Obama’s mess

In the course of Democratic primaries between Hillary Clinton and then little-known Senator Barack Obama, an obscure one-term African-American Senator whose Muslim father came from Kenya, and who grew up largely in Hawaii and Indonesia,Clinton broadcast an advert highlighting Obama’s limited national security experience-“who would you like to be at the other end of the phone?” when the next global crisis breaks? In the event, Americans elected Obama President and Hillary became Secretary of State. Based on the evidence that has since emerged, it seems clear neither Obama nor Clinton should have been picking up those national security calls!

I decided over a week ago on this article and settled on the topic, “Obama’s Mess”. You can imagine my shock when a few days later, two very senior American political figures described the world in exactly the same terms-the Chairman of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon in response to Obama NSA Susan Rice’s letter of July 25, 2014 encouraging repeal of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Force in Iraq wrote, “This administration is fiddling while the world burns…if the administration fought terrorists with half the tenacity they fight straw men, we wouldn’t be in this mess”. If anyone was inclined in spite of abundant global evidence of the mess in Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Kenya, CAR, Northern Nigeria, Israel and Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine and Malaysia, to dismiss McKeon’s statement as partisan Republican posturing, then former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, a Democrat who served at the State Department under Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001 declared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on July 27, “To put it mildly, the world is a mess”!!! It would be funny, if it wasn’t so tragic!

Let us return for a minute to Susan Rice’s letter on behalf of her boss to Congress urging repeal of the Iraq War Authorisation Act-this is the same Iraq in which a murderous group of terrorists, ISIS has taken over a third of the territory and imposed a harsh Caliphate which threatens the whole of the Middle East and the West; the country is effectively partitioned into three sectarian parts, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish; ISIS has destroyed religious sites and monuments, expelled and killed Christians, engaged in beheadings and mass executions of captured Iraqi soldiers, and imposed a reign of terror on Mosul and other areas  under their control. How could the Obama administration’s priority in these circumstances be to ensure that a legal instrument which a future government could rely on to attack ISIS militarily is removed?

The first sign that Obama and Clinton were out of their depths was their naïve and reactive response to the so-called “Arab Spring” and their actions and inactions in Libya and Egypt. In Egypt, while Obama correctly sided with the people against Mubarak, he became strangely silent and complicit as Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood attempted to subvert Egyptians’ aspirations for freedom and democracy in preference for an Iranian-style Islamic Caliphate. The US and its media organs, especially CNN, which comes across increasingly as a blatant propaganda instrument (!), duly alienated themselves from Egyptians, who took their destiny in their hands and rescued themselves from the Muslim Brotherhood. I haven’t yet figured out the absurdity of a secular American democracy which under Obama increasingly erodes Christian religious freedoms in favour of homosexual rights and abortion, being so tolerant of Morsi’s sectarian politics, while ordinary Egyptian Muslims were the ones vigorously asserting their preference for a secular state! 

In Libya, the US and European allies helped disparate militia to overthrow and kill Muammar Ghaddafi and then went away happy at their success! The result-Jihadi terrorists killed four Americans including the US Ambassador and burnt the Benghazi Consulate; Libyan arms proliferated all over Africa causing instability in Mali, Nigeria, Cameroun, Somalia, Kenya and CAR; and Libya fell into anarchy with contending militia battling to fill the security vacuum. In Iraq, ISIS has created a de facto terrorist state with access to huge oil and gas resources and a battle-tested (from Syria) army! The only discernible US strategic response has been to leverage ISIS invasion to blackmail the Iraqi regime on behalf of Sunni factions under influence from Sunni Arab nations. Syria is the pre-eminent mess created by Obama, Hillary and John Kerry!!! Obama almost went to war in Syria, in de facto alliance with Jihadistssuch as Al Qaeda, Al Nusra and similar elements, but for the intervention of Vladimir Putin. US policy in Syria was curious and befuddling, an insistence that Al Bashad’s days were numbered, combined with unwillingness to do anything to achieve that outcome beyond encouraging sectarian conflict and creating a humanitarian disaster! 

In Nigeria, Hillary Clinton influenced by her advisers-Huma Mahmoud Abedin, her Pakistani-born Chief of Staff with alleged though unproven links to the Muslim Brotherhood; Johnnie Carson former US diplomat in Nigeria with close ties to former military rulers; Susan Rice of the MKO Abiola “tea cup” fame; and John Campbell a consultant for Northern Nigerian politicians, refused to designate “Boko Haram” a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) and instead continuously harangued Nigeria’s government to hand-over security responsibilities and more political roles to Northerners as well as create a “Ministry of Northern Affairs”. The US also appears determined to resurrect the cold war with Russia! I don’t accept the US/CNN narrative on the conflict in Ukraine-the US/NATO/EU in my view continued to fight a war it had won by continuously seeking to isolate and marginalize Russia. It should have been apparent that inciting Ukraine against Russia would lead to conflict and there is evidence that US incitement was abundant in Ukraine, including in the leaked Victoria Nuland tapes. 

The US state department under Obama, Clinton and Kerry,with Samantha Powers at the UN sounds and acts more like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch than a super-power agency managing global diplomacy and conflict. One Israeli journalist,ironically a liberal writer for Haaretz, Barak Ravid said of Kerry, “It’s as if he isn’t the foreign minister of the world’s most powerful nation, but an alien, who just disembarked his space ship in the Mid-East”!!!

Opeyemi Agbaje