Thanks to UK & US intervention, al-Qaeda now has a mini-state in Yemen. It's Iraq and Isis again

[bemildred]

9. There are two aspects to that question:

1.) The little boy has now pointed out that the Emperor has no clothes, in public. It will therefore be discussed. And so it is with the Obama Doctrine. That is an improvement.

2.) Because of disingenuous way that politics is conducted in this country, you cannot interpret what politicans say and do as direct attempts to do something, nobody has that sort of official organic power, you have to convince people to do what you want. This is rarely done by means of reason and logic, mostly they appeal to the baser instincts and great reliance is placed on disinformation. And mostly by negative means, fending off any alternatives rather than advancing arguments for what you want. Since so many of the policies we are subjected to are contrary to the wishes of the public, this is necessary. We are sold the lesser evil, not the greater good. So to understand what is going on, you have to interpret in terms of what (probably good) things they are trying to fend off or delegitimize, and from that you can begin to infer what they are trying to do. For example, they don't want single payer, so we get told it's impractical, despite the fact that it is the norm in most advanced countries. We don't get nice things here because we have to pay for our empire, and that means feeding the banks.

So from that point of view I infer that Obama wants to put an end to the Washington consensus, and he has taken a good shot at bringing that about too. You can argue about whether that was intentional, or from some agreement with my view of the situation, but I don't care about that very much. The effect is there, and will be hard to reverse.