Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Mystery of Washington's Waning Global Power

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Mystery of Washington's Waning Global Power

Posted by Dilip Hiro at 3:53pm, September 29, 2013.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175753/tomgram%3A_dilip_hiro%2C_the_mystery_of_washington%27s_waning_global_power/

Among the curious spectacles of our moment, the strangeness of the Obama presidency hasn’t gotten its full due.  After decades in which “the imperial presidency” was increasingly in the spotlight, after two terms of George W. Bush in which a literal cult of executive power -- or to use the term of that moment, “the unitary executive” -- took hold in the White House, and without any obvious diminution in the literal powers of the presidency, Barack Obama has managed to look like a bystander at his own funeral.
If I had to summarize these years, I would say that he entered the phone booth dressed as Superman and came out as Clark Kent.  Today, TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro, author most recently of the invaluable A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Middle East, points out that, as far as Obama’s foreign (and war) policy, it’s almost as if, when the American president speaks, no one in the Greater Middle East -- not even our closest allies or client states -- is listening.  And true as it may be for that region, it seems, bizarrely enough, no less true in Washington where the president’s recent attempts to intervene in the Syrian civil war were rejected both by Congress (though without a final vote on the subject) and by the American people via opinion polls.