Barack Obama’s blundering, bumbling and bull-shit costs the US credibility and leadership throughout MENA

Arab Spring gives US a new chance in the Middle East
Michael Young – Aug 25, 2011

Barack Obama has not faced the continuing revolutions in the Arab world with any passion. Rather, the US president has often behaved as if these were annoying intrusions into his domestic agenda. Yet change has come, and whether Mr Obama likes it or not this will alter Middle Eastern attitudes toward the United States.

Mr Obama has been lucky – not a bad thing for a politician. The president has avoided taking the lead amid regional convulsions, failing to exploit openings to Washington’s advantage. He has not even outlined a strategy defining American interests and aims, beyond the generalities in his speech at the State Department last May. And yet the US administration has almost everywhere managed to fall on its two feet, with limited negative consequences. Those who predicted that the Arab Spring would be a disaster for the US have so far been proven wrong.

For a superpower that has spent 60 years claiming to be a sentinel of Middle Eastern stability, even stalemate, the record recently has been very different. Mr Obama helped push an old friend, Hosni Mubarak, out of office in Egypt. He has sought to midwife a new order in Yemen to replace that led by another partner, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He has blessed the removal of an ally in Tunisia, Zine Al Abedin bin Ali. He is demanding that Bashar Al Assad step down in Syria. And he has used the US military to help unseat Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. US support for the monarchy in Bahrain is the exception confirming the rule.

Mr Obama’s paralysing caution has been a mitigating factor. The president has tried, though not very convincingly, to play up the fact that the US, as the world’s leading democracy, has a desire to see democracy triumph elsewhere.

However, American abandonment of comrades in Egypt and Tunisia came only when there was no other choice. In Libya, Mr Obama seemed perpetually to move one step forward and two back in sponsoring Nato military action. In Syria it took the president almost six months of slaughter by the regime to take a stance against Mr Assad – though this would have been justified, even essential, much sooner, on both moral and political grounds.

Perception is important in politics. Mr Obama could have accumulated valuable cards by being out ahead of the transformations in the region. Ideas are equally important in this period of Arab upheaval, yet Washington has not been good at using its democratic ideals as a means of influencing what comes next in the Middle East and North Africa.

But perceptions can cut both ways and the reality is that, disturbing contradictions aside, in the public imagination the Americans today are increasingly perceived as having chosen the side of insurgent populations against overbearing despots. …more