With all the chaos rocking the Muslim world and drawing us once again towards the sinkhole, this may be the best thing I've read on misguided American policy even though it's nothing more than an intimation of things - it points out the key issue in all this way I see it: US political and intellectual elites do not get Islam in general and Islamism and the dysfunctional cultural dynamics of the Mideast in particular - this ignorance/foolishness has been on display since the first Gulf War, but has really shown its ugly head recently with regards to rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, failure to understand and accurately predict how the supposed Arab Spring would play out, the pullout of Iraq, the delusion of leading from behind, the phony surge in Afghanistan, sham nuke negotiations with Iran, failure to understand that as long as Hamas is around peace with Israel is an impossibility, and even throw in failure to grasp what Erdogan is up to in Turkey - the essay rightly points out that this is not just about Obama since Bush made many of the same mistakes - still, Obama has taken the stupidity to a whole new level - and the essay also rightly points out something that really worries me: how Obama's awful foreign policy instincts are made much worse by a media that just cannot bring itself to criticise the man in the way he needs to be criticised - as WR Mead astutely put it, Obama's foreign policy is so awful the media has no choice now but to report on the ugly 'dots' but it still is not connecting those dots and without a connecting narrative the American people will never really grasp just how bad Obama is and therefore correcting the mistakes will be harder to do.
