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Benjamin Netanyahu just gave a controversial speech to Congress this week. Now, America is unquestionably friends with Israel, that's pretty much a given. But what I find interesting is that even though most of the American people are currently unaware of it, we are also de facto allied with Iran right now, in the fight against the Islamic State.
After an impressive showing in January, President Barack Obama's job approval ratings in February continued to climb, but at a slower rate. Obama seems to have topped off for now, in other words. Overall, the month averaged better than January, but Obama's numbers softened noticeably at the end of the month, and could turn flat or even slightly downward in March.
Jeb Bush gave a speech this week that was supposed to lay out his foreign policy ideas. The speech itself fell far short of this goal, according to most who bothered to listen to it. Bush did announce his foreign policy advisory team -- which looks a whole lot like his brother's, with a sprinkling of his father's advisors added into the mix. But the entire exercise left many questions unanswered.
Listening to President Barack Obama's State Of The Union speech tonight, I couldn't help but think that he's been waiting a long time to give such a speech, and he was happy to finally be giving it. Finally he could speak of the economy without having to hedge his language. Finally, he could unleash his inner optimism once again.
The whole story would likely be rejected as a Hollywood plot, on the grounds that nobody would believe it could ever happen, even as comedy or farce. A dictator is insulted by an upcoming movie -- a comedy about his own assassination -- and he unleashes his hackers on the studio to take revenge, by posting their embarrassing emails and then prevents the movie's release by making ludicrous threats to theaters? Preposterous!
It is indeed the season. Yes, it's that magical time of year when the wee folk of Capitol Hill actually get something done. These brief bursts of activity only happen very rarely, of course, and always immediately proceed another one of the many, many long vacations Congress takes during the year.
What walks like a duck and quacks like a duck but seems to have serious mobility problems?
President Barack Obama has always been a reluctant warrior. It is, in fact, one of the big reasons he was elected, since America had turned away from the cowboy swagger of Bush and Cheney by 2008. Tonight, President Obama laid out the case for escalating a war we've already begun, in Iraq and Syria. He presented his plan to the public, and gave his reasons for why America should become more involved in the fight against the Islamic State (or, variously, ISIS or ISIL), and explained what America would and would not be doing in the coming months.
American aircraft are once again waging war over the skies of Iraq. President Obama, as many have pointed out, is now the fourth United States president in a row to order some form of military offensive in Iraq. As always, plenty of critics immediately popped up to loudly explain what the president was doing wrong. The usual characters on the right demanded a much more intensive military action, the ones on the left warned darkly about slippery slopes and possible blowback, and the American people seemed to heave a sigh of resignation, in a "here we go again" moment.
In all the pontificating on what now should be done (and what should have been done previously) in Iraq, one subject oddly never seems to be on the table. I find this a bit strange, because it really should be a subject worthy of debate -- if only to add to the finger-pointing about what could have been done to avoid the current situation. From hawks to isolationists, though, nobody seems to ever bring up the possibility of Iraqis performing their own airstrikes. To put this another way: where is the Iraqi Air Force?