Like Friedman I don't think Obama's speech was quite as inimical as a lot of people do. That said, Obama is clearly not a friend of Israel and as a result its tone was, as usual with Obama, off-kilter. He simply can't avoid shining the spot light where he thinks Israel has to compromise, while being vague about the obvious steps the Palestinians have to take. That made it sound worse than it actually was in my opinion.
Also, giving it immediately before Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington was a political mistake. I imagine he expected Netanyahu to be in the same sort of box he put the Supreme Court Judges and Boehner in earlier, where Netanyahu would have to be polite during the lecture for appearances sake. Instead he ended up ceding the ground to Netanyahu, who turned tables on Obama by lecturing him during the press conference and strongly laying out Israel's position in the process.
Finally, I'll bang one of my favorite drums again -- the speech should have slid the Israel/Palestine issue into the background and swung around to pressuring Syria. I believe events will show that the Palestinians made a grave error in aligning themselves with the Iranian proxy Hamas. I doubt the arabs, who already have a low opinion of the Palestinians, will long tolerate that. I believe that Iranian tentacle could be leveraged by American diplomats to influence events in the region. Prying Syria away from Iran should be the aim of American diplomacy at this time.
Then again, I really don't know what I'm talking about, so you can take my diplomatic master-minding with a huge grain of salt. All I've got to say is... thank God for blogs, everybody can be an expert.
At any rate, the Middle East is a mess, the Arab Spring is a mess, and the Israel/Palestine situation is a mess; so the notion of messes was on my mind as I pondered the article's Hot Stratfor Babe possibilities. Naturally this turned my mind towards mud wrestling, and for that reason I selected Evangeline Lilly for the honor.
Evangeline Lilly played Kate on TV's Lost which, come to think of it, had a plot about as complex, nonsensical and pointless as Middle Eastern diplomacy. In Season III there was an episode where Kate was handcuffed to her mortal enemy Juliet. Juliet lipped off one too many times, Kate got hopping mad, and they ended up in a fight which led to the two of them flopping into a mud puddle to do some wrestling.
The picture of her above is from later in the episode, when the now mud-covered Kate was hopping mad over something else. She was hopping mad a lot in that episode. As a bonus, after the Strafor article I've embedded a video of another fight between the two, this one in the rain, from earlier in the episode (as I said, Kate got hopping mad a lot in that episode).
OBAMA AND THE ARAB SPRING
By George Friedman, May 24, 2011
U.S. President Barack Obama gave a speech last week on the Middle East. Presidents make many speeches. Some are meant to be taken casually, others are made to address an immediate crisis, and still others are intended to be a statement of broad American policy. As in any country, U.S. presidents follow rituals indicating which category their speeches fall into. Obama clearly intended his recent Middle East speech to fall into the last category, as reflecting a shift in strategy if not the declaration of a new doctrine.
While events in the region drove Obama's speech, politics also played a strong part, as with any presidential speech. Devising and implementing policy are the president's job. To do so, presidents must be able to lead -- and leading requires having public support. After the 2010 election, I said that presidents who lose control of one house of Congress in midterm elections turn to foreign policy because it is a place in which they retain the power to act. The U.S. presidential campaign season has begun, and the United States is engaged in wars that are not going well. Within this framework, Obama thus sought to make both a strategic and a political speech.
Obama's War Dilemma
The United States is engaged in a broad struggle against jihadists. Specifically, it is engaged in a war in Afghanistan and is in the terminal phase of the Iraq war.
The Afghan war is stalemated. Following the death of Osama bin Laden, Obama said that the Taliban's forward momentum has been stopped. He did not, however, say that the Taliban is being defeated. Given the state of affairs between the United States and Pakistan following bin Laden's death, whether the United States can defeat the Taliban remains unclear. It might be able to, but the president must remain open to the possibility that the war will become an extended stalemate.
Meanwhile, U.S. troops are being withdrawn from Iraq, but that does not mean the conflict is over. Instead, the withdrawal has opened the door to Iranian power in Iraq. The Iraqis lack a capable military and security force. Their government is divided and feeble. Meanwhile, the Iranians have had years to infiltrate Iraq. Iranian domination of Iraq would open the door to Iranian power projection throughout the region. Therefore, the United States has proposed keeping U.S. forces in Iraq but has yet to receive Iraq's approval. If that approval is given (which looks unlikely), Iraqi factions with clout in parliament have threatened to renew the anti-U.S. insurgency.
The United States must therefore consider its actions should the situation in Afghanistan remain indecisive or deteriorate and should Iraq evolve into an Iranian strategic victory. The simple answer -- extending the mission in Iraq and increasing forces in Afghanistan -- is not viable. The United States could not pacify Iraq with 170,000 troops facing determined opposition, while the 300,000 troops that Chief of Staff of the Army Eric Shinseki argued for in 2003 are not available. Meanwhile, it is difficult to imagine how many troops would be needed to guarantee a military victory in Afghanistan. Such surges are not politically viable, either. After nearly 10 years of indecisive war, the American public has little appetite for increasing troop commitments to either war and has no appetite for conscription.
Obama thus has limited military options on the ground in a situation where conditions in both war zones could deteriorate badly. And his political option -- blaming former U.S. President George W. Bush -- in due course would wear thin, as Nixon found in blaming Johnson.
The Coalition of the Willing Meets the Arab Spring
For his part, Bush followed a strategy of a coalition of the willing. He understood that the United States could not conduct a war in the region without regional allies, and he therefore recruited a coalition of countries that calculated that radical Islamism represented a profound threat to regime survival. This included Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, and Pakistan. These countries shared a desire to see al Qaeda defeated and a willingness to pool resources and intelligence with the United States to enable Washington to carry the main burden of the war.
This coalition appears to be fraying. Apart from the tensions between the United States and Pakistan, the unrest in the Middle East of the last few months apparently has undermined the legitimacy and survivability of many Arab regimes, including key partners in the so-called coalition of the willing. If these pro-American regimes collapse and are replaced by anti-American regimes, the American position in the region might also collapse. [continued after jump]
