Obama turns ME policy on its head

Barack Obama's 2009 Cairo speech in which he looked to reset US relations with the Arab world was a breathtaking moment. He placed a Palestinian-Israeli settlement at the heart of his ambition. But he also looked to a wider review of America’s role in the Middle East. His words made a considerable impression. It was not all to do with the extraordinary wave of hope that was attached to the first Africa-American US president. There was also the pleasant surprise that at last Washington was about to do some genuinely fresh thinking about the Arab world. 
Eight years on and the Cairo speech looks like a grim joke. There has indeed been a reset in US relations with the Arab world. But that has been at the expense of Washington’s historic allies. A well-informed article in the Atlantic magazine, headlined “The Obama Doctrine” lays bare the president’s core thinking on the Middle East. As Prince Turki Al-Faisal made clear on Monday in this newspaper, it does not make good reading.
Obama told the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that the United States had been the victim of “free riders.” He meant other states that, in terms of security, had looked to Washington to do their heavy lifting for them. Mention was made of the UK, which as a NATO member, was edging toward failing to commit two percent of GDP to defense, as organization’s rules require. Obama warned British Premier David Cameron that this was not acceptable. The British agreed to invest the full amount.
Goldberg’s article suggests that Obama also sees the Kingdom as a “free rider.” As Prince Turki made clear in his riposte, it is hard to credit this analysis. Saudi Arabia has been a loyal ally which has stood shoulder to shoulder with America. Most significantly, the Kingdom has played a leading role in the fight against terrorism. This has been acknowledged repeatedly by US politicians and officials. 
Yet Obama appears to have long nurtured a distrust of Washington’s long-standing Middle Eastern ally. Goldberg writes that early in his presidency Obama decided that he wanted to reach out to Iran, America’s most implacable foe.
Obama won the White House in 2008 promising to disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan. He brought US troops back from Iraq. After a final “surge” he also withdrew significant forces from Afghanistan. But the greatest withdrawal was the one that he should not have made. He withdrew from the moral responsibility to clear up the mess that his predecessor George W. Bush had left behind. 
That moral withdrawal meant that he failed to act decisively in Syria. Bashar Assad murdered over a thousand people with Sarin gas in a rebel area of Damascus. He crossed the red line that Obama had publicly drawn. The world waited for the promised US military response. It never came. The president used the rubbish intelligence given by the CIA over Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, as the reason to doubt CIA reports that Sarin had in fact been used. Thus one calamitous error was used to justify another.
But of course Obama has not in fact withdrawn America from the Middle East. The rapprochement with Iran has dominated his policy from the outset. Last November’s Geneva agreement on Iranian nuclear weapons was a triumph for that policy. 
History will however show that it was a disaster for the Arab world. Unleashed from sanctions, Iran is now able to increase its aggression toward its Arab neighbors. As Prince Turki pointed out, Iran is free to sustain Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorist group, free to sustain the brutal Assad government and free to back Yemen’s Houthi militants. It is also free to meddle in the US-made ruins of Iraq and free to foment discord in the Gulf states. 
It is hard to conceive of a more terrible miscalculation. Obama has betrayed Washington’s loyal regional friends for a dubious deal with a slippery, unreliable Iranian regime. The interests of Iran are the polar opposite of Washington’s. 
The amazing, hopeful words of Obama’s Cairo speech have turned to bitter wormwood. He has indeed reset US Middle East policy. But he has reset it in a way that no one could ever have imagined. Instead of a rapprochement with the Arab world, he has delivered an almost complete alienation. He has laid the ground for a regional chaos.

Source : Arab News