Obama’s world outreach teetering

By Jim Lobe

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.

AT

Comments are closed.