OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY: BIN LADEN REDIVIVUS? PLEADING “WAR WEARINESS,” OBAMA EXITS IRAQ, EGYPT, AFGHANISTAN, WHILE SYRIA SINKS & IRAN RISES

Contents:

How Osama Bin Laden Outsmarted the U.S. and Got What He Wanted: David Samuels, Tablet, Jan. 22, 2014 — “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” President Barack Obama told David Remnick in a newly published New Yorker interview, by way of dismissing the current incarnations of al-Qaida.

Obama’s Losing Bet on Iran: Michael Doran & Max Boot, New York Times, Jan. 15, 2014 — A great deal of diplomatic attention over the next few months will be focused on whether the temporary nuclear deal with Iran can be transformed into a full-blown accord.

American War Weariness? Think Again!: Jonathan Adelman & Asaf Romirowsky, Ynet News, Dec. 22, 2014 — Over and over again we hear that Americans have lost their traditional willingness to use military force in places like Syria and Iran for a simple reason: They are war weary.

Changes in the Pacific: A Return to the 1930s: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Dec. 9, 2014 — In the 1920s, Japan began to translate its growing economic might — after a prior 50-year crash course in Western capitalism and industrialization — into formidable military power.

On Topic Links

On Syria, Obama Administration is Leading to Failure: Editorial Board, Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2014

Obama Was Never Serious About Afghanistan. Now We Know It: Charles Krauthammer, National Post, Jan. 17, 2014 

If Israel Makes Arabs Mad at the U.S., Our Partnership With Iran Will Make Them Even Madder: Lee Smith, Tablet, Jan. 8, 2014

The U.S. and Christian Persecution: Raymond Ibrahim, National Review, Jan. 18, 2014

Putin Is Pulling All The Strings – And Obama Is Letting Him: Doug Schoen, Forbes, Jan. 22, 2014

HOW OSAMA BIN LADEN OUTSMARTED THE U.S.

AND GOT WHAT HE WANTED               

David Samuels

Tablet, Jan. 22, 2014          

“If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” President Barack Obama told David Remnick in a newly published New Yorker interview, by way of dismissing the current incarnations of al-Qaida. As far as planning another Sept. 11-style spectacular on American soil goes, Obama may be right. But to understand al-Qaida as an NBA franchise-style operation suggests a profound misunderstanding of the strategic purpose of the Sept. 11 attacks—which was not to create circumstances favorable to more big attacks on American soil, or to ensure organizational continuity, but rather to set off a history-altering chain reaction that would transform the Middle East into a region where the United States was no longer in charge of much of anything.

Unlike Obama, who hailed the so-called Arab Spring as the dawning of a new age of democracy in the Middle East, or Bush and his adviser Condoleezza Rice, who imagined Iraq as a model for other Arab states, Osama Bin Laden was never interested in short-term results, or in Western-style democracy. Despite his fondness for sound-bites, he thought in historical time, guided by his own strategic vision—which he hoped would lead to the establishment of an Islamic caliphate. And judging from his last known private letter, dated April 25, 2011, Bin Laden died a happy man. “What we are witnessing these days of consecutive revolutions is a great and glorious event,” he mused, after watching the fall of the secular, Western-backed regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, which he watched on CNN, before the daring Navy SEAL raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. “[T]hanks to Allah things are strongly heading toward the exit of Muslims from being under the control of America.”

Even at this late date, it seems difficult for American policymakers to grasp exactly how Bin Laden’s mastery of the inherently paradoxical logic of warfare—a logic very different than the linear cause-and-effect style of reasoning that governs normal life and electoral politics alike—allowed a man without a country, heavy weapons, or even broadband Internet access to reshape the world to his advantage. The clarity of Bin Laden’s strategic insight, which now seems obvious, also suggests that the dynamic that he deliberately set in motion is still unfolding, in ways that he foresaw before his death—ways that continue to roil the Middle East and will continue to pose a threat to the safety of Americans at home.

