Obama Is Dangerous for Peace

By James Lewis

The president of the United States has just destroyed the longest-lasting peace treaty in the Middle East.  That Nobel Prize-winning treaty between Egypt and Israel was destroyed by Obama in broad daylight, right in front of God and everybody, with stunning audacity.

The White House kept repeating the message that Mubarak must resign, and "now means now."  This is simply unprecedented, even during the height of the Cold War.  American presidents don't demand in public that their crucial allies resign. It is a diplomatic insult of unprecedented proportions.

And yet -- Obama said nothing when Iran's genocide-threatening regime killed and tortured thousands of demonstrators at the start of Obama's administration.  He has said nothing about Syria's Assad sending tanks to fire on rebels in the city of Homs.  He said nothing when the Saudis sent troops into Bahrain to violently suppress protests.  Indeed, the White House has actively aided repression by regimes much worse than Mubarak was -- regimes in Yemen, Somalia, and Iran.

So what's going on?  Was it just another opportunistic chance for Obama to parade his overweening ego?  Or was it more sinister?

Mubarak was the thirty-year strongman who preserved the single biggest pillar of Middle East peace, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.  USA Today predicted that the peace treaty was in danger when Mubarak fell.  Everybody knew.  The Israelis kept telling Obama, and the Egyptians and Saudis must have done that as well.  The Saudis, who are now facing a nuclear Iran fifty miles away, are walking away from their decades-long alliance with the United States.  Nobody trusts American guarantees anymore.

Obama did it, knowing that the Arab world would break down into near-universal civil war.  The so-called "Arab Spring" is a fraud.  What we are seeing is an "Pan-Arab Civil War," from Tunisia to Yemen.  Every country is in deep trouble, and Prof. Niall Ferguson, who has been warning about this catastrophe all along, now believes that famine and social warfare will come to Egypt and the others.  They can no longer pay for the massive food imports they need to survive.  Local capital has fled to safer places.

The Middle East has been "community disorganized."  This is straight out of Saul Alinsky: community agitators destabilize communities so that they can push the remnants into whatever shape they want.  The people who die are just too bad.

This is so shocking, and so contrary to Obama's "peace" rhetoric, that few Americans can believe their own eyes, seeing that the biggest pillar of Middle East peace has been smashed right before them.  This can only be a knowing move on the part of the Obama administration.  Everybody who remembered the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty had to know.

Obama has now demanded that Israel retreat to its 1949 ceasefire lines --- which he lied about as the "1967 borders."  Those 1949 lines would set Israel back to three large wars ago.  It would turn Israel into one of those famous gerrymandered districts that look like a wriggling salamander.

Those borders are indefensible, and they therefore would drive Israel into its ultimate defensive weapon: nuclear war.  The radical leftist fantasy of threatening Israel with destruction runs into that brute fact: with its back to the wall, Israel would use nukes in self-defense.  You cannot drive a nuclear power into a corner without it resorting to war.

The overthrow of Mubarak has destabilized the entire Middle East.  Indeed, this Pan-Arab Civil War has already taken more lives than the Japanese tsunami...and it threatens to get worse.  After half a century of warm and friendly relations, Turkey is now threatening naval war against Israel in the eastern Mediterranean.

This is exactly how Iran fell back into its medieval tyranny in Jimmy Carter's time -- and don't doubt that that calamity was triggered by Carter and his NSC henchman Zbigniew Brzezinski.  A million people died in the Iran-Iraq war that followed the radicalization of Iran.  Thousands of innocent Green Revolution demonstrators are still dying today in the regime's horrific prisons and torture chambers.

The U.S. Sixth Fleet has kept the peace in the Mediterranean for sixty years.  When the Sixth Fleet was doing its job, no American ally like Turkey would ever have threatened naval war against another ally like Greece or Israel.  Turkey has warships, but nothing compared to the Sixth Fleet.  It therefore follows that Obama is not allowing the USN to interfere with the Turkish naval threat.

For thirty years the Egypt-Israeli Peace Treaty sustained the fragile peace in the Middle East.  Everything positive in Arab-Israeli relations was based on it.  Stable relations between Israel and Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, and even Syria were all based on that solid-looking Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty.

Then Mr. Obama tore it all down, right in front of our eyes.

Israel is now surrounded by countries that used to be at peace, but which are now talking war.  They are armed with high-tech missiles: tens of thousands of scud missiles in Syria; forty thousand missiles of various types in Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah, and therefore by Iran; thousands of Grad and more primitive missiles in Gaza.  If the PA declares a state, it will try to import even more offensive missiles, just like Hamas did in Gaza.

Finally, Iran now has IRBMs and the first ICBMs with nuclear weapons coming soon, which can easily strike Israel -- but Iran can also strike U.S. military bases and naval vessels within a radius of 1,000 miles and more, not to mention the nations of southern and eastern Europe.  Once developed, Iranian ICBMs can reach the United States, China, and Russia.

The President of the United States has therefore destabilized the Middle East in the most dangerous way, and he has done so in broad daylight.  And yes, people are already dying in the tens of thousands -- so far, 90 percent Muslims. But others may start dying soon.

Even now, American armed forces are in secret combat in Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, and elsewhere, to keep things from completely falling apart.  U.S. soldiers are facing daily death to keep Obama's China shop from shattering.

Obama knows that he's pulled the rug out, and U.S. forces are now engaged in unknown numbers of Muslim countries to try to shape the outcome.

And yet America's political pundits have watched it happen, and they mostly have kept silent as the grave.  Nobody wants to say out loud what's obvious.  That is the power of audacity.  Obama's overthrow of Middle East peace is so shocking that no pundit even wants to call it what it is.  American Jews has been silent.  The left and Europe are pretending it didn't happen.  The "neocons" are silent so far.  (But Michael Ledeen is writing a Broadsides book about it.)

This is the biggest news not fit to print in the New York Times.  It's the biggest public secret in the world.  But open your eyes, and you'll see it.

Any sane observer has to wonder why the president did that.  The pillar of Middle East peace, what there was of it, is now weakened, maybe fatally.  It has to come from the combatants.  It took three major wars to bring about that treaty.

After Sadat was assassinated, his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, took over instead, and kept the peace with Israel intact for thirty years.  Israel ceded the entire Sinai Desert to Egypt in return for that peace -- the biggest piece of land ever at stake in Arab-Israeli struggles.  The Sinai is a huge land buffer, and when you're at war with a neighbor, you want to have plenty of land between you and your enemies.  So Israel traded land for peace.

Obama has "community disorganized" the Middle East, and he did it knowing what would happen.  If you think our other at-risk allies aren't watching -- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Saudi Arabia, Poland -- well, think again.  If the United States stabs Egypt and Israel in the back, all the others are looking for safety.  The Saudis are getting their own nukes.  So will Japan and South Korea.  Poland has signed a local self-defense treaty with former Soviet colonies.

So much for Obama, the Prince of Peace and Compassion, not the mention the Messiah of Hope and Progress.  V.I. Lenin famously said that things have to get worse before they can get better.  The only trouble is that Lenin only made things worse.  That is why the Soviet Union gave up seventy miserable years after Lenin.

This is the biggest foreign policy gamble by any American president, ever.

Obama is dangerous for peace.