Obama’s dangerous Middle East failure

It is hard to put a good spin on the Obama administration’s dealings in the Middle East.

The nuclear treaty negotiations with Iran now reportedly not only won’t be sent to the Senate for ratification, but won’t even be in writing. Negotiations that started with a goal of not allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons are ending with an almost-guarantee that they will have them. Not only will they have them, but their centrifuges from producing plutonium will be allowed to exist in underground hardened bunkers to protect them from air attacks.

{mosads}Just to demonstrate their good will at a crucial time in the negotiation, the Iranian leader led the masses in a “death to America” chant, which the Obama administration dismissed as just rhetoric for internal consumption.

This is the same Iranian government that supported the fall of the capitol of Yemen, and in the process got reams of confidential U.S. spy data, gaining a potential roadmap to find and kill those people in the region who have been helpful to our national interests.

An Iranian takeover of Yemen would mean that the Iranians control both of the chokepoints that Saudi Arabia’s oil must pass through to get to the world. With Iran and Saudi Arabia sharing the Persian Gulf narrowing at the Straits of Hormuz, Iran’s control of Yemen poses an existential threat to the Saudis. This explains why the Saudi Air Force is running bombing missions against the Iranian-supported rebel positions.

Iran has also effectively taken over Iraq and with U.S. air support, the “Iraqi” army is fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). However, for anyone paying close attention, this fight is somewhat illusory, as it is reported by The Independent in Great Britain that after defeating ISIS in the town of Amerli, the “good guys” burned down the homes of all the Sunni Muslim residents.

With war waging all over the Middle East, the one cool spot is Israel, yet President Obama is not content to allow this to continue for long. The revelation that the administration has released information about Israel’s nuclear program effectively ends our alliance with the only democracy in the region. On a pop culture note: This probably even means that the character Ziva David is never coming back to “NCIS.”

In the past, the Mossad and the CIA have engaged in what is purportedly pretty broad information sharing. Now, Israel cannot share information with the U.S. without an expectation that the information won’t be made public.

What’s more, none of the U.S. allies can depend on the CIA for information or trust that they can engage in a sharing arrangement with the normal expectations of secrecy.

Once trust is broken with one former friend, every current friend becomes necessarily skittish. This churlish decision by Obama in the wake of his failed attempt to electorally take over the Israeli government is a devastating blow to our nation’s worldwide efforts to track and stop terrorist networks and will have ramifications that last decades.

In Egypt, Obama is seen as the enemy by the government that has declared his Muslim Brotherhood allies to be enemies of the state. All this without mentioning how Obama’s Libyan war effort ended with the death of our own ambassador and three others by an al Qaeda-affiliated crowd.

It is shocking that a man whose first major foreign policy effort was built around his “A New Beginning” speech in Cairo in June 2009 could have been so wrong about everything in the most dangerous region in the world. Yet the wars waged all over the region are Obama’s legacy, and as the Iranian nuclear deal demonstrates that he doesn’t even recognize the mess he’s created.

Manning is president of Americans for Limited Government.