The Syria mess is Obama’s doing

Syria is the new rallying point for the worldwide jihad. There has not been a secular fighting force in Syria for close to a year. Instead, it has become the destination for jihadists across the world to engage in holy war. This war is not about nationality, borders, geography. Jihadists in Syria include British, American, French, German, and Norwegian Muslims.

It has come to this: Israel and the world have to choose between Bashar Assad and al-Qaida. Former Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said Tuesday that although “the Syrian regime is killing its citizens every day…we have to recognize that the opposition in Syria is made up primarily of Muslim extremists like Al Qaeda.” He concluded: “The question ‘what is better for Israel?’ is an important question, because we need to ask ourselves if we want to swap the bad Syrian regime we know for a very bad regime that we don’t know.”

This is Barack Obama’s doing. He has supported every single transition in the Middle East from secular Arab state to brutal Sharia thugocracy. And he supports the jihadi savages in Syria. The only movement we should be supporting in Syria are the Kurds who have declared independence. The genocide of millions of religious minorities by the Muslim supremacists would be stopped in an independent Kurd state. 

I have been reporting on Obama’s alignment with enemies of America since Obama took office and his support of jihad elements in Syria for well over a year now. The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page news story confirming this treachery in November -- so why isn't Congress calling for hearings? Why are our elected officials standing by while a traitorous administration backs the very enemy that has vowed to destroy us and has brutally attacked us at home and abroad?

In the middle of this fresh hell stands the indefatigable Jewish state. They face the Muslim Brotherhood to the south, al-Qaida to the north, and hostile invaders within their own borders, with the tacit support of an American President who is aligned with these vicious, Jew-hating supremacist forces. A terrorist takeover of Syria promises death and destruction not just for Israel, but for all free nations. Is this the objective of Obama’s statecraft? What does he expect the region to look like in ten or twenty years? A sheet of glass? 

The idea that Obama is somehow naive or clueless is indeed clueless. The terrible fact is that in every situation, in every conflict, Obama supports the jihadists. In Libya, Obama involved the United States in the efforts to overthrow Qaddafi without congressional approval, and without anything close to national self-interest. And while Qaddafi was a somewhat madcap barbarian, he was secular. And yes, as can be seen by what followed his overthrow, he contained the jihadist threat in that part of Africa.

Obama aided and abetted the rise of the Islamic supremacist regime in Libya, which is has now “transitioned” to Sharia government. When Ambassador Christopher Stevens and others at our embassy in Benghazi called for help against the growing jihad threat there, the Obama administration employed an Al Qaeda brigade as additional security for the embassy. Is it any wonder that the jihadists who attacked our consulate and murdered our people had intelligence that could only have come from insiders? They knew where Ambassador Chris Stevens’s safe-house was, as well as where the fuel was.

After the fall of Libya, Mali fell to jihadists as well. There was a major (although almost completely ignored) jihad attack on a British Petroleum gas complex in Algeria: hundreds of non-Muslims were taken hostage and scores murdered. The jihadis have been acting with greater impunity than ever, knowing that Obama is going to do little or nothing to stop them, and may actively send them aid. 

For Libya was just one in a long string of Obama interventions on behalf of jihadists. As soon as Obama came into office in 2009, he made an apology tour to the Muslim world. At its center was his historic June 4, 2009 speech to the ummah, which he delivered from Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Just five months into his presidency at the time, he invited the then-banned Muslim Brotherhood to that speech.

That invitation prohibited Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak or his cabinet from attending that speech. Obama had, in effect, decided then where he was going with Egypt. And so it went.

Concurrently, the Iranian people were marching and taking to the streets for freedom --the only real freedom revolution that took place in the Middle East. They were marching for freedom because they had been living under the boot of the Sharia since 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in a coup against the shah.

This was a real freedom revolution, led by women. We never see that in the Muslim world. But Obama ignored that revolution. This was the most consequential failure to act in the twenty-first century. Iran is the head of the snake. Besides Saudi Arabia, Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism in the cause of Islam. Had Obama supported that revolution, the trajectory of the world would have been completely different, and we would be in a far different place from where we are now and where we are going.

All this was preventable, and foreseeable: I predicted it all in my book, The Post-American Presidency. But now Obama has effectively switched sides, making disastrous concessions to Iran, betraying Israel and numerous other longtime U.S. allies. The effects of his actions have only just begun to be felt. Unless a sharp reversal comes quickly, historians will remember this as the time the U.S. went into irretrievable decline.