Center for Strategic Communication

Obama’s Foreign Policy Gamble on the Moderate Islamists

by | Sep 12, 2012 | Monitor

As you probably already know, the US Embassy in Cairo Egypt was stormed today by Islamists supposedly angry about a video on Youtube supposedly made or endorsed by anti-Muslim Quran-burner and bigot Rev. Terry Jones. The embassy, deliberately left without sufficient protection by the Egyptian government of Islamist President  Mohamed Morsi, was overrun, Islamists tore down the US flag and hoisted the black flag of al Qaida while a senior Muslim Brotherhood official has called on the US to “apologize”. All on the anniversary of 9/11.

The US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya was attacked by an Islamist militia with RPGs and small arms, sacked and burned, killing at least one American.

The Obama administration has gambled heavily upon a Mideast policy of engagement verging into appeasement and sponsorship of Sunni Islamist groups’ political and even revolutionary aspirations in the hopes of  co-opting “moderate” or “pragmatic” Islamists into a durable partnership with the United States. The new regime of American-educated Mohammed Morsi, represents the cornerstone of this policy, alongside the Libyan Revolution that toppled Gaddafi. This initiative has been delicately balanced, Nixon-style, with a very tough campaign of unapologetic targeted drone strikes on hard-core al Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

If you have a sense of deja vu, you are harkening back to 1979, when another Democratic administration and an arrogantly uninformed group of senior State Department officials severely misread another, that time Shia, Islamist revolution. We lost several embassies then as well and endured a national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis.

But give the Carter administration, it’s due: when the embassy in Teheran was seized or the one in Islamabad burned by military-sponsored Islamist mobs, no State Department official at the time responded with quite this level of truckling moral cowardice and incompetence:

@Mbaha2

@USEmbassyCairo you say all humans are equal but the truth is you hate Muslims and describe us as terrorists when u are the real terrorists

@USEmbassyCairo

@mbaha2 No, that’s not true. We consistently stand up for Muslims around the world and talk abt how Islam is a wonderful religion

Perhaps the time for anxiously politically correct FSOs describing Islam as “a wonderful religion” to an online Salafist hater could wait a few days, at least until Egypt restored the American embassy to it’s sovereign status with an apology and the body of the slain American diplomat is returned to their family from Libya for a decent burial?

The administration’s policy teeters on a knife’s edge. Their so far craven and confused response today to two of our diplomatic missions being attacked by the forces they themselves have engaged could potentially cause a snowball effect across the region. Their would-be “allies” are  currently calculating the costs of biting the hand that fed them vice the dangers of their own swarming fanatics in the streets. The administration’s officials as of today seem to have little awareness of the effects of their bizarrely conciliatory words and a stubborn determination to double-down rather than correct their course  have begun to reevaluate at least their rhetoric. The policy is another question.
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Perhaps for our next hostage crisis, we will see an American ambassador beheaded live on al Jazeera……
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UPDATE:
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Events in Libya were worse than news reports yesterday indicated. Ambassador Stevens and three other diplomatic personnel were killed and the security situation in Libya remains dicey.
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When this terrible incident is examined by Congressional committees, one focus will be on the security provided to the embassy and Ambassador Stevens by the State Department and the government of Libya, whose security minister reported that the government safe house sheltering American diplomatic personnel had been discovered by the attackers. “Where were the Marine guards?” is a question already being asked privately by national security and defense professionals which will soon be put forward in public.
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UPDATE II:
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Now policy may be changing sharply in the direction of realism. Good

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