(Reuters) – An eruption of violent unrest across the Middle East is confronting President Barack Obama with the most serious challenge yet to his efforts to keep the Arab Spring from morphing into a new wave of anti-Americanism – and he has few good options to prevent it.
Less than two months before the U.S. presidential election, a spate of attacks on embassies in Libya, Egypt and Yemen poses a huge dilemma for a U.S. leader who took office promising a “new beginning” with the Muslim world but has struggled to manage the transformation that has swept away many of the region’s long-ruling dictators.
On top of that, even as he tries to fend off foreign policy criticism from Republican rival Mitt Romney, Obama is grappling with an escalating crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations over Iran’s nuclear program and increased bloodshed in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has defied international calls to step aside.
Obama’s Middle East woes deepened this week with a series of mob attacks on U.S. diplomatic compounds and the killing of America’s ambassador to Libya. Demonstrators were incensed by a U.S.-made film they consider blasphemous to Islam.
With the White House fearing further violence in the region after Muslim prayers on Friday, Obama and his aides were scrambling to re-calibrate their approach to the problem. Warnings were issued to Muslim governments around the world that they would be expected to help protect U.S. interests.
All of this may simply point to a larger challenge that will endure well beyond November’s U.S. vote – an apparently growing gulf between the United States and increasingly assertive Islamist forces within the Middle East.
The irony is clear.
With his vaunted 2009 speech in Cairo, Obama had hoped to “reset” relations with the region and ease some of the ill feeling stoked by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and “war on terror” rhetoric of Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.
The Obama administration was caught flat-footed by a wave of pro-democracy revolts last year that toppled autocratic leaders – some, like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a longtime U.S. ally. But Washington gradually gave cautious backing to the goals of the Arab Spring movement.
Now, with much of the U.S. optimism that accompanied the Arab world’s uprisings seemingly gone for good, Washington faces an apparent rise in Islamic activism and declining influence over countries it once counted as allies.
Reuters has the full article
