This week with David Barnett | January 18

He was born into a Muslim household, obviously, to get those given names. He is a superb rhetorician, in the class of Winston Churchill. But he is not the descendants of slaves, who today contribute so enormously to American pre-eminence.

More relevantly, he was not a successful president. He never grasped the fact that the Muslim revolutionaries who set out to overthrow tyrannical regimes across North Africa and the Middle East were worse than those regimes, and that those regimes might have been less tyrannical had they not had to deal with rebellious fanatics, who regard democracy and capitalism as blasphemy and who circumcise their girl children.

In hindsight, the Shah of Iran should not have been overthrown. Saddam Hussein should have been left in charge of Iraq. Libya is not a better place because it is no longer run by Gaddafi. 

But surely by the time Syria came along we should have begun to work it out.

Obama did not. Instead he vacated the field to Russia, who intervened on behalf of the Syrian government. Nobody says it’s a lovely government, but who denies that those who seek to overthrow it are not worse?

Setting aside the dismerits of the two sides, what Obama did was to make an international leader of Vladimir Putin, who is hell-bent on making Russia great again, to recoin a phrase.

Obama did a deal with Iran’s theocratic government that endows their nuclear program with American blessing. It would be astonishing if Iran were not to announce one day that they had developed a bomb.

It gets worse. He switched sides at the UN on a vote that purported to roll the accepted borders of Israel back to 1947, on the vote of the UN’s bloc of Muslim members, borders which were not accepted at the time by Israel’s five Muslim neighbours, who attacked and were beaten off, but that’s not the point. Israel must fear the future. One should  also note that Obama has been as busy as he can be undermining Donald Trump’s opening to Russia. Does that help anybody?