The Day of Reckoning

BarbWire BWNote: Richard Fernandez at PJ Media has written an excellent analysis of the latest events in Iraq and of the Obama presidency to date. Here are a few excerpts.

Ernest Hemingway observed that people went broke gradually at first then all of a sudden.  Barack Obama’s career, for so long without visible means of support, has now moved onto the “all of sudden stage” of bankruptcy.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaeda affiliated front of Muslims, have followed up their lightning seizure of Mosul by taking Tikrit, the former stronghold of Saddam Hussein.

In Mosul and surrounding areas, more than 150,000 troops fled their posts as the militants advanced, leaving behind thousands of weapons, including tanks and helicopters, that are now in ISIL’s possession, said Jabbar Yawer, a spokesman for ethnic Kurdish armed forces in Erbil.

The speed with which ISIL and its allies have advanced after their seizure on Tuesday of Mosul – a city of two million people – has sent alarm bells ringing not only in Baghdad but in western capitals.

The dangers of abandoning such a vital region were always obvious. Those who have not read my 2010 post, The Ten Ships, might take the time to do so now. It’s good for a laugh, not because it is so “brilliant” but because it’s so obvious. It explains how Obama’s political petulance made him ignore fundamental military strategy by ignoring the obvious center of Islamic militant gravity the Middle East in favor of redeploying the ground forces to a PR fantasy campaign in Afghanistan.

[T]he real price of Obama’s campaign to stuff the voter rolls with “undocumented aliens” will soon have to be paid. Like a child throwing a tantrum, President Obama has deemed it clever to throw open the southern border, ascribing what any sane person would regard as territorial suicide to high-minded humanitarianism. It has somehow become cool to encourage the invasion of America and racist to even consider that might be bad idea.  But through that portal, what might come? Well, Bienvenido y Allah Akbar.

Whether in fulfillment of some childhood psycho-drama, in the service of some bizarre obsession or in pursuit of an imbecilic strategy, Obama has basically made every bad move it is possible to make. For a long time the press covered up this perverted process out of admiration for the creases in his trousers; and so it appeared Obama was going gradually bust. Now we’re in the “all of a sudden” part of the curve.  The check’s come back from the bank, bounced.

The accumulated weight of Obama’s errors is now too great to escape.  There is no soft landing.  It’s crunch time. America waits on its ill-defended beaches behind Obama’s Cash-for-Clunkers, Solar Panel, Carbon Trading Certificates and Obamacare sandbags, though it still has no Keystone XL pipeline.

See him as Clint Eastwood saw him.  An empty chair; the man who failed at everything including his stint at the Annenberg Foundation and as Illinois legislator; who probably even had his “books” ghostwritten for him. A blank screen, on which he proudly declared everyone could project their fantasy. His inability to think a new thought is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in his unshaken desire to release even more hardened terrorists from Gitmo.  He is marching to some invisible drummer, pursuing a vision of greatness some once believed was visionary but which turns out to be merely delusional.

Read the entire article at PJMedia.com.