A grand strategy, by definition, is not devised in response to events of the moment. Yet, that is just what Obama is doing in the Middle East: innovating as he goes.
No one in the Obama administration the president himself, the State Dept., the CIA, the National Security Council considered, as a scenario, the possibility of a popular uprising in any Arab country. Not to mention, when a popular uprising did happen in Iran in June, 2009, it set off not a single memo, speech, conversation or other uttered thought in the Obama administration about the possibility of uprisings elsewhere in the Middle East.
No one can predict a popular uprising, but national security policymakers are supposed to plan for one, just as they are supposed to plan for its opposite.
Thats what national security experts do: they manufacture scenarios and put into place careful plans for each possibility.
Obamas experts, however, didnt plan. When uprisings came in Tunisia and Egypt, the administration was caught flat-footed. Not a single strategic paper or plan had been prepared by the administration. This was an especially egregious failing given that Hosni Mubarak is 82 and quite ill. Now the challenge to authoritarian regimes is spreading to Iran, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain and Jordan, and the best the administration can do is to say that governments must not suppress peaceful protests. This is not a strategy.
To engage in outreach to the Muslim world or in outreach to Iran is not a strategy. To say, as Obama said in Cairo in June, 2009 (and as recalled by Niall Ferguson in this weeks Newsweek) America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings is not a strategy.
To hammer on Israel to stop building settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is not a strategy. It could be part of a strategy, but absent any idea by which a settlement freeze should activate a larger solution articulated by Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton or George Mitchell a settlement freeze is not a strategy. Merely to ask, beg or demand of Israel and the Palestinians to come to the negotiating table, alongside a settlement freeze, is not a strategy.
And so, when Israel froze settlement building for 10 months, the absence of any larger American strategy rendered the freeze sterile.
To be caught by surprise, as Jimmy Carter was in Iran with the Islamic revolution there in 1979, is not a strategy. To be caught by surprise, as Barack Obama was in in Egypt in January, 2011, is not a strategy.
To play nice with a recalcitrant, obdurate, nuclear-bent Iran, and then to say that if playing nice does not help, the US will impose gulp! sanctions, is not a strategy.
If the US deployed the Stuxnet virus against Irans nuclear centrifuges, and if that virus actually did what was reported, that was a strategy, and a good one. But one piece of strategic thinking about a single country in a Middle East of 22 countries is not a global, not even a regional strategy.
Not to mention, the Iranian nuclear challenge remains.
What is the objective of the US in the Middle East? What are the this countrys priorities in the Middle East? Does the US even have priorities there?
Other than peace a vague goal, not a strategy no one knows. Neither Israel nor her enemies; neither Americas other friends in the region nor their enemies.
When it comes to the Middle East, Obama is out of his depth. Good intentions do not constitute a strategy. Staddling the fence between supporting allies and supporting pro-democracy demonstrators is not a strategy.
Strategy spells choice, plan, vision; and accompanying tactics. As Niall Ferguson put it so well in Newsweek:
Bismarck knew how to choose. He understood that riding the nationalist wave would enable Prussia to become the dominant force in Germany, but that thereafter the No. 1 objective must be to keep France and Russia from uniting against his new Reich. When asked for his opinion about colonizing Africa, Bismarck famously replied: My map of Africa lies in Europe. Here lies Russia and here lies France, and we are in the middle. That is my map of Africa.
Where is Barack Obamas map of the Middle East? Does he even have one? Is his map merely, as Ferguson asks, in the heartland of America, where his presidency will be decided next year?
Is the US merely scrambling from crisis to crisis in the Middle East? Thats how it looks, feels and is.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
