President Obama's Middle East policy, 2009-2013.

• Author: Nuruzzaman, Mohammed
• Position: Report

Barack Obama's election, as the 44th president of the United States (US) in December 2008, created a high degree of optimism for a new beginning for Americans and worldwide. His ascendance to power was marked by two watershed developments for America: first, the political decline of the neoconservatives, whom under former President George W. Bush entangled America in a series of endless "war on terrorism" operations abroad and, second, the promise that the new president would regain America's lost image and credibility in the international arena. In his inaugural address of January 20th, 2009 Obama enthusiastically spoke of America's role as a world leader again. He said: "And so, to all other peoples and governments watching us today ... know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more." (1) The desire to "lead once more" was predicated on a supposed transformation of American foreign policy by shedding the excesses of his predecessor's militaristic foreign policy characterized by the so-called "war on terror," the elimination of hostile regimes through preemptive strikes, the glorification of American military, and high defense spending. (2) The Middle East, the battleground of Bush's foreign policy, naturally captured the spotlight in Obama's stated transformational foreign policy. In the course of delivering the 2009 inaugural address, the new president promised to withdraw American troops from Iraq, firmly deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and reduce or eliminate nuclear threats in cooperation with "old friends and former foes." More importantly, he called upon the Muslim world to join "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect" In a similar landmark speech he made in June 2009 at Cairo University in Egypt, President Obama also offered hope for "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world" (3) and he sounded committed to his words.

This article focuses on President Obama's stated foreign policy "transformation" with regard to the Middle East region and presents an assessment of his Middle East policy from 2009 to 2013, the first five years of his presidency. It raises questions about Obama's policy of a "new beginning" in the Middle East and examines whether it marks a fundamental shift from Bush's Middle East policy. It concludes that the Obama administration's Middle East policy is more characterized by continuity in change and, other than the withdrawal from Iraq by the end of 2011 and the interim nuclear deal struck with Iran in November 2013, which are significant foreign policy developments judged by any criteria, Obama's Middle East policy falls short of making a fundamental break from the George W. Bush period. Further, certain US positions on perennial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the animus towards Iran continue almost unchanged, while its position on the civil war in Syria appears to go nowhere. The article starts with a comparative discussion of Bush's and Obama's foreign policy approaches towards the Middle East and then relates the discussion, with an exclusive focus on Obama's policy, to a set of critical Middle Eastern issues--the Iraq war under the rubric of "war on terrorism," the stalemated Arab-Israeli peace process, and the Iranian-Western nuclear conflict. It also brings into focus the Obama administration's role in the Arab popular uprisings for democratic change and the associated use of force under the "responsibility to protect" doctrine to promote democracy in the Arab world.

US Middle East Policy: Bush and Obama in Perspectives

President George W. Bush took over the White House in January 2001 with no significant foreign policy commitments or priorities but was surrounded by a group of close associates who were better known as neoconservatives (henceforth neocons). He started his presidency with an inward-looking domestic policy focused on issues like tax cuts, educational reforms, the "No Child Left behind Act", etc. One important foreign policy issue he took serious interest in was the ballistic missile defense program. (4) However, the major change in his foreign policy came after the notorious 9/11 attacks that not only changed America but the whole world forever. A new foreign policy was immediately announced as dividing the world along "friends versus foes lines", with unforeseen implications for the post-war world order. (5) The neocons used the attacks to justify efforts to promote America's global supremacy and to reorder other societies along American ideological and political lines, particularly societies in the Middle East. Salient to US foreign policy towards the Middle East, this new ideology eventually drew up a dividing line between the Muslim world and the US. The attacks soon resulted in a new foreign policy prescription, which President Bush dubbed "the war on terrorism", initially directed against the al-Qaeda network based in Afghanistan and subsequently extended to Iraq. Bush interpreted the 9/11 attacks as an existential threat posed by the Islamic fundamentalist group al-Qaeda, viewed it as a fight between good and evil forces, and declared his intention to rid the world of these evil forces. (6) The "war on terrorism" was planned to be fought overseas and would target all organizations and states that supported al-Qaeda terrorists. In his address to the American people delivered on September 11th, 2001 Bush categorically said: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them". (7) This is what soon came to be known as the "Bush Doctrine". (8)

Major strategic objectives, operational targets and plans of the Bush Doctrine were laid out in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued in September 2002. It defined threats to freedom as primarily coming from non-state actors through a combination of "radicalism and technology," which was a marked departure from the traditional idea of security defined as immunity to external military threats. The National Security Strategy identified three sources of threat agents: terrorist groups with no specific people or state to defend but are able to strike any country anywhere, states that provide refuge to terrorists, and rogue states that kill their own peoples and try to acquire weapons of mass destructions (WMD) to hold other states hostages. The reference to rogue states indicated a possible expansion of the frontier of the war on terror to include states hostile to America. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as members of "an axis of evil", hostile states that collaborated with terrorists and were posing serious threats to American security and prosperity. (9)

Bush's war on terror officially started on October 7th, 2001 with large-scale military assaults on Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda and its protector--the Taliban government. Having the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces driven out of Kabul, President Bush directed efforts to include Iraq in his campaign against global terrorism on the grounds that the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had possessed WMD that threatened America and that he maintained close links to terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda. (10) He defied global opposition, bypassed the UN Security Council, and unilaterally decided to invade Iraq on March 3rd, 2003 with the support of the so-called "coalition of the willing" but ultimately ended up with no WMD found in Iraq. The Iraq Survey Group, appointed by the Bush administration itself to seek biological and chemical weapons, finally concluded that US WMD intelligence on Iraq was wrong. Moreover, no link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was ever proven. Bush's second term in office started in January 2005 and this time he exclusively shifted his attention away from WMD to democracy promotion in Iraq, an elusive goal that he never achieved. Initially, his administration used the rhetorical slogans of freedom and liberty for the Iraqi people in the run up to the invasion in 2003 but once the allegations of WMD and links to al-Qaeda proved false, democracy promotion became his only option to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But rising sectarian violence between Shi'ites and Sunnis, unbridgeable differences between Iraqi political parties and groups, differing opinions on US troop presence on Iraqi soil, and so on, had critically defeated Bush's democracy promotion agenda in Iraq. The Bush administration, before the invasion, appeared not to have realized that controlling and rebuilding a country like Iraq would be much more difficult than toppling the Saddam regime. The rising human and material costs of the war and the Iraqi opposition to occupation quickly morphed into a deadly insurgency. This rapidly deteriorating situation blew away all hope for a post-Saddam democratic Iraq. Bush himself later described the Iraq war as "a catastrophic success". (11)

President Bush's Middle East centric foreign policy, as a whole, was marked by three significant characteristics: first, unilateralism at the expense of multilateral efforts to deal with terrorism and other global issues; second, the promotion of democracy through force; and, third, militarism. Aggressive unilateralism became an important part of American foreign policy after the 9/11 attacks. The administration officials, particularly the neocons, had a deep distrust in international institutions and were in favor of shedding institutional constraints on America's freedom of actions in the global arena. It launched military attacks on Afghanistan with UN approval but bypassed the same institution with regard to Iraq, primarily due to French and Russian threats to veto American actions to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. The neocons projected the UN as a weak...