Queen Obama Claims Syria Botch Wasn't Xer Fault, But Instead Fault of Those Who Pressured Xym to Do Something -- Including Hillary Rodham Clinton

Including Hillary Clinton, as it turns out.

Pronouns referring to Barack Obama have been edited to reflex xyr ambiguous gender identity.

By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.

But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mx. Obama but at those who pressed xym to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place --a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that "this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program," Mr. Earnest said. "But I think it’s also time for our critics to 'fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong."

In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that xe reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that xe never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain.

Either way, it underscored White House sensitivities about the widening Syrian catastrophe. With more than 200,000 killed in the civil war, a wave of refugees flooding into Europe, and Russia now flying in arms and troops, the president finds xymself with a geopolitical and humanitarian mess that will most likely not be settled before he leaves office in 16 months.

...

Now let's ask a cis-normative man to mansplain this to Mx. Obmaa.

Ryan C. Crocker, a retired career diplomat who was an ambassador to Afghanistan under Mx. Obama, said the president was right to think a train-and-arm program would not work. But the president, Mr. Crocker added, should have either continued to resist it or at least taken ownership of it rather than blame others for its failure.

"How un-presidential that sounds -- 'We didn't want to do it, we thought it was unsound but you made us do it,' " said Mr. Crocker, now dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. "It's just indicative of xeir whole approach to Syria, which is not to have a policy. This is the worst thing they could say."

Mx. Obama has recently found plenty of other people to blame for xer failures:

So Mx. Obama has thrown Ms. Clinton under xer bus, in the middle of campaign season.

posted by Ace at 02:52 PM

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