Sorry, Obama: 'We' Aren't Complicit. It's You Who Has Blood on Your Hands | Opinion
newsweek ^ | 11/5/2023 | Liel Leibovitz
Posted on 11/7/2023, 9:49:00 AM
In 1953, the Swiss novelist Max Frisch published a play called The Arsonists. It's a pitch dark comedy about a small town ravaged by a group of maniacs disguised as traveling salesmen, who sweet-talk their way into people's homes and then set them on fire. Its protagonist is a dolt called Biedermann—bieder being German for honest, respectable, and upright. He's aware of the danger, and yet, when the arsonists knock, he lets them in. The tragedy, Frisch argues, is that he almost has no other choice: The arsonists are such smooth talkers that it's easy, when listening to them, to ignore the large drums of kerosene and the matches they're holding in their hands.
I thought of The Arsonists this week when I heard snippets of a podcast interview featuring former president Barack Obama on the Middle East. "Nobody's hands are clean," Obama said. "All of us are complicit."
Nah, man. Not all of us are complicit. It's just you.
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It's you, because you're the one who gave that stentorian speech about red lines in Syria and then sat by and did nothing as those red lines were crossed and Assad continued to slaughter his own people, allowing the Iranians and the Russians to creep in and fill the vacuum left by your devastating lack of leadership.
It's you, because you're the one who came up with the idea of empowering Iran, the world's premiere exporter of terrorism, Holocaust denial, and chaos, all the while telling the American people you were merely trying to stop Teheran from getting a nuclear bomb. Billions of dollars and thousands of dead later, we can all see how well this idea—which you, with the eloquence only a professor could muster, called "regional integration"—is working.
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