Obama's Lack of Strategic Vision for the Arab World

President Obama is, by all accounts, an avid basketball fan. Thus, he has to know that strategy is the key element in sustained winning. Strategy matters - after all the physical training, after all the equipment fine-tuning, after all the money poured into finding and keeping the best players - it is strategy that counts.

Applying what he knows about basketball to the Middle East may seem too frivolous in today’s world, but it is what he is entirely lacking in the region that is most in need of strategy, for the region itself, for America and for the world.

Instead of acting out of a strategic vision to resolve the grave current mass of Middle East problems, Mr. Obama has decided to play point man in an opportunistic effort to deal with each crisis as it develops. While this may work in any given basketball game, it is a deadly approach to take in the Middle East.   

His reactionary policies have already seriously undermined American credibility in the region, and one might add, in Europe, given French President Sarkozy’s effort to provide strategic leadership to fill the void.

Put Tunisia aside, where France was better prepared and better able to provide long-term support for change with stability, and where America was quick to help but lacking in an understanding of local politics.

That leaves perhaps the best example of America’s lack of strategic vision - in the very late White House support for the Egyptian rebels, so late in fact, that it might have been better not to act at all, but to try to reach out to an old friend, Hosni Mubarak, to ease his exit and thus gain Obama’s objective, democratic reform.  That, at least, would have fit our role as the elder statesman in the Gulf region, where strategic decisions are becoming critically necessary.

Instead, Obama publicly abandoned Mubarak, and in so doing, left the old regimes in the Gulf baffled by his indifference, not to them personally but to their strategic position in the world.

Following Egypt, we were treated to Obama’s White House calling for a cost-benefit analysis before deciding whether to help the Libyan rebels. This was another strategic error, because anyone who knows anything at all about Arab politics knows that Qadhaffi is despised by the entire Arab world leadership. Now, at the midnight hour, Obama is trying to turn a last-minute change in American policy into a call for UN action. Too late to show support for the Arab world’s position vis-à-vis Qadhaffi. To late to speak to the Arab world about our genuine support for democratic change when it is obviously needed. Too weak to be taken as strategy.

That brings us to Bahrain, where Obama’s lack of strategic vision is the most pronounced and the most dangerous. His comments seem to be aimed at supporting Iran-leaning Shi’ites, whom he portrays as democrats but whom many experts see as Iran’s pawns, in their effort to topple the Saudi-led Sunni Gulf regimes. Not only is this a disastrously uninformed approach to the Gulf, it is the sure road to an undeclared Saudi-Iran war on every front for control of the Gulf and its petroleum. The Saudi king and his ministers have already made clear diplomatically that it really doesn’t matter what Obama thinks, they are not abandoning the Gulf to Iran.  They see Obama as a weak president who mistakes democracy for regional strategy and who is quick to criticize them while saying nothing about Iran’s meat-axe suppression of its own fledgling democrats.

Again, America is weakened and our role in the Arab world in jeopardy. Nothing could be more dangerous for world peace.