FOD 2015.03.30

Here's the overview:

An abiding goal of President Obama’s foreign policy has been to reduce America’s role in the Middle East, in the belief that it would lead to greater stability and serve U.S. interests. Has a policy ever been so thoroughly repudiated in so short a time? Mr. Obama has succeeded in his retreat, but the vacuum he’s left has produced a region on fire...

Here's the details:

As the Arab Spring has been followed by a long, hot summer of Middle Eastern warfare, President Obama’s vision of stable, reasonably democratic states is increasingly preposterous. His boast that “the tide of war is receding” under his watch is laughable.

And his desperation to strike a nuclear deal with the Israel- and Western-hating mullahs of Iran increasingly seems a desperate push to claim any accomplishment in the region by ignoring the facts on the ground.

Look at Yemen, which Obama cited four months ago as one reason why “America is safer” from terrorism. There, Saudi Arabia and Gulf allies Thursday launched an air campaign against Iran-backed Houthi insurgents — giving the head of U.S. Central Command all of an hour’s notice before the operation began.

Yemen’s president has fled while the old, formerly U.S.-embraced one, who had been pushed out in the Arab Spring, is working with the Houthis. The U.S. has closed its embassy and withdrawn Special Forces. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group’s flagship franchise and the one most active in the quest for a 9/11-scale attack, has gained freedom to operate.

Look at Iraq, where Obama boasted that, with America’s withdrawal, “Iraqis have taken full responsibility for their country’s security.” The country has shattered, with ISIS brutalizing large swaths of territory and Iran filling the vacuum we left behind.

The U.S. offered air support to a siege against ISIS in Tikrit, only to see Iranian-backed militias withdraw from fighting to protest American involvement. Air support became irrelevant without fighters on the ground.

 Look at Syria, where Bashar Assad crossed Obama’s red line without consequences, where more than four years into a civil war Assad uses chlorine in indiscriminate slaughter, and where ISIS fighters with Western passports are reportedly training with the gas in hope of launching attacks against Western train systems.

Finally, look to Israel. There, a peaceful, robustly functioning democracy has reelected a prime minister who, surveying the region, concludes that now is not the time to negotiate a two-state peace deal with Palestinian leaders who are partnered with an Iranian-supported terror group and who may or may not be able either to make a deal or enforce one.

Yet here it is, in Israel, that Obama sees a wellspring of chaos. Likely on the verge of a nuclear deal with Iran that could threaten Israel’s existence, the President pummels Benjamin Netanyahu for refusing to roll over.

The President’s responses to the meltdown in the Islamic states have been incoherent. In the best light, he’s coping with unmanageable forces. But his offensive against Netanyahu, leader of a rock-solid island of stability and Western values, elevates Obama’s regional policy beyond incoherence into insanity.

This is serious shit, folks. Under obama, the Mideast is  on a downhill path towards increased instability, increased tension, and inevitable armed conflict. And God help us all if Iran gets nukes, which seems inevitable under barry's regime.