by Caroline Glick
The operational, intelligence and political fiascos that led to and
followed the September 11 jihadist assault on the US Consulate in
Benghazi, Libya, all derive from the same problem. That problem is the
failure of US President Barack Obama's conceptual framework for
understanding the Middle East.
The Islamic
revolutionary wave sweeping across the Arab world has rent asunder the
foundations of the US alliance system in the Middle East. But due to
Obama's ideological commitment to an anti-American conceptual framework
for understanding Middle Eastern politics, his administration cannot see
what is happening.
That framework places the blame for all or most of the pathologies of the Muslim world on the US and Israel.
What
Obama and his advisers can see is that there are many people who
disagree with them. And so they adopted a policy of delegitimizing,
discrediting and silencing their opponents. To this end, his
administration has purged the US federal government's lexicon of all
terms that are necessary to describe reality.
"Jihad,"
"Islamist," "radical Islam," "Islamic terrorism" and similar phrases
have all been banned. The study of Islamist doctrine by government
officials has been outlawed.
The latest casualty of this policy was an instructor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
Until he was sacked this week, the instructor taught a class called "Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism."
According
to Col. Dave Lapan, spokesman for the Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman
of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the instructor was fired for
committing a thought crime. He "portrayed Islam almost entirely in a
negative way." Dempsey himself ordered the probe of all Islamic courses
across the US military educational system.
The
administration's refusal to accept the plain fact that the Islamic
regimes and forces now rising throughout the Muslim world threaten US
interests is not its only conceptual failure.
Another
failure, also deriving from Obama's embrace of the anti-American and
anti-Israel foreign policy narrative, is also wreaking havoc on the
region. And like the conceptual failure that led to the murderous attack
on the US Consulate in Benghazi, this conceptual failure will also come
back to haunt America.
This second false
conceptual framework argues that the root of instability in the region
is the absence of formal treaties of peace between Israel and its Arab
neighbors. It claims that the way to pacify the radical regional forces
is to pressure Israel to make concessions in land and legitimacy to its
neighbors.
Obama is not unique for his embrace
of this conceptual framework for US Middle East policy. He is just the
latest in a long line of US presidents to adopt it.
At
the same time the concept that peace processes and treaties ensure
peace and stability collapsed completely during Obama's tenure in
office. So what makes Obama unique is that he is the first president to
cling to this policy framework since it was wholly discredited.
Israel
signed four peace treaties with its Arab neighbors. It signed treaties
with Egypt, Jordan, the PLO and Lebanon. All of these treaties have
failed or been rendered meaningless by subsequent events.
Today
Israel's 31-year-old peace treaty with Egypt is a hollow shell. No,
Egypt's new Muslim Brotherhood regime has not officially abrogated it.
But the rise of the genocidally anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood to power
has rendered it meaningless.
The treaty is no
longer credible, because the Muslim Brotherhood, including Egyptian
President Mohamed Morsi, reject Israel's right to exist. Their rejection
of Israel's right to exist is not a primarily political position, but a
religious one. Morsi and his regime perceive Jews as the enemies of
Allah deserving of annihilation.
Morsi himself
has a rich record of pronouncements attesting to this fact. For
instance, in November 2004 he said, "The Koran has established that the
Jews are the ones in the highest degree of enmity towards Muslims."
He continued, "There is no peace with the descendants of apes and pigs."
In
January 2009, Morsi called Israelis "Draculas who are always hungry for
more killing and bloodshed using all kinds of modern war weapons
supplied to them by the American administration." He accused Israelis of
"sowing the seeds of hatred between humans."
With
positions like these, Morsi has no need to pronounce dead the peace
treaty for which Israel surrendered the Sinai Peninsula, and with it,
its ability to deter and block invasions from the south. Its death is
self-evident.
The peace was made with a regime.
And once the regime ended, the peace was over. The fact that the peace
was contingent on the survival of the regime that made it was utterly
predictable.
In 1983, Israel signed a peace
treaty with Lebanon. The treaty was abrogated as soon as the regime that
signed it was overthrown by Islamic radicals and Syria.
Then
there was the peace with the PLO. That peace - or peace process - was
officially ushered in by the signing of the Declaration of Principles on
the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.
Today,
the Obama administration opposes PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas's attempts to
receive international recognition of a Palestinian state through an
upgrade of its position at the UN to non-member state status.
Monday
US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice explained that the Obama
administration opposes the PLO's move because it believes it
"jeopardize[s] the peace process."
But this is not a credible reason to oppose it. The reason to oppose it is because the PLO's move harms Israel.
The
peace process is dead. It is dead because it was a fraud. The
Palestinians negotiated in bad faith from the beginning. It is dead
because the Palestinian Authority lost the Gaza Strip to Hamas in 2007.
It is dead because Abbas and his PA have no capacity to make peace with
Israel, even if they wanted to - which they don't. This is so because
their people will not accept peaceful coexistence with Israel. The
Palestinian national movement is predicated not on the desire to
establish a Palestinian state, but on the desire to destroy the Jewish
state.
