Submitted by: Donald Hank
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
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.
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