Obama laps to the wrong side of history

While he is wisely not spiking the football, President Obama is still taking a few victory laps.  The problem is that there are other races still going on in the stadium.  He is supposed to be competing in those as well:  the autocrats in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria should not be left to win their competitions.  How do we think they will behave if they are successful in their current efforts to repress the demonstrations?

The picture is different in each of these countries.  Obama has made it clear enough that Gaddafi must leave Libya, but the NATO military effort seems to be falling short and the diplomatic maneuvering hasn’t yet produced the desired result.  In Yemen, the slippery president has refused to sign an agreement negotiated with the Gulf Cooperation Council to step down and has returned to beating up on demonstrators.  King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa in Bahrain is busy bulldozing Shia mosques, as if that will make the 70% Shia population go away.  In Syria the supposed reformer Bashar al Assad has killed hundreds, rounded up thousands and subdued towns one by one using grossly excessive military force against civilians.

We are not hearing much from either President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton about these developments.  I would argue that the outcome of the still ongoing rebellions in the Arab world are more important to U.S. vital interests than the killing of Osama bin Laden, who wasn’t living much better in Abbottabad than he would have in Guantanamo (though he was clearly in better communication with his network).  Yemen is already a weak state where terrorists hide and Syria provides support to Hizbollah and Hamas.  Libya has undertaken state-sponsored terrorism in the past and may well revert in the future.  Bahrain?  How does the Sunni king expect his Shia majority population to react once he is finished depriving it of its political rights as well as many houses of worship?

I won’t propose a full package of solutions.  What it seems to me is needed is simpler than that:  a Presidential decision to make the cause of democracy in the region his own, and a tasking to the State Department to come up with the (non-military) propositions that will make it real.  Failing that, Obama risks lapsing to the wrong side of history.

PS:  Jackson Diehl treats the Syrian case well in this morning’s Washington Post, as does Brian Whitaker in The Guardian.