A Middle East Policy in Shambles

By Victor David Hanson

As President Obama launches another war, he knows no one is going to demagogue him the way
Senator Obama did President Bush.
A Middle East Policy in Shambles
7 April 2011

Almost every promise, almost every reset proclamation from Barack Obama about the struggles
against, and those within, the radical Muslim world has either been withdrawn or proven
bankrupt.

On the day the president announced his reelection bid, his administration renounced its loud
promises to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a New York civilian court. While blaming Congress
for the flipflop, Team Obama conceded that it had no public support for such a sensational
courtroom drama — and knew that the trial of the mastermind of 9/11, a few blocks from the site
of his mass murdering, might have endangered the president’s reelection.

Consider the rest of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, all of which Senator Obama
demagogued and promised to overturn, or at least curtail, if he was elected president. Yet
Obama has now embraced military tribunals, kept Guantanamo open (and will probably put new
prisoners in it), left the Patriot Act largely untouched, vastly expanded the Predator targeted-
assassination program, continued renditions, declared preventive detention and the suspension of
habeas corpus legal and necessary in the case of terrorists, surged in Afghanistan, and kept to the
Bush-Petraeus-Maliki agreements on scheduled troop withdrawals from Iraq. President Obama
assumes two facts: Such policies are critical in keeping us safe; and they can be embraced
without worry over demagogic attacks by the likes of Senator Obama.

Candidate Obama’s campaign opposition to all of the above, except the war in Afghanistan,
weakened American credibility at a critical juncture in the war in Iraq, and helped propel him
to victory over Hillary Clinton as a more passionate and leftward critic of George Bush. That
he has now simply copied Bush’s anti-terrorism agenda, gussied it up with some ridiculous
euphemisms, and banned descriptive terms like “war on terror” and “radical Islam” exposes him
as hypocritical, naïve, and weak. Hypocritical: If these measures were bad in 2008, why are they
good in 2011? Naïve: Did Obama really believe that campaign rhetoric was synonymous with
the responsibility of governance? Weak: Why boast about ending Bush’s protocols only to give
up on repealing them at the first sign of political pushback?

For most of 2009–2011 the two countries receiving most of Obama’s rhetorical distaste were
democratic Israel and democratic Iraq — the region’s only constitutional states. The former
is often portrayed as a rogue aggressor at the heart of all unrest among hundreds of millions
of Muslims in the Middle East, the latter, a mistake not worth the cost of its founding in
American blood and treasure. Yet despite all the Obama administration’s outreach to the
region’s autocracies, only Israel and Iraq have largely avoided mass demonstrations calling for
transparent and representative government. Arabs are killing each other from Syria to Libya,
from Bahrain to Tunisia, without much worry over the ethnic makeup of the Jerusalem suburbs.

Almost immediately upon taking office, Barack Obama made two controversial moves in
reaching out to Iran and Syria. He gave serial deadlines to Iran to cease its effort to acquire
nuclear weapons (stop it by the U.N. summit in New York, stop it by the G-20 summit, stop it
by the preliminary meetings of envoys). All were ignored. Obama turned his back on a million
protesters in the streets of Tehran, with bizarre promises not to “meddle,” coupled with vague
apologies about American behavior more than a half-century ago. A golden opportunity to
help topple a vicious anti-American theocracy was turned into a buffoonish effort to appear
multiculturally sensitive.

Over the last thirty years, every administration has sought to woo the Assad family dictatorship
— and all have failed, some, like the Clinton diplomatic team, in humiliating fashion. Syria
has one goal: to reclaim from Israel the strategically important Golan Heights without giving
up its various agendas of destroying an independent Lebanon, aiding anti-Israeli terrorists, and
stockpiling a vast arsenal in preparation for the next Middle East war. For only a brief moment
in the last three decades was it willing to engage the United States: in the spring of 2003, when
the brilliant three-week victory over Saddam Hussein left Bashar Assad worried that he might
share a similar fate. The chances of normalizing relations with Syria are near zero — given that
it is a terrorist state, with assassination and the sponsorship of Hezbollah embraced as national
policy. Obama’s unusually persistent outreach to Damascus has proven, like Clinon’s, to be a
humiliating failure — emphasized most recently when, in the midst of violent demonstrations
against Assad’s authoritarian rule, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that Assad had
been considered a “reformer.” We are in the surreal position of reaching out to the Syrian
autocracy with new initiatives at the very time Syrians are trying to overthrow it.

