While debating Mitt Romney this fall, Barack Obama declared that he had decided to embrace the term "Obamacare" - a name originally coined and to that point only used by its detractors to tie the president firmly to the health care fiasco he had spawned. Perhaps he will, therefore, not object if we dub the escalating conflict in the Middle East by a similarly apt name: Obamawar.
After all, frantic efforts underway at the moment by assorted diplomats aimed at containing hostilities between Israel and the terrorist enclave known as the Gaza Strip (primarily by blocking Israel's decisive retaliation) cannot obscure a dismal reality: The crescendo of rockets and missiles unleashed by the Palestinians on Israeli civilians are a predictable repercussion of President Obama's reckless defense and foreign policies.
Consider how such attacks - and the danger to Israel and to us that is growing by day - have been aided and abetted by an Obama Doctrine that can be described in nine words: Embolden our enemies; undermine our friends; diminish our country:
• Let's start with the hundreds of incomings Israel has sustained since Mr. Obama was reelected by the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian franchise, the designated terrorist organization Hamas. These have been made possible and encouraged by the ascendancy of the Brotherhood throughout the Middle East and North Africa. That trend, in turn, has been enabled by the president's assiduous legitimating of the world's preeminent jihadist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, his engaging with its operatives, in some cases (notably, Egypt) his enriching them and in others (for sure Libya and probably Syria) his arming them.
As a result, it is not just the Islamists of Gaza who think they can act with impunity against America's only enduring ally in the region, Israel. The same goes for: the Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi in Egypt (who sent his prime minister to the Gaza Strip last week to demonstrate tangibly solidarity with the terrorists there); Turkey's Recep Tayyep Erdogan (whose open hostility and increasingly aggressive behavior towards Israel is materially supporting Hamas and other enemies of this country); and the jihadist elements in Libya, Tunisia, Yemen and Syria.
• Then there's Iran, whose inexorable pursuit of nuclear weapons has not been appreciably slowed, let alone derailed, by President Obama's "engagement" with the mullahs in Tehran. His failure to check their ambitions and the advent of an imminent Iranian bomb is heartening to our foes, and adding tremendously to the volatility of the region.
Thanks in no small measure to such emboldening, the next shoe to drop in the region seems likely to be the overthrow of the king of Jordan. Other royals in the Persian Gulf are also in the Islamists' cross-hairs, despite the longstanding practice by the former of generously underwriting the latter in the vain hope of buying them off. It is hard to overstate the dire implications of these prospective tectonic shifts and those accomplished in the recent past, thanks in no small measure to Team Obama and its embrace of the Islamists.
• President Obama has also contributed to the unfolding war by isolating, demeaning and otherwise undermining Israel. Arguably, for the first time in the history of the Jewish State, her enemies have grounds for thinking there is strategically exploitable "daylight" between the United States and its ally. Repeatedly in the past, even when that perception has not been warranted, the Arab nations have tried to drive the Jews into the sea. It is not hard to imagine that they will seize the present opportunity to try to achieve that long-deferred goal.
That response is made all the more probable if Israel's enemies have the savvy to recognize favorable trends in what might be called a "fundamental transformation" of the Democratic Party now underway that threatens to end its historic solidarity with the Jewish State. As the Washington Free Beacon's Adam Kredo reported last week http://freebeacon.com/israel-in-the-balance/, the incoming class of congressional Democrats is, like the president, markedly more hostile towards Israel than their predecessors.
The prospects for, at a minimum, a terrible regional war are further increased by the last element of the Obama Doctrine: the diminishing of our country. Such an effect is particularly evident with respect to the wrecking operation the administration is pursuing with respect to the U.S. military. At particular risk is our armed forces' ability to maintain the sort of presence and to project the sort of power that has proven effective in deterring aggression against us, our allies and our interests. Even if President Obama actually meant it when he said "we have Israel's back," he is greatly reducing our ability to honor that commitment.
History will, in due course, assign a name to the horrific war now in prospect. For the moment, it seems appropriate to give the dubious credit for helping to catalyze such a nightmare in the same way we have his monstrous health care legacy, by calling it Obamawar.