John Kerry

I was proud to see the SoS, on Monday, and Obama, yesterday speak out on climate change and to try to lead the world - even when our own Congress can't be led - to take action.

On the Middle East, it has been amazing to see that inch by inch, they are having success. While things are still incredibly grave, the steps taken have not been insignificant and were necessary as building blocks. I am not speaking ofthe air strikes or military itself, but their careful leadership. From actually getting Afghanistan to recognize a new government, to getting Iraq to create a new government which is speaking of being inclusive, to getting Arab countries to really commit and join a coalition against ISIL, they have done things the media scoffed at as impossible when Obama first spoke of them. (That Kerry quietly led on all three is obviously noticed by his peers and his boss.)

I don't think that things will always go smoothly in this mess. However, I think the pundits who argue that there is no plan are either intentionally ignoring the steps that Obama said he wanted to happen or their own biases are making them distort a plan they would not have chosen as no plan. Personally, I see a broader, clearer plan here than in Bush's spreading democracy fiction they eagerly praised. The difference is that it empowers the countries in the area to work together for their own good.

On the left, people are still so traumatized by the Bush years that Obama has inherited the lack of trust that Bush worked hard to earn. In some ways, I fault them as much as the right, who respond just out of hate of Obama and because they really do believe that Bush was right. The thing that bothers me the most is that most have no ability to admit that they could have been wrong even in the slightest way. This leads to them claiming credit for the Syrian CW deal (because they were against striking) or giving it to Putin, because Obama, in their view, was not pure enough here to deserve it.

But ultimately, it may be that the rest of the world may credit them long before the fractured US media does - especially as it will soon turn to just covering 2016 politics. It may be history that will note that Obama's administration's actions on the Middle East have been incredibly thoughtful and have actually done one thing that no one really has given them credit for -- actually leading and having other follow, because they were won over by the logic of doing so.

Meanwhile our media was more focused on the silly semantics battle of is it "war" or "counter terrorism". In reality, the word doesn't matter. What it seems to me is that Obama, in his West Point speech and his actions on this, is closer to what Kerry proposed as the best response to terrorism in 2004 than to the Bush actions that the media is comparing this to.