MIDEAST MESS DEEPENS

Mideast comes unglued, Obama transfixed....

President Assad's chances look increasingly brighter, after 22 months of rebellion, with Western support for the rebels too tepid to ensure victory.  A Shadow Government article recaps 21 months of policy failure over Syria:

Watching the nightmare in Syria unfold, you have to ask yourself: Could the Obama administration have made a worse hash out of the situation if it had tried?

Short of an outright Iranian victory that saw the Assad regime's power fully restored, it's hard to imagine a more dire set of circumstances for U.S. interests. The Syrian state is well on its way to imploding. A multiplicity of increasingly well-armed militias are rushing to fill the vacuum. At the forefront of the fight are a growing number of radical Islamist groups, including some affiliated with al Qaeda. The prospect that Assad' s demise will be accompanied by the use (and/or proliferation) of chemical weapons and massive communal bloodletting gets higher by the day. Libya on steroids is what we're looking at, only this time not on the distant periphery of the Middle East but in its heartland, a gaping strategic wound that is likely to threaten the stability and wellbeing of Syria's five neighbors -- critical American partners all -- for years to come.

Does it require saying that it need not have been this way? That with sustained American leadership over the past 21 months the most threatening aspects of this crisis could not only have been seriously mitigated, but U.S. interests significantly advanced?

The result:

All of which has left us here, confronting an oncoming train wreck of well-armed Islamists, battle-hardened and thirsty for power and revenge on the one hand, and a crumbling, desperate dictatorship on the other, its hands drenched in the blood of its own people and sitting on top of the Middle East's largest arsenal of chemical weapons.

Belatedly, it seems to have dawned on the administration that simply sitting on the sidelines, allowing events to play out while hoping for the best might not accrue to U.S. interests, and could well prove catastrophic. But having waited so long to act, the window of opportunity that was once available for shaping an outcome consistent with U.S. concerns has narrowed considerably, if not closed. A popular movement whose core once clamored for Western leadership and intervention has grown increasingly embittered and resentful at what they perceive to be their near total abandonment by Washington. With more than 40,000 corpses underfoot, frantic 11th-hour moves by the U.S. to mobilize a coherent political opposition, establish influence with armed groups, and marginalize extremist militias like Jabhat al-Nusra that have carried a major brunt of the fighting are widely viewed with a mixture of suspicion and contempt -- not just too little too late, but part of some larger conspiracy to abort the revolution's victory over Assad just as it comes into view.

For its part, Israel is building a 43-mile fence to keep unwanted Syrian & Lebanese immigration at bay.  Which underscores anew the wisdom of Menachem Begin's annexation of the Golan (Dec. 14, 1981), a move not recognized outside Israel but necessary for Israel's security.

So inaction begets rising instability, as America's hitherto stabilizing influence wanes.  We face four more years of this under a re-elected president who continues to obsess over the one conflict that is utterly marginal to Mideast evolution, the Arab-Israeli stalemate, which is guaranteed by Palestinian intransigence.  In that one, Jonathan Schanzer warns, Hamas is likely to emerge supreme among Palestinian factions.  Israel's latest housing moves in Jerusalem will create facts on the ground that will prevent Arab fragmenting of the capital of Israel.

Citing Palestinian polls showing popular support for armed struggle v. Israel, Jennifer Rubin explains why the "peace process" that had mesmerized Western leaders is utterly moribund.  It always was: Yasser Arafat's widow has publicly admitted that her deceased husband planned to launch the 2000 uprising long before Ariel Sharon's Temple Mount visit purportedly triggered the violence.  As recounted in The Daily Caller:

“Yasser Arafat had made a decision to launch the intifada,” she told Dubai TV on Dec. 16, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

“Immediately after the failure of the Camp David [negotiations], I met him in Paris upon his return. … Camp David has failed, and he said to me: ‘You should remain in Paris.’ I asked him why, and he said: ‘Because I am going to start an intifada. They want me to betray the Palestinian cause. They want me to give up on our principles, and I will not do so.’”

Barry Rubin explains in detail why the settlements are not the obstacles to peace; Palestinian intransigence is the culprit. BR demolishes the contiguity objection raised by Palestinians versus the new East Jerusalem housing project:

Israel’s latest construction, which will connect Maale Adumim—a short walk from Jerusalem—with the rest of the city is hardly the destruction of any chance for peace which has been portrayed in much of the Western media and by some Western governments. The worst-case scenario would be that if this corridor determined the ultimate border between two states, Palestinian motorists might have to take a detour of about ten minutes.

A Washington Post editorial agrees:

Twenty-five years ago, Israel’s government openly aimed at building West Bank settlements that would block a Palestinian state. But that policy changed following the 1993 Oslo accords. Mr. Netanyahu’s government, like several before it, has limited building almost entirely to areas that both sides expect Israel to annex through territorial swaps in an eventual settlement. For example, the Jerusalem neighborhoods where new construction was announced last month were conceded to Israel by Palestinian negotiators in 2008.

Overall, the vast majority of the nearly 500,000 settlers in Jerusalem and the West Bank live in areas close to Israel’s 1967 borders. Data compiled by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace show that more than 80 percent of them could be included in Israel if the country annexed just more than 4 percent of the West Bank — less than the 5 percent proposed by President Bill Clinton 12 years ago.

Consider it near-zero that Team Obama accepts this view, as once again evidence contrary to entrenched preconceptions--such as the latest Palestinian moves aimed at perpetuating conflict, not state-building institutions (that for Zionists were started a full generation before getting a state)--falls by the wayside.

Then there is evidence suggesting that anti-US elements inside the Libyan gov't may have impeded American efforts in the embassy affair.  Oh yes, there is an emerging Kurdish nationalist movement waiting for its spring, too.  And amidst all this the president dithers--seeking more fruitless talks with Iran's mullahs--while Iran's ballistic missile programs accelerate. In 2005 an Iranian negotiator admitted that Iran used negotiations to stall while it pursued its nuclear ambitions, telling colleagues: “While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the facility in Isfahan."  (As it happens, Iran & the US are negotiating now, over hostages.)

On a brighter note, there are signs that Congress may move to block the sale of ten F-16s & 200 Abrams main battle tanks to Egypt's hardline Muslim government.

Bottom Line.  The president's Mideast designs are coming apart before our very eyes, while he & his administration persist in policies overtaken by events.

Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, National Security, Foreign Policy, WMD, Conservative Politics