A New Doctrine of Disengagement

[Draggingtree]

The New Media Journal:

A New Doctrine of Disengagement

Adm. James A. Lyons (ret.), Accuracy in Media

The sense that America is disengaging, coupled with our unilateral disarmament, is contributing to instability throughout the world.

 

Most Americans did not comprehend in 2008 what President-to-be Obama meant when he declared that he was going to "fundamentally" transform America. The first clear indication should have come with his June 2009 Cairo "outreach" speech to the Muslim world. With the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood leadership prominently seated in the front row (and his host, Egypt's then-president, Hosni Mubarak, not in attendance), his speech, in effect, gave the green light to the Arab Spring movement. Secular dictatorships that were cooperating with the United States and keeping Islamic jihadists under control were clearly the first targets. This should have raised the question: Is this the new Obama doctrine? If so, it has left our friends and allies not only confused, but at times feeling betrayed. Certainly, that is the case for our longtime and closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. With the Obama administration's ill-conceived agreement with Iran, Israel, for all practical purposes, has been cast adrift and must now make plans to ensure its own survivability.

[Draggingtree]

Judith Levy, Ed.

"Don't Listen": The Biggest Losers in US Middle East Policy in 2013

December 29, 2013

Lee Smith has a piece up at Tablet Magazine listing the parties in the Middle East that were the most seriously damaged by American foreign policy over the past year. In his estimation, they are:

1. The Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK (the Iranian anti-regime resistance movement)
2. The Syrian rebels
3. Israel

Smith contextualizes the question by explaining how times have changed:

This was the year that America swapped the sledgehammer for the scalpel and reached out a hand of friendship to its enemies—leaving its friends to wonder what lay in store. For those actors who didn’t understand that the era of heroic U.S. engagement in the Middle East—everything from democracy promotion and big-ticket aid packages to “shock and awe” and regime change brought about by hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops—has ended, 2013 was a particularly bad year.

 

He explains his selection of the top three this way. With regard http://ricochet.com/content/view/full/5319