'So Mr. President, You Want a New Syria Policy'.

• Author: DeAtkine, Norvell

"SO MR. PRESIDENT, YOU WANT A NEW SYRIA POLICY"

By Marc Ginsberg, former U.S. Foreign Service Officer and Ambassador to Morocco

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amb-marc-ginsberg/so-mr-president-you-want_b_4811380.html

This article is particularly timely, not so much because it is about the still festering Syrian tragedy, but because in the light of the Ukrainian crisis it has particular relevance. In an unintended sense, it conveys the international price of perceived American weakness and how it has consequences throughout the world. Ambassador Ginsberg, long identified with the Democratic Party, skewers the Obama approach to Syria in a most uncharacteristic venue, given the ultra-liberal leanings of the Huffington Post.

Referring to the Obama foreign policy record, the author wrote "if there is one reason that encapsulates the endless missteps and miscues it is the battle for the President's foreign policy soul between the moderate-progressive policy wing and the neo-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party." Ginsberg verifies the incoherence of the Obama foreign policy-making by reference to Secretary Robert Gates in his epochal book, Duty, in which Gates recorded the unprecedented interference in military affairs by politically oriented operatives in the White House.

In this regard Ginsberg singles out Valerie Jarrett as the chief culprit. To mitigate what Ms. Jarrett and others felt was "ultra-leftist" criticism of Obama's anti-terrorist policies, she orchestrated an isolationist American policy. As Ginberg wrote: "The mantra from the neo-isolationists and their in-house emissaries [was] stay out and stay home no matter how injurious to long-term...