There has been no shortage of popular attempts over the past decade to understand Osama Bin Laden’s personal history and religious beliefs, as a way of illuminating the origins and consequences of what most Western readers and policymakers still imagine as a singular and shocking expression of hate. Bin Laden has been portrayed as a spoiled rich kid discombobulated by the sudden oil wealth of his native Saudi Arabia; as a religiously motivated visionary who sought to fracture the space-time continuum and return to the seventh century, when Islam was born; as a former ally of the United States in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, outraged by the presence of American troops on Arabian soil; as the media-savvy creator of a global terror brand; and as a superannuated jihadist who spent his days solving quarrels among his three wives. But while all of these stories are dramatically compelling, and most of them are true, none of them explain why Bin Laden was any different from tens of thousands of other jihadists—or how he was able to topple America from its position of primacy in the Middle East.

What made Bin Laden so influential among his fellow jihadists before Sept. 11 was his unique strategy for turning the world’s only superpower—the “far enemy”—into a tool that could be used to reshape the Middle East in a way that would undermine the Arab regimes—“the near enemy”—which they sought to overthrow. Bin Laden’s insight was that while the jihadist movement was far too weak to overthrow the Arab regimes directly, there was a world power strong enough to make the ground shift beneath the feet of Arab rulers—namely, the United States. American politicians and pundits still roll their eyes at the suggestion that Bin Laden was guided by a coherent long-term strategy to attack America with the aim of provoking U.S. attacks on Muslim countries, where the jihadists could bleed the Americans dry and eventually force them to withdraw, which would leave local pro-American rulers isolated and unprotected by their superpower patron, and which would in turn set off a subsequent chain of revolutionary events that would bend the arc of Arab history in his favor. The logic is too contradictory, and the thinking too long-term, for a polity that measures time in Internet news cycles. Except that’s exactly what Bin Laden foresaw—and exactly what has happened.

Bin Laden was never shy about explaining what he was doing and why. His public statements about his strategic logic and goals in targeting “the far enemy” remained remarkably consistent, from his first fatwa against America until the last letter he wrote before his death. In his 1996 Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, published soon after the Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia, he explained that “it is essential to hit the main enemy who divided the Ummah”—the Muslim world—“into small and little countries and pushed it, for the last few decades, into a state of confusion.” America’s response to an attack would be to get sucked into a war, he predicted—and when the going got tough, the United States would cut and run. Responding to then-U.S. Defense Sec. William Perry, who had called the Khobar bombers cowards and had sworn not to give in, Bin Laden asked, “Where was this false courage of yours when the explosion in Beirut took place on 1983 AD (1403 A.H). You were turned into scattered pits and pieces at that time; 241 Marine soldiers were killed.”…

It is proof of Bin Laden’s mastery of the unexpected logic that animates strategic thought, and of the glaring inability of America’s political leaders to think strategically, that not one but two American presidents have faithfully acted their roles in his geo-political script: George W. Bush, the hawk, with his open-ended and heavy-handed occupation of Iraq; and Barack Obama, the dove, with his precipitous and wholesale withdrawal of American military forces and influence from the Middle East. Both men—and their many advisers—should have known better….                                                                      [To Read the Full Article Follow This Link –ed.]                                                                                   Contents
                                  

OBAMA’S LOSING BET ON IRAN                                                      

Michael Doran & Max Boot

New York Times, Jan. 15, 2014

A great deal of diplomatic attention over the next few months will be focused on whether the temporary nuclear deal with Iran can be transformed into a full-blown accord. President Obama has staked the success of his foreign policy on this bold gamble. But discussion about the nuclear deal has diverted attention from an even riskier bet that Obama has placed: the idea that Iran can become a cooperative partner in regional security. Although they won’t say so publicly, Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry surely dream of a “Nixon to China” masterstroke. They are quietly pursuing a strategic realignment that, they believe, will end decades of semi-open warfare between Iran and the United States and their respective allies. In our view, the Obama administration wants to see in its place a “concert” of great powers — Russia, America, the European nations and Iran — working together to stabilize the Middle East as in the 19th century, when the “Concert of Europe” worked together to stabilize that Continent.

