Obama’s behavior since last January 25 has made clear to US friend and foe
alike that under Obama, the US is more likely to attack you if you display
weakness towards it than if you adopt a confrontational posture against it.
One year later, the elements of the US’s alliance structure have either been
destroyed or seriously weakened. US allies like Saudi Arabia, which have yet
to be seriously threatened by the revolutionary violence, no longer trust
the US. As the recently revealed nuclear cooperation between the Saudis and
the Chinese makes clear, the Saudis are looking to other global powers to
replace the US as their superpower protector.
Our World: America and the Arab Spring
By CAROLINE B. GLICK The Jerusalem Post 01/23/2012 23:17
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=254857
The US’s rapid fall from regional power is everywhere in evidence.
A year ago this week, on January 25, 2011, the ground began to crumble under
then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s feet. One year later, Mubarak and
his sons are in prison, and standing trial. This week, the final vote tally
from Egypt’s parliamentary elections was published. The Islamist parties
have won 72 percent of the seats in the lower house.
The photogenic, Western-looking youth from Tahrir Square the Western media
were thrilled to dub the Facebook revolutionaries were disgraced at the
polls and exposed as an insignificant social and political force.
As for the military junta, it has made its peace with the Muslim
Brotherhood. The generals and the jihadists are negotiating a power-sharing
agreement. According to details of the agreement that have made their way to
the media, the generals will remain the West’s go-to guys for foreign
affairs. The Muslim Brotherhood (and its fellow jihadists in the Salafist
al-Nour party) will control Egypt’s internal affairs.
This is bad news for women and for non-Muslims. Egypt’s Coptic Christians
have been under continuous attack by Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist
supporters since Mubarak was deposed. Their churches, homes and businesses
have been burned, looted and destroyed. Their wives and daughters have been
raped. The military massacred them when they dared to protest their
persecution.
As for women, their main claim to fame since Mubarak’s overthrow has been
their sexual victimization at the hands of soldiers who stripped female
protesters and performed “virginity tests” on them. Out of nearly five
hundred seats in parliament, only 10 will be filled by women.
The Western media are centering their attention on what the next Egyptian
constitution will look like and whether it will guarantee rights for women
and minorities. What they fail to recognize is that the Islamic
fundamentalists now in charge of Egypt don’t need a constitution to
implement their tyranny. All they require is what they already have – a
public awareness of their political power and their partnership with the
military.
The same literalist approach that has prevented Western observers from
reading the writing on the walls in terms of the Islamists’ domestic
empowerment has blinded them to the impact of Egypt’s political
transformation on the country’s foreign policy posture. US officials
forcefully proclaim that they will not abide by an Egyptian move to formally
abrogate its peace treaty with Israel. What they fail to recognize is that
whether or not the treaty is formally abrogated is irrelevant. The situation
on the ground in which the new regime allows Sinai to be used as a launching
ground for attacks against Israel, and as a highway for weapons and terror
personnel to flow freely into Gaza, are clear signs that the peace with
Israel is already dead – treaty or no treaty.
EGYPT’S TRANSFORMATION is not an isolated event. The disgraced former Yemen
president Ali Abdullah Saleh arrived in the US this week. Yemen is supposed
to elect his successor next month. The deteriorating security situation in
that strategically vital land which borders the Arabian and Red Seas has
decreased the likelihood that the election will take place as planned.
Yemen is falling apart at the seams. Al-Qaida forces have been advancing in
the south. Last spring they took over Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan
province. In recent weeks they captured Radda, a city 160 km. south of the
capital of Sana.
Radda’s capture underscored American fears that the political upheaval in
Yemen will provide al- Qaida with a foothold near shipping routes through
the Red Sea and so enable the group to spread its influence to neighboring
Saudi Arabia.
Al-Qaida forces were also prominent in the NATO-backed Libyan opposition
forces that with NATO’s help overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in October. Although
the situation on the ground is far from clear, it appears that radical
Islamic political forces are intimidating their way into power in
post-Gaddafi Libya.
Take for instance last weekend’s riots in Benghazi. On Saturday protesters
laid siege to the National Transitional Council offices in the city while
Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the head of the NTC, hid inside. In an attempt to quell
the protesters’ anger, Jalil fired six secular members of the NTC. He then
appointed a council of religious leaders to investigate corruption charges
and identify people with links to the Gaddafi regime.
In Bahrain, the Iranian-supported Shi’ite majority continues to mount
political protests against the Sunni monarchy. Security forces killed two
young Shi’ite protesters over the past week and a half, and opened fired at
Shi’ites who sought to hold a protest march after attending the funeral of
one of them.
As supporters of Bahrain’s Shi’ites have maintained since the unrest spread
to the kingdom last year, Bahrain’s Shi’ites are not Iranian proxies. But
then, until the US pulled its troops out of Iraq last month, neither were
Iraq’s Shi’ites. What happened immediately after the US pullout is another
story completely.
