Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Must be time for a nice speech

On Syria, Obama is doing nothing, again… must be time for a nice speech.  As Michael Gerson points out, Obama’s pattern in reaction to a crisis is to do nothing, give little sound bites about needed reforms from the sidelines as if he were powerless to do anything but scold the tyrants, do very little, and make a nice speech. 

How comforting that will be for the Syrians being hunted and killed.

Meanwhile, this administration seems befuddled by the ineluctable move in the Middle East against tyrannical police states supporting corrupt kleptocracies.  This is a movement as momentous as the overthrow of Communism and the Soviet empire in 1989.  The Islamic world is moving into the 21st Century, and good for them, and it’s not about the U.S. or the West.  They are creating an Islamic version of representative government, and I don’t think that movement will be able to be stolen by Islamist tyrants to supplant the previous venal tyrants.

But the absence of support from America for massive democratic movements like this is contrary to America’s purpose for being – freedom from tyranny. 

The United States didn’t have a revolution to be free of England, it had a revolution to be free of the tyranny of the unelected aristocracy.  That revolution has spread throughout the world, and is now in the Middle East.  In a deeply fundamental way, the revolution in the Arab world is an extension of the American revolution of 1776.  The rule of aristocracies continues to be overthrown by the people demanding freedom. 

It would be nice if the current American president did a little more than make speeches about it all - how about economic sanctions, freezing of assets of the tyrants, withdrawing of the U.S. ambassador, expelling the Syrian ambassador from America?  Just some suggestions.