Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
President Barack Obama cut short his trip to India to fly to Riyadh on Jan. 27 to pay homage to the rulers of Saudi Arabia, following the death of King Abdullah. Secretary of State John Kerry called the late king “a man of wisdom and vision.”
In actual fact, Abdullah, in the words of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, presided over a state “whose domestic policies are almost cartoonishly repressive and whose international influence has been strikingly malign.”
Those who hope the new monarch, King Salman, will prove to be more progressive will soon enough be disabused of that notion.
On the other hand, Obama was too busy to join the huge Paris rally on Jan. 11 attended by some two million people, including more than 40 world leaders, which followed the massacre at the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket a few days earlier.
Obama has also announced that he will not be meeting Benjamin Netanyahu when the Israeli prime minister comes to Washington to speak to a joint session of Congress on March 3.
Netanyahu has said his priority is to urge the United States and other powers not to negotiate an Iranian nuclear deal that might endanger Israel.
This is something Obama doesn’t want to hear. Indeed, he has indicated he will veto any action by Congress to strengthen sanctions against Tehran.
Is he hoping that reason might prevail over the apocalyptic religious visions harbored by the mullahs – visions which require, among other things, destroying Israel and vanquishing Sunni Arab rivals? The current talks will in the end legitimize Iran as a nuclear state.
Since the ascension to power of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, Iran has been slowly building an empire in the Middle East, through armed force and terror. Its Lebanese Shi’ite proxy Hezbollah has taken Lebanon hostage, and is now helping Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime in Syria, long an Iranian client.
The Shi’ite government of Haider al-Abadi in Baghdad, which rules those parts of the country not under Kurdish or Islamic State control, is effectively an Iranian puppet. Like his predecessor Nouri al-Maliki, he is a member of the Hizb Al-Dawa, the Islamic party long under Iranian tutelage.
In chaotic Yemen, the Houthis, also allied to Iran, have taken the capital, Sanaa. President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has resigned and the country is close to disintegration.
Iran has also had a hand in trying to destabilize some of the small Sunni-ruled Gulf states, in particular Bahrain, which has a Shi’a majority population. Saudi Arabia has blamed Iran for inciting upheaval in the small country starting in 2011.
Partly as a response, Sunni terrorist groups, sometimes bankrolled by the Saudis, Qatar, and other Sunni states, have mounted their own campaigns in the region. The Islamic State controls about 90,000 square kilometres in parts of Iraq and Syria, and is gaining support elsewhere.
Alarmed by the Houthis’ expansion, Sunni separatists in the south of Yemen have started to seize territory and are working with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The demise of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya has turned that country into a failed state, with various Islamist militias fighting each other in the streets of Tripoli and Benghazi. Militants have also become active in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
And Hamas, despite three major wars with Israel since 2008, remains stronger than ever in Gaza, which it has governed since 2007.
In 2009, soon after taking office, Obama made a major speech at Cairo University, asking the Islamic world for a “new beginning” in its relations with the United States.
But for all of his “make nice” foreign policy, Obama will probably leave office with a Middle East in much worse shape, and less friendly to the U.S., than it was when he won the presidency in 2008.
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