Barack Obama a 'dithering, controlling, risk-averse' US president

Barack Obama is a "dithering" president whose controlling tendencies and extreme risk-averse attitude to foreign policy has damaged US interests in the Middle East, according to a new book by a senior former State Department adviser.

Vali Nasr, a university professor who was seconded in 2009 to work with Richard Holbrooke, Mr Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, records his profound disillusion at how a "Berlin Wall" of domestic-focused advisers was erected to protect Mr Obama.

"The president had a truly disturbing habit of funnelling major foreign policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics," Mr Nasr writes in The Dispensable Nation: America Foreign policy in Retreat.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...ident.html

To be fair, most of what is going on over there now is exactly what I predicted several years ago as the inevitable result of attempting to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. That's not to say that spreading democracy is bad. It's that 1) neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is ready for democracy to succeed, and it hasn't, and 2) the expectations raised by that effort led inexorably to the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

Where Obama is the problem is that he truly does not understand the dynamic any more than Shrub and his minions did. Hint: If you want to understand the Middle East, you probably need someone around who has actually spent time there. I took my son to Dubai for a long weekend vacation trip (over Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, back Sunday). In that brief time in a place that is more like Walt Disney made a movie than it is about the real Middle East, he still came up with so many insights that people who have never been there simply don't comprehend. You really do have to be there to understand.