The Right Way The U.S. And Muslims Should Work Together
The Right Way The U.S. And Muslims Should Work Together
http://www.investors.com/wp-content/...-021716-AP.jpgSaudi Arabian armed forces are leading the largest military exercise in Middle East history, involving 20 Islamic countries, an obvious reaction to President Obama's Iran nuclear deal and the new U.S. weakness in the region. (AP)
When President Obama went to Cairo a few months after arriving at the White House in 2009, you would have thought America had been engaged in a 200-year Crusade against Islam.
In the eyes of the world, it was a self-flagellating Uncle Sam, standing before a large audience at historic Cairo University (that included members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood) publicly blaming his own country for “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”
The CIA in 1953 saved Iran from Soviet dominance, but as Obama described it, “in the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”
You would never think from that first stop in Obama’s infamous “apology tour” that this was the same U.S. superpower whose president in 1981, in Ronald Reagan’s first year of office, risked losing Jewish support at home and was subjected to the full ire of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for selling high-tech AWACS reconnaissance planes and advanced F-15 tactical fighters to a powerful Islamic power in the Middle East – the biggest international arms sale in history up to that point.
You would never think we had sacrificed over 6,000 American lives, and trillions of dollars, spending years and years trying to liberate the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The “New Beginning” Obama proposed — which clearly had a role in launching the so-called Arab Spring of Mideast destabilization — was really a New Beginning with violent, radical Islam.
If the president really wanted a relationship with Mideast Muslims “based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition,” but rather “overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,” he would have worked on strengthening ties with Muslim political leaders like Mubarak and the Saudi royal family.
As flawed as they are – and in the Saudis’ case, flawed may be an understatement, since its government funds the teaching of pro-terrorist Wahhabism in schools – it is vital for the U.S. to maintain and foster its longtime alliance with these Islamic powers, as the counterweight to the Islamism of Iran and the Islamic State.
On Monday, Saudi Arabia launched “North Thunder,” in a northeastern area of the country, the largest military exercise in the history of the Middle East, involving military personnel from 20 Islamic nations, including Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Kuwait and nuclear-armed Pakistan, and using air, land and sea forces.
This saber rattling is unquestionably a response to Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, and the $150 billion that the pact places in the coffers of the world’s foremost terrorist state, much of which will finance new attacks from groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, plus Tehran’s future moves to gain dominance in the region over the Saudis and its other rivals.
Unfortunately and surreally, it is also a perfectly understandable act of defiance against a wavering friend — America. The Saudis, Egypt and the other anti-Iran Muslim countries are letting the U.S. know they won’t sit docilely as Iran’s pockets are filled and we allow it – help it – to rise in stature and power, at their expense.
Similarly, Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon warned over the weekend of “signs that countries in the Arab world are preparing to acquire nuclear weapons, that they are not willing to sit quietly with Iran on brink of a nuclear or atomic bomb.”
So Arab states that have been U.S. allies against terrorism are forced to join together and flex their military muscles because of the Iran nuclear deal; the pact is apparently sparking an Arab nuclear arms race in the Middle East; and the new unspeakably barbaric threat – to the Mideast and U.S. homeland – of the ISIS caliphate materializes in the power vacuum that Obama left after losing the war in Iraq.
In “Lawrence of Arabia,” Peter O’Toole declares, “So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.” What is wrong with this president that he reaches out not to Arabs who unite in the abandonment of barbarism, but instead to their enemies – Islamic powers like Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood – who have displayed their commitment to cruelty, and their hostility to the U.S. and the free world?
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