Middle East: Did Obama’s ‘weakness’ cause the chaos?

President Obama has lost control of the Middle East, said William Kristol in The Weekly Standard. After Islamist militants raided U.S. Consulate buildings in Benghazi, Libya, two weeks ago—killing American Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staffers—White House officials repeatedly insisted that the attack was just a “spontaneous” protest against a “wacky anti-Islam video made in America.” That was a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened. Intelligence officials have since revealed that the attack was planned to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11, and was likely the work of al Qaida. Over the past two weeks, anti-American factions also staged riots and assaults on embassies and U.S. businesses in Tunisia, Egypt, and Pakistan, while in Afghanistan, the Taliban is back on offense. Why? The extremists see Obama pulling U.S. troops from the region, and they know he will not fight for our nation’s interests. “We are paying the price of American weakness.” That weakness began with Obama’s “Cairo doctrine,” said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. In 2009, our worldly new president went to Egypt with his hat in hand, telling rapt listeners that America had lost its way after 9/11, and offering Muslims “a new beginning.” With disdainful crowds now chanting, “Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas,” we now see “a foreign policy in epic collapse.”

Let’s keep these events in perspective, said Marc Lynch in ForeignPolicy.com. The riots that broke out across the Middle East this month were “vastly inferior in size and popular inclusion to the Arab uprisings last year,” and don’t represent the majority of the population’s views. In fact, many Muslims have taken to the streets to condemn the violence, said The Washington Post in an editorial. Last week in Benghazi, tens of thousands of Libyans stormed the headquarters of the Islamist militia suspected of staging the consulate attack. Waving signs that read, “The ambassador was Libya’s friend,” the crowd forcibly disarmed the militants, and handed the base over to the national army. In Egypt, the country’s most influential sheiks denounced a riot outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, “calling it shameful and contrary to Islam.” Anti-Americanism has long been a powerful force in the Middle East, and blaming Obama for causing the recent riots is pure “demagoguery.”

No, it’s not, said Victor Davis Hanson in NationalReview.com. The rise of the Islamists to fill the power vacuums in these countries was entirely predictable, yet Obama naïvely supported the Arab Spring. In Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi “was a monster, but also one in a sort of rehab who was seeking better relations with the West.” Now the country is a chaotic breeding ground for al Qaida–aligned militants. In Egypt, the uprising resulted in the toppling of a reliable U.S. ally, former President Hosni Mubarak, and a new government led by the fiercely anti-American Muslim Brotherhood. Our best option is to cut back aid to these hostile nations, and “call home ambassadors—at least until Arab governments control their own street mobs.”

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Yes, let’s go home—our meddling there was wrong in the first place, said Pankaj Mishra in The New York Times. The U.S. is widely distrusted across the Middle East not because we’re weak, but because of a long history of imperialism, invasion, and complicity with dictators, from the Shah of Iran to Mubarak. Now that “awakened peoples” in Arab nations are seizing their own destinies, “American retrenchment is inevitable.” Conservatives who think Obama could frighten these people into submission with “a big stick” seem to think “they live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt.”

The U.S. can neither dominate this turbulent part of the world, nor give up on it, said James Traub in ForeignPolicy.com. “Freedom releases poisons as well as noble aspirations,” and one of the poisons is anti-Americanism. Another is religious extremism. If we cut off our billions in aid to new regimes in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, and the rest, and cease our diplomacy and our quiet work to build democratic institutions there, these countries will suffer economically and politically—leaving millions of unemployed, disaffected young men as willing recruits for jihadists. Whatever we do, the Islamic world will be a mess for a long time, said Avi Spiegel in HuffingtonPost.com. The transition from autocracy to democracy and modernity will take decades. It’s in the U.S.’s best interests to play the long game here, to refrain from overreacting, and to “redouble our efforts to help build stable democratic institutions. This is not about us; it is about them.”