Part 1: What Instability Really Looks Like

[Valin]

The American Interest:

Self-proclaimed Middle East “experts” have long bemoaned the instability of the region. They didn’t know the first thing about real instability.

Adam Garfinkle

1/21/14

 

Imagine trying to follow a critical baseball or football game—a World Series finale or a Superbowl, say—without being able to see it in person or even on TV, without knowing which players are in the lineups at any given time, and without even having access to a real-time eyewitness play-by-play over the radio or the internet. All you have to go on is delayed second- and third-party accounts whose unbiased reliability cannot be firmly established, and, worse, whose motive to obfuscate or “spin” the facts has to be assumed. That’s a little like what trying to follow U.S. foreign policy feels like right now, U.S. Mideast policy in particular. Things are happening even amid some internal debate and disagreement. Assessments and decisions are being made, and those judgments, large and small, are bearing consequences. But for those who aren’t calling the pitches and flashing the signs to hitters and base-runners, and who can’t even follow the game in real time, it’s frustrating trying to figure out what’s going on because what we do know of the decision-making process could conceivably fit into more than one explanatory template.

 

The sports metaphor is obviously a limited one. U.S. foreign policy is not a game. No score can be expressed in numbers than makes any sense. There are more than two teams. Lineups are neither symmetrical nor fixed. Offense and defense are not sharply distinguished. The competition doesn’t ever exactly end. The rules are diffuse. There are no umpires, aside, perhaps, from the unrelenting logic of strategic interaction. But you still get the basic idea: Important stuff is going down, but we on the outside can only infer what it is. And this is a “big game.” Unprecedented instability in the Middle East, whatever else it’s doing, is teeing up an unprecedented number of generative decision points for U.S. officials, creating path-dependent realities we’ll be living with for decades. These are molten times, so the demands to “get it right” now reach incandescent levels of intensity (or they should).

 

We know most of the discrete decision points: What to do about the Syrian civil war? How best to stop or limit the Iranian military-nuclear program? What to do about a re-fracturing Iraq? How to stop the contagion from Syria and Iraq from spreading into Jordan and Lebanon? How to handle the critical Turkish angle viz Syria and Iraq and the Kurds amid a new and potentially far-reaching Turkish political crisis? How far and in which ways and with what relative priority to push Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations? How to influence post-“Arab Spring” political developments in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere? How to think about the burgeoning sectarian cleavages in the region and relate it specific countries? How the counter-proliferation portfolio relates to the other challenges in the region? How to refashion the U.S counterterror intelligence footprint given the withdrawal of so many platforms and personnel from Iraq and, prospectively, Afghanistan?

 

What is striking about these decision points is how many of them there are right now, and how diverse, difficult and intertwined they tend to be. This is not normal........(Snip)

 

 

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I am extremely disappointed in Adam over this. There is no mention of the most important issue facing both the republic and the world. I speak of course of Bridgegate.

[Valin]

Part 2: Syria Policy, Up Close and Ugly
In the run-up to Geneva II, all of the Administration’s policy failings are coalescing into a truly weird and tragic spectacle. Part of a longer essay.

Let’s turn now to a few of the discrete decision points enumerated above, and try to make our way through the policy thickets. Despite the interconnectedness of much of the portfolio, we’re going to take the topics one by one, and do our knitting as the need arises.

 

First Syria. The best way to begin an understanding of U.S. policy toward Syria is to start with Libya. In March 2011, before the upheaval in Syria really amounted to anything, the President decided to throw in with Britain and France and start a war in Libya. Administration counsels were divided as the mayhem in Libya increased. Defense Secretary Bob Gates and all the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed intervention. So did Vice President Biden and then-National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, who was “Biden’s guy.” So did lots of others outside the Administration, including the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and, for what little it’s worth, me.

