The impending war over the Gaza Strip, like the Benghazi fiasco, is just another demonstration of the consequences of President Obama’s foreign policy and national security policies.  We are dismantling our military capability, telegraphing our lack of support for Israel, appeasing our enemies in the Islamic world, and generally projecting weakness.  At the same time, we have a President who has adopted the trademark political strategy of the international Left, which is that no government is as important as the political party that controls it, and that the primary function of the controlling party is to maintain its position of control, hence the perpetual campaign:  the President spends most of his time and effort on campaigning rather than governing.  The economy may be in shambles (it is), our military may be unable to conduct even one war successfully (much less two or more), and our strategically most important ally in the Middle East may be under existential threat, but our President appears oblivious and will not take questions.

The White House knew enough about Benghazi to spend two weeks attempting to persuade us that it was a spontaneous action sparked by an obscure video, but it will not field any questions about Benghazi because the matter is still under investigation and they do not want to give explanations until they know what really happened, which raises the obvious question:  if they do not know enough about it to take questions, how could they have known enough to be offering answers?

Good luck to the Israelis!   They will need it, as they certainly will not be able to count upon any support from the United States.  Note the U.S. response to the Hamas rockets:

“We support Israel’s right to defend itself, and we encourage Israel to continue to take every effort to avoid civilian casualties,” US State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

“We strongly condemn the barrage of rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel, and we regret the death and injury of innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians caused by the ensuing violence.”

Note the general statement of a principle (support for “Israel’s right to defend itself”), a condemnation of the rocket fire from “Gaza” (not Hamas itself), a soothing expression of regret for casualties on either side.  But also note the absence of any statement that Israel was justified in retaliating for the rocket attacks, and note the absence of any pledge of assistance to Israel in this conflict.  In other words, the U.S. supports the principle of self-defense, but declines to participate or assist in Israel’s efforts at self-defense and declines to characterize retaliation as a form of self-defense.  This is the kind of word game for which Obama was notorious at Harvard Law (mediating arguments by deluding each side into believing that he supported them, rather than the other side), but I do not think it fools either Hamas or Israel.