In December 2012, Professor Jacobson posted “Barack Morsi“.
It turns out the title was truer than he realized.
President Obama took the advice of “back-benchers” over experienced security experts to promote the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, creating condition for the usurpation of power by Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi:
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told Fox News that President Barack Obama ignored the advice of his “entire national security team” during the Egyptian coup in 2011 that ousted Hosni Mubarak, the country’s former president.…Gates, who headed the Pentagon during the Egyptian coup, lamented that, while he and the rest of the president’s national security experts advised Obama to handle the situation in Egypt cautiously, the president chose to listen to three junior officials instead and called for Mubarak’s immediate ouster.“Literally the entire national security team recommended unanimously handling Mubarak differently than we did,” Gates said. “And the president took the advice of three junior backbenchers in terms of how to treat Mubarak.”
According to Gates, Obama wanted to be on the “right side of history.” Frankly, Obama has always been more of a Narcissist-in-Chief than Commander-in-Chief. That both his domestic and foreign policy decisions are based primarily on how he looks is no surprise for those who recall his days occupying the “Office of the President-Elect”.
As Commander-in-Chief, Obama completely owns the consequences of taking the advice from the political equivalent of Curly, Larry and Moe. Sadly, his reputation isn’t the only thing that has taken a hit.
I chronicled the chaos that the coup created in Egypt, and the unrest and violence in that country cost hundreds of lives. Egypt’s tourism industry has collapsed. There were more than 14 million visitors a year in 2010, and numbers so far this year are down by around 40 percent.
The only positive about the entire “Arab Spring” debacle is that Morsi’s replacement, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is a moderating force (calling for an Islamic religiouos revolution). He is also a solid leader in the fight against Islamic terrorists in Libya, and has had to directly deal with the disastrous fallout from the policies implemented by Obama’s former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
You will recall Obama snubbed Sisi during the Egyptian president’s September visit to the US. Putin has been taking advantage of the disdain to create warmer relations between Russia and the Land of the Nile.
Given the background, it is completely understandable that Sisi is asking the West to refrain from further Libyan intervention.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has cautioned Western powers against launching a military intervention in Libya and instead urged them to support retired general Khalifa Haftar, based in the eastern parts of the conflict-ridden country….“If we provide arms and support to the Libyan National Army, it can do the job much better than anyone else, better than any external intervention that would risk putting us in a situation that could get out of hand and provoke uncontrollable developments,” Sisi said in the interview.
When I posted this story on Facebook, many Obama supporters defended the President by saying that the Constitution meant he could ignore the guidance of the national security team.
Yes, that is his prerogative. But choices have consequences, and unfortunately the next “President Elect” will be forced to seal the breeches Obama has created among our allies by clearly being on the wrong side of history.
Criticizing Obama for these choices is my prerogative.
[Featured Image: Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi TV statement]
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