Obama and Iran, Sitting In A Tree ...

From PJM:

Obama ... needs Iran to get him out of the jam caused by his feckless withdrawal from the region. ISIS  flourished in the resulting vacuum and daily humiliates the president with publicized outrages. With Obama powerless to prevent it, he needs someone who can pull him out of the quicksand.

But as the Daily Beast notes the price will be steep. “The bargain for making a deal with Iran, these critics say, has allowed Iran a free hand to assert dominance in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.” Having spent years campaigning against American military action Obama has essentially left himself no other choice but to rely on  someone else.  ”Such an approach is also politically unfeasible due to American war weariness and scepticism of any mission with shifting goalposts.

And Iran is charging him an arm and a leg for yanking him out of the hole.  Yemen, next-door-neighbor to Saudi Arabia has now been partitioned between an Iranian client state which has as its capital Sana’a — from which the GCC embassies have evacuated — and Aden, to which they will be moving as the new capital of Sunni recognized Yemen.

Obama’s own efforts to establish “moderate rebel” forces in the region have ended in ignominious defeat, having accomplished nothing but showcase his pitiful incompetence. One of the main Obama-backed groups has just folded up and joined the enemy.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – One of the main western-backed rebel groups announced on Sunday that it had dissolved itself and joined a larger Islamist alliance, weeks into a battle which saw it lose ground and men to more powerful al Qaeda insurgents. Hazzm is one of the last remnants of non-jihadist opposition to President Bashar al-Assad in northern Syria, much of which has been seized by the Nusra Front and Islamic State, an offshoot of al Qaeda that controls roughly a third of Syria.

All hope of independent action is fading fast. Micah Zenko at Foreign Policy is calling the debacle Obama’s Bay of Pigs in the Desert. The Obama administration has effectively destroyed its own credibility, by the ample display of stupidity, possibly past the point of recovery. As a Brookings Institution article puts it “If America leads, will anyone follow?”

even if the United States is still willing and able to lead, and even if other major powers accept that it does so, Washington will likely confront the growing problem of followership. President Obama made clear in his 2014 West Point speech that future interventions by the United States in overseas conflicts will be a function of the willingness of “partners” to lend a hand. In fact, Washington has always depended to some extent on other nations to supplement its efforts, but the question for the future is whether this operating principle remains feasible.

Who wants to join the club where Obama’s the leader of the band? Not unless you want a knife in the back.

-----

And, here's another really interesting article on the geopolitics of the Iranian deal