With the nation fixated on the Democrats’ convention in Charlotte, half a world away the United States is frittering away its twin victories in the Middle East.
The latest indication of US weakness: Iraq is allowing Iran to use its airspace to airlift supplies and weapons to help prop up Bashar al-Assad’s embattled government in Syria.
The Obama administration — in the increasingly comic and ineffectual figure of Vice President Joe Biden — has “registered its concern” about the overflights, to which the Iraqis have basically replied: Stuff it.
No surprise: Under President Obama, US troops unceremoniously exited from Iraq — after a war that cost nearly $1 trillion billion and more than 4,400 American lives — without a proper status of forces agreement. The last 500 American troops slunk away under cover of darkness last December, leaving behind a new embassy and a few consulates, plus about 5,000 “defense contractors” (mercenaries) — and almost zero leverage.
Having won in Afghanistan and Iraq on the strength of its peerless military, which dismantled the Taliban in a matter of months and — after considerable blood and treasure — toppled Saddam Hussein and destroyed al-Qaeda in Iraq, America now faces a humiliating strategic defeat in its global struggle against Islamic radicalism.
And not from lack of military effectiveness, either — but from lack of political will.
Our total retreat from Iraq has left Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki little choice but to grow increasingly closer to his Shia co-religionists in Iran — whose military dwarfs his post-US defense abilities.
Nor is a Shia-majority Iraq that keen to see revolution in Syria. For what appears to Westerners as a Syrian civil war is becoming a proxy struggle between Iranian Shias and the “Arab Spring” Sunni Muslims of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Even if he cared to burn Assad for all his aid to al Qaeda in Iraq, Maliki can’t afford to stand up to Iran with the US no longer a player in Iraq.
The situation in Afghanistan, where the US death toll recently topped 2,000, is hardly better. Since routing the Taliban in the wake of 9/11, the so-called “good war” (as the Obamacrats distinguished it from Bush’s “bad war” in Iraq) has degenerated into a hearts-and-minds, nation-building operation that has nearly completely soured.
The corrupt government of President Hamid Karzai remains in power, the Taliban is on the rise again and a now a worrying new phenomenon has appeared: Afghan security forces have been turning their weapons on their NATO (largely American) “allies” and killing them.
So far this year, some 45 coalition troops have been murdered in “green on blue” incidents. A recent NATO report concluded that most of the attacks came not from Taliban infiltration, but from ordinary Afghans.
So say good-bye to the Bush-era strategy of bookending a dangerous Iran with two friendly client states in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All of which leaves one real ally — Israel — especially nervous. Iran’s lunatic “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been making bellicose noise about wiping the Jewish state from the map, and the Iranian nuclear program moves forward completely unfettered by America or by international sanctions.
Latest reports indicate that the Iranians are now in the late stages of developing the sophisticated nuclear triggers that will enable them to arm their medium-range (1,200 miles) Shahab-3 missiles with warheads — and hit Israel.
Which is why Israel is in the final stages of its plan to strike the Iranians first. And why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with Obama later this month to try to convince the US to drop its opposition to a possible Israeli strike.
In short, the situation is fraught and getting worse. And all the talk in Charlotte this week about abortion rights, the joys of big government and the personal magnificence of the president isn’t going to change that.
What’s needed is leadership — but with the election eight weeks away, that’s just not going to happen.