My colleague Alessandra called this long ago: Obama's Middle East foreign policy debacles would induce the Saudis and Israelis to work more and more closely, even flat out openly, against Iran. A common fear of a regional nuclear hegemon makes strange bedfellows? Desperate times call for desperate measures.
There's also this observation (my emphasis in boldface):
Obama came into office convinced that U.S. influence in the Middle East, as well as regional stability, revolved around one problem: the plight of the Palestinians. Resolving their conflict with Israel was the president’s top foreign policy from his first day in office. His belief that the U.S. was too close to Israel and that by establishing more daylight between the two allies, he could help broker an end to the long war between Jews and Arabs. To accomplish that goal, he picked fights with Israel, undermined its diplomatic position, and did his best to pressure the Israelis into making concessions that would please the Palestinians. The failure of this policy was foreordained since the Palestinians are still unable to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.
But the events of the past six years have also shown that his focus on the Palestinians as the source of the problem was a disastrous mistake. The Arab spring, civil war in Syria, the rise of ISIS, and the Iranian nuclear threat proved that the Palestinians had little or nothing to do with the most serious problems in the region. Indeed, by forcing Israel and the Saudis to cooperate against Iran with little attention being paid to the dead end peace process with the Palestinians, Obama has effectively debunked the core idea at the heart of his foreign policy.
Current polling has some 90% (!) of Israelis supporting Netanyahu.
Meanwhile Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have basically lined up against Hamas and so aligned themselves with Israel.
Support at home and from the usually hostile neighbors will give Israel a lot more leeway to act. The New York Times reports on this and complains that Egypt, et al's choice is making everything worse by impeding a ceasefire. You know, ceasefires would probably be more feasible if Kerry weren't an idiot, Hamas didn't consistently break them by refusing to stop firing rockets, and - let's be brutally honest - they didn't help the aggressor.
Obviously it's reductive and imperfect (where is Jordan? I didn't see Lebanon either), but this chart is an interesting attempt to begin to think about the complexity of relationships in the Middle East. I kind of want to add "Frenemies" as another relationship option and "Kurds/Kurdistan" as another player. Note, though, how ISIS is pretty much hated by everybody.
So ISIS (or ISIL or you say tomayto, I say tomahto, you say bloody-minded extremist, I say violent jihadist) has renamed itself IS (Islamic State) and declared a caliphate. Bold and risky move. See too the role of history, mangled and otherwise. While we're on the topic, don't forget this:
By formally abolishing the Syrian-Iraqi border ISIS doubtless hopes to evoke memories of the Ottoman era before supposedly artificial states were constructed for the convenience of European powers—a time when frontiers were porous and the ways of Islam were universally observed. The fatal flaw in this utopian vision—apart from its obvious historical inaccuracy—is its failure to recognize the division between Sunnism and Shiism that long predated Western interventions in Iraq and Syria. ...
However much the leaders of ISIS seek to draw on the imagery of an international Arab jihad rolling back a century of Western imperialism, the growth of ISIS feeds on these sectarian tensions that have been reanimated across the region. Politically, the jihadists have gained support from the widespread hatred of the Shiite cronyism of the Maliki regime, which replaced the cronyism of Saddam Hussein’s, as well as from the brutality of its counterpart in Damascus. And to the extent that foreign powers are driving the situation, the underlying dynamic flows less from the West than from the rivalry between the Sunni monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf on one side and Shiite Iran on the other.
You know, when the Saudi ambassador calls you out in the New York Times, that's probably not a good sign, hmmmm?
And yet rather than challenging the Syrian and Iranian governments, some of our Western partners have refused to take much-needed action against them. The West has allowed one regime to survive and the other to continue its program for uranium enrichment, with all the consequent dangers of weaponization.
Big Pharaoh's a long-time Egyptian blogger (and tweeter), and this pseudonymous wit has come up with the fittingly, deceptively named, and only partly tongue-in-cheek chart that the WaPo ran a few days back. If you haven't had a chance to look, take a gander:
Even Big Pharaoh himself admits that it's incomplete and he's constantly having to add to it. I have to say too that there aren't enough red lines directed at Israel, but perhaps hating Israel is taken so for granted that it's not even necessary to note the fact. Since the "USA" means for all intents and purposes "the Obama Administration," it should really have green lines going in every direction possible, y'think?
Among the ever-proliferating analyses you can read now, I think this is a good distillation:
There is a war going on in Egypt. We may not like either side, but one side is clearly worse than the other. We need to make sure the Moslem Brotherhood doesn't emerge victorious in this war.
This seems obvious, but as I've often said, nothing is so obvious that you don't have to spell it out, especially in a world where some people in government can actually say with a straight face that the Brotherhood is "secular" and therefore benign. (Other people get it and are acting in their own self-interest: the Saudis and company haven't decided to give the Egyptian military $12 billion for no reason: they want the Brotherhood smashed.) Time to hold our noses and back Egypt's military. Does that sound horrible? Maybe. Sometimes reality is.
In related news, an Egyptian court has just ordered Hosni Mubarak let out of prison, so it's on like Donkey Kong. As my buddy Alessandra quipped, "So ... Basically, the Egyptians got rid of Mubarak and put in Morsi, and then decided the new boss was so horrible they'd rather have their old boss back?"
I had no idea. Some of the action is in Texas and North Dakota. And up through the ground came a-bubblin' crude. Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea!
Nope, it's not that IKEA airbrushed the ladies so they have ridiculous bodies in some catalogs. It's that IKEA airbrushed the ladies OUT entirely in some catalogs meant for the Saudi market. IKEA has since apologized. As it should!
