How a top general see's the Most Equal Comrade's foreign policy

He sees it as all sensible people do: As a narcissism-clouded failure to face facts - mainly the necessity for American leadership in the world:

A top U.S. Army general with nothing left to lose has publicly admitted something that conservatives have been saying for a long time — the rise of the Islamic State terror group can be directly attributed to President Barack Obama’s premature withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq.

Outgoing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno told Fox News on Wednesday that a continued U.S. troop presence in the region would have kept Iraq on a positive track.

“It’s frustrating to watch it,” Odierno said. “I go back to the work we did in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 and we got it to a place that was really good. Violence was low, the economy was growing, politics looked like it was heading in the right direction.” 

Matthew Contenetti, writing at NRO, says that the Most Equal Comrade's supreme confidence that he knows better just because he has such a noble vision of how the world ought to me is what leads to boneheaded decisions such as that which frustrates General Odierno:

I used to think President Obama’s illusions were simply the product of his ideology, of his faith in the universality of human reason, in the idea of historical progress, of his ambivalence toward American power. But after reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s epic, absorbing, revealing interview with the president in The Atlantic, I have come to a different conclusion. It’s not just ideology that drives Obama’s cluelessness. It’s narcissism.

If there is a theme to Goldberg’s article, it is this: Barack Obama knows better. He knows better than the “foreign-policy establishment” that his team snidely dismisses as controlled by Jewish and Arab money. He knows better than the elected leaders of Great Britain, France, and Israel, and the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, of whom he is so contemptuous. (Angela Merkel of Germany, Goldberg reports, is “one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects.”) And he knows better than his critics, whose arguments he pores over in obsessive detail, coming up with explanations, rebuttals, and straw men to dismiss them.

Why does Obama know better? Not out of any intense study of or reflection on diplomatic and world history and international-relations theory. Not because he served in the military or in the diplomatic corps or held senior posts in government prior to election as president. What graces Obama with superior insight and prudence is the simple fact of his own existence. He is his own proof of his superiority.

Goldberg tells us about one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visits to the States. “The Israeli prime minister launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations.” So Obama interrupted him. “Bibi, you have to understand something,” Obama said. “I’m the African-American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.”

Sounds a lot like the foreign-policy confidence of a certain public figure who says he primarily consults himself on these matters because "I have a very good brain, and I've said a lot of things."