How Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton lost 70 years of American postwar deterrence in the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Nations in the Middle East that once aligned with America are now indifferent. Interests who opposed the United States grow defiant. Fence-sitting countries that calibrated their policies to the perception of U.S. strength are leaning toward our adversaries. Chaos is the result.

...The American estrangement from the Gulf States is a result of near U.S. independence in gas and oil production, the collapse of the global oil market, and the Obama administration’s tilt toward Iran. That American realignment was interpreted in the Gulf as staged indifference to radical Shiite efforts to undermine the Gulf Sunni monarchies. Most Sunni states are prepping for the likelihood of a new Middle-East arms race in a soon to be nuclear neighborhood.

The only upside is an emerging de facto alliance between Israel and the so-called moderate Arab monarchies. That odd coupling assumes that Iran threatens both more than they do each other, and that the United States is no longer a reliable patron to either.

...Three landmark events over the last four years fueled the general Middle East chaos.

The Libya Disaster
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and National Security Council staffer Samantha Power all pushed for an easy air campaign against Libya. The Obama administration had recently been flummoxed by unrest in Egypt and embarrassed by its disastrous tilt toward Mohamed Morsi, who by spring 2012 had sought to manipulate democratic elections as a means of turning Egypt into an Islamic state.

Yet Libya’s strongman Moammar Khadafy was a monster in rehabilitation, slowly passing power over to his Westernized progeny. That fact was ignored by the administration. Almost everything imaginable went wrong after the United States began bombing Libya. The U.S. violated UN resolutions to limit its intervention to no-fly zones and humanitarian assistance. Instead, it provided close air support to anti-Khadafy insurrectionists. Yet the administration had no intention of filling the void after the collapse of the Khadafy government.

The logical consequence of America’s bomb-and-run Libyan policy was a terrorist wasteland, an ISIS recruiting ground, the Benghazi disaster—with the ensuing wages of scandal and disinformation that continue to this day. Unwise chest-pounding such as “lead from behind,” Secretary Clinton’s crude Caesarian boast over Khadafy’s corpse (“We came, we saw, he died”), her later callous quip “what difference does it make” in congressional testimony about the American dead, and the scapegoating and jailing of a U.S.-resident video maker—these all became iconic of the entire sordid mess.

The Iraq Withdrawal
...the abrupt disappearance of thousands of American peacekeepers—40,000 were still posted there in midsummer 2011—created a catastrophic void.

...Disaffected Sunnis and scattered al Qaedists reformulated under the new ISIS brand—exploiting the furor at Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government. Without U.S. troops, Maliki had sensed no more pressure to honor commitments to the Sunni minority or to the Kurds, and thus invited in Iranian interests, essentially destroying the Iraqi military.

Obama seemed stunned by the sudden implosion of Iraq. At first in denial, he serially dismissed ISIS for the next two years, even as it insidiously carved up the Syrian-Iraq borderlands. In an infamous January 2014 interview, Obama assured the New Yorker that ISIS was a mere jayvee team: “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”

In short order, an abandoned Iraq became what South Korea probably would have looked like in 1955—had an opportunistic President Eisenhower, up for reelection in 1956, sought to blame the war on Harry Truman’s unwise intervention years earlier, and had he promised to yank out all U.S. troops from the DMZ.

Empty Redlines to Syria
The third milestone was the “red line” ultimatum to Syria’s President Bashar Assad to cease using weapons of mass destruction or face U.S. bombs. As Obama put it in August 2012, in the final stretch of his reelection campaign: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation… We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.”

When Bashar Assad—who had been ordered earlier by Obama to abdicate—used chemical weapons, Obama abruptly called off promised air strikes. Worse, Obama almost immediately denied that he had ever set a red line in the first place. On September 4, he instead blamed the United Nations and Congress for putting him on the spot: “First of all, I didn’t set a red line; the world set a red line. The world set a red line… Congress set a red line when it ratified that treaty. Congress set a red line…”

Obama appeared stunned by the notion that Assad unexpectedly had called his bluff—thus forcing an anti-war, Nobel Peace Prize laureate to preempt and bomb Syria right before the election. Yet Obama was also worried that his failure to back up his own ultimatums might confirm to the electorate perceptions of impotence.

