Updated: July 13, 2014 2:25AM
The Middle East is in flames, and the president of the United States seems largely irrelevant.
Israel and Hamas terrorists are fighting another Gaza war. What was once touted by the administration as a success story in Iraq degenerated into a nightmare of bloodshed and triumph by Islamist fanatics. The Syrian civil war plods on with the death toll at 150,000, millions turned into refugees and dictator Bashar al-Assad still in power despite Washington’s demand that he must go.
No one sees the United States as the power-player of yesteryear. President Barack Obama has squandered American credibility in foreign affairs, and confidence in U.S. reliability and commitment is at a low.
Obama’s famous 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim faithful was built on his personality, his background as someone who was familiar with Islam, and his belief that all that was wrong with the world and U.S. relations with it flowed from the presidency of George W. Bush.
But in the hard world of Mideast politics, talk is cheap and what you do defines who you are.
One of the first things Obama did was distance the United States from its best ally, Israel. He created a new condition for peace talks, that Israel freeze all construction in the disputed West Bank. The Palestinians had never made that demand before, now they do. Israel naturally resisted. Obama failed, the Palestinians felt betrayed and Israel was left distanced from its main ally.
Worse for broader U.S. policy, the rulers of the Middle East saw Obama shun a friend and concluded he could not be trusted as a reliable ally.
That impression was reinforced when Obama quickly abandoned President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s 2011 revolution. That upheaval was soon hijacked by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt’s military, the authority behind Mubarak, seized power in a coup, nullifying the revolt.
In his haste to wash his hands of Iraq, Obama failed to negotiate an agreement to keep a residual U.S. force there. Virtually every expert believed U.S. military influence in the country was necessary to keep Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, of the country’s Shiite majority, from excluding minority Sunnis and Kurds from effective participation in government. With America gone, Maliki did exactly that and more, persecuting Sunnis. Angry Sunnis rebelled and the al-Qaida offshoot Islamic State in Iraq and Syria took advantage of the chaos to seize parts of the country. Obama promised new aid for Iraq — in 2015. Iran quickly delivered several fighter jets and other support.
No one in the region has forgotten Obama’s infamous retreat from his “red line” threat to punish Assad for using chemical weapons against his people in Syria’s civil war.
This month is supposed to bring agreement to contain Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran is hanging tough in negotiations. Word is that Secretary of State John Kerry may try to negotiate an extension of the talks. That would feed worries that Iran is succeeding in a scheme to stall talks while advancing its atomic goal.
The new crisis sparked by the murder of three teens, almost certainly by Hamas, and the showering of Israel with hundreds of rockets offered Obama a moment of clarity.
He could have taken to the White House podium to declare the obvious truth — that this Gaza war would end the minute Hamas stopped firing rockets at Israeli cities. He could have instructed his U.N. ambassador to shout that truth to the world at the United Nations. He did neither.
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