http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2014/06/17/uhh-kerry/Uhh, Where’s Kerry?
by KEITH KOFFLER on JUNE 17, 2014, 11:20 AM
Why isn’t Secretary of State John Kerry in Baghdad today?
The Obama administration loves to talk about how it wants to rely on diplomacy, unlike the knee-jerk start-a-war Bush folks.
SO WHY IS JOHN KERRY SPENDING THE DAY FOCUSED ON PLANKTON AND TUNA FISH?
The Secretary of State today is hanging out and giving various remarks at the “Our Ocean” Conference at the Department of State. I don’t know what this is but I assume it isn’t an effort to help the fishing industry.
Friday, he was in London attending the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict.
Thursday he huddled with the prime minister of Australia, who was in Washington for a visit, met with Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa, and attended a reception for the Global Equality Fund at the Department of State.
Over the weekend I don’t know what he was doing. His boss was playing golf.
Meanwhile, Iraq is falling apart.
In his usual dismissive manner, President Obama demanded that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki conciliate with the Shiites and the Kurds before getting any serious help repulsing the terrorists rampaging through the country. So I gather now we’re just sitting here with our arms folded waiting until Maliki perceives that defying the Will of Obama leads to no good.
Maliki so far is ignoring the president, according to the New York Times, hoping to defeat the ISIS terrorist rebels with the help of Iran and knowing that in the end Obama never makes good on his red lines and will probably come to his aid in some fashion whether he makes nice with the other Iraqis or not.
But if we’re serious about changing the dynamic in Iraq, which is the proper goal, Kerry should be in Baghdad knocking heads together and forming some kind of unified front to show Iraqis that the mistreatment of the Sunnis will change. If we really want Maliki to do something we should be ripping him a new . . . page of history and making sure he bends to our will, not waiting and pouting.
How much time over the past year, one wonders, has Kerry wasted trying to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize by dragging the Israelis and the Palestinians into a deal neither of them wants right now, when instead he should have been tending to America’s real national interests?
But you know how President Obama views Iraq. In his typical self-referential manner, he thinks it’s not his deal, it’s Bush’s and it doesn’t concern him.
But he forgets, he’s president of the United States. (How often he seems to forget.) He must deal with the world and the perils to America as they are, not as how Barack Obama thinks they should be. This is a problem for the United States, and so it’s a problem for the country’s president.
Soon we’ll see if Obama and Kerry would prefer an al Qaeda or a Iran-dominated Iraq over admitting they were wrong to abandon the country.
Even Obama must recognize we can’t have al Qaeda running Iraq, right?
Right?
Here’s the former ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, demanding in his low-key style that Kerry get on a plane to Baghdad yesterday, if not sooner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qrBh2y1mjU
