* So no President was better familiarized with the Islamic world, but few have made worse calls than the one Obama made over Syria.
I don’t watch him on the news. Does he ever try to even use his background to explain his understanding of the developing world?
I’ve never seen him do this. Three things that come to mind: a. he’s just too self centered to really expand on other people in general b. he’s a bit scared to push what he knows, either so to stay the blank page that lets people project their fantasies about him or to not appear committed to some idea that he’ll have to back out of (Sailer’s Middle East Warning) or c. his experience abroad was sheltered to the point that he really doesn’t have that much depth to share.
I’m leaning on b. This fellow doesn’t seem to like to get his feet wet.
* In a lot of ways, the current mess in Syria is worse than the American occupation of Iraq (2003-2011) was. To begin with, more people have been killed in Syria since 2011 than were killed in Iraq during the occupation, and Syria has fewer people. AQI was a fearsome, merciless guerrilla movement, which has since become ISIS, an international terrorist semi-state, far more competent than Al-Qaeda proper ever was.
The Iraq War was more costly for the US (in troop losses and in government spending), but at least the war was largely self-contained. In contrast, hundreds of thousands are pouring into Europe and Obama wants to adopt over 600,000 in the US. Absolutely insane. It felt terrible seeing thousands of Americans die in Iraq, one by one, day after day – but accepting hundreds of thousands of Sunnis into the Western world could ensure that what happened to US soldiers in Iraq will start happening to Western civilians in their own countries.
Bush was incompetent, but he at least partially woke up after 2006. He stopped promoting democracy and hired Robert Gates. Obama hasn’t learned anything. He’s doubling down on accepting refugees when anyone who isn’t insane or completely callous to Western lives can see how that’s the most disastrous choice the Western world can make.
* Perhaps credit is due to some of the ethnic and religious groups in the Middle East for acting with restraint in their dealings with the others. But surely there’s one obvious reason for the periods of stability that did happen there – authoritarian government. The greatest curse ever to befall the region was the insane idea that anything resembling Western democracy would work in countries where a large portion of the population wants a regime in which the Koran is the statute book and apostates are sadistically punished.
I don’t think Obama could ever have used his experience of the Muslim world to American advantage, because he doesn’t have America’s interests at heart. If he did want what was best for his country, his knowledge of foreign cultures wouldn’t be particularly relevant – expert advisers from academia can provide that. What’s needed more than anything else in a politician or diplomat is the knowledge (tragically rare) that America should leave well alone.
* Obama is like Lucy who takes away the neocons’ ball every time. God only knows how many people the insane McCain and the lunatic Palin would have gotten killed for Jesus and Israel. God loves little children and the USA as the saying goes.
* As feckless as the affirmative action president is. It is not Obama who is driving American policy, rather it is his weakness that is allowing others to set the agenda. As you yourself have noted Steve, Obama’s principal interests are primarily domestic and like all black American politicos are singularly concerned with issues of “blackness”. Refer to the Beer summit, saint Trayvon, and recently clock boy. His heart is simply closer to home rather than foreign affairs hence the influence of his camarilla on matters beyond his interests. Obama is functionally the anti-Nixon who himself ran roughshod over the State department to set his own agenda.
One only has to survey America’s other prominent elected representatives to see what passes for received Wisdom among courtiers who keep Washington informed to realize Congress appears even more insane than Obama. Rather than realists that many presumed Obama would bring to power, Washington policy seems to be driven by a sickly melange of Bush era neoconservatives and wild eyed liberal interventionists. Perhaps this is what passes as the default weltanschaung of the budding American deep state.
* Obama has stood up to the neocons more than any previous president. All of his likely successors (unfortunately a Trump administration is unlikely) will be more beholden to the neocons than Obama is. What his administration did in Lybia and Syria was bad, but McCain, Romney and Hillary would have done much worse. They would have probably bombed and destabilized Iran too by now.
Obama has an aversion to using US ground troops. Why? Probably for the same reason that Colin Powell opposed the 2003 Iraq Attaq behind closed doors. What’s in it for Blacks? Only flag-draped corpses. And they’re right about that.
The Iran deal, the Hagel appointment and other things show that Obama sees through the neocons a little. They hate him because he hasn’t advanced their priorities as much as they would have liked. Unless Trump wins, and as I said, I don’t think he will, there will be a massive increase in US troop presence in the Middle East during the next administration. There will be more wars. Saudi Arabia hasn’t been destabilized yet. There’s no war in Egypt or Turkey at the moment. Things can get a lot worse than this.
* With the newly ascendant neo-conservatives empowered to change the world by 9/11, a new model, call it regionalization or balkanization in the Middle East was embarked upon. This idea was first propagated in 1982 in an article by Israeli Oded Yinon entitled “A strategy for Israel in the 1980s.” Some highlights:
“Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon….
Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.
Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. (…) This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.”
And so if this is the policy direction Obama has inherited, his job is to assist in the breakup of Syria while keeping American hands as clean as possible. Thus the ISIS is used as the agent of change. The US on the other hand only supports “moderate” Islamists but we insist on the exact same strategic goal as ISIS: the end of Bashar al-Assad’s rule.
So if Obama wanted to counter this policy in Syria, the only real alternative he has is to make a complete 180 degree turn on US foreign policy and to re-embrace Baathist nationalism. Of course the globalist Obama is never going to do this.
But the interesting fact is that a President Trump just might, in collaboration with Vladimir Putin.
* In late ’02, amid word of the planned democratization of Iraq, an Egyptian said to me, “Arabs don’t want self-government – they have to be told what to do.”
* Saudi money helps the Sunni image too.
I like to imagine that deep in the vault of a Swiss bank is a manuscript entitled “The Memoirs of Prince Bandar: My Years in Washington as the Saudi Paymaster” with a letter to his estate’s lawyer triggering its publication if he happens to die at any age before 99.
* James Michener’s 1963 novel “Caravan” is about Afghanistan. The first chapter is great: it’s all about a diplomatic crisis because the Prime Minister’s granddaughters are going on dates with two Marine guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and the furious holy men want to kill them. It’s kind of Waughish. After that though, Michener’s character just hangs out with various progressive Moderate Muslims talking about how science education and Islam aren’t incompatible, and the book kind of drags. I mean I wish the kind of reasonable people Michener liked to write about had prevailed in Afghanistan, but from an artistic standpoint, the kind of unreasonable characters Waugh liked to write about are more fun.
* A different take is that Obama’s long relationship with Jeremiah Wright is evidence of Obama’s long-standing hostility toward Western civilization and Christianity … something that has slowly come to light in Obama’s domestic and foreign policies. Black extremists, who share the same views, were a safer political cover than radical Islam at the time.
Obama has proved a master of social pretense and illusion throughout his life … the kind of things homosexuals used to do to mask their sexual orientation. In the current free-for-all “freak show” we call American society, the pretense and illusions are no longer politically or socially necessary. With the masks removed, Obama is openly pressing his Islamic-friendly agenda, something that was there all the time if we had known how to read the evidence.
