Mick Hartley

Maajid Nawaz – How Obama Lost the Mideast to Putin:

By latest human rights accounts, Syria’s five-year civil war has left 470,000 dead. To add to our disgrace, we don’t even know how accurate these figures are because—as if in despair—the United Nations gave up collecting statistics 18 months ago. Syria has spiraled into the biggest humanitarian, political and security challenge of our time….

The consequences of Obama’s stunning lack of vision will be felt in Europe, too, in more ways than one. As Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kurds, Turkey, Russia and various jihadist terrorist factions such as ISIS and al Qaeda fight over the Middle-Eastern jewel, half of Syria’s population has become displaced. Hundreds of thousands are fleeing to Europe, and the resulting cultural civil strife this has sparked will only bolster those—like Putin—who seek to break up the European Union….

It’s too late for Obama now, but not for the next American president to recoil from this record of failure. American leadership and strategic vision should, first and foremost, have recognized that the intervention pendulum has swung too far the other way, to pacifism. A global power vacuum, by definition, would soon be filled by another power. Enter Russia.

American leadership would have called Putin’s bluff over that “red line,” and recognized that Putin’s position in Moscow was weaker than it looked. American leadership would have recognized that the recent center-left trend towards isolationism— far from being true to the principles of liberal internationalism— has always been symptomatic of parochial conservative populism. This is why it eventually gave way to Donald Trump.

American strategy would have exploited the opportunity of talks with Iran to force a compromise over Assad. American strategy would have exploited the Egyptian, Saudi and Israeli common foes of Iran and Assad, to unify them instead around a deal over Palestine. American strategy would have long ago supported an independent Kurdish state before Russia began to seize that opportunity, too. A Kurdish state would have been the Middle East’s only secular, democratic Muslim-majority country, and could have acted as a torchlight for the entire region against insurgent Islamism.

Instead, none of this happened. But Obama did receive a Nobel Peace Prize. Congratulations, Mr. President.

How long, I wonder, before Nawaz returns to politics? I think we need him.