A Victor Davis Hanson post from a couple of days ago, but still of interest:
How did Obama get himself into this mess? It was bound to happen, given his past habits. All we are seeing now is the melodramatic fulfillment of vero possumus, lowering the rising seas, faux Corinthian columns, hope and change, the bows, the Cairo speech, and the audacity of hope. Hubris does earn Nemesis.
1) His inclination is to damn straw men, blame others for his self-inflicted errors, and spike the ball when he should keep quiet and become modest (cf. the bin Laden raid). So in Syria we heard the same old, same old: A host of bad guys, here and abroad, wants to do nothing. Obama alone has the vision and moral compass to restore global and U.S. credibility through his eloquence; but the world disappointed him and is now at fault for establishing red lines that it won’t enforce: He came into the world to save the world, but the world rejected him.
[…]
2) Obama thinks in an untrained manner and for all the talk of erudition and education seems bored and distracted — and it shows up in the most critical moments. Had he wished to stop authoritarians, prevent bloodshed and near genocide, and foster true reform in the Middle East, there were plenty of prior, but now blown occasions: a) the “good” war in Afghanistan could have earned his full attention; b) the “bad” Iraq War was won and needed only a residual force to monitor the Maliki government and protect Iraq airspace and ensure quiet; c) the green revolution in Iran was in need of moral support; d) Qaddafi could have been continually pressured for further reform rather than bombed into oblivion; e) postwar Libya needed U.S. leadership to ensure that “lead from behind” did not lead to the present version of Somalia and the disaster in Benghazi; e) long ago, the president could have either kept quiet about Syria or acted on his threats when Assad was tottering and the resistance was less Islamist; f) he could have warned the one vote/one time Muslim Brotherhood early on not to do what everyone in the world knew it would surely do; g) he need not have issued tough serial deadlines to Iran that we have not really enforced and probably have no intention of enforcing.
Instead, Obama relied on his rhetoric and talked loosely, sloppily and inconsistently from crisis to crisis, the only common denominator being that he always took the path of least resistance and thus did nothing concretely to match his cadences. Usually to the degree he made a decision, he made things worse with empty, first-person bombast.
