By Schmoel Yitzhak
Barack Obama's failure to deliver a punishing assault against Assad's Syrian forces indicates that the president never played a day of baseball in his life.
Procrastinating to a fault, America's chief executive reminds me of the baseball rookie who kept the bat on his shoulders while the pitcher tossed three straight strikes.
Yes, Obama has struck out on Syria.
We have come to learn that this is typical of the man who won the White House after being the master of inaction during his Congressional years and never worked a day in his contrived life before that.
Apparently the president never learned the bromide, "Strike while the iron is hot."
Had he understood the logic behind those six words, he would have swiftly made good on his vow to punish Assad the day that Syrian forces crossed the red line and used chemical weapons on their own men, women and children.
By now Israel's leaders know full well that Uncle Sam's commander-in-chief's red lines are delivered with a large eraser attached so that any vow can easily be made to disappear like smoke rings in the wind.
When news originally broke of the chemical weapon calamity Syrian forces had inflicted on its masses Obama was dealt a fat pitch which he should have belted out of the ball park. Outraged by the Assad-inspired massacre, the public was behind an American military strike. But the president's bat never left his shoulders and the umpire called, Strike One.
Bewitched, bothered and befuddled, the president went into his hem-and-haw routine. Or, as Professor Abraham Ben-Zvi wrote in Israel Hayom, "Obama suffered a bout of paralysis at the moment of truth."
Like his Arab (Palestinian) friends, the president never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Yet there still was time to deliver the big hit. An oh-and-one count isn't the end of the world when you're at the plate but he blew it again and again.
When his support, unsurprisingly, began eroding like a dirt road in a hurricane, the president desperately needed a diversion; someone -- or some thing -- to distract the public from his egregious ineffectiveness.
Forgetting that he once asserted at an AIPAC convention that he "had Israel's back," Obama suddenly turned to AIPAC and asked Israel's most supportive organization in America to have his back. He brazenly urged AIPAC to join the congressional tussle and vigorously lobby senators and representatives to vote in favor of a strike at Syria.
But that was nothing more than: 1. A lame attempt at procrastinating; 2. An unfair attempt to draw Israel into a dispute that Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted to avoid. 3. Obama's way of telling his Arab friends that Israel is an interloper and, therefore should be punished.
The bat remained on Obama's shoulder and he took Strike Two and public support for the punitive strike slipped to just 35 percent.
Meanwhile, AIPAC -- dragged into the morass against its will and better judgement -- allowed that marshaling support for Obama was roughly equivalent to employing a toothpick to push a rock uphill.
Thus, the spineless president took the third strike and walked back to his dugout with the bat firmly ensconced on his shoulder. Worse, for Israel, is the fact that AIPAC's involvement made Israel look bad because Obama made it all so public.
Ben-Zvi: "It made it difficult for Jerusalem to continue with the same low-profile policy it has led with until now. Involving AIPAC could give Israel's enemies in Washington the chance they need to bring out the battering ram to wear at the foundations of U.S.-Israeli relations."
Not surprisingly, immediately after Obama struck out, the next guy up hit a home run.
His name is Putin!
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