Obama is as they used to say about the Bourbon Kings of France, someone who “learns nothing and forgets everything”.
by Caroline Glick
The operational, intelligence and political fiascos that led to and followed the September 11 jihadist assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, all derive from the same problem. That problem is the failure of US President Barack Obama’s conceptual framework for understanding the Middle East.
The Islamic revolutionary wave sweeping across the Arab world has rent asunder the foundations of the US alliance system in the Middle East. But due to Obama’s ideological commitment to an anti-American conceptual framework for understanding Middle Eastern politics, his administration cannot see what is happening.
That framework places the blame for all or most of the pathologies of the Muslim world on the US and Israel.
What Obama and his advisers can see is that there are many people who disagree with them. And so they adopted a policy of delegitimizing, discrediting and silencing their opponents. To this end, his administration has purged the US federal government’s lexicon of all terms that are necessary to describe reality.
“Jihad,” “Islamist,” “radical Islam,” “Islamic terrorism” and similar phrases have all been banned. The study of Islamist doctrine by government officials has been outlawed.
The latest casualty of this policy was an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
Until he was sacked this week, the instructor taught a class called “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.”
According to Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for the Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the instructor was fired for committing a thought crime. He “portrayed Islam almost entirely in a negative way.” Dempsey himself ordered the probe of all Islamic courses across the US military educational system.
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Another failure, also deriving from Obama’s embrace of the anti-American and anti-Israel foreign policy narrative, is also wreaking havoc on the region. And like the conceptual failure that led to the murderous attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, this conceptual failure will also come back to haunt America.
This second false conceptual framework argues that the root of instability in the region is the absence of formal treaties of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. It claims that the way to pacify the radical regional forces is to pressure Israel to make concessions in land and legitimacy to its neighbors.
Obama is not unique for his embrace of this conceptual framework for US Middle East policy. He is just the latest in a long line of US presidents to adopt it.
At the same time the concept that peace processes and treaties ensure peace and stability collapsed completely during Obama’s tenure in office. So what makes Obama unique is that he is the first president to cling to this policy framework since it was wholly discredited.
Israel signed four peace treaties with its Arab neighbors. It signed treaties with Egypt, Jordan, the PLO and Lebanon. All of these treaties have failed or been rendered meaningless by subsequent events.
Today Israel’s 31-year-old peace treaty with Egypt is a hollow shell. No, Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood regime has not officially abrogated it. But the rise of the genocidally anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood to power has rendered it meaningless.
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All of this has changed in the past 10 to 15 years as the Beduin of the area underwent a drastic process of Islamic radicalization. Today the Beduin of Sinai stand behind much of the jihadist violence. The Beduin of Israel have increasingly embraced the causes of irredentism, radical Islam and jihad. And the Beduin of Jordan have become even more opposed to peaceful coexistence with Israel than the Palestinians.
This leaves the Hashemites. A small Arabian clan installed in power by the British, the Hashemites have historically viewed Israel as their strategic partners and protectors of their regime.
Since the fall of the Mubarak regime, Jordan’s King Abdullah II has been increasingly stressed by regional events and domestic trends alike. The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has empowered the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. The rise of pro-Iranian Shi’ite forces in post-US-withdrawal Iraq has made pro-Western Jordan an attractive target for triumphant jihadists across the border. The rise of Islamist forces in the Syrian opposition, not to mention the constant subversive activities carried out by Syrian regime agents, has limited Jordan’s maneuver room still further.
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This revolt was exposed in all of its ugliness in recent weeks following Abdullah’s appointment of Walid Obeidat to serve as Jordan’s new ambassador to Israel.
Obeidat’s tribe disowned him and his family and branded him a traitor for accepting the appointment. His tribe invited the other tribes to join it in a mass rally demanding the abrogation of the treaty and the destruction of Israel.
In this state of affairs, the strategic value of Israel’s peace treaty has been destroyed. Even if Abdullah wished to look to Israel as a strategic protector, as his father, King Hussein, did in the 1970 Jordanian civil war between the Hashemites and the Palestinians, he can’t. In 1970, the Syrians shared Hussein’s antipathy to Yasser Arafat and the PLO and therefore did not intervene on their behalf. Today, there is no Arab force that would back him in an Israeli-supported fight against Islamic fundamentalists.
Perhaps in recognition of the fragility of the Hashemites’ hold on power, last week it was reported that the US has deployed military forces to the kingdom. According to media reports, the force consists of a few hundred advisers and other teams whose main jobs are to assist Jordan in handling the 200,000 refugees from Syria who have streamed across the border since the onset of the civil war in Syria, and to help to secure Syria’s chemical and biological arsenals. It is more than likely that the force is also in place to evacuate Americans in the event the regime collapses.
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But to adopt this policy, the Americans first need to discard their false conceptual frameworks regarding the Middle East. Unfortunately, as the US response to the Benghazi attack and its continued assaults on Israel make clear, there is no chance of that happening, as long as Obama remains in the White House.
Read the rest – Libya, Jordan and Obama’s narratives
Tags: Caroline Glick
