The Day the Roof Fell in!

American Interest ^ | 9/12/12 | Mead

Sometimes trouble blows up out of a clear blue sky. That’s what happened to the White House yesterday.

Coming out of the Democratic Convention, despite an uninspiring speech, President Obama had a united party and a comfortable bounce. While the economy was no great shakes, the President’s stewardship of foreign affairs helped give his administration an air of competence and professionalism. At a time when war-weary and terror-wary Americans, buffeted by storms at home and upheavals abroad, want nothing more than a quiet life, “no drama” Obama was ready to campaign as a safe and experienced steward of the national interest against a gaffe-prone challenger.

But that was before 9/11/12, the day the roof fell in. The Chicago teacher strike raised doubts about the President’s domestic leadership, the publication of Bob Woodward’s new book raised questions about his economic management and political skills, and 11 years to the day after the 9/11 attack, radical America-hating Islamists stormed the U.S. embassies in Cairo and Benghazi, assassinated the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others even as U.S. and Israeli relations sank to another low point.
“No drama” Obama is in it now: his ex-chief of staff is locked in a high profile cage fight with one of the most important unions and donors in the Democratic stable in his home town; his humanitarian intervention in Libya has created yet another bloody Middle East imbroglio for the United States; his efforts to reconcile the U.S. and moderate Islamism—in part by distancing the U.S. from Israel—have angered Israel without reducing Islamist bitterness against the United States.
And in the middle of all this, a misguided U.S. embassy employee in Egypt issued a groveling “apology tweet” condemning a privately made film whose unflattering portrayal of the Prophet of Islam was stoking mob violence. Even as pictures of the U.S. flag being torn down at the Cairo embassy flashed across the world, Secretary Clinton was disavowing the ill-conceived tweet—and critics were jumping on the incident as a sign of confusion and appeasement in the administration’s approach to Middle East radicalism.
The Middle East mess calls President Obama’s policy of engagement with democratic forces in the region (much more similar to his predecessor’s approach than either President Obama or anybody else is willing to acknowledge) into question. The events in Libya and Egypt—combined with the bloody chaos in Syria—make Americans more eager to wash their hands of this tormented region. They don’t want to bomb, they don’t want to build; they want to get out out. Getting out of Iraq was popular; getting in to Libya was not—and going in to Syria looks, politically, about as smart as sticking your hand into a wood chipper.
The politics of this are at one level quite tricky for Republicans. It is not as if there was some magically effective Middle Eastern policy that the Obama administration is obstinately refusing to employ. Many American voters are likely to support whichever candidate they think will be less likely to get the country more deeply embroiled in the Middle East. “Apology tours” are unpopular, but after eleven years of unsatisfactory results, so are wars. Denouncing President Obama for insufficient hawkishness will stir some people up, but it may quietly reinforce the determination of many others to keep executive power out of the hands of a party which looks to be just a little bit too quick on the draw.
Complete Article