Obama And Now Trump: Brothers In Buck Passing

Taking responsibility for mistakes is a sure sign of 
character; blaming others is not.

In a cover story in the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine, President Obama offers astonishing scapegoating for his own foreign-policy disasters.

According to Obama, the deterioration of the ISIS wasteland that is now Libya was not due to improvident administration bombing followed by a hasty departure, but was largely the fault of others.

photo: AP

European allies, the president complained, did not do any follow-up nation-building despite the proximity of Libya. Obama depicts French President Nicolas Sarkozy as a showboater who tried to claim credit for the air campaign in Libya after the U.S. had done the heavy lifting.

Obama did not stop there.

Administration aides told The Atlantic that Obama’s unfortunate quip about ISIS being a “jayvee” organization was really the Pentagon’s fault. Gen. Lloyd Austin, who at the time was leading U.S. Central Command, supposedly misled Obama by describing ISIS as a “flash in the pan.”

Earlier, Obama had blamed the spread of ISIS on National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who, Obama told “60 Minutes,” “has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Obama also criticized British Prime Minister David Cameron for not getting Parliament on board for decisive action in Syria.

This blame-gaming is old and tired. After Obama established a “red line” with Syrian President Bashar Assad on the use of chemical weapons, only to see Assad ignore the warning with impunity, Obama denied that he had ever set a red line in the first place.

Read the rest of Victor David Hanson's op-ed HERE.

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