Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) (22 page)

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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza

Tags: #Non-fiction, #Political Ideologies, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science

BOOK: Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012)
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Obama’s willingness to antagonize Israel may seem surprising given the strong Jewish support for the Democratic Party. Neither Bill Clinton nor John Kerry would have contemplated risking this support in the way that Obama has. Even when leading Jewish Democrats urged Obama to reconsider his position, he refused. True, Obama has changed his rhetoric in this election year. Now he sounds like a longtime friend of Israel. Very few people in Israel are fooled, but Thomas Friedman of the
New York Times
evidently is. Friedman recently called Obama “Israel’s best friend.” Why? Because, in Friedman’s words, Obama “redefined the Iran issue.” Friedman quotes Obama: “Preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon isn’t just in the interest of Israel, it is profoundly in the security interest of the United States,” in part because “this would run completely contrary to my policies of nonproliferation.” So Friedman is excited that Israel alone doesn’t have to bear the responsibility of blocking an Iranian bomb; Obama has committed the United States to that task as well.
21
But most Israelis from the prime minister on down realize that they cannot count on Obama to save them. Against Friedman’s unrealistic hopes they have to consider a much more realistic set of fears. Let’s consider a different interpretation of Obama’s behavior that is more consistent with the man’s anti-colonial sensibility. Obama wants to prevent Israel from acting by itself until he can definitely stop it from acting at all. Obama must prevent Israel from launching its own attack against the Iranian nuclear sites before the November election. If Israel attacks, then Obama may be forced, to protect his re-election prospects, to suppress his outrage and publicly back Israel. Obama wants to avoid this predicament, which for him would be an ideological sellout. So Obama has to find a way to delay any Israeli action. Obama seeks to achieve this by publicly assuring Israel, “I’ve got your back.” Obama knows that Netanyahu won’t believe him. Netanyahu probably knows that if Obama has his back, he is just as likely to be shot from the back as from the front. Still, Netanyahu cannot say this, because his nation is so reliant on America. Obama seeks to put Netanyahu in a position where, whatever his private opinions, he is diplomatically forced to place Israel’s public trust in America. In this way, Obama buys time, and a little time is all he needs. Once Obama is re-elected, he can then bluntly say to Israel: if you now use military force, America will not support you. In fact, America will join the rest of the world in condemning you. Israel then faces a horrible choice: either refuse to act and live with an Iranian nuclear bomb, or act and face international condemnation and isolation, which is to say, global pariah status.
I believe this is what Obama wants: he wants Israel to be delegitimized in the way that South Africa was over apartheid. Eventually the South African system simply collapsed. In his first term, Obama has been content to back the Palestinians over the West Bank and Gaza. But I believe his longer-term goal is much more ambitious. Like any good anti-colonialist freedom fighter, he seeks to get rid of the occupying power itself. Let’s remember that from the anti-colonialist view, Israel is the “little Satan” occupying Muslim land, and America is the “great Satan” backing Israel. Ultimately no true anti-colonialist can be content until all of occupied Palestine, which is to say all of Israel, is returned to the Muslims. I don’t think Obama expects the Jews to go elsewhere. But he can delegitimize the Jewish state and perhaps he can force Israel to grant a right of return with full voting rights to Palestinian refugees. If that happens, then in relatively short order, the Muslims would outnumber the Jews, with obvious political consequences. An Obama second term could be fatal for the future of Israel.
CHAPTER TWELVE
 
OUR ARAB WINTER
 
Human history has often been a record of nations and tribes—and yes, religions—subjugating one another in pursuit of their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating.
1
—Barack Obama, speech at Cairo University, June 4, 2009
 
 
 
