Obama Doctrine's Epic Fail: Arm Them All, and Hope for the Best

Failure of Obama Doctrine

by Ramzy Baroud  - Arab News

To suggest that the US policies in Yemen were a “failure” is an understatement. It implies that the US had at least attempted to succeed. But “succeed” at what? The US drone war had no other objective aside from celebrating the elimination of whomever the US hit list designates as terrorist.

But now that a civil and a regional wars have broken out, the degree of US influence in Yemen has been exposed as limited, their war on Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in the larger context of political, tribal and regional rivalry, is insignificant.

For a long time, the US seemed invulnerable to what even Yemen analysts admit is an intricate subject to understand, let alone attempt to explain in a straightforward manner. The US drones buzzed overhead independent from all of this. They “took out” whomever they suspected was Al-Qaeda affiliated. President Barack Obama was even revealed to have approved of a “secret kill list,” and agreed to consider counting casualties in such a way that “essentially designates all military-aged males in a strike zone as military “combatants.”

In fact, a timeline of events that have befallen poverty-stricken Yemen shows a strange phenomenon, where US involvement in that country operates parallel to but separate from all other horrific events, violence, suffering and politicking. Sure, the shadowy US war had augmented the suffering, demoralized the nation and undermined whatever political process was under way, especially after the Yemeni version of the Arab Spring in early 2011. However, the US paid little heed to Yemen’s fragile alliances and the fact that the country was on a fast track toward civil war, worse a regional war, directly or by proxy.

The responsibility of mending broken Yemen was left to the United Nations. But due to the regional situation, UN envoys had little margin for meaningful negotiations. But the US continued with its war unabated, arming whomever it deemed an ally, exploiting regional differences, and promoting the power of Al-Qaeda in ways that far exceeded their presence on the ground. 

It saw Yemen as a convenient “war on terror,” enough to give Obama the tough persona that American voters love about their presidents, without the high risk of military quagmires like the ones that his predecessor, George W. Bush, created in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was hardly that simple.

Even a “clean” drone war activated from faraway places is rarely enough to guarantee results. Set aside the moral responsibility of torturing an already wounded nation, the US seemed to lack understanding of how its actions frustrate and contribute to regional conflicts. Its exasperation of Iraq’s sectarian fault lines following the 2003 invasion, leading to a massive civil war few years later, was a lesson unlearned. That “divide and conquer” backfired badly. Empowered and brutal US-supported Shiite government that took revenge on Sunni tribes and communities across Iraq following the war met their match with the rise of a brutal, so-called “Islamic State” in more recent years, turning Iraq, and of course Syria, into a savage battleground.

Gone are the days in which US policies alone dictated the course of history in the Middle East. The Iraq war was catastrophic at so many levels, lead among which is relegating direct military intervention as a way to achieve strategic and political ends.

The Obama doctrine was an attempt at combining use of US military influence (while scaling down on direct military intervention), on the one hand, and regional and international allies on the other, to sustain US ascendency in the region as much as possible.

What seemed like a relative success in Libya with the ousting of Muammar Qaddafi was too difficult to duplicate in Syria. The stakes there were simply too high. Regional rivals like Iran, and international rivals like Russia were too resistant to any open attempt at overthrowing the Assad regime. And with the rise of IS, Assad had suddenly be re-casted into a different role, becoming a buffer, although still designated as an enemy. John Kerry’s statement about willingness to engage Assad signaled a massive turnabout in US policies there.

Now, with a preliminary nuclear deal agreed upon by Iran and US and its allies, chances are the US, although will carry on with its saber-rattling (as Iran will surely do as well) there is little chance that Obama will enact any major shift in his regional policies. To the contrary, his administration is likely to retreat; further hide behind its allies to achieve whatever muddled objectives it may have at the chaotic moment.