Team Obama's entire Middle East policy has failed

K.T. McFarland, Team Obama's entire Middle East policy has failed and the problem is about to get worse

The Benghazi Report has condemned the State Department for “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies.” Four officials have resigned, and a few more lesser heads are likely to roll ...

But the Benghazi report misses the point. The events of September 11 are a symptom of a much larger problem -- the Obama administration’s entire Middle East policy has failed. And the problem is about to get much worse as the as yet unpunished but ascendant Al Qaeda and its affiliates contemplate what they might do next to attack Americans.

Less than two years ago, the entire region was at peace. Granted, it was an uneasy peace, but it’s a region where for thousands of years an uneasy peace was as good as it gets...

Fast forward to today. Everything has changed. The entire region is in upheaval. With our help, Egypt has replaced a pro-American dictator with what promises to be an anti-American Muslim Brotherhood dictator and Islamist constitution. We helped Libyan rebels topple their dictator, yet their new government ... has failed to consolidate control. They are cowed by Al Qaeda affiliated militias and couldn’t - or wouldn’t - prevent the Benghazi attack and assassinations of our diplomats. Syria’s vicious civil war threatens to go from horrific to hellish as Al Qaeda sympathizers and Islamic extremists take over the rebel cause...  At best, countries will be governed by the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood. At worst, chaos will ensue. Political and economic chaos are waiting in the wings, and radical Islamists, terrorists and Al Qaeda expand their influence throughout the region.

If the chaos and upheavals continue, which seems likely, we could in a few years see a region stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Pakistan which is anti-American and consumed by ethno-sectarian violence...

That’s the real story, and the real scandal – not Ambassador Rice’s talking points or the State Department’s security failures. It not even the not attack on a Consulate’s American soil and murder of American diplomats – tragic as those deaths may be. It’s that we are losing the Middle East to radical extremists and opening the door to more attacks against Americans...

Egypt: 50,000 Islamists March Through Christian Area Chanting Egypt Will Be "Islamic" (via WZ)

ASSIUT, Egypt – A campaign of intimidation by Islamists left most Christians in this southern Egyptian province too afraid to participate in last week's referendum on an Islamist-drafted constitution they deeply oppose, residents say. The disenfranchisement is hiking Christians' worries over their future under empowered Muslim conservatives.

Around a week before the vote, some 50,000 Islamists marched through the provincial capital, Assiut, chanting that Egypt will be "Islamic, Islamic, despite the Christians." At their head rode several bearded men on horseback with swords in scabbards on their hips, evoking images of early Muslims conquering Christian Egypt in the 7th Century.

They made sure to go through mainly Christian districts of the city, where residents, fearing attacks, shuttered down their stores and stayed in their homes, witnesses said.

Melanie Phillips, Into the abyss

To an astonishing silence by the media on both sides of the pond, the US along with the UK and a number of European governments is leading the west into an abyss. I have repeatedly noted here that the US, UK and France helped bring to power in Egypt Islamic extremists hostile to the free world, and were threatening to do something very similar in Syria. Now they have indeed done so by recognising the Syrian National Council as the legitimate leader of the Syrian opposition.

The thinking behind this is to designate the al-Qaeda linked Jabhat al-Nusra as a terrorist group, while supporting the Muslim Brotherhood – which dominates the Syrian National Council -- as a reasonable alternative. But this is the same catastrophic mistake the US et al have made in Egypt. For the Brotherhood are not a reasonable alternative to Islamic extremists hostile to the west. They are themselves Islamic extremists hostile to the west.

File under: Obama's confidence v. the retrograde force of Islam.