http://www.politicollision.com/story.php?title=dangerous-naivete-obamas-policies-allow-radicals-to-rise-in-the-middle-east His election would spread democracy and respect for the United States throughout the Middle East, President Barack Obama believed. It hasn't worked out that way. Since 2009, the percentages of Middle Easterners who have a favorable opinion of America, and of President Obama, have declined by 40 percent and 37 percent, respectively, according to Pew's annual poll. The "Arab Spring" has produced new breeding grounds for terrorists, said the head of MI5, Britain's counterintelligence service. • Last Sunday, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood won in what was the first -- and may be the last -- democratic presidential election in Egyptian history. The Muslim Brotherhood are Islamists, many of whom advocate the worldwide imposition of Islamic law. "Amid the euphoria of the Tahrir Square revolution last year," there were two sets of pessimists, wrote Richard Spencer, a Cairo-based correspondent for the London Telegraph. "The first said the Muslim world was unsuited to democracy, and some form of dictatorship would reassert itself. The second said that democracy would sweep in the Islamists. I don't suppose even the worst pessimists thought Egypt would end up with both, but that, on the face of it, is what we have now," Mr. Spencer wrote. • NATO waged war last year in Libya to oust dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The result, according to StrategyPage, is chaos. "The situation in the country gets worse by the day," wrote Con Coughlin, foreign editor of the London Telegraph. "A return to democracy and the return of law [is] nothing but a distant dream." • Nearly 15,000 have been killed in a brutal civil war in Syria that pits forces loyal to dictator Bashir Assad against at least 20 rebel groups. The war is going badly for Mr. Assad. There have been mass defections from the Syrian army -- including at least one general -- the London Daily Mail reported last Sunday. ... Mon, 02 Jul 2012 01:11:03 EDT en