I submitted the following as a Letter to the Editor of my local newspaper:
Students of history will recall how British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wanted desperately to believe that Adolph Hitler was a man of his word when Hitler said in 1938 that after Czechoslovakia he had no further territorial ambitions. Even after Hitler invaded Poland, Chamberlain clung to his delusion that another land swap might restore peace. Over 50 million people died in World War II in part because of Chamberlain’s willful delusion about the nature of his enemy.
Fast forward to the Middle East where the Obama Administration seeks to relearn that lesson. First, they looked the other way and saw only the good side of the Egyptians demonstrating for the ouster of Mubarak. Now, as Christian churches burn in Cairo we see who many of these people really are.
Next, in Syria Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, propagated the myth that President Assad was a reformer. This, despite the fact that he is butchering his own people and has allowed his country to be a transit point for terrorists into Lebanon and Iraq where they killed American soldiers.
Finally, Obama’s speech on the Middle East demanded that Israel return to it’s pre-war 1967 borders without any meaningful concession on the side of Palestinians who continue to refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist. No peace can exist without that.
Sharing my concern that Obama is in over his head is Andy McCarthy, who writes in National Review:
Would that the president of the United States were as worried about Arizona’s border as he is about “Palestine’s.”
There was less fanfare about this latest Obama oration on the future of the Middle East, staged at Foggy Bottom, than there was about his 2009 Cairo speech. It was, however, every bit as delusional, and twice as treacherous.
...
The president stumbled into a bracing truth when he compared the change achieved by the people in the region, on the one hand, and by terrorists on the other. The change both are seeking is the same: the creation of sharia societies. Obama and Democracy Project promoters like to frame the Arab Spring as the ultimate rejection of al-Qaeda. But it is, at most, a discovery that there are better tactical routes to the promised land than al-Qaeda’s crude brutality. That promised land is not Western liberalism; it is Islam in all its repression of free speech, religious liberty, and equality — American principles the president spoke of his boundless determination to promote, while avoiding a single mention of Islam or sharia, which make achieving those principles a pipedream in this region.
Regarding Obama's slap at Israel, an editorial in the Washington Post puts it this way:
Now, of all times, the Israeli and U.S. governments ought to be working closely together; they should be trying to defuse the U.N. threat, induce Mr. Abbas to change course, and above all prevent a resumption of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, Friday found Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu once again publicly and poisonously at odds with each other, thanks to a handful of lines added by Mr. Obama to his Middle East speech on Thursday. The president’s decision to publicly endorse terms for a peace settlement seemingly calculated to appeal to Mr. Abbas, over the strong objections of
Once again, willful delusion and appeasement join hands to create a situation which can only lead to disaster!
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