Luck is half the game. It's no good having it and being incapable of using it. On the other hand, great striving may come to naught without luck. My sense is that President Barack Obama is a lucky man. – Roger Cohen
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Why is it luck that President Obama surrounds himself with advisors he carefully chose – a hydra headed advance guard with the expertise and intelligence and, best of all, contacts throughout the world, to see what's coming in a year, two years, more?

While critics of Obama were accusing him of being "unprepared" and "dithering," even "uncomfortable" with the situation in the Middle East, he was immersed in intelligence gathered by his administration over at least two years on the how and why and, most important, when he'd see a Middle East uprising.

And when it happened, caution was called for. These uprisings would be against dictatorial leaders backed by the United States for decades. It was essential to keep the US away from being used as the ostensible cause for the dictators murdering their own people. It was bad enough, in the case of Egypt, that the weapons used against Mubarak's own people were clearly marked as made in the USA. 

Like FDR did in the 1930s, Obama acts as a sponge, soaking up the information culled from this advance guard. He orders and categorizes it, and then, after one helluva lot of cogitation, he acts on it.

Leaders of countries have always been faced with "lucky" explosive situations, both at home and abroad, and they have not always used those opportunities well because they've not always acted intelligently when meeting them. Think of Vietnam, for instance – who in the world thought up the "domino theory" anyway? It set off pages and pages of ink about who or what will be next to fall to the communist menace.  Well, Eisenhower was among the first to articulate the domino theory and it seemed to fit and Eisenhower was a heroic general during World War II, and also a reasonable man.

But as one president followed another, the problem of Vietnam slowly grew into a mess that we couldn't get out of, like quicksand. By the time Richard Nixon appeared on the scene, we were in it up to our chins with thousands of young, drafted soldiers paying for it with their lives and futures.

Result? The domino theory ended in the deaths of untold numbers of Vietnamese and American troops, not to mention the Vietnamese civilians caught up in it. No Great Man appeared to pull us out of Vietnam and, before long, we were all sick of the very sound of the domino theory and glad enough to leave the field in ignominious defeat. What did the term even mean? Finally, it was quietly put away and forgotten.

Then there's the Cold War, a phrase coined by Bernard Baruch, a long-time advisor to presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman. The phrase was picked up by the press through columnist Walter Lippmann and that's all we heard for decades, killing millions in proxy wars backed by the US versus the USSR, stretching from the Korean War to wars in Southeast Asia and beyond.

We've all read, I'm sure, that Reagan "broke up the Soviet Union," though what actually broke up the Soviet Union was exhaustion bred from too many wars, too many states pulled into their orbit, both stretching its economy to the breaking point. It was as early as the seventies that  historians and analysts foretold the Soviet Union's break up. Not only was the USSR's economy bad, but the Soviet Bloc countries were becoming increasingly restive and pulling away.

In fact, if any one person "broke up the Soviet Union" it was Mikhail Gorbachev who tried to stop his country's economic freefall with his Perestroika and Glasnost. The reward he received was a Soviet jail and exile, in that order but, by 1991, the USSR was no more and all the dead were still dead, and for nothing.

Okay, say President Obama is "lucky" to be facing so many disasters all at once, including the revolutionary fervor spreading throughout  the Middle East. Suppose he followed the advice of most of the far Left and all of the Right and went into the Middle East with guns blazing to either 1) put down the revolutionaries or 2) take down their leaders? He could take his pick.

Suppose he followed the advice of so many to assert his role as a standup leader of the free world and straighten out the entire kit and kaboodle? Expecting, perhaps the demonstrators in Tahrir Square to strew flowers in the paths of the US troops?

Certainly there were more of the Hawks urging war than there were of his advisors furnishing him with information that pointed instead to restraint – to not give the overbearing dictators the gift of making the US the enemy rather than themselves? And even among his close advisors there might well have been some who counseled intervention.

But while he was still a US senator Obama said that he wasn't against all wars. He was against dumb wars. And intervention in Tunisia and Egypt would have been dumb and Barack Obama is not dumb.

In fact, Barack Obama is a real life example of The Great Man theory – that in times of need, a Great Man would arise and, further, that his actions would be foretold by the social conditions built before his lifetime.

The theory fits President Obama.  It took more than a confluence of good genes to give our president the brilliant brain and good sense and empathy he has. I agree with many of Barack Obama's admirers that he is blessed rather than simply lucky, except to add that our country and the world are infinitely more blessed to have him.

Joan Katherine Shaw