As a first step, Mr. Kerry has made no secret of his desire to involve Iran in Syrian peace talks, scheduled to convene next week in Geneva. And much more than previous administrations, this one has refrained from countering Iranian machinations in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. There are two main reasons for this attempted shift. One is simply the desire of the president to extricate the United States from the Middle East. The other reason, arguably more important, is fear of Al Qaeda: The White House undoubtedly sees Iran and its Shiite allies as potential partners in the fight against Sunni jihadism.

The Obama strategy is breathtakingly ambitious. It is also destined to fail. First, it ignores the obvious fact that, unlike China at the time of President Richard M. Nixon’s diplomacy in the 1970s, Iran does not share a common enemy that would force it to unite with America. Though Iran’s proxies are fighting Sunni extremists in a number of theaters, Iran itself has cooperated with Al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists, such as Hamas and the Taliban, when it has served its interests to do so. Iran’s rulers simply do not regard Al Qaeda as an existential threat on a par with the “Great Satan” (as they see the United States). By contrast, Mao did see the Soviet Union as a sufficient threat to justify an alliance with the “capitalist imperialists” in Washington. The second major problem is that Iran has always harbored dreams of regional hegemony. There is no sign that the election of the “moderate” cleric Hassan Rouhani as president has changed anything. On the contrary, Iran is stepping up its support for militants in the region. There have been reports recently that Iran is smuggling sophisticated long-range missiles to Hezbollah via Syria and that it sent a ship, intercepted by the Bahraini authorities, loaded with armaments intended for Shiite opponents of the Sunni government in Bahrain.

Iran under President Rouhani has done nothing to lessen its support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria either. It has, in fact, gone “all in,” sending large numbers of its own operatives and its Hezbollah allies, along with copious munitions, to help the regime stay in power. Iran’s power play is engendering a violent pushback from Sunnis increasingly radicalized in the process. This is the third and final problem that will doom Obama’s outreach to Tehran. In Iraq, the Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who is surrounded by aides with ties to the Iranians, has been arresting prominent Sunnis in Anbar Province, thereby driving many of the tribal fighters who once fought Al Qaeda in Iraq back into an alliance with the terrorist group. Al Qaeda-linked fighters have now taken control of Falluja, a town that American forces secured in 2004 after a costly campaign. Jihadist influence now extends from western Iraq into neighboring Syria, where Sunnis are reacting just as violently to the Iranian-orchestrated offensive to keep Assad’s Alawite regime in power. With the United States providing little or no support to moderate opposition elements, extremist groups such as the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq) are increasingly prominent among the rebel forces.

The spillover from Syria is also affecting Lebanon, where Hezbollah has long been the dominant force. But now Hezbollah’s ruthlessness has been matched by Sunni terrorists who, on Nov. 19, bombed the Iranian Embassy in Beirut. Hezbollah is presumed to have retaliated when Mohamad B. Chatah, a leading opponent of Syrian and Iranian interference in Lebanon, was killed by a car bomb on Dec. 27 close to the spot where a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, was also killed by a car bomb in 2005. This shows what happens when the United States stands aloof and refuses to do more to counter Iranian power: America’s allies in the region take matters into their own hands. The result is the polarization of the entire region into pro- and anti-Iran blocs that feed a mushrooming cross-border civil war. The situation will only get worse if Iran is allowed to maintain its nuclear program with international blessing. Saudi Arabia has made clear that it is prepared to build its own bomb, while Israel has threatened to launch a unilateral strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.                                                                                                                                                  [To Read the Full Article Follow This Link –ed.]                             

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AMERICAN WAR WEARINESS? THINK AGAIN!                 

Jonathan Adelman & Asaf Romirowsky                                                     

Ynet News, Jan. 22, 2014

Over and over again we hear that Americans have lost their traditional willingness to use military force in places like Syria and Iran for a simple reason: They are war weary. This is often stated as an obvious, undeniable truth connected to the winding down of two long wars in Afghanistan (begun in 2001) and Iraq (begun in 2003). Yet, few bother to see if this is actually true and, if so, what it means for the United States.

