, is the team he confidently assured us would know the microsecond Iran was close to deploying atomic weapons, during the same presidential campaign where he assured America that Iraq was secure and the Russians were our harmless comrades now.
Turkey, a crucial U.S. ally in the Middle East that borders Syria, said it won’t allow the U.S.-led coalition to launch strikes in Syria from its air bases. It also won’t participate in any combat operations. “Turkey will not be involved in any armed operation but will entirely concentrate on humanitarian operations,” an unnamed Turkish government official told Agence France-Press.
There was initial confusion after British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond saidearlier on Thursday the U.K. “will not be taking part of any airstrikes in Syria,” according to AFP. A spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron said Hammond meant to say that the U.K. would not be bombing Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Guardian reported. Obama’s plan does not include any strikes against the Syrian leader.
Not only did Turkey tell Obama to pound sand, but as the New York Times notes, other Arab governments that “grumbled quietly in 2011 as the United States left Iraq, fearful it might fall deeper into chaos or Iranian influence” are giving Obama “tepid support” for his non-strategy to wage non-war with a non-coalition against the non-Islamic Islamic State, with the most enthusiastic support for an American bombing campaign coming from – gulp – the Assad regime in Syria:
◼ Obama’s Iraq strategy unraveling...didn't take long for that to happen - RedState
This is damning. It shows an abysmal lack of coordination between the administration and the alleged coalition members. It is asinine to announce increased airstrikes that your coalition will not only not support, but opposes to the extent that they disavow your strategy shortly after it is announced..
If it wasn’t clear last night, it is becoming more clear today that Obama’s strategy is nothing more than a rhetorical exercise that is designed to accomplish nothing
◼ Obama ISIS Speech Reaction: Germany, Turkey Won't Join Airstrikes In Syria; UK Won't Rule Them Out - IBT
