President Flexibility wants world to wait til after election

David Ignatius:

It’s embarrassing when President Obama’s risk-averse refusal to engage on foreign policy issues becomes so obvious that it’s a laugh line for the president of Iran.

“I do believe that some conversations and key issues must be talked about again once we come out of the other end of the political election atmosphere in the United States,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said cheekily in an interview last Sunday. I hate to say it, but on this matter the often-annoying Iranian leader is right.

Less than six weeks before the election, the Obama campaign’s theme song might as well be the old country-music favorite “Make the World Go Away.” This may be smart politics, but it’s not good governing: The way this campaign is going, the president will have a foreign affairs mandate for . . . nothing.

The “come back after Nov. 6” sign is most obvious with Iran. The other members of the “P5+1” negotiating group understand that the United States doesn’t want serious bargaining until after the election, lest Obama have to consider compromises that might make him look weak. So the talks with Iran that began last May dither along in technical discussions.

Ahmadinejad and some of his aides let slip during their visit to New York that they may be willing to offer a deal that would halt enrichment of uranium above 5 percent. Is this a good deal or not, in terms of U.S. and Israeli security? Sorry, come back later.

Will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keep his gun in the holster until after the polls close? The White House certainly hopes so. But someone should check the odds with Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who is one of Mitt Romney’s biggest financial backers.

The Obama arm’s-length approach is evident with Egypt and the other nations convulsed by the Arab uprising. The United States is launching an innovative economic-assistance program to help Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government. But you don’t hear much about it this election season. Nor is there much public discussion of the covert U.S. effort to aid the Syrian rebels, or the war in Yemen, or the god-awful mess in Iraq.

And though Obama was eloquent in his speech to the United Nations on Tuesday in eulogizing Christopher Stevens, America’s brave ambassador to Libya, the administration has been reluctant to talk about resurgent al-Qaeda operations in that country. One senses a desire to keep the lid on this explosive subject in the State Department’s effort to suppress CNN’s reporting of Stevens’s private diary, along with a commendable effort to protect the family’s privacy.

I’m told that the talk in the Libyan underground is about a “global intifada,” like what the new al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has been preaching for the past five years. But ask U.S. officials about that subject, and you get a “no comment.”

To be blunt: The administration has a lot invested in the public impression that al-Qaeda was vanquished when Osama bin Laden was killed

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Obama is going to have a tough time selling more money for Egypt with their president freeing murderous terrorist and asking for the release of the guy behind the first World Trade Center attacks.  Egypt is a country that did nothing to the Islamist who first showed the video that got them all wee weed up, but through in jail a Coptic Christian blogger who merely linked to it.  He openly talks about capturing Jerusalem.  Why should we help prop this guy up.  We should want him to fail.

Why is Obama pretending that sanctions against Iran have been effective when they have clearly failed in their primary objective of stopping their development of their nuclear program.  Iran is already exploiting Obama's retreat from Iraq using it as a corridor to supply the killing in Syria.

But the biggest disaster has been Obama's weak groveling response to al Qaeda's latest offensive against our diplomatic sites around the Muslim world.  Obama's war strategy looks about as effective as GM's marketing of the Volt.