The Assumptions Beneath Obama's Disastrous Middle East Policy

Barry Rubin writes that we are in luck: At Long Last! An Explicit Admission of What Obama Middle East Policy Believes, noting the basic assumptions upon which both the Obama administration and the media operate:

• Only al-Qaida is a real threat because only al-Qaida wants to attack the United States directly right now.
  
  
• Al-Qaida has been defeated due to the great policies of the Obama Administration.
  
  
• The remaining revolutionary Islamist groups are potential friends. After all, [sarcasm warning] they only want to seize state power, overthrow all existing relatively moderate regimes, create Sharia dictatorships, suppress women’s rights, persecute Christians, wipe Israel off the map, and drive U.S. influence out of the region.

The key to understanding what the Obama administration believes is reassuringly provided by one Robert F. Worth who writes about Al Qaeda-Inspired Groups, Minus Goal of Striking U.S..

Rubin notes:

What Worth did in this article could stand as the poster article for a decade of mass media bias. The bias is often transparent (for some of us) while others—and I constantly meet such people—simply take the mass media’s coverage as their own belief without any consideration or revision.

The first part of the trick includes focusing on the “top leaders.” Yes, the top leaders are in many cases dead but al-Qaida isn’t a strictly hierarchical group. Local affiliates operate independently of those guys in Afghanistan or Pakistan, as we can see in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, the Gaza Strip, Iraq, Morocco, and other places. By focusing on “top leaders,” Worth is profoundly distorting the issue. It’s hard to believe that he doesn’t get this obvious point.

From the start, Obama has emphasized the need to explore the option of negotiation -- unconditionally so -- as part of his foreign policy. He has considered Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood as "potential allies". And who can forget Hillary Clinton praising the Assad regime for its potential for reform.

Rubin quotes various paragraphs in Worth's misguided analysis of the Middle East and Obama's foreign policy before concluding:

The problem with all this is that respected institutions are spouting what can easily be deciphered as pure nonsense just by analyzing their own words. Such corruption of key American institutions is frightening and must be reversed.

Read the whole thing.

On the bright side, I suppose that should Romney be elected president, we will no longer have to endure the media's ceaseless coddling of the president -- although that is no guarantee that their criticisms will be anymore knowledgeable than they are now.

Until then, we are stuck with a president who is more focused on his contrived Republican war on women than on the Islamic war on the US.


-----

If you found this post interesting or informative, please it below. Thanks!

Technorati Tag: Media Bias and Al Qaeda and Islamists and Terrorism.