NEW YORK // The US president’s declaration of a continuing focus on diplomacy will do little to dispel the perception of disengagement from the Middle East, as he failed to address major crises in the region and provided few details on key regional challenges.
In his annual speech before Congress, Barack Obama said US diplomacy, sanctions and the threat of military force brought the two major breakthroughs in the Middle East last year — the plan to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons and the temporary curbing of Iran’s enrichment programme.
On Iran, Mr Obama offered his most coherent vision during Tuesday’s address, warning Congress that he would veto new sanctions against Tehran while the current round of negotiations are under way.
“We must give diplomacy a chance to succeed,” he said.
“[I]f Iran’s leaders do seize the chance — and we’ll know soon enough — then Iran could take an important step to rejoin the community of nations, and we will have resolved one of the leading security challenges of our time without the risks of war.”
On Syria, he reiterated that “American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force” led to the plan to destroy Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s chemical weapons stockpiles. But Mr Obama, whose administration has in recent months backed away from once unambiguous calls for the Syrian president to step down, said nothing about support for a political transition.
Instead, he stated that the US would “support the opposition that rejects the agenda of terrorist networks”, a reflection of western fears over the security threat posed by extremist fighters.
Mr Obama underlined the necessity of the US moving off “a permanent war footing” after nearly 13 years of war in the region and said the plan to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan by the end of the year would be kept.
“After 2014, we will support a unified Afghanistan as it takes responsibility for its own future…If the Afghan government signs a security agreement that we have negotiated, a small force of Americans could remain in Afghanistan with Nato allies to carry out two narrow missions: training and assisting Afghan forces and counterterrorism operations to pursue any remnants of Al Qaeda.”
But he gave no details for how many US troops would remain, or steps his administration would take if Afghan President Hamid Karzai follows through on threats not to sign the security agreement.
In Iraq, which also refused to allow any US troops to remain, a resurgent Al Qaeda has exploited chaos in Syria and discrimination against Sunnis by Baghdad to reoccupy parts of the country and violence is back up to war-time levels.
Mr Obama did not address this issue, but acknowledged the threat from Al Qaeda, adding that the US approach to fighting Islamist militants would change.
“While we have put Al Qaeda’s core leadership on a path to defeat, the threat has evolved, as Al Qaeda affiliates and other extremists take root in different parts of the world” such as Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Mali, he said.
“So even as we actively and aggressively pursue terrorist networks, through more targeted efforts and by building the capacity of our foreign partners, America must move off a permanent war footing.”
An end to permanent war also implied an end to some of the extraordinary powers granted to the office of the presidency after the September 11 attacks, and Mr Obama once again promised to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
“[W]ith the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action but by remaining true to our constitutional ideals and setting an example for the rest of the world,” he said.
tkhan@thenational.ae
