Israel Matzav

Hillary Clinton admits that Obama's Middle East policy is a failure

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami views Secretary of State Clinton's speech in Qatar this past weekend as embracing the Bush doctrine for the Middle East - and as essentially confessing that the Obama approach has failed.

But there was a truth that our secretary of state glided over. Sinking into the sand, too, is the worldview that informed President Obama's approach to the Middle East.

Mr. Obama had come into office with a belief that he knew and understood the Islamic world. He was proud that Islam was a strand in his identity. He was sure that the policy of his predecessor had antagonized Islam. President George W. Bush's "diplomacy of freedom" was not given the grace of a decent burial. "Ideology is so yesterday," Secretary Clinton proudly proclaimed in early 2009. Realpolitik was to be the order of the day.

The Bush diplomacy had declared an open ideological assault against the Iranian theocracy. Mr. Obama would offer that regime an olive branch and a promise of engagement. Syria had been pushed out of Lebanon and viewed as a renegade regime that had done its best to frustrate the American war in Iraq. The Obama diplomacy would offer the rulers in Damascus diplomatic rehabilitation.

Thus the word went forth to the despots in the region that the American campaign on behalf of liberty that Mr. Bush had launched in 2003 had been called off. A new Iraqi democracy, midwifed by American power, was fighting for its life. The Obama administration would keep Iraq at arm's length.

This break of faith with democracy was put on cruel display in the summer of 2009, when the Iranians rose in revolt against their rulers. True, American diplomacy was not likely to alter the raw balance of power between the regime and its democratic oppositionists. But the timidity of American power, and the refusal of the Obama administration to embrace the cause of the opposition, must be reckoned one of American foreign policy's great moral embarrassments.

Read the whole thing.

Ajami doesn't even mention Israel, but we're the one country in the Middle East where Obama's foreign policy was forceful... in the wrong way. Obama's entire Middle East foreign policy can be summed up in half a sentence: The 'fierce moral urgency' of creating a 'Palestinian state.' While that might (or might not, as we now know thanks to Wikileaks) please the region's Arab and Muslim autocrats, it completely ignores all of the region's problems. It's not realpolitik. It's just plain stupid.

Labels: Barack Obama, Bush doctrine, fierce moral urgency, Hillary Clinton, Palestinian state, Wikileaks

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:19 PM