WHILE WE SLEEP – AT 8:29 A.M. ET:  We've been focusing on the State of the Union speech, but much has been happening in the Middle East, and much of it can cause dangerous convulsions.  Once again, the "reach out" administration has been caught off guard, and has been reaching out to the wrong people.  From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration confronts the spectacle of angry protesters and baton-wielding riot police officers from Tunisia to Egypt to Lebanon, it is groping for a plan to deal with an always-vexing region that is now suddenly spinning in dangerous directions.

In Egypt, where a staunch ally, President Hosni Mubarak, faced the fiercest protests in years on Tuesday, and Lebanon, where a Hezbollah-backed government is taking shape, the administration is grappling with volatile, potentially hostile forces that have already realigned the region’s political landscape.

Add Tunisia, where a popular revolt overthrew the government.  The president, in his speech last night, finally got around to supporting the people against the dictator, but it was an afterthought...the same mistake he made in being too slow to support the Iranian people in their uprising against the mullahs.

These were surprising turns. But even the administration’s signature project in the region — Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations — became even more intractable this week, with the publication of confidential documents detailing Palestinian concessions offered in talks with Israel. The disclosure makes it less likely that the Palestinians will agree to any further concessions.

In interviews in recent days, officials acknowledged that the United States had limited influence over many actors in the region, and that the upheaval in Egypt, in particular, could scramble its foreign-policy agenda.

What?  We have limited influence?  Even with a demigod in the White House?  Why, why, I'm crushed.  Weren't we told that this president could wave his hand across the landscape and change the world?  Weren't the oceans going to recede right after Inauguration Day? 

No.

Our foreign policy in the Mideast is falling apart.  We don't seem to have one in Latin America, and the North Koreans get away with what they want to get away with.  China seems similarly unimpressed with godliness at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A very bump year coming up.

January 26, 2011