Secretary Global-Test: Endangering post-America with his cluelessness

So GT meets with representatives from twenty-six Muslim nations (that in itself is interesting; do we ever still speak of Christian nations or a Christian community?) and says this:

. . . the military piece is one piece. It’s one component of this. It’s a critical component, but it’s only one component. And the truth is, equally – probably far more important than the military in the end is going to be what countries are able to do to help Iraq to be able to step up and other places, by the way, to step up and start drying up this pool of jihadis who get seduced into believing there’s some virtue in crossing into Syria to fight or to join ISIL. And a young nine-year-old kid who goes with his father and his mother and holds up the severed head of someone. I mean, that’s just beyond imagination. And what this effort has to do is literally dry up the money, dry up the foreign fighters, prevent the foreign fighters from going home back to various places to do harm. It has to start major efforts to delegitimize ISIS’s claim to some religious foundation for what it’s doing and begin to put real Islam out there and draw lines throughout the region. 

And I think this is a wake-up call with respect to that because every Arab leader there today was talking about this, about real Islam and how important the Friday sermons are and where they need to go. Those are critical components of this strategy. 

 Would that be the real Islam they practice in, say, Saudi Arabia, where police stormed a Christian prayer meeting and arrested the entire congregation, including children?

Or Egypt, which has a female genital mutilation rate of 91 percent?

Or Pakistan, where in 2011 at least 943 women and girls were murdered for "dishonoring" their families?

And this business of "help[ing] Iraq step up and . . . start drying up this pool of jihadis" is a real knee-slapper.  Mona Charen, in her Townhall column today, offers a bit of recent Iraqi history that is pertinent here:

Obama withdrew all U.S. troops from Iraq when their continued presence would have facilitated the growth of democratic institutions and prevented the upwelling of extremism. As Dexter Filkens of The New Yorker explained in a recent interview:

"Every single senior political leader ... said to them privately, we want you to stay. ... We don't want combat troops. We don't want Americans getting killed, but we want 10,000 American troops inside the Green Zone training our army, giving us intelligence, playing that crucial role as the broker and interlocutor that makes our system work." But Obama wanted bragging rights about "ending" the war.

What is even more striking for the president who prides himself on non-military solutions is his diplomatic failure.

After a free election in 2010 gave a plurality to Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, Nouri al-Maliki, a close second-place finisher, staged a coup backed by Iran. The U.S. remained silent about this clear violation of Iraq's constitution. Writing in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart quotes the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack: "The message" that America's acquiescence "sent to Iraq's people and politicians alike was that the United States under the new Obama administration was no longer going to enforce the rules of the democratic road. ... (This) undermined the reform of Iraqi politics and resurrected the specter of the failed state and the civil war."

This Maliki, he proved to be quite the unifier:

On a visit to the White House, Maliki tested the waters with Obama by denouncing Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the highest-ranking Sunni government minister, as a supporter of terrorism. Obama responded that this was an internal Iraqi matter. A week later, a warrant was issued for Hashimi's arrest. He fled the country, but 13 of his bodyguards were tortured. This was followed by a wave of arrests and murders of Sunnis.

The Obama administration claims that it pressured Maliki in private to be more inclusive. Perhaps so, but private conversations do not make history. Maliki could take satisfaction in Obama's continued public support. Even after he had unleashed a wave of arrests and worse against Iraqi Sunnis, Obama declined to criticize. On the contrary, he praised "Prime Minister Maliki's commitment to ... ensuring a strong, prosperous, inclusive and democratic Iraq." That was carte blanche for civil war. 

And then, as we know, the Most Equal Comrade turned on al-Maliki, just as he had Assad in Syria, Mubarak in Egypt, and Ghaddafi in Libya.  Not that any of these guys were paragons of enlightened governance, but these abrupt turns in post-American policy didn't exactly project an image of consistency to the "international community."

And, as I say, al-Maliki was no fine leader by Western standards, and the MEC's confusing stance toward him paved the way for our current juncture:

The Sunnis were open to ISIS precisely because they had been excluded, harassed, arrested, tortured and murdered by Maliki.

And then, of course, there is the great Shiite menace to Iraq's immediate east, and that regime's nuclear program which we have shown no resolve to undo.

So, Secretary Global Test, what is this "real Islam" and who will help us "put [it] out there?"

Just go wind surfing for the next two years, pal, and quit ratcheting up the world's peril level.