If the connection were that simple, how can we explain American behavior after World War I and World War II? For the United States did not even enter World War I until April 1917, 32 months after the war started, and seriously engage in combat until September 1918, only two months before the end of the war. Its 55,000 battle losses were far less than 1% of total fatalities (9.5 million) suffered in the war. And none of the war was fought on American soil but rather it devastated significant areas of northern France, Eastern Europe and even part of Turkey.

Yet, with minimal casualties and no property losses, the United States, not even joining the League of Nations conceived of by President Wilson, happily retreated from the world back to isolationism and lapsed into the joyful isolationism of the Roaring Twenties. The reverse happened in World War II. There the United States suffered the trauma of Pearl Harbor, the death of 300,000 men in combat, over one million injured, full scale military mobilization (12 million men conscripted into the military), and civilian rationing. The United States was engaged in a global war for three and a half years in Asia, Africa and Europe, and over five million men deployed abroad in combat. There were almost daily American bombing raids for years over Germany while American and British forces launched the greatest amphibious invasion in history at Normandy in June, 1944. American naval forces supported island hopping operations against the Japan while an American-British task force invaded Italy, and the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs over Japan – and all this did not promote war weariness. Instead, after the longest, bloodiest and most protracted foreign war in its history, the United States, intensely war weary, leapt out of isolationism into becoming a global superpower with bases all over the world and two years later fighting the Cold War, especially in the Korean War (36,000 fatalities) and Vietnam War (56,000 fatalities). By comparison, the recent wars in Afghanistan (began 2001) and Iraq (began 2003) have barely impacted the United States, Its 6,500 fatalities constitute not 1%, not even .1%, but an infinitesimal .002% of the population, or one fatality for less than one in every 50,000 Americans. Unlike earlier wars, the soldiers were not recruited from the population but belonged to a volunteer army. And the cost of the two wars, while high ($150 billion dollars/year) came to barely 1% of the GDP.

Americans are discouraged not so much by an alleged “war weariness” but by numerous other problems such as slow economic growth, terrible rollout of Obamacare, concerns about an Iranian nuclear threat, immigration, and declining American competitiveness in the world. As a result President Obama’s popularity has cratered to the high 30s and low 40s. Even more telling, in his new book Duty, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, observes that “the president doesn’t trust his commander” (Gen. David H. Petraeus), “can’t stand” the Afghan President Hamid Karzai, “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” The triumph of personal impressions over classic security policies mars key areas of American foreign policy.  

The notion of “peace making” has led to seeing “favoritism” towards Israel as costing us too much in the region. The historical argument that American involvement in the Middle East is a modern day phenomenon ignores our entanglements in the region back to the Barbary Wars. Poorly thought-out axioms, such as making peace with our enemies and not our friends, lead to mistakenly viewing Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran as potentially constructive partners once they are brought into the political tent.

Finally, let us look beyond the American experiences with war weariness. Surely, Russia, after losing 27 million dead in World War II, having 25 million people living in holes in the ground after the war, massive economic devastation (taking ten years to rebuild) and almost one million civilians starved to death in Leningrad alone, represented the ultimate case of war weariness. And yet, Russia not only won the war but within two years launched a global Cold War with the United States that lasted 40 years.

Americans need to remember that while wars are not intrinsically desirable, they are needed to protect the values we cherish. The famous military theorist Carl von Clausewitz aptly declared that “if we read history with an open mind, we cannot fail to conclude that, among all the military virtues, the energetic conduct of war has always contributed most to glory and success.”                                                                           

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CHANGES IN THE PACIFIC: A RETURN TO THE 1930S                     

Victor Davis Hanson                                                                               

National Review, Jan. 9, 2014

In the 1920s, Japan began to translate its growing economic might — after a prior 50-year crash course in Western capitalism and industrialization — into formidable military power. At first, few of its possible rivals seemed to care. America and condescending European colonials did not quite believe that any Asian power could ever dare to threaten their own Pacific interests. Japan had been a British ally and a partner of the democracies in World War I. Most of its engineering talent was trained in Britain and France. The West even declared Japan to be one of the “Big Five” world economic powers that shared common interests in peace, prosperity, and global security. Occasional parliamentary reforms had convinced many in the West that Japan’s growing standard of living would eventually ensure cultural and political liberality.