 

The President seemed ambivalent, and so he laid down a series of strenuous conditions before he would countenance intervention—included Arab League support and a UNSC Article 7 resolution. But the President heeded the war party when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was won over to it, and, perhaps to his chagrin, all of his conditions were improbably met. While we’ll have to await candid memoirs to know for sure, my guess is that the President soon regretted his decision in light of the many dour and unintended consequences of the Libya intervention. Thanks to the allies’ failure, yet again, to plan for the post-combat phase of the war, some of these dour consequences have affected Libya (and led to the September 2012 Benghazi raid) while others have spread all the way to Mali, northern Nigeria and, arguably, Algeria.

 

So when his aides divided again over Syria a few months later, this time President Obama was determined to stay out. How much partisan political considerations came into play as the 2012 election approached is hard to say, but I think they probably mattered a lot (and I said so at the time). In any event, even without election politics affecting his judgment, U.S. passivity with respect to Syria was over-determined.

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]

Foreign Policy and the 2014 Elections

 

By Daniel Larison • January 24, 2014, 12:06 PM

 

Nikolas Gvosdev thinks about how foreign policy issues might affect and be affected by the approaching midterm elections:

 

A comprehensive deal that “solves” the Iran nuclear imbroglio could be a major boost for Obama, validating his approach to world affairs and discrediting those who argue that only military confrontation can produce a satisfactory resolution to the Iranian nuclear stand-off—and other crises. Indeed, the administration might push for a comprehensive deal with Iran in order to contrast the success of Obama’s cautious approach to war with the failures of Republican approaches. A similar logic undergirds the current push for restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and might also serve as the basis for a U.S. diplomatic push to reduce tensions in the East and South China seas.

 

On the other hand, diplomacy, if spun as “concession” or “weakness,” might damage the Democrats’ electoral chances, particularly on the Iran issue, where there is enormous skepticism as to the good faith of the Islamic Republic to implement any agreement.

 

All of this makes sense, but it seems more likely that the midterms won’t be significantly influenced by http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/foreign-policy-and-the-2014-elections/

[Draggingtree]

Obama’s Middle East Fantasies

January 24, 2014 by P. David Hornik

“With respect to Israel,” President Obama said in his interview this week to the New Yorker,

the interests of Israel in stability and security are actually very closely aligned with the interests of the Sunni states…. What’s preventing them from entering into even an informal alliance with at least normalized diplomatic relations is not that their interests are profoundly in conflict but the Palestinian issue, as well as a long history of anti-Semitism that’s developed over the course of decades there, and anti-Arab sentiment that’s increased inside of Israel based on seeing buses being blown up

Obama meant, of course, an alliance against Shiite Iran. Indeed, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has referred several times to snip http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/obamas-middle-east-fantasies/

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

What makes people believe there are not informal alliances?

[Draggingtree]

@Draggingtree

 

What makes people believe there are not informal alliances?

Got me I don't know

[Valin]

 

@Draggingtree

 

What makes people believe there are not informal alliances?

Got me I don't know

 

 

It appears that some people think there are not.

 

Example:

The Saudis have told the Israelis that if they wanted to feel free to use their air space on the way to Iran.

A couple of years ago the Egyptians allowed an Israeli missile sub to use the Suez Canal to get to the Red sea.

[Draggingtree]

January 26, 2014

Barack Obama's Foreign Policy: An Utter Failure

By Elise Cooper

Looking back on President Obama's foreign policy, many wonder what the "Obama Doctrine" actually means. He is inconsistent and appears to be weak in the eyes of the world. Although his rhetoric tries to state otherwise, al-Qaeda is re-emerging, Iran seems to have its way with this administration, and the president has allowed Russia as well as China to become obstructionists. American Thinker interviewed intelligence experts to comment on this administration's foreign policy.

 

In a major foreign policy speech, while running for president in July 2008, candidate Obama outlined his goals: "Instead of alienating ourselves from the world, I want America -- once again -- to lead ... I will focus this strategy on goals essential to making America safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21^st century... [and] to engage China on common interests."

 

Evaluating these goals, it seems that the president has pretty much failed. Congressman Tom Rooney (R-Fla.), a member of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, HUMINT, Analysis, and Counterintelligence, told http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/01/barack_obamas_foreign_policy_an_utter_failure.html