Yes, Obama is incompetent and amateurish but is he even well-intentioned?

http://tinyurl.com/27elklv
Mort Zuckerman: World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur The president is well-intentioned but can't walk the walk on the world stage By Mortimer B. Zuckerman US NewsRWR
President Obama came into office as the heir to a great foreign policy legacy enjoyed by every recent U.S. president...Yet, the Iraq war lingers; Afghanistan continues to be immersed in an endless cycle of tribalism, corruption, and Islamist resurgence; Guantánamo remains open; Iran sees how North Korea toys with Obama and continues its programs to develop nuclear weapons and missiles; Cuba spurns America's offers of a greater opening; and the Palestinians and Israelis find that it is U.S. policy positions that defer serious negotiations, the direct opposite of what the Obama administration hoped for. The reviews of Obama's performance have been disappointing....uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America's role in the world....One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one's own tribe while in the lands of others....Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly scorned a number of Obama's visions. Relations with the Chinese leadership got off to a bad start...where his hosts treated him disdainfully and prevented him from speaking to a national television audience of the Chinese people....The withdrawal part of the policy was meant to satisfy a domestic constituency, but succeeded in upsetting all of our allies in the region... Obama clearly wishes to do good and means well.****Even this gives Obama more credit than is justified. One would HOPE that he means well but it becomes increasingly clear that he does not believe in American exceptionalism and seems, indeed, not even to approve of America and especially not of the Constitution he swore an oath to "preserve and protect." He has publicly complained of the Constitution's emphasis on "negative" rights and one can only wonder if he taught Constitutional Law as it is or as he thinks it should be.He seems to carry personal animosities for Britain ( perhaps because of his Kenyan heritage ) and Israel ( perhaps because of the anti-Semitism in which he was marinated during his decades on the South Side of Chicago with Rev. Wright and Farrakhan.****But he is one of those people who believe that the world was born with the word and exists by means of persuasion,...not as a tough-minded leader...there is "the impression that Obama might confuse speeches with policy."...The Obama presidency has so far been characterized by a well-intentioned but excessive belief in the power of rhetoric with too little appreciation of reality and loyalty....Even the king of Saudi Arabia, a country that depends on America for its survival, reacted with disappointment and dismay. Obama's meeting with the king was widely described as a disaster.... Les Gelb wrote of Obama, "He is so self-confident that he believes he can make decisions on the most complicated of issues after only hours of discussion." Strategic decisions go well beyond being smart, which Obama certainly is.****"Even this concession about Obama's vaunted intelligence is unjustified. His academic record was undistinguished before Harvard Law School (he got into Columbia on a one-hop via Occidental, despite the advantage of having gone to a tony private school albeit in a pot--and "blow when he could afford it"-- haze )and did not graduate either with honors or a Phi Beta Kappa key. He seems to be proud of not having taken calculus. Even at Harvard, he was one of a hundred editors and was ELECTED as President of the Law Review. His academic reputation rests on the absence of evidence of his grades and courses. Even at the University of Chicago, he was NOT a professor, not a legal scholar, published no scholarly work and was a Senior Lecturer, a post reserved for non-academics.His knowledge of history, economics and even arithmetic has been shown to be deficient.Worst of all, it's not clear if his fallacious statements are due to ignorance or deceptiveness, perhaps both. ****...there is no cost in lining up with America's most serious enemies and no gain in lining up with this administration?...there is a sense that there is something amateurish and even incompetent about how Obama is managing U.S. power. For example, Obama has asserted that America is not at war with the Muslim world. The problem is that parts of the Muslim world are at war with America and the West. ...he has failed to address the religious intolerance, failing economies, tribalism, and gender apartheid that together contribute to jihadist extremism...****Is all this due merely to incompetence or leavened by an inordinate sympathy for anti-Westerm Islam?****
...The Arabs believe you do not deal with Iran with the open hand of a handshake but with the clenched fist of power....They did not see Obama or his administration as understanding the region, where naiveté is interpreted as a weakness of character, as amateurism, and as proof of the absence of the tough stuff of which leaders are made... America right now appears to be unreliable to traditional friends, compliant to rivals, and weak to enemies. One renowned Asian leader stated recently at a private dinner in the United States, "We in Asia are convinced that Obama is not strong enough to confront his opponents, but we fear that he is not strong enough to support his friends."...The world now senses, in the context of the erosion of America's economic power and the pressures of our budget deficits, that we will compress our commitments. But the world needs the vision, idealism, and strong leadership that America brings to international affairs. This can be done and must be done. But we are the only ones who can do it.//
****Obama seems to have an unusual number of personal preferences and DISLIKES that are separate from, and often at odds with, the good of the American polity.****
http://tinyurl.com/299pgnw
The President's Animosities Since when was the American idea us versus them? By DANIEL HENNINGER...