Abbas made this clear - yet again - this
week in a statement published on his official Facebook page. There he
said outright that his claim that Israel is illegally occupying
Palestinian territory applies not only to Judea and Samaria, but rather,
"the point applies to all the territories that Israel occupied before
June 1967."
With peace partners like this, it
is beyond obvious that there is nothing that Israel can do short of
national suicide that will satisfy them.
This
brings us to Jordan. Jordan is one of those stories that no one wants to
discuss, because it destroys all of our cherished myths about the
nature of Israel- Arab relations, the relative popularity of jihadist
Islam and the US's options going forward.
The
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is composed of three population groups.
Ethnic Palestinians comprise the vast majority of Jordan's citizenry.
The Hashemites have always viewed the Palestinians as a threat to the
regime, and so blocked their integration into governing and military
hierarchies. The Palestinians have always been opposed to Israel's
existence.
The second largest group of
Jordanians is the Beduin tribes. Until the last decade or so, the Beduin
tribes in Jordan, like those in Israel and Sinai, were not particularly
religious, nor were they inherently opposed to peaceful coexistence
with Israel.
Israeli Beduin served in the IDF
in large numbers. The Beduin of Sinai served in Israel's Civil
Administration in Sinai and opposed the peace treaty that returned them
to Egyptian control. And the Beduin of Jordan did not oppose the
monarchy's historically covert, but widely recognized, strategic
alliance with Israel.
All of this has changed
in the past 10 to 15 years as the Beduin of the area underwent a drastic
process of Islamic radicalization. Today the Beduin of Sinai stand
behind much of the jihadist violence. The Beduin of Israel have
increasingly embraced the causes of irredentism, radical Islam and
jihad. And the Beduin of Jordan have become even more opposed to
peaceful coexistence with Israel than the Palestinians.
This
leaves the Hashemites. A small Arabian clan installed in power by the
British, the Hashemites have historically viewed Israel as their
strategic partners and protectors of their regime.
Since
the fall of the Mubarak regime, Jordan's King Abdullah II has been
increasingly stressed by regional events and domestic trends alike. The
rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has empowered the Muslim
Brotherhood in Jordan. The rise of pro-Iranian Shi'ite forces in
post-US-withdrawal Iraq has made pro-Western Jordan an attractive target
for triumphant jihadists across the border. The rise of Islamist forces
in the Syrian opposition, not to mention the constant subversive
activities carried out by Syrian regime agents, has limited Jordan's
maneuver room still further.
Emboldened by all
these forces, the Jordanian Beduin are now in open revolt against the
monarchy and its refusal to abrogate the peace treaty with Israel.
This
revolt was exposed in all of its ugliness in recent weeks following
Abdullah's appointment of Walid Obeidat to serve as Jordan's new
ambassador to Israel.
Obeidat's tribe disowned
him and his family and branded him a traitor for accepting the
appointment. His tribe invited the other tribes to join it in a mass
rally demanding the abrogation of the treaty and the destruction of
Israel.
In this state of affairs, the strategic
value of Israel's peace treaty has been destroyed. Even if Abdullah
wished to look to Israel as a strategic protector, as his father, King
Hussein, did in the 1970 Jordanian civil war between the Hashemites and
the Palestinians, he can't. In 1970, the Syrians shared Hussein's
antipathy to Yasser Arafat and the PLO and therefore did not intervene
on their behalf. Today, there is no Arab force that would back him in an
Israeli-supported fight against Islamic fundamentalists.
Perhaps
in recognition of the fragility of the Hashemites' hold on power, last
week it was reported that the US has deployed military forces to the
kingdom. According to media reports, the force consists of a few hundred
advisers and other teams whose main jobs are to assist Jordan in
handling the 200,000 refugees from Syria who have streamed across the
border since the onset of the civil war in Syria, and to help to secure
Syria's chemical and biological arsenals. It is more than likely that
the force is also in place to evacuate Americans in the event the regime
collapses.
In the current situation, the US
has very few good strategic options. But it does have one sure bet.
Today the US has only one ally in the Middle East that it can trust:
Israel. And the only no-risk move it can make is to do everything in its
power to strengthen Israel.
But to adopt this
policy, the Americans first need to discard their false conceptual
frameworks regarding the Middle East. Unfortunately, as the US response
to the Benghazi attack and its continued assaults on Israel make clear,
there is no chance of that happening, as long as Obama remains in the
White House.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
Caroline Glick
Source: http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2012/10/libya-jordan-and-obamas-guidin.php
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
1 comment:
See Frank Gaffney's 10 part course, the part on the "information dominance" that Obama is permitting the Muslim Brotherhood to have. This is a part of their civilization settlement project -- engaging in a "grand jihad" eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within,[23] and "sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions." This is the language found in the Explanatory Memorandum for the General Strategic Goal of the [Muslim Brotherhood] Group in North America. that updates and restates a plan adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1967. So it has been ongoing for 25 years.
See also, "The Poject" document discovered by the Swiss authorities that shows a 100 year plan of the Muslim Brotherhood to obtain world dominance for sharia. Patrick Poole, "The Project", Front Page Magazine and the english translation of the project document.
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