Failure to Communicate

 'From the beginning of the conflict, and despite his protestations to the contrary, Obama was never serious in trying to effectively help the Syrian people beyond providing much needed humanitarian aid. His half-baked attempt at helping the armed opposition was too little too late, because he never intended to help them overthrow their tormentor – the Assad regime. Just as Obama abandoned the Libyan people after the overthrow of Qaddafi, he abandoned the Syrian people to the depredation and savagery of the Assad regime. From the beginning of the conflict, Assad’s friends – the Russians, Iranians and Hezbollah – were committed to his survival; unlike the friends of Syria, who met regularly, talked and then talked more, but were never committed to their victory against tyranny.
 There is an iconic scene in the movie Cool Hand Luke (1967) in which the prison warden played by Strother Martin, after striking Luke the main protagonist, played by Paul Newman, says: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate”. One could say that one of America’s failures in the Middle East, historically, was communicating clearly its policies and strategies, assuming that they do exist. However, in the case of President Obama we would be more accurate if we paraphrase the warden’s sentence as: “What we’ve got here is failure of leadership.” '