“You want to know why we have an Arab Spring? Barack Obama has laid the table for an Arab Spring by demonstrating weakness from the United States of America. The Number One duty of the president is to be the commander in chief.”Bachmann's saying that we should have had Moammar Gahdafi's back and defended his murderous, terrorist-sponsoring regime instead of organizing NATO airstrikes to prevent a massacre of civilians.
Bachmann is saying we ought to back the Bashar Al-Assad regime against the Syrian civilian uprising against oppression.
For Bachmann the most apt analogy for the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, etc. is the collapse of the regime of Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1978. In her view of history we "didn't have the Shah's back," which then led to the rise of "radical jihad."
Of course, the rise of Al-Qaida doesn't trace back to Shiite Iran, but rather to Sunni Saudi Arabia. And if we're going to pick a President to tar with the rise of "radical jihad," we might as well pick Ronald Reagan for his support of the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. After all, that's where Osama bin Laden learned his trade.
You can't make this stuff up, and it would be precious if it came out of an eighth-grader's history report. But from a serious candidate for President, it's just insanity.
Perhaps most ironically, Bachmann's saying that our foreign policy toward the Middle East ought to look like Don Rumsfeld chummily assuring Saddam Hussein that his dispute with Kuwait is an internal affair. After all, anything to keep the dictators in power, right? Without dictators to keep the rabble in line, we'll have chaos!
By the time this is over, Michele Bachmann may not be electable as a candidate for the Lake Elmo City Council, let alone for the Presidency of the United States.
Follow me on Twitter @aaronklemz
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