Obama Still Defending His Underreactions
Max Boot / Dec. 20, 2016
Barack Obama
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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John Podhoretz coined the perfect term for the Obama foreign policy: The Underreaction Doctrine. President Obama has spent eight years underreacting to various threats—and then lecturing critics, in sanctimonious terms, about why his approach is the right one and why they are foolish for suggesting an alternative. If he has ever admitted making a major mistake, it has eluded me. It was hardly a surprise, then, that this pattern continued in the president’s final end-of-the-year press conference on Friday.
Obama was forthright in denouncing “the savage assaults by the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies on the city of Aleppo,” which he rightly said constitute “a deliberate strategy of surrounding, besieging and starving innocent civilians.” (Were that the president-elect would say as much!) But when asked if he felt responsible for allowing this horror to continue, Obama immediately reverted to his favorite straw-man argument—namely that it would have been impossible to ameliorate the suffering in Syria without an Iraq-style invasion. He claimed that little could have been done “short of putting large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground uninvited, without any international law mandate, without sufficient support from Congress, at a time when we still had troops in Afghanistan and we still had troops in Iraq and we had just gone through over a decade of war and spent trillions of dollars.”
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/an-underreaction-press-conference-barack-obama/
