Obama’s “Strategic Reticence”

“Strategic reticence” is how the Obama administration is characterizing their own approach to the turmoil in the Middle East, according to a background quotation from an administration official featured in David Ignatius’s column at the Washington Post on Sunday. …Obama’s political archetype, the community organizer, is an oxymoronic entity: a strategist without an objective. ‘Perpetual tactician’ might be more accurate: one whose fulfillment comes from maneuvering against the boundaries of the existing order, and who, when those boundaries are breached, waits for someone with more vision—for good or ill—to reset them. Obama’s greatest service to America may be demonstrating for the people why we should repudiate this political model.