The net result of talking loudly while carrying a twig was that friends in the region no longer counted on American assurances. Enemies sought to escalate their provocations without worrying about the consequences. Observers saw all three disastrous decisions as amateurish political miscalculations, cynically intended to win Obama dividends in the upcoming reelection bid.

In short, 70 years of American postwar deterrence in the Middle East was lost, and we have yet to see the end of the frightening consequences.

Read more here.

End Times

Ace writes,

Ages are marked by their paranoias and despairs, and we see those paranoias and despairs in the art an age produces. What we dread in earnest we enjoy in fantasy.

After Watergate, there were a series of very paranoid and nihilistic films -- The Parallax View, Capricorn One, The Conversation on the paranoid end; then all the violent ones about a growing nihilism in the world -- Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and so on.

Cultural observers had no problem pointing directly at Watergate (and the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr.) to explain the paranoia, and nor were they so blind as to not notice the decay and malaise (and rising tide of bloody crime) of the seventies were responsible for the various violent retribution films.

During the Carter years and the first few years of Reagan (bear in mind, movies take a year or year and a half to greenlight, make, and exhibit), there were lots and lots of movies about taking the money and running and pulling heists. Even normal, everyday suburbanites were just stealing stuff (Fun with Dick and Jane, The Thief Who Came to Dinner), due to the economic insecurity of the age and the lingering recessions of the late seventies.

Lot of outlaw movies made then: one about D.B. Cooper, a new burst of Old West movies, this time all about the outlaws.

In the eighties, cultural observers had no problem tracing movies' focus on wealth and excess for the "Age of Greed" they said was a product of Reagan, nor even in the nineties did they fail to notice that a spate of paranoid entertainments -- Murder at 1600, Absolute Power, Wag the Dog -- were all rooted in a very definite cultural consciousness that Bill and Hillary Clinton's co-presidency was a shady affair. You'll no doubt remember the "Arkansas Death List" emails that circulated about.

Since 9/11, we faced a lot of movies about cataclysm and the end of the world. It's easy enough to see that connection.

But the Age of Obama has not produced any uplift, nor any respite from the current preoccupation of people with the End Times. As a non-religious person, I don't mean this literally (though many may), but it is impossible not to note the idea of Apocalypse and Cataclysm is in the air.

Look at the number of zombie films and zombie tv shows -- as obvious a metaphor for decay and rot as can be imagined. Or the still-doing-bonzo-business cataclysm fantasies. Even the latest Man of Steel was about cataclysm.

And now add into that the large number of paranoid, rotten dystopia movies.

If the Age of Obama is so swell, if we're all filled with Hope, why is this age not producing the spate of feel-good, have-fun, get-rich movies the 80s did?

Why are our collective fantasies in the Age of Obama so single-mindedly focused on the idea of dystopia, cultural decay, and ultimately cultural destruction?

Whether liberal cultural critics want to admit it or not -- and they seem very much to not want to admit it, because this is so obvious it's painful, and yet they fail to make this obvious connection -- the Obama years are years of economic want, emotional depression, and spiritual chaos, at least as reflected by entertainments resolutely focusing on the end-times and the wretched dystopias that arise after the End Times, when civilization is dead but just hasn't stopped moving yet.

...This is all very obvious. The people in Hollywood turning out one cataclysm-and-dystopia entertainment after another surely sense this, as do the talentless idiots paid to comment on the culture at fluffy magazines like the Atlantic and New York and the New Yorker; and yet, another aspect of the Age of Obama -- that one must never admit the horrible truth; one must always pretend it away, and give only praise to Dear Leader -- keeps people from stating what is so obvious it's increasingly uncomfortable to remain silent about it.

Read more here.

Jim Geraghty adds,

allow me to offer a giant, glaring counter-example that just happens to be the top-grossing film of 2014:

Somewhere in this gloomy America, American Sniper made $350 million, and nearly another $200 million overseas.

Maybe Americans are hungry for stories about true heroes in a time as challenging as this.

Read more here.