I
n the last couple years, we have seen protests and rebellions break out all over the Arab and Muslim world. It started in December 2010 when a 26-year-old Tunisian set himself on fire to protest unemployment and corruption. Pretty soon there were uprisings in Tunisia which spread over subsequent months to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Iran, and Syria. When the dust had settled a year and a half later, four governments had been toppled—the governments of Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt. As of this writing, Syria continues to battle resisters in several cities. The overall impact of the so-called Arab Spring is two-fold: it has advanced the cause of democracy in the Muslim world, and it has undermined the strength and influence of the United States. As Fawaz Gerges put it in his recent book,
Obama and the Middle East
, “U. S. influence … is at its lowest point since the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s. America’s ability to dictate policy in the Middle East has diminished considerably, and it no longer determines the course of events in the region. America’s moment is coming to an end.”
2
How did this rapid decline occur? The United States clearly didn’t cause the Arab Spring. This was an indigenous revolution, a response to repression and corruption which are unfortunately widespread in the Muslim regimes of North Africa and the Middle East. Yet America’s actions in responding to the Arab Spring have been wildly contradictory. In Libya, President Obama used military force to oust the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Obama’s stated reason was to prevent the Gaddafi regime from committing genocide against the Libyan people, even though at the time America launched its attack, fewer than 250 people had been killed. Meanwhile, Obama initially refused to take any action in Syria; finally, under pressure, he reluctantly provided modest non-military aid to the Syrian resistance. Obama’s conduct is especially odd given that Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad had, over a period of several months, killed more than 10,000 people. Evidently, genocide is more acceptable in Syria than in Libya.
Obama also played an active role in removing the Egyptian ruler, Hosni Mubarak, from power. Mubarak was replaced first by an interim government established by the military, and then by a new government led by the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamic groups. These groups prevailed in the Egyptian elections. The Obama administration’s role was, first, to use U.S. diplomatic pressure to back the military in pressuring Mubarak to leave; then, to turn on the military and back the street protesters’ demands for elections. Obama did not bring the radical Muslims to power in Egypt—Egyptians voted them in—but he cleared the way for their ascent. Yet if this could be considered an exercise of American support for democracy, Obama responded in precisely the opposite manner in 2009, when there were equally massive demonstrations in favor of democracy in Iran. Then Obama urged patience and restraint, and the consequence was that the mullahs and the police were successful in subduing the rebels. So Mubarak was ejected in Egypt while the mullahs continue to rule Iran.
To date, no one has convincingly explained why Obama used force in Libya while eschewing it in Syria; or why Obama aided in the ouster of the Mubarak regime while acquiescing in the crackdown of the Iranian regime. Why intervene here rather than there? What is Obama’s principle of selectivity that accounts for the seeming inconsistency in his foreign policy? There has been a good deal of head-scratching on this. The best we have is Walter Russell Mead’s theory that Obama is “the least competent manager of America’s Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time. He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya . . . . He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street . . . . He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies.”
3
But surely Obama knows that Libya is strategically irrelevant; surely he can see that he is antagonizing America’s friends and strengthening America’s enemies. So Mead’s analysis only begs the question: Why would Obama continue to act in this way when the results are as obvious to him as to Mead and the rest of us?
Here I offer a coherent explanation that better accounts for Obama’s conduct. There is in fact no inconsistency. Behind Obama’s apparent “double standard” there is a single standard that is glaringly obvious. Obama is getting precisely the results he wants. He is attempting to get rid of American allies in Egypt and several other countries, and he has done that. He is trying to conserve anti-American regimes in Syria and Iran, and he has done that. Obama’s goal is to reduce America’s footprint in the Middle East, and in four years Obama has been wildly successful in doing that too. We can confidently project that if Obama is re-elected, American influence in the region, and in the world, will decline further.
Four rulers are gone: Ben Ali in Tunisia, Ali Saleh in Yemen, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. What did they have in common? Sure, they were thugs, in a region of thugs. Sure, they were corrupt, in an area of the world where corruption is the norm. But here is the significant point: they were all also, to a lesser or greater degree, allies of the United States. Mubarak was our strongest ally in the region, not counting Israel. Ben Ali and Ali Saleh were both helping us fight al-Qaeda. Once called “the mad dog of the Middle East,” Gaddafi had renounced his past support for terrorism. Since 2002 he had suspended his nuclear weapons program and given up his quest for weapons of mass destruction. He paid reparations for his role in the Lockerbie bombing. He turned over terrorist suspects and normalized Libya’s relations with the West. He also banned radical groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya. Now all these men are gone, and in every case the United States helped push them out.
We’re going to look more closely at Libya and Egypt later. But here for instance is the April 3, 2011, headline in the
New York Times
: “U.S. Shifts to Seek Removal of Yemen’s Leader, an Ally.” We read that “the United States, which long supported Yemen’s president” because “he was considered a critical ally in fighting the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda” had, under the Obama administration, “now quietly shifted positions” and was pushing to get him “eased out of office.”
4
The article expresses very little curiosity about why Obama would want to push out a ruler who is pro-American and helping in the fight against al-Qaeda.
In two of the four cases, Libya and Yemen, the devil we know has been replaced by the devil we don’t. In other words, America is quite possibly going to get new governments that are more anti-American and more sympathetic to radical Islam. In Tunisia and Egypt, we know this is the case. In Tunisia, the secular political parties were easily defeated by Nahda, a long-banned Islamist party led by the radical activist Rachid Ghannouchi. Tunisia’s new prime minister, Hamadi Jebali, has been quoted saying that his goal is to establish a “sixth caliphate” under Muslim holy law in Tunisia.
5
The Egyptian elections brought to power the Muslim Brotherhood, in coalition with an even-more-radical Islamist party called the Party of Light.
The regimes in Syria and Iran have also been run by corrupt dictators, so there is nothing new there. What, then, distinguishes them from the regimes in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen? The distinguishing feature is that Syria and Iran are ferociously opposed to the United States. In fact, they have long been allied with each other in that opposition. If these regimes fall, we can’t be sure what sort of regimes would replace them, but in Iran at least we can be confident that the new regime would be less anti-American and less anti-Israel. Yet it is the Iranian opposition that Obama has refused to assist at all. Obama apparently believes in helping to oust pro-American dictators and leaving anti-American dictators alone.
It may seem shocking to suggest that these are actually Obama’s goals, as opposed to the unintentional consequences of his foreign policy. Yet if Obama didn’t intend these results, you would expect him to regret what has happened or start pursuing a different policy. On the contrary, Obama forges ahead, offering aid and protection to the Islamic radicals who are now in power. Obama’s actions suggest a man who knows exactly what he is doing, even as naive pundits continue to lecture him on how he can more wisely advance American interests and American influence in the Middle East. Obama coolly ignores these people because advancing American interests and influence in the region is the last thing he wants. Obama’s actions are totally consistent with those of an anti-colonialist who considers America to be the global oppressor that needs to be cut down to size.
To understand the Arab Spring, we have to recognize a shift in strategy on the part of the Islamic radicals. Actually, it is a shift back to an old strategy. Consider what Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were doing before they launched al-Qaeda. Bin Laden was fighting to overthrow the pro-American government of Saudi Arabia, and Zawahiri was fighting to overthrow the pro-American government of Egypt. In their own understanding, they were fighting the “near enemy.” The Islamic radicals in those days didn’t bother with attacking America directly, and they weren’t even that concerned with Israel. Both were regarded as the “far enemy.” One of Zawahiri’s famous slogans from that period was, “The road to Jerusalem runs through Cairo.” This meant that Muslims had first to take over their own countries; then they would be strong enough to tackle Israel and eventually the United States.
6

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