From Fox's Journal Editorial Report, Wall Street Journal editorial director Daniel Henninger along with host Paul Gigot and another of their editorial writers, Matthew Kaminski discussing what Gigot called the "biggest foreign policy story of 2011,
December 31, 2011

From Fox's Journal Editorial Report, Wall Street Journal editorial director Daniel Henninger along with host Paul Gigot and another of their editorial writers, Matthew Kaminski discussing what Gigot called the "biggest foreign policy story of 2011, the Arab Spring. And in typical Fox fashion where what's up is down and black is white, we get this bit of commentary on the cause of the uprisings from Henninger:

HENNINGER: Now, admittedly our options are limited, but why are they limited? The Arab Spring started last January. At least eleven nations erupted against existing dictatorships. The United States' reaction was we don't know what to do because we don't know who these people are, because we aren't engaged with those people.

GIGO: But for precisely that reason, we played or in part because of that reason, in part because of the reluctance of the Obama administration to lead in the world; you know they like to “lead from behind” as one of the advisers famously told The New Yorker. They've played a pretty passive role here. And so is that...

HENNIGER: Well I think they've done that as a matter of policy. They do not want to lead. They want to engage with other multilateral institutions. But I think what you're seeing in the Middle East is a microcosm of what the world looks like when the world's leading power disengages itself. It begins to spin out of control on its own and this is why this will occur in other parts of the world if we don't show global responsibility.

Which by engaging, what they're talking about naturally is threatening to or allowing Israel to go ahead and bomb Iran. They're just aching for a return to the days of George W. Bush and the neocons and more military engagements in the Middle East, facts and how badly that's worked out for us in the past be damned and they'll use any excuse to continue to push for just that as they did here. Heaven forbid we've got all this messy protesting and uprisings going on where people are tired of dictators and oppression. We'd better get more "engaged" to put a stop to it.

I think our meddling in the Middle East and propping up these dictators over the years that the populations are rising up against has done quite enough damage already, thank you. And to claim that we're not "engaged" already when we've still got thousands of troops and contractors over there and are doing drone attacks in the name of this fiasco they call the "war on terror" is utterly ridiculous.

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