Why he dithered

I have regularly expressed my contempt for Mr. Obama's dithering over the past month, while a democratic movement bled on the sands of North Africa. But here is Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal with an analysis of the president's failure that is more, um, nuanced than mine:

Everywhere Mr. Obama looked, he saw Iraq. We couldn't rescue Tripoli and Benghazi because of what we had witnessed in Fallujah and Sadr City. Iraq was Mr. Obama's entry into the foreign world, it was his opposition to that war that gave him a sense of worldliness and gravitas. He had made much of being "a student of history." But history didn't stretch far for him, and in a man who claimed affinity with distant peoples and places, there was a heavy dosage of parochialism. It was history's odd timing: A great historical rupture in the Arab world, bearing within it the promise of remaking a flawed political tradition that knew no middle ground between despotism and nihilistic violence, happened on the watch of an American president proud of his deliberateness and his detachment from history's passions.

Worth a read. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford