While many are baffled by Obama's seemingly incoherent policy on Syria, it makes more sense if one looks at it through the prism of what has guided his foreign policy all along:  setting the stage for coercing Israel into accepting a Saudi-style "peace" deal with the Palestinian Arabs. The problem for Obama in the case of Syria, however, is that this point of policy reference led him into a no-win policy quagmire.  The implications of his failure here go well beyond Syria.

Once upon a time (say, 50 years ago), we stood for something as a civilization. We had just fought some incredibly bloody wars which we could have easily avoided at that time by appeasing or ignoring Japan, Germany, and soon after, North Korea. In the course of these conflicts, we affirmed what we stood for as a society. Little things like democracy, religious tolerance, free speech, human rights, etc

During his recent visit to Israel, rather than face the elected representatives of the Israeli people in the Knesset, the American President – in a pointed departure from all past U.S. presidential visits to Israel – instead chose to lecture a hand-picked group of liberal/left Israeli students on the ‘virtues’ of a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority

"One of the persistent problems with the manner in which the war on Islamist-based terror is presented in the media is the lack of historical context.  The general public is rarely presented with other historical situations that are at least somewhat analogous to this conflict, so as to better understand its nature.  While volumes may be written on this, here I intend to provide a brief overview of how aspects of another recent long-term struggle, the Cold War, can be related to events of the present day centered on the Middle East and beyond, and to touch on other larger factors at play in the war on terror that are seldom mentioned in the media." R.V.