Better in their words…

Con Coughlin: Obama’s Diplomatic Vandalism – WSJ.com.

Your president…

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By CON COUGHLIN

Barack Obama has achieved his ambition of making the Middle East the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The problem is that he has done so for all the wrong reasons.

In June 2009 the U.S. President took to the stage at Cairo University to revolutionize Washington’s relationship with the Arab world. Except that in his now famous speech, Mr. Obama’s primary intention in pleading for a “new beginning” was to revive the moribund peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.

Fueling popular uprisings of the sort now sweeping the far corners of the Arab world were not on his agenda. President Obama explicitly declared that “no system can or should be imposed on one nation by another.”

Now hardly a day passes without Mr. Obama making a public intervention for regime change in the Middle East. It started in Tunisia, where the president gave his backing to the reform movement that overthrew Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Mr. Obama belatedly also backed the anti-government protests in Tahrir Square, which led to the overthrow of his former Egyptian host, Hosni Mubarak. White House support for similar movements in such disparate countries as Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Morocco could ultimately result in similar outcomes.

But how precisely Mr. Obama’s support for pro-democracy movements in the Middle East squares with his ultimate objective of negotiating a peace deal between Israelis and the Palestinians has yet to be explained. If, for example, Mr. Obama was really serious about nailing a peace deal then surely he might have pressed less for Mr. Mubarak’s resignation. The former Egyptian president was, after all, a staunch ally of the U.S. for the better part of three decades.

Apart from backing Washington’s attempts to neutralize Iran’s nuclear program and confronting al Qaeda, Mr. Mubarak’s Egypt was a key player in efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian negotiators together. Cairo kept the pressure on Hamas in Gaza and provided political support to Mahmoud Abbas, the beleaguered Palestinian leader. Mr. Mubarak’s commitment to the Mideast peace process as well as to his own country’s peace accord with Israel was central to the success of Washington’s approach.

But none of this appears to have counted for much as Mr. Obama threw his weight behind the protesters even though Mr. Mubarak’s departure could have dire consequences for U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Obama is a great advocate of change, as we saw during his presidential election campaign. But proposing change to the way a mature democracy like America governs itself is one thing: encouraging countries like Egypt, which have never known proper democratic government, to do the same is another matter entirely and fraught with risk.

For the moment all that Mr. Obama’s support for the protesters in Egypt has achieved is the establishment of a military junta that has suspended the constitution and dissolved parliament. The country’s military commanders insist they are committed to holding free and fair democratic elections later in the year. If that happens the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s best-organized political party, which is in close contacts with Islamists throughout the region and Europe, will be one of the main contenders.

The Middle East has been down this road before, in Algeria and the Palestinian territories, where the West’s support for the democratic process resulted in the election of Islamists who are opposed to democracy and Western interests. Given the conservative nature of Egypt’s military establishment, they are unlikely to tolerate such an outcome. They have, after all, spent most of the past 20 years fighting Islamist terrorists who have sought to undermine Egypt’s economy by attacking tourist sites popular with Westerners.

Mr. Obama’s diplomatic vandalism of abandoning Mr. Mubarak is sure to make an impression on America’s other key regional allies. For a start the Obama administration can wave good-bye to any hope of persuading Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to become a “partner in peace.” More than ever, Israelis feel they can’t afford to take any risks as they can no longer count on Washington’s support. Few members of the Israeli government believe it is in their country’s best interests to trade land, i.e. strategic depth, for a peace deal with a Palestinian leadership that is terrified of the intimidating shadow cast by Hamas.

The Saudis, who have supported the peace process, were also outraged by Washington’s treatment of Mr. Mubarak. The Saudi regime might not be everyone’s cup of tea, with its grisly public executions, amputations and floggings. But even Mr. Obama must understand that if the House of Saud were to be overthrown in a popular revolt, it would most likely be replaced by fanatical, anti-Western Islamists whose contribution to world peace to date has been the creation of the Taliban and al Qaeda.

And what about the impact of Mr. Obama’s pro-reform agenda on a country like Bahrain, which provides the U.S. Fifth Fleet with its main base in the Gulf? For much of the past decade King Hamad, the Sunni monarch, has resisted attempts by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to infiltrate the country’s majority Shia population. Now, Bahrain’s modest security forces find themselves locked in violent street protests with Shia demonstrators demanding regime change, a development that will surely bring smiles to the faces of the ayatollahs in Tehran.

Nor is it by any means certain that post-revolution countries like Tunisia will be more sympathetic to the West. When he visited Tunis last week, U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague received a rough ride from student protesters who pointed out that, until only a few weeks ago, Britain had been a staunch ally of their corrupt former president.

Mr. Obama has let the pro-democracy genie out of the bottle, and it would be reassuring to think that he knows what he is doing. But it really doesn’t look that way.