US should rethink its foreign policy and show restraint

When Barack Obama was first elected US president, many expected he would carry out a foreign policy that was less interventionist than his predecessor George W. Bush who ordered the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

That has been mostly true. But Obama's intervention in Libya in 2011 to remove Muammar Gadhafi, the bombing of Syria without the invitation of its legitimate government and the arming of Syrian rebels, and his drastic escalation of drone strikes in other sovereign nations have made his foreign policy less distinct from that of the Bush administration.

Even Obama admitted that US intervention in the Mideast had failed miserably in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine early this year.