That was a comforting dream, given that by the 1930s Americans were disillusioned over the cost of their recent intervention in the Great War in Europe. They were weary of overseas engagement and just wanted a return to normalcy. A terrible decade-long depression at home only added to the popular American desire for isolation from the world’s problems. Americans sympathized with China’s security worries — but not enough to do much other than hector Japanese military governments with haughty sermons about fair play and international law, and threaten to impose crippling embargoes. Japan ignored such sanctimoniousness. Instead, it harangued its Asian neighbors on the evils of Western colonialism and the need for them to combine under Japan’s own tutorship to reassert Asian influence in world politics.

The League of Nations did nothing when Japan began colonizing Manchuria in 1931. Westerners seemed more impressed by the astonishing rate of Japanese economic progress and growing armed clout than they were determined to stop Japanese aggression. By 1941, few Americans were even aware that the Imperial Japanese Navy had almost magically grown more powerful than the Pacific fleet of the United States in every category of battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. The idea that Japan was waiting for an opportune moment to exploit American weakness, at a time when Europe was convulsed in war, would have seemed absurd to most Americans. The 1940 American relocation of its Pacific-fleet home port from San Diego to an exposed Pearl Harbor was supposed to deter Japan. But the Japanese interpreted such muscle-flexing as empty braggadocio, if not mere foolhardy symbolism. The attack on Pearl Harbor followed.

Substitute Communist China for imperial Japan and the same thing is now occurring in the Pacific. China believes it is finally time to make its military reflect its enormous economic power. Chinese armed forces are growing while America’s are shrinking. China does not like visiting American blowhards — most recently, Vice President Joe Biden — lecturing them on human rights, especially when American power, both military and economic, appears to be waning. If the Japanese of the 1930s once talked of Western decadence and American frivolity, so too the Chinese now sense that American global influence is not being earned by the current generation of Americans, who enjoy the high life on $17 trillion in borrowed money, much of it from China. China likewise senses growing American isolationism, hears parlor talk about the U.S. reducing its nuclear arsenal, and notices America’s new habit of distancing itself from allies.

Americans once talked tough about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. But China tuned out that empty rhetoric and instead noted that we abandoned Iraq after the successful surge, are exhausted by Afghanistan, were humiliated by Bashar Assad in Syria, and were seemingly paid back with Benghazi after removing Moammar Qaddafi in Libya. China is reassured that what America says and what America does are not quite the same thing. More important, the Chinese also appear to hate the Japanese in the same way the latter despised the former in the 1930s. China resents Japan’s undeniable lack of contrition over the approximately 15 million Chinese killed by Japanese aggression in World War II. The Chinese also sense that Japan may be a has-been power, with an aging, shrinking population; energy woes; a sluggish, deflationary economy; and increasingly without its once-ubiquitous American patron at its side. China accepts that the U.N., like the old League of Nations, is useless in solving global tensions, and prefers that it be so. Add everything up and China seems about as confident of the future as Japan once was in the 1930s. It is as eager to teach Japan a lesson as Japan once did China. America once again appears confused by these radical changes in the Pacific. That is, until someone in the region tries something stupid — once again.                                                                                 

                                                     Contents

On Syria, Obama Administration is Leading to Failure: Editorial Board, Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2014

Obama Was Never Serious About Afghanistan. Now We Know It: Charles Krauthammer, National Post, Jan. 17, 2014 

If Israel Makes Arabs Mad at the U.S., Our Partnership With Iran Will Make Them Even Madder: Lee Smith, Tablet, Jan. 8, 2014

The U.S. and Christian Persecution: Raymond Ibrahim, National Review, Jan. 18, 2014

Putin Is Pulling All The Strings – And Obama Is Letting Him: Doug Schoen, Forbes, Jan. 22, 2014