When The Arab League Has To Fill The Vacuum Left By Obama...

Melanie Phillips writes about the Arab League, which has taken the uncharacteristic step of threatening Syria with sanctions if Assad does not put a stop to the crackdown on unarmed protesters.

Apparently, the Arab League believes the US is too weak to help stabilize the Middle East region:

[A]s Amir Taheri explains in the Times (£) today, the League is filling the vacuum left by the collapse of the US under President Obama as a global power broker -- most obviously of all in his appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also his failure to deal with the Islamist regime in Turkey which is currently eyeing up Syria as a strategic prize. The League wants to stop Turkey’s President Erdogan from his apparent wish to dominate the region as a second Ataturk; even more desperately, it wants to halt Iran’s steady march to regional domination through a ‘Shia Crescent’ stretching from the Gulf to the Mediterranean and encompassing Syria and Lebanon.

Obama's foreign policy is not being perceived as coming from a position of strength, but of weakness--adding to the destabilization in the region:

The conclusion by the Arab states that the US is now a ‘weak horse’ and thus must be circumvented should itself be a source of intense worry for the free world at this self-induced and dangerous marginalisation of its supposed leader -- not least because this has also pushed a number of relatively quiescent Arab states into cosying up to Iran, on the basis that if no-one is going to defeat the ‘strong horse’ then they have no alternative but to clamber into its saddle instead.

Read the whole thing.

It's a good thing that the US is being such a good friend by selling all those arms to Israel.
Thanks to Obama, Israel is going to need them.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Obama and Iran and Syria.