Extolling Iraq’s swift deterioration into an Iranian satrapy, last
Wednesday, Brig.-Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards Corps Jerusalem Brigade, bragged, “In reality, in south
Lebanon and Iraq, the people are under the effect of the Islamic Republic’s
way of practice and thinking.”
While Suleimani probably exaggerated the situation, there is no doubt that
Iran’s increased influence in Iraq is being felt around the region. Iraq has
come to the aid of Iran’s Syrian client Bashar Assad who is now embroiled in
a civil war. The rise of Iran in Iraq holds dire implications for the
Hashemite regime in Jordan which is currently hanging on by a thread,
challenged from within and without by the rising force of the Muslim
Brotherhood.
Much has been written since the fall of Mubarak about the impact on Israel
of the misnamed Arab Spring. Events like September’s mob assault on Israel’s
embassy in Cairo and the murderous cross-border attack on motorists
traveling on the road to Eilat by terrorists operating out of Sinai give
force to the assessment that Israel is more imperiled than ever by the
revolutionary events engulfing the region.
But the truth is that while on balance Israel’s regional posture has taken a
hit, particularly from the overthrow of Mubarak and the rise of the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Salafists in Egypt, Israel is not the primary loser in
the so-called Arab Spring.
Israel never had many assets in the Arab world to begin with. The
Western-aligned autocracies were not Israel’s allies. To the extent the
likes of Mubarak and others have cooperated with Israel on various issues
over the years, their cooperation was due not to any sense of comity with
Jewish state. They worked with Israel because they believed it served their
interests to do so. And at the same time Mubarak reined in the Muslim
Brotherhood and Hamas because they threatened him, he waged political war
against Israel on every international stage and allowed anti-Semitic poison
to be broadcast daily on his regime-controlled television stations.
Since Israel’s stake in the Arab power game has always been limited, its
losses as a consequence of the fall of anti-Israel secular dictatorships and
their replacement by anti-Israel Islamist regimes have been marginal. The
US, on the other hand, has seen its interests massively harmed. Indeed, the
US is the greatest loser of the pan-Arab revolutions.
TO UNDERSTAND the depth and breadth of America’s losses, consider that on
January 25, 2011, most Arab states were US allies to a greater or lesser
degree. Mubarak was a strategic ally. Saleh was willing to collaborate with
the US in combating al- Qaida and other jihadist forces in his country.
Gaddafi was a neutered former enemy who had posed no threat to the US since
2004. Iraq was a protectorate. Jordan and Morocco were stable US clients.
One year later, the elements of the US’s alliance structure have either been
destroyed or seriously weakened. US allies like Saudi Arabia, which have yet
to be seriously threatened by the revolutionary violence, no longer trust
the US. As the recently revealed nuclear cooperation between the Saudis and
the Chinese makes clear, the Saudis are looking to other global powers to
replace the US as their superpower protector.
Perhaps the most amazing aspect to the US’s spectacular loss of influence
and power in the Arab world is that most of its strategic collapse has been
due to its own actions. In Egypt and Libya the US intervened prominently to
bring down a US ally and a dictator who constituted no threat to its
interests. Indeed, it went to war to bring Gaddafi down.
Moreover, the US acted to bring about their fall at the same time it knew
that they would be replaced by forces inimical to American national security
interests. In Egypt, it was clear that the Muslim Brotherhood would emerge
as the strongest political force in the country. In Libya, it was clear at
the outset of the NATO campaign against Gaddafi that al-Qaida was
prominently represented in the antiregime coalition. And just as the
Islamists won the Egyptian election, shortly after Gaddafi was overthrown,
al-Qaida forces raised their flag over Benghazi’s courthouse.
US actions from Yemen to Bahrain and beyond have followed a similar pattern.
In sharp contrast to his active interventionism against US-allied regimes,
President Barack Obama has prominently refused to intervene in Syria, where
the fate of a US foe hangs in the balance.
Obama has sat back as Turkey has fashioned a Syrian opposition dominated by
the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Arab League has intervened in a manner that
increases the prospect that Syria will descend into chaos in the event that
the Assad regime is overthrown.
Obama continues to speak grandly about his vision for the Middle East and
his dedication to America’s regional allies. And his supporters in the media
continue to applaud his great success in foreign policy. But outside of
their echo chamber, he and the country he leads are looked upon with
increasing contempt and disgust throughout the Arab world.
Obama’s behavior since last January 25 has made clear to US friend and foe
alike that under Obama, the US is more likely to attack you if you display
weakness towards it than if you adopt a confrontational posture against it.
As Assad survives to kill another day; as Iran expands its spheres of
influence and gallops towards the nuclear bomb; as al- Qaida and its allies
rise from the Gulf of Aden to the Suez Canal; and as Mubarak continues to be
wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher, the US’s rapid fall from regional
power is everywhere in evidence.
caroline@carolineglick.com
| 
