There is good and there is bad, and sometimes, you have your in-between gray areas where you don't really know what to think. You just try to muddle through and hope things work out for the best. That's the situation right now in the Middle East, where let's face it, there's almost never any good news, so why start now?
The so-called Arab Spring is something I have been wary of from the start, just like I am of any alleged "pro-democracy" movements among the Arab/Muslim states. We have already seen the result of President Bush's insistence that the Palestinians be granted free elections. That turned into a fiasco which haunts us, and the Israelis, to this day. True enough, it resulted in the removal from power, in Gaza, of the corrupt Fatah organization, but it was replaced by the insanely and fanatically evil Hamas.
Proponents of the Arab Spring revolts throughout the Middle East, which started in Tunisia and spread first to Egypt, and then throughout the various countries of the Middle East with varying degrees of intensity, insist that it is a mostly secular movement. They might be right to a degree, but scratch the surface and it doesn't take long to smell the rancid, stinking odor of fanatical Islamic fascism, already taking strong root in Egypt, resulting in attacks on the minority Coptic Christians.
But so far, the most violent and dangerous disruptions have come about in Yemen, where the presidential palace was attacked and the President seriously injured. The place is in all but name a failed state, where a significant percentage of the people are either loyal to or terrorized by the local Al-Queda group, Al-Queda in Yemen. This is especially significant in that one of the most influential leaders of this group is a transplanted American who is deemed responsible for the Fort Hood Massacre.
It's also important to note that Obama, while expressing sympathy for the insurgents throughout the Arab world-after all, they only want the right to self-determination and freedom, supposedly-kept a generally hands off approach. He was criticized for this, and for his inconsistencies when it came to the status of our former ally, recently deposed President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. He has also been taken to task for his lack of support for the anti-Assad factions in Syria, just like he was condemned, generally, for his lack of involvement with the anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya.
It was good that Obama was criticized, but it was all for the wrong reasons. In reality, Obama is in this up to his eyeballs. The State Department, various socialist factions within the EU and the UN, in conjunction with disparate leftist organs, including organized labor activist and progressive activist groups such as Code Pink, have engaged in a coordinated effort to inflame tensions in the region.
And when some people do point this out, they also err in casting aspersions related to the influence of Islamic radicals. The perpetrators here are not the radicals, but pro-democracy forces who are by no means republican in orientation, but of a progressive, socialist cast. These are the people Obama, the State Department, the EU and the UN, as well as international labor and progressive activists want to use to recast the Middle East, in a socialist, parliamentary democratic image. The problem is they fail to see the danger posed by the Islamic radicals in the event their schemes are initially successful. This is a blind spot of the ideological progressives, one that could induce them to lead the whole region over a cliff.
Why there haven't been demands for a Congressional investigation is beyond me, but on the other hand, conservatives wasted too much time and energy making political hay out of Obama's seeming lack of involvement, when the reality was quite the opposite of the perception he was purposely manifesting.
Obama has learned well the political lessons of the last few years. No matter what he does he will be attacked. And he would obviously be excoriated if he openly sought to throw the Middle East into the kind of turmoil that it is now experiencing. He would be criticized not just by the GOP, but worldwide. Few Democrats even would support him.
This might go a long ways towards explaining the recent involvement of NATO in the Libyan insurgency. The problem is, the US is expected as usual to contribute the lion's share of money and resources, and Obama is pressured daily by NATO elements to provide "boots on the ground".
For once, criticism of Obama is justified, and not misdirected. He has, in jumping on board the NATO bandwagon, defied established US protocol. Such actions should first go through Congress and gain congressional approval. Bush did this when he went to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. He sought and received bi-partisan support. Obama, when it comes to the Libyan theater, acts like it is beneath him to even answer congressional queries concerning his actions.
Yemen, however, is an altogether different matter. Yemen has been our ally, at least officially, in the War on Terror. Our troops have been stationed there. We have an already vested interest in what happens there. Plus, we are at war, not just ideologically but in point of fact, with Al-Queda in Yemen.
Therefore, when people criticize Obama for his assault on the insurgent forces and Al-Queda in Yemen, they are off the mark and out of bounds. This is especially true of the charge that he is doing this without congressional approval. Of course we have congressional approval. We have had that approval, implicitly, ever since our troops were stationed there, ever since we had an agreement with the Yemeni government.
Sometimes it pays to step back and take a deep, long hard look at everything that's going on. Oftentimes if you just take the time and make the effort to peel back the layers, you might find things are not so simple as they might appear at first glance. And, sometimes they are even more simple.
There are some things that are just not appropriate venues for political grandstanding no matter how much or even how rightly you dislike the target of your attack. Obama should be investigated as to what his real role in the Arab Spring insurgencies. I might be wrong, but if I am right, he should be impeached and tried on that, among some other things.
But his attack on the insurgents in Yemen is not only justified, it is appropriate.
