US foreign policy is failing worldwide.
The Russian and Chinese embrace
of indicted traitor Edward Snowden is just the latest demonstration of the
contempt in which the US is held by an ever increasing number of adversarial
states around the world.
Iran has also gotten a piece of the
action.
As part of the regime’s bread and circuses approach to its
subjects, supreme dictator Ali Khamenei had pretend reformer Hassan Rohani win
the presidential election in a landslide two weeks ago. Rohani has a long record
of advancing Iran’s nuclear program, both as a national security chief and as a
senior nuclear negotiator. He also has a record of deep involvement in acts of
mass terror, including the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos
Aires that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds.
Yet rather than
distance itself from Rohani the phony, the Obama administration has celebrated
Iranian democracy and embraced him as a reformer. Obama’s spokesmen say they
look forward to renewing nuclear talks with Rohani, and so made clear – yet
again – that the US has no intention of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear
power.
Rohani responded to the administration’s embrace by stating
outright he will not suspend Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities. In other
words, so great is Iran’s contempt for President Barack Obama and his
administration, that it didn’t even pay lip service to the notion of cutting a
deal.
And that makes sense. Obama only has one card he is willing to play
with Iran – appeasement. And so that is the card he plays. His allies are
already talking about containing a nuclear Iran. But that’s not an
option.
A government’s ability to employ a strategy of nuclear
containment is entirely dependent on the credibility of its nuclear threats.
Obama is slashing the US nuclear arsenal, and Snowden reportedly just gave the
Russians and the Chinese the US’s revised nuclear war plans. Obama has no
credibility in nuclear games of chicken. He has no chance of containing Khamenei
and his apocalyptic jihad state.
Iran, its Russian ally and its Lebanese
Hezbollah proxy now have the upper hand in the Syrian civil war. In large part
due to Obama’s foreign policy, the war is spilling into Lebanon and threatening
Jordan and Iraq – not to mention Israel. In response to this state of affairs,
Obama has decided to begin arming the al-Qaida-dominated Syrian opposition
forces. Now it’s true, Obama is planning to transfer US arms to the Supreme
Military Council of the Free Syrian Army that is recognized by the US. But that
is no reason not to worry.
The Free Syrian Army is dominated by the
Muslim Brotherhood. It condemned the US’s decision to designate the Syrian
al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, a foreign terrorist organization. FSA
fighters and commanders regularly collaborate with (and sometimes fight)
Al-Nusra. At a minimum, there is no reason to believe that these US arms will
not be used in conjunction with al-Qaida forces in Syria.
In truth, there
is little reason from a US perspective to view a Syria dominated by any of the
warring parties – including the FSA – as amenable to US interests or values.
There is no ideological distinction between the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood
and those of al-Qaida, or Hamas or a dozen other jihadist armed groups that were
formed by Muslim Brotherhood members. Like Iran and its proxies, they all want
to see Western civilization – led by the US – destroyed. And yes, they all want
to destroy Israel, and Europe.
But for the Obama administration, this
ideological affinity is not relevant.
The only distinction they care
about is whether a group just indoctrinates people to become jihadists, or
whether they are actively engaged – at this minute – in plotting or carrying out
terrorist attacks against the US. And even then, there are
exceptions.
For instance, the Taliban are actively waging war against the
US in Afghanistan. But since the Obama administration has no will to defeat the
Taliban, it is begging them to negotiate with US officials.
Obama’s
default position in the Muslim world is to support the Muslim Brotherhood.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is the wellspring of the Sunni jihadist movement. And
Obama is the Brotherhood’s greatest ally. He facilitated the Brotherhood’s rise
to power in Egypt, at the expense of the US’s most important Arab ally, Hosni
Mubarak.
He even supported them at the expense of American citizens
employed in Egypt by US government- supported NGOs. Forty-three Americans were
arrested for promoting democracy, and all the administration would do was
facilitate their escape from Egypt. Robert Becker, the one US aid worker who
refused to flee, was abandoned by the State Department. He just escaped from
Egypt after being sentenced to two years in prison.
The Obama
administration supports the Morsi government even as it persecutes Christians.
It supports the Muslim Brotherhood even though the government has demonstrated
economic and administrative incompetence, driving Egypt into failed state
status. Egypt is down to its last few cans of fuel. It is facing the specter of
mass starvation. And law and order have already broken down entirely. It has
lost the support of large swathes of the public. But still Obama maintains
faith.
Then there are the Palestinians.
