Obama’s “Terminal Self-Marginalization” in the Middle East — From the Lebanon Star

Tony Badrun flagged this note by the Lebanon Star’s opinion editor Michael Young. No friend of Israel, Young notes how confused and self-defeating is Obama’s array of contradictory and incoherent initiatives in the Middle East:

With respect to the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, Obama has taken Israel on over its settlements. It was about time, since the Bush administration’s permissiveness on settlement construction neutralized its own “road map”. However, there is more to Palestinian-Israeli peace than settlements. Obama is exerting considerable political capital to confront Israel, but it may be capital wasted at a moment when Hamas can still veto any breakthrough from the Palestinian side. In other words, Washington is working on a narrow front whereas its failure to weaken Hamas may render the whole enterprise meaningless. But how can the US weaken Hamas when improving relations with the movement’s main regional sponsors, Iran and Syria, remains a centerpiece of American efforts? 

 Barack Obama’s devotees may imagine that because he spent a few years abroad as a boy, he is well equipped to understand our complicated world. Perhaps he is, but his approach to the greater Middle East, shorn of the soaring rhetoric, has been artless and arrogant. The president is being tied up every which way by his foes, who can plainly see that the Obama vision is an unsystematic one. If ever the US has been close to achieving potentially terminal self-marginalization in the region, it is now.