Now the world is learning the high price of American detachment

Luiza Ch. Savage July 7, 2014

On a Saturday afternoon in July 2012, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton invited CIA director David Petraeus to her brick colonial home in Washington. The four-star general had led George W. Bush’s U.S. troop surge in Iraq and President Barack Obama’s in Afghanistan. Clinton asked him whether it was possible to vet, train and equip moderate opposition fighters in Syria where the forces of President Bashar al-Assad had begun killing civilians by the thousands.

“He had already given careful thought to the idea, and had even started sketching out the specifics and was preparing to present a plan,” Clinton recalled in her new memoir, Hard Choices. The next month, Clinton flew to neighbouring Turkey to discuss plans for a no-fly zone over Syria and support for the opposition. Clinton and the Turkish foreign minister made calls to foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany to build an international coalition. She returned to Washington “reasonably confident” that allies were on side.

But when Petraeus presented the plan to the President, Obama balked. He had just ended the Iraq war and did not want to get mired in a new conflict. He had promised war-weary Americans he would do “more nation-building at home.” Besides, the weapons could fall into the wrong hands. Given Saudi Arabia was already arming rebels, he didn’t think American arms would make a decisive difference in driving Assad from power. Clinton argued that the U.S. could train fighters responsibly, and that the goal was to weaken Assad enough to get him to the negotiating table with the opposition.

Still, Obama said no. Clinton turned her efforts to getting food and medicine to suffering Syrians, and cellphones to anti-Assad activists. But, she wrote, “all of these steps were Band-Aids.”

Clinton’s was not the only voice Obama overruled as he sought to keep the U.S. out of Syria. Last February, as the death toll surpassed 130,000 and Assad resisted UN-led peace talks, the U.S. ambassador, Robert Ford, became so frustrated with the President’s hands-off approach that he quit his job in disgust. “When I can no longer defend the policy in public, it is time for me to go,” Ford told PBS this month.

Three years after it began, the Syrian crisis has now spread to Iraq. A portion of northern Syria has been taken over by an offshoot of al-Qaeda, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which, this week, declared it has established a theocratic caliphate. Washington has been jolted by the nightmarish sight of ISIS sweeping through a large swath of Iraq—the largely Sunni north and west—seizing city after city, and looting banks and oil refineries. Iraqi forces, trained and equipped by the U.S., have in some instances dropped their weapons and run away. Executions and beheadings by ISIS are hardening sectarian divisions between Sunnis, Kurds and the Shia-led government in Baghdad.

Reluctance to aid Syria’s moderate rebels may not have been Obama’s only mistake. His failure to leave behind a residual force of several thousand troops in Iraq, as counselled by his generals and cabinet members, is now in the spotlight. Meanwhile, the President’s modest vision for American power is being tested, not only as the sectarian war in Iraq worsens, but as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expansionism destabilizes Europe.

The President who aimed to extract America from its entanglements abroad is suddenly learning the price of detachment. Halfway through their second terms, presidents often turn to foreign affairs as a constructive diversion from gridlock at home. But Obama is facing what could be the biggest foreign policy challenge of his presidency. And, as the superpower steps back, it may be horrified to see who steps in to fill the breach.

for more:
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpol...ia-and-ukraine/

this is one month old too! it's more true today