Reordering the Middle East

NOTES OF CONCERN…

  …Jack Blair

                        Reordering the Middle East

Since its inception the State of Israel has been the one true ally of The United States in the Middle East. Their friendship never in doubt we have always had their back.

Until lately.

Lately the Israeli president has felt unwelcome when he visits The White House. If we are to believe the press a very cool relationship between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu was present from the beginning and has recently turned to ice.

If we take a look at the forest and ignore the trees one could argue that President Obama set out to reorder the Middle East as part of his foreign policy. 

It would be fair to say he has succeeded in reordering the Middle East.

It would be fair to say that in almost every country in the Middle East that policy has made enemies of former friends.

Under other presidents we have found ways to peacefully deal with the realities that exist in other nations of the Middle East. In order to do so we had to overlook their traditions, some of their bad behaviors, and try very very hard to keep them neutral.

It has always been a delicate balance in the Middle East with reference to relations with the United States.

In the presidency of Jimmy Carter we decided our friend the Shah of Iran was just too brutal and not only could we not support his regime but we could encourage his overthrow and refuse to let him come to America for much needed cancer treatment.

Carter failed to look beyond the information he had on the Shah and America got in the Shah’s place the Ayatollah. Iran got a nation with harsher conditions, albeit it religious ones, and we lost our delicate friendship with Iran, a nation that continues to this day  to be a thorn in our side.

Then somehow we convinced our friend Anwar Sadat that if he would just come to Camp David and shake the Israeli Prime Minister’s hand a new era of friendship would immediately be jump started in the Middle East. Sadat came, did the hand shaking, went home and was assassinated by his own troops. In this instance he was succeeded by Hosni Mubarak who was able to keep the lid on and keep friendly relations with America. Then we turned on Mubarak.

Then President Obama decided that we should encourage the rebels in Egypt to overthrow Mubarak. They were successful in this. It  all came under  the wonderfully encouraging idea of an Arab Spring from which good things would surely come. What came was the Muslim Brotherhood and no relationship of significance between our two countries.

On to that terrible fellow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He was at one time an outrageous and ardent enemy of America. President Reagan got tired of it and put a missile through the front door of Gaddafi’s tent. Message sent and understood. Gaddafi hardly bothered us since. In fact he actually started to disarm. But President Obama believed a better partner could be found there and we encouraged a revolution that showed Gaddafi brutalized and assassinated in the streets of the capital. He was replaced by  two rival governments who are still trying to figure out how to govern. And neither is friendly with the USA.

I hope you can see a pattern here. We abandoned leaders who, while not necessarily to our liking, were at least not beheading Americans or burning them alive. And while their rhetoric on Israel got pretty strong, it was still mostly rhetoric.

Along comes Syria in this litany of American involvement in politics and revolution in the Middle East. This time our president was up against a pretty tough leader by the name of Assad. Further, Assad had an ally in Russia. Nevertheless, we announced he had to go and drew a red line which we warned him not to cross. He crossed the red line and then erased it completely. He is still there and shows no signs of going anywhere soon. And we aren’t painting any more lines. In fact we hardly mention that country at all.

And some of those who are older will remember when Saddam Hussein was our ally when Russia was trying to outmaneuver the poppy growers in Afghanistan. He went from friend to enemy mighty fast and we created such a mess in Iraq our enemies there are actually using the money and the weapons we left behind when we departed to fight us.

Just writing this stuff is demoralizing.

We had allies of sorts in Egypt, Libya, Iran, Iraq, and other countries. They weren’t the nicest of folks but they were mostly under control and not even close to having the hatred of America that exists today.

Everyone has their own take on history. Mine is this: we tried a foreign policy that was unnecessary, we meddled in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, we did so in such a naive way that the new leaders in almost every instance turned out worse than the old, and the bottom line is that America has never been in this much danger from a divergent group of countries that we have now single handedly brought to a point where they may actually succeed in forming a Caliphate and through united action become a major world power opposed to everything we hold dear.

And if that happens the history books will have a field day with our role in a major change in the balance of power in the world.