Barack and Hillary: rank amateurs when it comes to the Middle East

Back in 2011, President Obama, Caesar-like, gave the thumbs down to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, telling him: "The transition must begin now."

And then, after Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, assumed power, we heard only fawning praise of him from Obama's Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton:

"I want to thank President Morsi for his personal leadership to de-escalate the situation in Gaza and end the violence," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who met Morsi Thursday, said at a Cairo press conference with Egypt's foreign minister announcing the accord. "This is a critical moment for the region. Egypt's new government is assuming the responsibility and leadership that has long made this country a cornerstone of regional stability and peace," she said.

The New York Times gushed about Obama's new man crush on Morsi:

The cease-fire brokered between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday was the official unveiling of this unlikely new geopolitical partnership, one with bracing potential if not a fair measure of risk for both men. After a rocky start to their relationship, Mr. Obama has decided to invest heavily in the leader whose election caused concern because of his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, seeing in him an intermediary who might help make progress in the Middle East beyond the current crisis in Gaza. ... Mr. Obama told aides he was impressed with the Egyptian leader’s pragmatic confidence. He sensed an engineer’s precision with surprisingly little ideology. Most important, Mr. Obama told aides that he considered Mr. Morsi a straight shooter who delivered on what he promised and did not promise what he could not deliver. “The thing that appealed to the president was how practical the conversations were — here’s the state of play, here are the issues we’re concerned about,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. “This was somebody focused on solving problems.”

So, Obama "invested heavily" in Morsi? Well, that investment has turned out about as well as his investment in Solyndra.

It would have been ok, if the Obama administration simply had not intervened in Egypt. But it did intervene, and ineptly. So that, Barack and Hillary are revealed once more to be rank amateurs who have absolutely no feel for politics in the Middle East. Their confidence in Morsi was as well-placed as their confidence that Al Qaeda would never attack the American consulate in Benghazi.