U.S.A. – destroyer of nations.

A propos of my post above here are a couple of choice quotes summarizing the Obama Middle East policy:

There’s no way to overstate the Obama administration’s destructive and nihilistic role in Syria. Along with its Gulf allies, the US has funded, armed and trained the bulk of the jihadi hoodlums that have ripped the state apart and killed nearly one quarter of a million people. Now that Putin has decided to put an end to Washington’s savage proxy war, the administration is planning to add more fuel to the fire by air-dropping pallets of ammunition and weapons to their fighters in central and eastern Syria. The editors of the New York Times derided the program as “hallucinatory.”^[1]

And this from ParaPundit:

Ross Douthat [of the New York Times] takes a look at Russia's widening intervention in Syria from a distinctly American elite perspective. Lots of nuance here as usual. But he does not get to the meat of the matter and I disagree in a big way with his conclusion:

... what’s closer to his [Putin's] grasp is something more destructive — a wrecker’s legacy, not Peter the Great’s, in which his own people gain little from his efforts, but the world grows more unstable with every move he makes.

Wrecker's legacy? That's America we are talking about. The far more powerful United States of America surely already has a wrecker's legacy in the Middle East. Consider: The US invasion of Iraq resulted in ISIS slavery, ethnic slaughter, and crucifixions in Iraq and Syria with at least half of Iraq's Christians fleeing and Syrian Christians major shafted. The support Obama and Hillary Clinton showed for Arab Spring has resulted in Libya fragmented into warring tribal regions. We have gained nothing for our efforts and racked up huge losses. Obama's policies (or MSM punditry for that matter) show little sign of having learned anything important from all these disasters and policy failures[.]

* * * *

Think about it. America's military interventions in the Middle East are a disaster. America's goals in Syria are lunacy. Against this background how are Vladimir Putin's interventions going to play a wrecking role? The wrecking is already in full swing.

The U.S. is engaged in something dirty and disgraceful in Syria. That is all on Obama, and the roots of our dishonor stretch back to the Obama blunder in removing Gaddafi and deliberate policy secretly to run guns through to the Syrian opposition out of the CIA Annex in Benghazi. The woman who crowed "We came. We saw. He died." was our Secretary of State at the time and now looks to be the next Democrat nominee for president. Was there anything more honorable than that at work in our attack on Gaddafi's Libya? There's not one head of state in Europe now who doesn't fervently wish that the Americans and the French had left Libya alone.

Just who are these moral lightweights who dabble in the Great Game and think that sociology, political science, and history majors and their Strayer Business College and Wellesley degrees give them the insight and wisdom to decide which regimes should fall by the wayside, regimes that have committed no acts of war against the United States?

George W. Bush is not at all blameless in this sorry litany of stupidity. A salutary punitive strike against Saddam Hussein, assuming that attacking Iraq had some rational relation to punishing those responsible for 9/11 (and disregarding the specious WMD justification offered at the time), was turned into a lunatic open-ended exercise in "nation building" as though the diplomatic and military officer corps of the United States had any kind of insight into the political realities of a third-rate Islamic country in the Middle East. What moron thinks that elections are some kind of elixir for what ails countries around the world? The Muslim world needs to be quarantined not reformed by naifs.

America, which started out as a magnificent experiment in self government, has devolved into a reckless, destructive force that is propelled by stupidity and hubris on the part of its political class. It's a political class, let it be said, that is also hard at work bringing chaos and bloody civil strife to our own shores.

Notes
^[1] "Did Russia’s Intervention Derail Turkey’s Plan to Invade Syria?" By Mike Whitney, The Unz Review, 10/15/15.
^[2] "Ross Douthat Asks: Is Putin Winning?" By Randall Parker, ParaPundit, 10/4/15 (color formatting of links removed).