The past months have established a low point in American foreign policy: the bloodbath by a group more extremist than al Qaeda – the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL); Syria’s descent into ever further rampage; President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and successful rabble-rousing in eastern Ukraine and the failure of US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian talks. Apparently the Obama administration never knew the golden rule of diplomacy — that fine tuning of mediated settlements reflect power balances. Also when you don’t give space for democratic moderate forces, as it was the case in Egypt and elsewhere after the Arab uprising in the Middle East and in Syria also. There was no al Qaeda in Saddam’s Iraq. The United States caused it to be, through brutal use of armed force.
The greatest blunder President Obama made by not allowing action when Syria’s monster President Assad crossed the US drawn red line. President Obama hesitated to support the moderate rebels. Now Islamic extremists are in a much stronger position in Syria.
The crisis in Middle East is mostly the creation of Israel and the United States for their combined policy not to help the moderates so that Islamic extremists as revolutionaries can seize the opportunity and Muslims can be blamed for terrorism.
Applying forces brutally in Afghanistan and Iraq without right policy for improving human relationship is mainly responsible for creating ripe situation for the victims of military brutality to rise as anti-American. Israel induced US policy has to go wrong with the Muslims of Middle East. A moderate and democratic Middle East is bad for Israel. The truth is Israel is somewhat concerned to prove its usefulness to the USA because of some signs of shift in US foreign policy.
Force without a sustained political aim cannot achieve the right political goal. This has been the reason for Obama’s fiasco in Afghanistan, where his administration never invested in human relationship with the Afghan people. In Iraq, where the president allowed American forces to withdraw prematurely without leveraging the massive US investment there into ensuring that the sectarian Sh’ite government of Prime Minister Maliki reached out to the Sunnis and Kurds as well. Asking Maliki to be inclusive won’t convince a single Sunni, let alone ISIL fighters. President Obama has to take political arrangement seriously.
The most careless blunder was committed in Syria by threatening action but not going for action to stop the savage dictator in Syria, President Assad. There was a moment in the Syrian conflict when decisive military aid to the moderate opposition was needed. The Syrian catastrophe, with its more than 150,000 dead, signals callous failure of the American administration in stopping the worst human rights failure in recent times.
We recall, how a brief burst of NATO bombing could change the power balance between the long-dominant Serbs and the Bosnian and Croat armies on the other. That military action, not words, laid the foundation for peace. Dictators from Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia to Bashar al-Assad in Syria don’t seek for peace on a caprice. They do so because they are realistic too and they give in when a seed of fear has already begun to rotate in their gut.
In Egypt, what the US administration has done will be remembered for ages by generations of moderate voices in the region and beyond. A democratically elected president was overthrown by a military which was receiving the largest amount of US funding only because the president was Islamist. He needed time to be moderate enough. But the elected government of Egypt was not given that opportunity. Despite the US law barring any military from getting aid if it engages in a coup, despite the presence of all classical symptoms of coup d’état in what happened in Egypt, President Obama’s “Don’t do stupid stuff” yet US diplomacy kept doing stupid stuffs.
