WASHINGTON - United States President Barack Obama's extraordinary efforts since
his first days in office to reassure Muslims in the Greater Middle East about
US intentions in the region have suffered a series of setbacks that threaten to
reverse whatever gains he has made over the past 10 months in restoring
Washington's badly battered image and influence there.
From Pakistan - where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got an earful of
growing anti-US sentiment last week - to the West Bank and East Jerusalem -
where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has successfully defied Washington's
demands that he freeze Jewish settlement activity - events appear to have
strayed far from the president's original game plan.
As for the vast territory that lies between, the badly tarnished election
victory by Afghan President Hamid Karzai raises new
questions over the viability of a conflict Obama himself called as recently as
August, "a war of necessity". Meanwhile, Iran's failure so far to accept a
US-backed plan to export most of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) for
reprocessing looks increasingly likely to foil his hopes for detente on that
front.
A series of devastating bombings in recent weeks has also raised the specter of
renewed ethnic and sectarian violence in Iraq, while a widely anticipated US
rapprochement with Syria - as well as the resolution of the protracted
political impasse in Lebanon - appears to have stalled.
Few analysts in Washington blame Obama alone for the lack of substantial
progress on these fronts. In a number of cases, unanticipated events, like the
rapid deterioration in security in Afghanistan - and forces over which the
administration exercises little or no control, such as the hardline governments
and domestic politics of Israel and Iran - have sabotaged his hopes.
But disappointment is clearly on the rise among those here and in the region
who believed that Obama's realist foreign policy strategy of "engaging" foes,
and his oft-repeated determination to achieve a two-state solution to the
Israel-Palestinian conflict "from day one" of his presidency promised rapid
improvement in Washington's standing after eight years of decline under former
president George W Bush.
"There is a general concern now, especially in the Arab world, that the
administration is not delivering with respect to any issues in the region,"
said Chas Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia who withdrew his
appointment to chair the National Intelligence Council (NIC) this year in the
face of a media campaign by neo-conservative critics close to Israel's Likud
Party.
"I think there's been quite a difference between how Obama as a person is
perceived and how the US government as an institution is perceived," he added.
"I think what may be happening is that Obama is sinking into the generally
negative view of the US government in the region rather than transcending it as
he once did."
"He started really well, particularly in his speeches in Istanbul [in April]
and in Cairo [in June], in changing how the region perceives America and in
setting forth a vision of the kinds of relationships he wanted," said Steven
Clemons, director of the American Strategy Project at the New America
Foundation.
"But those words have not been followed up by the kind of deep restructuring of
policy vis-a-vis Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians that [former
President Richard] Nixon implemented toward China," he added. "If he had done
so, the trend lines we're seeing in the region might not be as negative as they
appear at the moment."
Of all the problems he faces the region, Afghanistan is the most urgent and
time-consuming. Obama has been considering a recommendation from his military
commanders to add some 44,000 US troops to the 68,000 already deployed there in
order to repel Taliban advances and gain time for Washington and its North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies to build national and local
governance capacity and the Afghan army so it can hold its own.
The request comes just eight months after the same military institution told
Obama that a total of only 75,000 US troops were needed to achieve the same
goal. In the intervening period, not only has the Taliban made greater far
greater strides - and killed more US and NATO forces - than anticipated, but
the discredited election, combined with the Karzai government's notorious
corruption, is virtually certain to make a US-led counter-insurgency campaign
that much more difficult.
By calling the conflict against the Taliban a "war of necessity" and
subsequently ruling out any drawdown of US forces, most analysts believe that
Obama will approve if not all, then at least half of the military's request.
But some experts are worried that any escalation in the US troop presence could
prove counterproductive, not only in Afghanistan, where they risk being seen as
enforcers of a corrupt regime's writ, but also in neighboring Pakistan where
Washington's pressure to bend the government and army to its will has clearly
spurred widespread resentment of the kind Clinton ran into last week.
"The more that a war is seen to be Americanized and a matter of American
occupation, the more we [risk] unit[ing] the disparate elements that we place
under the label of the Taliban and bring[ing] into the fight [against the US]
many people who have no sympathy whatsoever for the Taliban," noted Paul
Pillar, a retired top Central Intelligence Agency analyst who served as
National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia between 2000 and
2005, at a Rand Corporation conference in Washington last week.
Meanwhile, events in the rest of the Middle East also appear to be conspiring
against Obama.
The renewed bombing campaign in Iraq, combined with rising tensions between
Kurds and Arabs over the fate of Kirkuk, could yet force a slowdown in the
planned withdrawal of US troops there, if not an unraveling of the relative
stability achieved over the past two years.
At the same time, continued stalling by Iran over implementation of the
low-enriched uranium export plan agreed in principle last month is making it
increasingly difficult for the administration to resist intense and growing
pressure from the so-called "Israel Lobby" and its Republican and Democratic
allies in Congress to adopt what Clinton has called "crippling sanctions"
against Tehran, even before the end of this year.
Not only would such a quick return to "sticks" risk nipping Obama's engagement
efforts in the bud, but it would also sharply escalate tensions between the two
hardline governments in Tehran and Jerusalem, renewing speculation about
whether Israel intends to attack Iran's nuclear facilities and how the US would
react.
But perhaps the most serious cause for the growing skepticism surrounding
Obama's policy trajectory lies with his handling of the Israel-Palestine
conflict, which his national security adviser, General James Jones, just last
week identified as the "epicenter" of US challenges in the region and beyond.
Not only has the administration retreated from its early demand - voiced most
bluntly by Clinton last May - that Israel freeze all settlement expansion. But
it also praised - through Clinton herself during a visit to Israel this week -
as "unprecedented" Netanyahu's offer to "restrain" settlement growth for up to
a year in order to help launch new peace talks.
At the same time, she publicly scolded Palestine Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas - who had joined the administration's demand for a total settlement
freeze earlier this year - for making it a pre-condition for Palestinian
participation in the talks, thus further undermining his position less than a
month after initially bowing to US pressure to shelve the Goldstone Report that
documented war crimes allegedly committed by Israel during its Gaza campaign.
Calling her remarks a "slap in the face", Arab League secretary general Amr
Moussa said Washington appeared to be moving backwards.
"[W]e are once again the same vicious circle we were in in the 1990s," he said,
while other Arab commentators argued that it was difficult at this point to
distinguish between Obama's policy and the Annapolis process pursued by Bush in
his last year in office.
"There had been growing skepticism in the region, and I suspect this apparent
capitulation to Netanyahu and the Likud will turn skepticism into suspicion,"
Freeman told Inter Press Service.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
