No sooner did U.S. President Barack Obama welcome home American troops from Iraq and laud that country's stability and democracy than an unprecedented wave of violence — across Baghdad and elsewhere — revealed the severity of Iraq's political crisis. Is that crisis an unfortunate exception or, rather, a symptom of the failure of Obama's Middle East diplomacy, from Egypt to Afghanistan?
Upon taking office, Obama set four objectives in the Middle East: stabilize Iraq before leaving it; withdraw from Afghanistan from a position of strength and on the basis of minimal political convergence with Pakistan; achieve a major breakthrough in the Middle East peace process by pushing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to freeze settlements; and open a dialogue with Iran on the future of its nuclear program.
On these four major issues, Obama has clearly achieved little. With regard to Iraq, since George W. Bush's presidency, the United States has strived to exert a moderating influence on Shiite power, so that the country can create a more inclusive political system — specifically, by passing a new law on sharing oil-export revenues among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities.
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