Toward a ‘Comprehensive’ Middle East

Will the books of the United States’ diplomatic history in the Middle East be classified under the detailed titles “before the Barack Obama administration” and “after it”?

In the Middle East, there is a steadily shrinking area of democracies and a retraction of the expanse of individual liberty. The history books will not forget the role of President Obama’s policies, direct and indirect, in “turning the tables” of the diplomatic currents in the region, through its reluctance to support the Syrian uprising in its first stage and then in fueling the confrontation region between the sectarian militant factions, through its courtship of Iran in the worst circumstances in the Middle East since 1948.

It is recognized that there is no place for the word “if” in the history books. Despite that fact, it is difficult to omit what many analysts have agreed on about the entrance of the Obama administration into the Syrian conflict. “If” America had acted in the beginning of the conflict, rather than two years later (the time of the use of the chemical weapons in Ghouta and Damascus), then it could have saved a lot of Syrian bloodshed, saved Syria a lot of economic damage and saved the international community $2.5 million which it raised at a donor’s conference in Kuwait to support the displaced Syrians.

It was President Obama’s right to take all measures that he saw leading to the reduction in his country’s burden in the Middle East and the realization of the promise that he made to himself in the 2008 presidential election: the return of the “boys” (American soldiers) to the homeland.

It is the right of the friends of the United States in the region to ask him: To whom are you leaving the open field in the Middle East?

America’s Secretary of State John Kerry does not hide his desire for Iran’s participation in the proposed Montreux talks about the settlement of the Syrian crisis. To some extent, this desire reflects the size of Iran’s involvement in the Syrian conflict. It also reflects America’s eagerness to involve a state that adopted a totalitarian regime and that is working on exporting it to neighboring countries in the process of restoring stability to a region mired in large and sectarian political conflicts.

Maybe the obsession with the disposal of the burden of responding to al-Qaida is one of the factors motivating President Obama to seek Iran and the Shiite militias’ participation in the Sunni jihadi faction fight, which is taking place currently in Syria and, to some degree, in Iraq. However, to some extent it seems that the strategy is ambitious from Washington’s perspective. It seems, in the perspective of the moderate countries of the region, to be a double-edged sword. It is fueling, on the one hand, the political-sectarian confrontation between the Sunnis and the Shiites (as is happening in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon) and, on the other hand, the involvement of a country that does not hide its quest for hegemony over the entire Middle East region in any new regional equation that comes out of the Montreux Conference.

It is hard to assume that Washington is oblivious to the fact that the moderate Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, has not given any indication of his preparedness to give up the strategy of dominance in the region. Rather, to the contrary, he has stepped up his level of military and political support for the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria and the Nouri al-Maliki regime in Iraq.

However, the remarkable irony in the American “opening” to Iran remains its disregard for Tehran’s history of working with Sunni extremist factions that Washington has classified as “terrorist” par excellence, such as Hamas, the Taliban and even al-Qaida itself, once the interests of the Iranian “revolution” required turning a blind eye to its bloody confrontations with “Great Satan” in Afghanistan.

Maybe the Obama administration does not recognize the difficulty that its openness to the Iranian regime will cause the marginalization of the Arab countries as a whole, at the forefront of which are the countries considered friends in the region, especially since the United States’ dependence on Middle Eastern oil is no longer a top priority as it was a few years ago. However, if the Iranian nuclear concessions do not lead to a complete stoppage of its military nuclear program, then it might be that the United States itself, in the era following Obama, is the first victim of the rearrangement of regional power in the Middle East … to the benefit of the totalitarian central regimes and at the expense of the emerging democracies in the region.