He didn’t listen to his point man on Syria, Frederic C. Hof; he didn’t listen to his second point man on Syria, Robert Ford; he doesn’t seem to be listening to General Petraeus long-standing point man on outreach to Sunni and Shia militias in Iraq, Col. Rick Welch; he obviously has a different crowd to which he listens, which is why he ends up whistling such a dissonant tune.
It’s not that he doesn’t care that chaos will be the main consequence of his inaction, or his extremely hesitant and minimalist actions; he seems to actually think that chaos is good. This is one point where he and Benjamin Netanyahu can agree: since their mortal enemies are busy fighting and weakening each other, they decided to give them all the leeway they need to stay at it.
It is difficult at this stage to determine the identity of the masterminds exploiting the current turmoil in the Middle East in a satisfactory manner, because the processes involved are not transparent and there are too many contradictory conspiracy theories out there to help make sense of anything, including ones that assert that the entire development called the Arab Spring is actually a phenomenon engineered by the “masterminds.”
By Ammar Abdulhamid for The Daily Star
The United States is a superpower but hardly a superhuman entity. It has never been that super, as all of us can attest.
For people who have long been obsessed with observing America’s every action, reaction and inaction, there has never been a shortage of criticism. But unless one is wearing an ideological blindfold, modern history clearly shows that the United States is one of the few countries that has tried to impose international order and where people’s rights and government accountability have been taken seriously. True, the United States itself has often done much to undermine the very system it was trying to impose, but the fact remains that no other country has tried to adopt a global perspective in the way America has.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 