Defying credibility

There are some clouds over the Arab Spring. Mike Rosen writes in today's Denver Post that the  "Obama administration's claim that the posting of the trailer on YouTube two months ago triggered this latest eruption of Muslim violence defies credibility. It was no more spontaneous than the Occupy Wall Street circuses stage-managed by community organizers and unions across the U.S. last year."

Furthermore, he asserts that "Obama's strategy to win the hearts and minds of radical Islamists doesn't appear to be working."
  
"Initial enthusiasm over the so-called Arab Spring — which Obama pretentiously compared to the American Revolution and the civil rights movement — is increasingly looking like a delusion. Moderate Muslims, an endangered species, are intimidated and overwhelmed by intolerant, brutal, irrational theocrats hopelessly trapped in a 7th century mentality. Obama's Middle East foreign policy is founded on the premise that you can reason and negotiate with the likes of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Salafists, Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and others who take offense at the very existence of competing religious faiths and believe the ultimate goal is death to the infidels.

The longer-term casualty of this current round of Middle East turmoil is Obama's foreign policy credibility. Recognizing this, the liberal media, wholly committed to his re-election, have come to his defense, circling their wagons around him. First, they gullibly (or conveniently) bought into the pretense of the anti-Muhammad video as the catalyst for the Muslim uprising. And then they deflected attention from Obama by attacking Romney for what they characterized as his rash criticism of the administration and the feckless statement from our Cairo embassy patronizing the "hurt religious feelings of Muslims," whose habitual response to hurt feelings is murder.

You'd think an incumbent American president had never before been criticized by members of the opposition party over foreign policy. How about Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes?

Imagine if Americans at our Cairo embassy or Libyan consulate had been taken prisoner and kept as hostages right before this election. It would have been Jimmy Carter all over again, as Obama follows in his foreign policy footsteps."

Read more: Rosen: Clouds over the Arab Spring - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_21585435#ixzz272TllXpA