Obama’s Mideast Vision: Confusion

Noah Pollak

Contentions/Commentary

27 August 09

An excellent column today from Michael Young in the Lebanon Daily Star:

Obama feels that an America forever signaling its desire to go home will make things better by making America more likable. That’s not how the Middle East works. Politics abhor a vacuum, and as everyone sees how eager the US is to leave, the more they will try to fill the ensuing vacuum to their advantage, and the more intransigent they will be when Washington seeks political solutions to prepare its getaway.

Those political solutions, as Young points out, are not the products of a coherent strategy but instead are insular policies, each one crafted seemingly as a rebuttal to the Bush administration. It is a mistake to view the Middle East as a European-style system, but it is also a mistake not to recognize that when one country seeks to dominate the region, the strategy crafted to prevent that domination must be coherent and consistently applied. Instead, we have an Obama administration in which one policy is undermining the next:

Obama is exerting considerable political capital to confront Israel, but it may be capital wasted at a moment when Hamas can still veto any breakthrough from the Palestinian side. In other words, Washington is working on a narrow front whereas its failure to weaken Hamas may render the whole enterprise meaningless. But how can the US weaken Hamas when improving relations with the movement’s main regional sponsors, Iran and Syria, remains a centerpiece of American efforts?

This might be because of simple incompetence. It might also be because the Obama administration doesn’t really care to stand in the way of Iran’s encroachments.
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