The Cleaner Used Too Much Starch

Kroft: Have the events that took place in the Middle East, the recent events in the Middle East given you any pause about your support for the governments that have come to power following the Arab Spring?

Obama: Well, I’d said even at the time that this is going to be a rocky path. The question presumes that somehow we could have stopped this wave of change. I think it was absolutely the right thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy, universal rights, a notion that people have to be able to participate in their own governance. But I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because, you know, in a lot of these places, the one organizing principle has been Islam. The one part of society that hasn’t been controlled completely by the government.

There are strains of extremism, and anti-Americanism, and anti-Western sentiment. And, you know, can be tapped into by demagogues. There will probably be some times where we bump up against some of these countries and have strong disagreements, but I do think that over the long term we are more likely to get a Middle East and North Africa that is more peaceful, more prosperous and more aligned with our interests.

The GOP criticism is that “bumps in the road” is an awfully mild way of referring to the murder of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The Democratic defense, as ABC’s Jake Tapper reports, is that that’s a tendentious construction of Obama’s words. An unnamed “senior administration official” emails Tapper: “It’s just not true that he was characterizing the attack in Benghazi–the question doesn’t even make mention of it. He’s speaking about broad trends.”

In answer to a question about domestic politics, CNSNews.com notes, Obama said this: “Oh I think that, you know, as president I bear responsibility for everything–to some degree.” The bump stops here!

BuzzFeed.com reports on the latest effort at bump-passing. The State Department has “slammed CNN for its ‘disgusting’ handling of Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ diary,” which CNN says it “found on the floor of the largely unsecured consulate compound.” BuzzFeed sums up: “The diary helped confirm, as the network reported, that Stevens had been worried about the threat of an Al Qaeda attack, and even feared his own name was included on a hit list.”

That contradicted “the line the State Department and the administration had been pushing,” namely “that there was no intelligence of a coming attack” and “that the attack could be blamed solely on an anti-Islamic video.” BuzzFeed argues that the blame rests mostly with Foggy Bottom and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

The election-year focus on President Barack Obama meant that the White House had at first been catching most of the heat for the tragedy in Benghazi. . . . But in reality, the fiasco appears to be largely–if not entirely–a State Department botch. It was the State Department that failed to provide its ambassador adequate security; it was the State Department that fled Benghazi in the aftermath of the attack, apparently failing to clear or secure the scene, leaving Stevens’ diary behind; and it was State that had taken the lead on the ground after the Libya intervention.

Well, no one can dispute that the State Department fouled up. It may be that the old Obama-Clinton rivalry is coming to the fore. (On that note, see this headline over an Associated Press story from yesterday: “Poor Economy Could Cost Obama Youth Vote, [Bill] Clinton Says.”)

But blaming Mrs. Clinton hardly gets Obama off the hook. She serves at his pleasure, after all, and if the State Department is leading him astray, he isn’t leading.

Obama’s lack of leadership is also on display in Egypt, strategically a far more important country than Libya. A week and a half ago, as we noted, the New York Timespublished a piece designed to depict Obama as a tough guy. Our president had placed a “blunt phone call” to his Cairo counterpart, Mohamed Morsi, and Morsi hastened to yield:

Egyptian leaders scrambled Thursday to try to repair the country’s alliance with Washington, tacitly acknowledging that they erred in their response to the attack on the United States Embassy by seeking to first appease anti-American domestic opinion without offering a robust condemnation of the violence.

But Morsi’s own account of the phone call was quite different, as Reuters reported:

On Thursday, [Morsi] said he asked U.S. President Barack Obama to act against those seeking to harm relations. His cabinet said Washington was not to blame for the film but urged the United States to take legal action against those insulting religion.

Which of the two men actually dominated the conversation? Perhaps tellingly, there was no indication even in the Times report that Obama made clear to Morsi that there would be no “legal action against those insulting religion” because any such action would violate the American Constitution. A clear defense of constitutional principles has been absent from the administration’s public statements as well.

Compare Obama’s passivity in the “60 Minutes” interview with Morsi’s confidence, even cockiness, in an interview to the Times published yesterday:

On the eve of his first trip to the United States as Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi said the United States needed to fundamentally change its approach to the Arab world, showing greater respect for its values and helping build a Palestinian state, if it hoped to overcome decades of pent-up anger. . . .

If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.

And he dismissed criticism from the White House that he did not move fast enough to condemn protesters who recently climbed over the United States Embassy wall and burned the American flag in anger over a video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad.

He suggested that Egypt would not be hostile to the West, but would not be as compliant as [Hosni] Mubarak either.

“Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region,” he said, by backing dictatorial governments over popular opposition and supporting Israel over the Palestinians.

Morsi is living up to Obama’s characterization in another recent interview: “You know, I don’t think that we would consider them [the Egyptians] an ally but we don’t consider them an enemy.” Actually, Egypt is formally designated a “major non-NATO ally.” Will Obama’s passivity permit Morsi to redefine the terms of that alliance in a way that is inimical to American interests?