Obama: The Middle East Should Be Run by Crazy Islamist Dictators
That’s not the exact quote, but it sums up the substance of it nicely. And it’s another revelation from the former Israeli ambassador’s new book.
More Erdogans please:
Evidently unfazed by the Turkish leader’s pro-Hamas and anti-Israel positions, Obama tells a Netanyahu-led Israel team at the White House in 2012: “We could do much worse than have a bunch of Erdogans in the Middle East.”
That was before Erdogan went completely nuts with the Geza Park protests next year, moved into a giant palace surrounded by guards in medieval armor and his apparent ties to ISIS were exposed during an internal Islamist struggle, but he was also pretty bad in 2012.
Obama was saying that he wanted to see a bunch of crazy Islamist tyrants who hated America and Israel, kept tens of thousands of political prisoners locked up, had been accused of WMD use against the Kurds, had threatened to ethnically cleanse Armenians, were suppressing the political opposition and were supporters of Hamas.
That’s a hell of an endorsement.
I had written in the past that Obama considered Erdogan a model for the region, but here we get it from the horse’s mouth. No wonder Obama clung so closely to Morsi. Morsi was supposed to be Egypt’s Erdogan.
