In The Middle East, Obama’s Doctrine Is Winning (for Now)

“After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.” Twenty-four hours after Gadhafi’s death, Barack Obama announced the U.S. will “remove all of our troops by the end of 2011” from the other war, that was started by George Bush.

While everyone is wondering “Who’s next?” — pressures have already been put in place to make Syria and Iran the next target in the domino effect — it’s time to take stock of Obama’s Middle East doctrine. It is controversial, criticized, even mocked, especially by the American right wing.

Regarding Libya, his opponents made a caricature of his strategy for a “minimum war.” They depicted Obama as a president that “leads from the rear,” who allowed France and the U.K. a prominent role in military operations. It is true that the policy seemed defeatist, as if it were a realization that the U.S. cannot be the gendarme of the world any longer. Military intervention must be proportionate to a declining economy. The U.S. now has to exercise their responsibility abroad in a collective manner.

Now the budget of the Obama doctrine looks very respectable, and withdrawal from Iraq enriches the last dividend. The right wing will not recognize his merit — we are now in the midst of an election campaign, fair play is ruled out — but in independent media outlets, the verdict is unanimous and positive.

Despite this, the next exercise has already started: to predict what will be the next test. It is the theater of the crisis in the Arab world that will present the most pressing challenges. The Obama doctrine, for which we can draw up a budget sheet today, is not just the “minimum war” applied to Libya, although this lends itself to exemplary comparisons with how long it took Bush to take out Saddam Hussein. Why such a waste of human and economic resources, in comparison to the liquidation of the dictator of Tripoli?

The announcement of the withdrawal from Iraq serves to highlight one disparity: Dispatching the executioner of innocent American passengers on the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie cost one-thousandth of the price tag of the Iraq conflict. Nevertheless, the Obama doctrine is much more than this. It was inaugurated at the Cairo University speech (June 4, 2009), which marked the opening of a dialog across the board, including a discussion of values, and is a break with Bush’s crusading tone. It is not by chance that in the right wing opinion the speech of 2009 is a symbol of “failure and surrender.”

Looking back, one can instead see the seeds of the events in Tunis and Cairo in exactly those words. Public opinion in North Africa predicted that the U.S. would not have shored up allied dictatorships forever. This is the next step of the Obama doctrine: how fast the White House abandons to their fate despots contested by people.

This is a very different choice in comparison to the obstinacy of another Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, who, no matter how sensitive he was to human rights, shored up the regime of the Shah of Persia (and then paid a very high price for that mistake). However, even in this aspect of the doctrine Obama is anything but peaceful: from Netanyahu to Republican hawks, many people continue to accuse him of having given up Mubarak, delivering Egypt to an uncertain fate, perhaps even an anti-Israeli one.

The president is now pulled in several directions. The left wing believes that Damascus should be the next target, because in Syria it sees a humanitarian tragedy similar to the Libyan [situation]. For the Republican right and the Netanyahu government, Iran is the most serious enemy instead. But Obama knows that he will not be judged only on future events in Syria, Iran and Yemen, but also on developments in those countries where he has achieved provisional successes.

For Tunisia and Egypt, the president proposed a Marshall Plan at the G-8 summit in Deauville to facilitate the transition to democracy and offer real opportunities to economic development. Construction has halted in that building yard. The risk of instability and the rise of Islamist forces, hostile to the West, are still possible outcomes in each of those countries.