Eulogy for American Policy Between Clinton and Jalili

In her farewell speech, Hillary Clinton summarized the results of American policy in the Middle East region; we heard only phrases of eulogy and failure. She said that there were no signs indicating the possibility of resuming the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On the subject of Iran, she added that Iran had been successful in resisting pressure to halt its nuclear plans. Iran is also the country that supplies the Assad regime with money and weapons. As for the Arab Spring regimes, Clinton said that the transition was difficult. Obama had said this in a less diplomatic and franker way when he described Egypt as a country that was neither friend nor foe. This description also applies to Libya, where the American ambassador was killed.

Clinton summarized the situation in the region as unstable; another interpretation of this statement is the seeming failure of American policy in the Middle East. This instability represents the success of Iran and Russia in imposing their influence in the face of the American administration’s failure and its blundering policies from the Bush era to the Obama regime. In the former, Iraq was delivered as easy prey to Iran, but the biggest error that Bush committed was giving the green light to Israel to finish off the kernel of a Palestinian state in Ramallah. Obama, however, who opened his term in office four years ago with his famous speech about peace and coexistence with Arabs and Muslims at Cairo University, has dishonorably acquiesced before Netanyahu’s attacks on any change in American policy regarding peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis during the Obama era, becoming merely a clown and a hypocrite.

American policy today harvests fruits that it planted in the region, opening Iraq with the force of its armies. They not only toppled the regime but destroyed the Iraqi state and divided the people and the land. American policy did not make any serious movement in the Security Council or the international community to put the Syrian crisis on the road to resolution, by using the pretext of the existence of Islamic extremists among the revolutionaries. This was confirmed by Maaz Khatib when he commented that the great states have no plan for a solution in Syria.

Who has plans in the region? It is Iran who inflamed deep sectarian conflict in the region, consolidated through casualty numbers that fall daily in Iraq. Iran has also worked since the beginning to extend the life of the Syrian crisis to use it as a bargaining chip with America and Europe for its nuclear program and also its influence. Mr. Jalili states from Damascus that Israel will regret its flight from Gaza, which is its model for behavior, to Syria, because it is naïve for anyone to trust Iran to teach Israel these lessons. This is the position since the announcement of Khomeini’s regime of war on the great devil, America, and the small devil, Israel, though we have not seen a single shot from Iran against these two devils. The Arabs together have fought these two devils in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon with their blood, bodies and the destruction of their cities while the Iranian government turns into a tool of harvest to reap the benefits of the Arabs’ sacrifices. Indeed, they invest the Arabs’ blood and causes in the Iranian stock exchange of national interests.