Barry Rubin writes a sentence to explain what Obama does not understand:
The changes in the region are producing more extremism, not more moderation.
There was a window of opportunity for us. It started when Baghdad fell in 2003 and lasted about a year. Little remembered about that time is how deathly frightened the tyrants of the Moslem world were. For the first time since World War Two the United States was engaged in forcibly liberating nations from tyranny. Afghanistan in late 2001, now Iraq in the middle of 2003. So frightened were these tyrants that Ghaddafi gave up his nuke program, Syrian began to loosen its grip on Lebanon, Pakistan shut down its nuclear arms bazaar and even the Iranian government started speaking in muted tones about the United States. We could have forced through real change – change which would have allowed non-Islamists to rise to power in the Moslem world.
But everyone reckoned without the global and especially the American left. They were even more frightened than the Islamists – they saw not the liberation of peoples but the palpable return of an American supremacy outside any global, leftist control. A damned cowboy and his bitter-clinger Christians in America were going to start doing whatever they wanted! There would be no need for the UN or for NGOs…dimwitted hicks would not seek root causes but would just go on and kill or capture evil doers! The global left could stand this – and, in America, the liberals in control of the Democrat party had an even bigger worry…that success in these efforts would lead to President Bush’s re-election. And so they went after Bush and our effort in Iraq…providing so much negative comment as to work out to pro-terrorist propaganda. And the terrorists took heart in this – certain that just as in Vietnam, the political left in the West would ensure an eventual paralysis of American might.
It didn’t work out quite as well as the left and the Islamists would have liked – they would have preferred that our effort in Iraq had completely failed. President Bush was made of sterner stuff than they figured and in spite of all attacks, he managed to secure victory. But he wasn’t able to follow up the victory with the logical, next step – taking out Iran and/or Syria. Because of this, the Islamists backed by Iran were given a new lease on life…given, that is, the ability to become more powerful and experienced and to trigger and/or take advantage of the massive popular discontent in the Moslem world. Now these Islamists, on the ropes in 2003, are poised to take over Egypt and then country after country in the Moslem world…and all of these emerging Islamist governments will either be tools or at least allies of the Islamists in Tehran.
Obama, as Rubin notes, does not understand this. He and others like him are calling this the “Arab Spring” as an echo of the Prague Spring of 1968…I guess these liberals (a) don’t realize that liberals didn’t lift a finger to help the Prague Spring and (b) that the Prague Spring was an utter failure…it resulted in even more tyrannical government throughout the Soviet bloc. These liberals think that these uprisings are going to result in a new, democratic and peaceful middle east…they would have done so, had they happened in 2004 under direct, American auspices. But they are being done increasingly at the direction of Tehran and associated Islamist groups…they are bent on an anti-democratic, anti-western, anti-Israel line. Under liberal pressure, America abandoned the field of reform in the Moslem world and Islamism stepped right in to the vaccum.
The overall situation is going to get a lot worse and a lot more dangerous before it ever gets better. The good news is that Islamist ideology is false and thus regimes founded on it will fail – just as Iran’s regime is failing even while managing to keep power by means which make Syria look a bastion of sweetness and light. Because of the coming failures of Islamism we will find ways and means we can thwart their aims and direct their people towards real liberty in the long run…but we’ll be a decade or two fixing this mess, and we won’t even be able to start fixing it while a clueless Obama is President of the United States.
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