Kicking A Friend When He's Prostrate

The still-new, still struggling, still hopeful, continually embarrassed administration of United States President Barack Obama is not meeting with much success. Certainly not on the home front, where Americans are nonplussed at what their new administration is attempting to achieve and where unemployment has reached distressing new heights, and home foreclosures are continuing rampant, and the value of the greenback is being restored, but the economy is still in survival-mode.

When an administration sees itself in huge trouble attempting to enact useful and needful legislation that would benefit a significant segment of its population, due to suspicion and fear, it represents a national tragedy. Pitting those who are comfortably covered for medical and hospital care, against that demographic that is not, never has been, and likely never will be at anything approximating an adequate level. It's pretty basic, that a wealthy state is obliged to care for its own.

And then, to compound all the interior problems assailing the administration, there are those imposed from outside its borders. As the world's superpower, it discharges what it sees as its obligations on the world stage. And it would not do so, if what happened abroad did not impinge deleteriously on American interests. There is the winding down of the American troop presence in Iraq and that appears to be proceeding on schedule, although the influence of Iran in that theatre is a concern.

And then there is the NATO-, but largely American-led military occupation of Afghanistan, and America's relations with Pakistan intertwined with that mission, which becomes ever more complicated and ever more fraught with the danger of failure. The Taliban and their great good friends, al-Qaeda have metastasized elsewhere, and surgery here and there only suffices to keep the patient alive and flailing. It's a temporary ruse; the patient will recover, fully, with U.S. withdrawal.

And already in places elsewhere in Africa and Asia, the cancer has spread and continues to spread. It has its sinister tentacles throughout Europe, throughout North America; there is no place free from that dread disease of terror-jihad. And here is the president of Afghanistan, furious that his plans to form a lasting alliance with a renascent Taliban have been foiled with the Pakistan-obliging capture of its second-in command, delighting the U.S., then infuriating it with these new revelations. Pleased too with Karzai's comfort with Iran.

Even its partnership closer to home with Mexico - in combating a deadly drug scourge that has morphed into a wholesale slaughter of ordinary Mexican civilians as drug lords battle it out resolutely for ascendancy, power and territory in their trade, happy enough to sacrifice the population to atrocities delivering a horrible message - has resulted in a very personal slap in the face to the United States. It will not sit idly by while its nationals are slaughtered by drug lords.

Wait, we're not quite finished. Israel, the long-time Middle-East confidant and dependent of U.S. concerns and special entitlements has decided that it will go its own way, as it has always done, despite U.S. interference and vital assistance, both. Inflicting a dreadful would of pride pricked on American diplomacy seeking to further a peace deal that will mortally wound Israel, while benefiting America in the regard of the Arab world. And Iran, always Iran looming over world events with its vaunted nuclear attainment and future weaponization.

It's been a bad year-plus-two-months, and an even worse week. Sad, but that's the way affairs unfold in the world community of complex machinations, intersecting interests and unanticipated human interactions.