Next week John Kerry will
knock on our door, again in an obsessive effort to restart the mordant phony
peace process. For its part, as The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh reported
this week, the supposedly moderate Fatah-ruled Palestinian Authority has adopted
a policy of denying Jews entrance to PA-ruled areas. Jewish reporters – Israeli
and non-Israeli – are barred from covering the PA or speaking with Fatah and PA
officials.
Jewish diplomats are barred from speaking to PA officials or
joining the entourage of diplomats who speak with them. Jewish businessmen are
barred from doing business in the PA.
As for the radical Hamas terror
group that rules Gaza, this week Hamas again reiterated its loyalty to its
covenant which calls for the obliteration of Israel and the annihilation of
world Jewry.
But Kerry is coming back because he’s convinced that the
reason there’s no peace process is that Israelis are too rich, and too happy,
and too stingy, and too suspicious, and too lacking empathy for the Palestinians
who continue to teach their children to murder our children.
You might
think that this pile-on of fiascos would lead Obama and his advisers to
reconsider their behavior.
But you’d be wrong. If Obama were asked his
opinion of his foreign policy he would respond with absolute conviction that his
foreign policy is a total success – everywhere. And by his own metrics, he’d be
right.
Obama is a man of ideas. And he has surrounded himself with men
and women who share his ideas. For Obama and his advisers, what matters are not
the facts, but the theoretical assumptions – the ideas – that determine their
policies. If they like an idea, if they find it ideologically attractive, then
they base their policies on it. Consequences and observable reality are no match
for their ideas. To serve their ideas, reality can be deliberately distorted.
Facts can be ignored, or denied.
Obama has two ideas that inform his
Middle East policy. First, the Muslim Brotherhood is good. And so his policy is
to support the Muslim Brotherhood, everywhere. That’s his idea, and as long as
the US continues to support the Brotherhood, its foreign policy is successful.
For Obama it doesn’t matter whether the policy is harmful to US national
security. It doesn’t matter if the Brotherhood slaughters Christians and
Shi’ites and persecutes women and girls. It doesn’t matter if the Brotherhood’s
governing incompetence transforms Egypt – and Tunisia, and Libya and etc., into
hell on earth. As far as Obama is concerned, as long as he is true to his idea,
his foreign policy is a success.
Obama’s second idea is that the root
cause of all the problems in the region is the absence of a Palestinian state on
land Israel controls. And as a consequence, Israel is to blame for everything
bad that happens because it is refusing to give in to all of the Palestinians’
demands.
Stemming from this view, the administration can accept a nuclear
Iran. After all, if Israel is to blame for everything, then Iran isn’t a threat
to America.
This is why Fatah terrorism, incitement and anti-Semitism are
ignored.
This is why Hamas’s Deputy Foreign Minister Ghazi Hamad reported
that he met with senior US officials two weeks ago.
This is why Kerry is
coming back to pressure the rich, stingy, paranoid, selfish Jews into making
massive concessions to the irrelevant Palestinians.
Obama’s satisfaction
with his foreign policy is demonstrated by the fact that he keeps appointing
likeminded ideologues to key positions.
This week it was reported that
Kerry is set to appoint Robert Malley to serve as deputy assistant secretary of
state for Near Eastern affairs. Malley has built his career out of advancing the
ideas Obama embraces.
In 2001, Malley authored an article in The New York
Times where he blamed Israel for the failure of the Camp David peace summit in
July 2000. At that summit, Israel offered the Palestinians nearly everything
they demanded. Not only did Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat refuse the offer.
He refused to make a counteroffer.
Instead he went home and ordered his
deputies to prepare to initiate the terror war against Israel which he started
two months later.
As Lee Smith wrote in a profile of Malley in Tablet in
2010, Malley’s article, and subsequent ones, “created a viable interpretative
framework for continuing to blame both sides for the collapse of the peace
process even after the outbreak of the second intifada. If both sides were at
fault, then it would be possible to resume negotiations once things calmed down.
If, on the other hand, the sticking point was actually about existential issues
– the refusal to accept a Jewish state – and the inability, or unwillingness, of
the Palestinians to give up the right of Arab refugees to return to their pre-
1948 places of residence, then Washington would have been compelled to abandon
the peace process after Clinton left office.”
In other words, Malley
shared the idea that Israel was to blame for the pathologies of the Arabs.
Stemming from this view, Malley has been meeting with Hamas terrorists for
years. He belittled the threat posed by a nuclear Iran and accused Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of exaggerating the Iranian nuclear threat to divert
attention away from the Palestinians. He has also met with Hezbollah, and has
been an outspoken supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
After the
September 11 attacks, the US pledged to wage a war of ideas in the Muslim world.
And in Obama’s foreign policy, we have such a war of ideas.
The only
problem is that all of his ideas are wrong.
caroline@carolineglick.com
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