A Disaster called Obama’s Middle East Policy

A Disaster called Obama’s Middle East Policy

With each passing day, it gets more and more difficult to ignore the monumental disaster that Obama’s foreign policy actually is. Nowhere is its utter failure more glaringly evident than in the Syrian Civil War.

But first, let us not underestimate the pathologies of the Middle East that have led to the present disaster in Syria, but Obama administration’s policies have created perils that we would be dealing with, in decades to come.

The geopolitical vacuum created by President Obama’s push to shrink America’s footprint in the Middle East has quickly been filled by Comrade Putin’s soviet-style jackboots. And President Obama-backed Nuclear Deal has single-handedly contributed billions of dollars to Islamic Republic of Iran’s war chest geared at funding global terrorism and regional adventures.

Five years into the conflict, Syrian Dictator Assad is only hanging on to his power thanks to the massive military and political backing from Moscow and Tehran. With the help of Russian military support, Assad is now redrawing the frontline to his own advantage. As Assad lays sigh of rebel stronghold Aleppo, the “moderate” rebels now look to be on their last legs. So far, Assad has been more inclined squeeze the “moderate” rebels, whom he considers as soft targets, than to go after the evil of Islamic State.

By betting on his stooge Assad, Russia’s Putin is looking more and more like a winner. Putin’s gains comes at a cost to the U.S. and its Western allies. The debacle is so great that even the mainstream media cannot afford to ignore it any longer.

In a recent article, London-based Financial Times attacked Obama administration of a “bungling mix of action and inaction” that “opened a vacuum into which Russia opportunistically leapt.” Financial Times writes:

After Russian president Vladimir Putin sent his air force into Syria in September, the tide of war turned in favour of Bashar al-Assad, whose regime had started succumbing to Sunni rebels over the summer. It was plain from the outset that Russia was targeting this threat — not the jihadis of Isis. What is abundantly clear now is that Moscow is eliminating any alternative between the regime and Isis, razing the liberated areas of Syria that might nurture one, and driving out a new surge of refugees who have run out of places to hide. Mr Putin is going about this systematically.

For five years Syrians have suffered as the Assad regime bombarded hospitals, schools and bakeries, attacked water and power supplies, and obliterated rebel-controlled civilian enclaves. But much of this barrel-bombing and shelling was indiscriminate. Russia is discriminating carefully in its targeting of civilian infrastructure. For Mr Putin, evidently, Aleppo is no different to Grozny.

Some Arab leaders, with bitter resignation, point out that the Russian president is nonetheless heading for a Pyrrhic victory. If he and his allies — mainly Iran-trained and led militias — succeed in encircling Aleppo, he will have salvaged for his Assad clients a rump state in western Syria. The rest of the country will be a wasteland dominated by Isis, on which the Russians and the regime have barely laid a glove. Neither legitimacy nor stability will follow. The Assads will still head a minority regime; and although the population will have diminished sharply, it will still be overwhelmingly Sunni. The chronic manpower shortage of the government’s forces, made up for now by Hizbollah paramilitaries, Iranian revolutionary guards and other Tehran-aligned fighters drawn from Iraq and Afghanistan, will not change.

The article also debunks President Obama supporters’ claim that the administration was justified in staying out of the Syrian conflict, saying “[President Obama in fact] did get involved,” reminding the readers of the “red line” U.S. President had set for Assad in August 2012, if the dictator was were to used chemical or biological weapons.

All the tough talk from the U.S. President came to nothing when Assad actually went ahead and used the deadly nerve gas against his people, killing more than a thousand people in an attack back in August 2013 – exactly one year after President Obama drew the now-infamous “red line.”

As Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, told a Senate committee last week; Assad had not parted with his chemical stockpile, and continues to use them on the battlefield in blatant violation of the international agreement reached in the aftermath of Assad’s deadly chemical attack.

Syrian Dictator knows that as long as President Obama is in the White House, he can get away with anything. The tragedy and the farce of it all is that even a third-world dictator is now able to call Obama administration’s bluff.

Watch: Did Putin outsmart Obama on Syria? Greta Van Susteren talks to Lt. Col. Oliver North:

(Cover  image courtesy CNN, YouTube screenshot)

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