As for Afghanistan, the newly inaugurated President Obama avoided meeting with the senior
American general there for months. He simultaneously sent in thousands of additional troops
while setting specific withdrawal dates. Commander-in-Chief Obama is now on his third ground
commander, after one removal and one resignation. Those assigned responsibility for the war
since 2009 — former national security advisor Gen. James Jones, Amb. Richard Holbrooke,
former CentCom commander Gen. David Petraeus, and Amb. Karl Eikenberry — have fought
with each other at times over spheres of influence. Jones is now retired, and Holbrooke is
deceased.

We have intervened in Libya on “humanitarian grounds,” but have not argued that more were
likely to die in Libya than in the Ivory Coast or the Congo. We wish to help the “rebels,” but
we do not know who or what they are. Apparently we came to their aid simply because they
seemed both likable and Westernized on CNN and because for a moment they seemed likely to
win and remove Qaddafi — and on the initiative of the Europeans, who have sizable oil interests
in Libya. The president has both demanded that Qaddafi leave and asserted that regime change
is not our aim; he has both promised to enforce a no-fly zone only and often gone beyond such
patrolling by bombing ground targets and inserting American agents. He has sought the sanction
of the U.N. and the Arab League, and then de facto ignored their resolutions by occasionally
calling for regime change and bombing Qaddafi’s bunkers, while not asking Congress for similar
authorization to intervene. We are told Qaddafi is doing terrible things (and he is), but we were
also told up until a few weeks ago that he was in diplomatic rehab and was now more an ally
than a mad-dog enemy.

Then, after two weeks of confused “kinetic military action,” the United States abruptly quit
fighting and outsourced further direct military operations to European NATO members —
apparently in the hope that either the Europeans or the rebels can oust Qaddafi. In any case,
Libya may be the first war in American history in which the United States directly attacked
another nation-state, in an act of war, then abruptly quit the preemptive assault with the enemy
still very much in power. If Qaddafi survives, do we say we’re sorry, pay reparations, take in
rebel refugees, patrol a protected enclave for years, bisect the country, or play golf and let the
Europeans deal with the mess?

The Obama administration, in finger-in-the-wind fashion, urged pro-American authoritarians in

Egypt and Tunisia to leave — but only belatedly and only when it appeared that the protesters
would probably win. In the aftermath, the Obama administration still has little notion who
the successors will be, or what their agenda is, or whether they will be better than what they
replaced. Most likely, the United States now suffers the worst of both worlds: looking weak and
opportunistic in withdrawing support from former American allies, while not receiving much
credit from the protesters because of the absence of early principled support. If the Muslim
Brotherhood assumes de facto power in Egypt, opens another front against Israel, and serves as
the Sunni bookend to Shiite theocratic Iran, then we may witness the worst geopolitical calamity
since the fall of pro-American Iran, or indeed the Communist takeover of China.

In fact, the entire American response to unrest in the Muslim world is ad hoc, reactionary, and
often contradictory — apparently favoring government repression of rebels in the Gulf while
intervening to stop such crackdowns in Libya but not elsewhere; pressuring pro-American
tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt, while carefully not antagonizing anti-American tyrants in Iran and
Syria; declaring support for human rights and transparency in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, while
ignoring these values altogether in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In eerie fashion, the less
the Obama administration seems to know about the complexities of the serial unrest, the more
it jumps in with blunderbuss sermonizing. We treat restraint from our allies with contempt, and
excess from our enemies with an odd sort of deference. One sees the Carter world of 1979 and
awaits only the oil crisis — and then shrugs that $5-a-gallon gas may be on the way to finish the
parallel.

While Obama, the anti-war Nobel Peace laureate, was inaugurating a new war in the Middle
East — simultaneously with not one but two other conflicts — back on the home front, the
U.S. is running a $1.6 trillion budget deficit. Politically, Obama has retrospectively exposed
the anti-war movement between 2003 and 2009 as partisan rather than principled. The Left is
now as quiet about Barack Obama’s preemptive war without congressional approval — against
an Arab Muslim oil-exporting nation run by a madman who was at the time being courted
by intellectuals, academics, and sympathetic American politicians — as it was not long ago
incensed about George Bush’s preemptive war with congressional approval — against an Arab
Muslim oil-exporting nation run by a madman who was at the time ostracized by the world and
condemned by several U.N. resolutions.

No one knows what the Middle East will look like in two years. We know only that Barack
Obama seems to be scrambling to adopt many of the policies of his predecessor against whom he
used to define his own entire reset diplomacy. And yet when he is not copying his predecessor,
the ensuing chaos earns him a far worse charge than hypocrisy.