The Obama Doctrine
- By Zhao Jinglun
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E-mail China.org.cn, September 30, 2013
When he talked about free and fair elections, he did not explain why Washington supports the Egyptian junta, which staged a military coup that ousted free and fairly elected President Morsi. It is only elections that elevated Washington's clients that it would recognize.
He insisted that Bashar al-Assad must go. But whether Assad stays or not should be up to the Syrian people to decide. And to his surprise, the so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels commanders on the ground announced that they were joining al-Qaeda, and that they are through with the "National Council" and are organizing their own "Islamist Alliance."
That group includes Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, the lead signatory; the Tawheed Brigade, the biggest Free Syrian Army unit in Aleppo and Liwa al-Islam, the largest rebel group in Damascus; and Ahrar al-Sham, a franchise of mostly Syrian Salafist fighters. The group claims to represent seventy-five percent of the rebels fighting to oust Assad.
As we said earlier, Obama has chosen to side with the comrades of those who brought down the World Trade Center towers and rammed the Pentagon on 9-11.
Fortunately, the UNSC resolution on Syrian chemical weapons paved the way for a negotiated settlement of the Syrian civil war.
So what is the Obama Doctrine? It is not yet an established term. According to The New York Times' David Sanger, it is Obama's "deep reluctance to use American power in long, drawn-out conflicts where national interests were remote and allies were missing." So he opts for an expanded drone war and cyber attacks on Iran's nuclear program.
In this, he took the life line thrown him by Putin, and heeded the warning by his former defense chief Bob Gates, who asked: "Haven't Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequences of military action?"
In the three years and two months left of his presidency, he will take two high-risk diplomatic initiatives: finding a negotiated end to the Iran confrontation (see my previous column) and creating a Palestinian state side by side with Israel with the latter's security guaranteed.
Successive American administrations failed in settling the Israel-Palestine dispute because of Washington's lopsided support of Israel. Can Obama overcome that bias? That remains to be seen.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/zhaojinglun.htm
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