A rchive Date
[ 19-01-2017 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.torontosun.com/2014/06/30/how-us-foreign-policy-came-to-grief
How U.S. foreign policy came to grief
David B. Harris, QMI Agency
Monday, June 30, 2014 12:36 AM EDT
You are witness to catastrophe. Generations of western - most recently, American - influence in North Africa and the Greater Middle East are collapsing and enemies of long reach are filling the void.
The Obama administration’s premature Iraq withdrawal triggered the rout of Baghdad’s forces. This flows from the administration’s undermining and inept approach to allied governments and associates in the region. It reflects a fecklessness that reportedly led the Polish foreign minister, in an intercepted conversation, to declare the U.S. a “loser” ally.
President Obama sat silent in 2009 as nuclearizing, Islamic- extremist Tehran crushed Iran’s democracy movement. Obama’s fetishistic dedication to negotiation with the mullahs and their Hezbollah terror group led many Lebanese democrats to give up and come to terms with the terrorists.
President Obama’s encouraging of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) - including the content and circumstances surrounding his 2009 Cairo speech - precipitated the West-friendly Mubarak government’s fall and a brief radical Brotherhood regime. Mubarak’s thugocracy was a guarantor of the Israel-Egypt peace upon which wider regional stability hinged, and the MB is an enemy of the West.
The Obama government “led from behind” to dump Libya’s Gadhafi, leaving a prize opening for extremists - and a river of weapons spilling from Tripoli’s arms storehouses. Then there was Obama’s not-so-red line in Syria. Now, it’s Iraq.
How did this happen?
Americans and their allies should look into the background to these strategic defeats, defeats that almost routinely favour Islamic radicalism. In particular, questions must be asked about the influence in Obama’s administration of several highly placed advisers with connections to the Brotherhood and other Muslim fundamentalist interests.
Take Mohamed Elibiary, please. Dubbed an Islamic ideologue, Elibiary was nonetheless appointed to President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. Surprising, “considering,” as U.S. national security correspondent Patrick Poole put it, “Elibiary’s appearance at a conference honouring (Iranian) Ayatollah Khomeini, his attacks on prosecution of terrorist fundraisers, his active promotion of jihadist ideology godfather Sayyid Qutb, and the threat he made against a Dallas Morning News journalist who repeatedly exposed his extremist views.”
Others? There’s Salam al- Marayati, a founder of the hardline Muslim Public Affairs Council.
Al-Marayati’s 1999 nomination to the U.S. National Commission on Terrorism was withdrawn after his apparent defence of terrorism and terrorists. Hours after the 9/11 attacks, he fingered Israel as a suspect. A leader of the Islamic Society of North America, an unindicted co-conspirator group, Louay Safi became an “endorsing agent” for the Pentagon’s Muslim chaplain program - and a White House visitor.
He and Chicago lawyer Mazen Asbehi, a man whom Poole says was tossed off Obama’s 2008 campaign team because he was on the board of an allegedly Hamas-connected Muslim Brotherhood front group, work with the wrong sort of Syrian rebels, and together have been welcomed to the White House.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s Rose El-Youssef magazine claims the MB’s penetration of the U.S. government goes considerably beyond all this.
Perhaps further scrutiny of some of the Obama administration’s advisers might help explain how a great nation’s foreign policy came to grief - and to profit transnational Islamic fundamentalism.
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