Making Sense of Obama’s Middle East Policy

"This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values."

--attributed to Barack Obama

What is Obama doing? He came into the White House with a strategy: unite the Arab world against Iran by securing peace between Arab moderates and Israel, doing so by forcing Israel to end expansion of its West Bank settlements.

In June 2009, he expanded his Middle East strategy. In Cairo Obama delivered an important address that played off his multi-racial background and Muslim heritage to identify with the Muslim world. As Obama telegraphed in advance of his address, he hoped to connect with young Arabs and Muslims in order to either persuade their leaders to move toward economic development, tolerance, and inclusiveness, or to threaten the leaders’ hold on power by rallying their youthful populations against them.

In another post, I laid out the resulting difference between the Bush and the Obama foreign policies:

Bush foreign policy: change the world by encouraging democratic governments in place of bad dictators.

Obama foreign policy: change the world by inspiring each nation’s youth to overthrow their bad dictators.

Following the Cairo speech, Obama took his policy through what seemed many twists and turns. First, he did nothing in Iran when the street erupted in fatal demonstrations against Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election. Apparently Obama believed he would be able to negotiate directly with Iran’s true boss, Ayatollah Khamenei, for a better Iran, while also thinking that if he publicly supported the demonstrators, Khameni would blame Tehran’s disorder on America (which Khameni did anyway). Thus Iran’s youth demonstrated for the very democracy the president encouraged in his Cairo address two weeks earlier, the youth died, and Obama just watched.

Six months after Iran, in December 2009, Obama zagged. He backed an infusion of 30,000 American troops into Afghanistan, rather than see the former al-Queda base-nation drift back into the Taliban’s hands. Though Democrats once called Afghanistan, in contrast to Iraq, the “good war,” by late 2009, many believed Afghanistan was becoming an Iraq-like quagmire from which we should extract ourselves. So Obama’s decision to go with his military was a surprising, positive sign he appreciated civilized people sometimes needed guns.

Over the next year, Obama continued to struggle with his Iran, Israel, and Afghanistan/Pakistan policies. But 2011 delivered him a new set of challenges, youthful uprisings in Arab capitals that seem a response to his 2009 Cairo call for change. In Egypt, he dithered, but eventually backed the demonstrators, who fortunately prevailed in their demands for change without forcing direct U.S. involvement. Then came Libya.

American opposition to U.S. military intervention on behalf of rebels fighting the ruthless dictator Muammar Gaddafi comes from both left and right—e.g., TIME’s Massimo Calabresi and Marc Lynch of Foreign Policy on one side, and Andrew McCarthy of National Review and conservative columnist George Will on the other. Both sides share a similar concern, not wanting to get the U.S. into a “new Iraq” in Libya.

Of course, Obama shares the same concern, and that’s why he opposes placing U.S. ground troops in Libya, and wants other nations taking the lead. Still, supporting military action of any kind against Gaddafi is a big change from cheering on from a distance the youthful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and from standing by as demonstrators are crushed in Iran, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen. It’s also a sharp departure from his earlier, obvious reluctance to move against Libya. Another big zig.

Why the sudden willingness to deploy our forces? Two recent articles, one in the Washington Post and the other in Foreign Policy, carry the “insider” story on Obama’s latest policy shift. According to Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin, Obama is responding “to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.” We are going into Libya in the name of human rights. Obama is paying more than lip service to the Cairo speech; his actions now finally match his words.

Maybe. Here’s what I see. If Gaddafi crushes the rebels while the U.S. stands by, Republicans will never let the country forget the president’s weakness in the face of tyranny, treating Libya as far worse than his inaction during the 2009 Tehran demonstrations. And what really forced Obama’s hand was al-Jazeera, which has mobilized the entire Arab world behind the Libyan rebels. According to Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch:

Al-Jazeera Arabic has been covering the Libyan situation heavily . . . and has powerfully conveyed the gravity of the situation, including broadcasting some truly disturbing images and video of protestors. I've been stunned by what Libyans inside the country and outside have been willing to say on the air about the regime --- prominent Libyan diplomats declaring Gaddafi to be a tyrant, major tribal leaders calling for his overthrow, [Muslim Brotherhood leader and al-Jazeera commentator] Yusuf al-Qaradawi calling on the air for someone to shoot Gaddafi, and more.

Now I understand. Al-Jazeera—the Arablc language television network that once rallied the ummah (Muslim nation) against America’s war in Iraq—is today going all-out for the Libyan rebels against Gaddafi, and the Arab League, France, Britain and others have taken up the call. Even China and Russia, who constantly use their Security Council vetoes to protect every repressive regime that comes before the UN, have backed away from Gaddafi.

Does the president, the man who told Arab youth to seize their destiny two years ago, now want to find himself that much out of step with the Arab masses, particularly when the entire coalition calling for us to help the rebels would then blame Obama for any crushing Gaddafi victory? In the end, fortunately, no.