State of Disunion

The clumsiness and incoherence, if not madness, of this administration’s foreign policies are creating havoc around the world.  No one wrapped up the story of the chaos better than Sultan Knish did this week:

 

When Bush left office at the end of his second term, the region was mostly stable aside from Iran’s nuclear program. By the time Obama had finished his first term, it was in a state of endless war.

 

[snip]

 

Bush had sought to stabilize the Middle East by removing Saddam. Obama instead destabilized it by trying to remove every government that was in any way friendly to the United States and was not covered by the umbrella of the Saudi GCC.

 

Bush’s Axis of Evil had consisted of “rogue states”. Obama’s Axis was made up of allied governments. Bush had set out to stabilize the Middle East by clearing out rogue states while Obama set out to empower rogue states by clearing out stable allied governments… which left the rogue states in charge.

 

The fall of more modern pro-Western governments left the Middle East divided sharply between Sunni and Shiite Islamists in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

 

[snip]

 

Obama’s abandonment of Iraq led to a comeback for Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda in Iraq had always been the most feral Middle Eastern franchise in the Al Qaeda family. The most brutal, the most senselessly violent and the likeliest to kill just for the sake of killing; its members seemed sociopathic even to hardened Al Qaeda leaders. And Bush had succeeded in burying it until Obama dug it up again.