Here are some thoughts on the cease fire just…negotiated…between Israel and Hamas.  These thoughts come against the backdrop of two concerns.  For one, how is it possible to negotiate with terrorists?  Their behavior makes them fundamentally untrustworthy.  This is illustrated by Hamas’ own behavior in the past: every cease fire to which they’ve pretended to agree has been broken by their own terrorism, most often by a simple renewal of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and their children.  For another, I listened to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech announcing to his country the current cease fire.  His diction and tone of voice were that of a defeated man.  He knows Israel lost this latest overt war.

Now let’s read between the lines of Jennifer Griffin’s article for Fox News.

…Hamas spokesmen had leaked to the press that the cease-fire would begin at 9 pm local time on Tuesday, but that was before [Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton had landed in Jerusalem.  It would take another 24 hours for the deal to be finalized.

Not even Hamas’ MFWIC, Ismail Haniyah, would have been foolish enough to make such a claim in the absence of an agreement.  Doing so, far from pressuring Israel, would have been seen for the blatant desperation that an empty claim would have been.  There was a cease fire agreement in place; its announcement and implementation were delayed for 24 hours—and for one more Hamas act of terrorism, a bus bombing in Tel Aviv—so that our own Secretary of State could arrive in country [emphasis added]:

In the official statement released by the White House Wednesday

The President commended the Prime Minister [of Israel] for agreeing to the Egyptian cease-fire proposal—which the President recommended the Prime Minister do.

Moreover, the Israelis were prevented from responding to the bus bombing, even to the extent of delaying for another day or two implementation of the cease fire.  Instead, the US pushed Israel into agreeing just hours after that atrocity.  This was a cessation of fighting for which Israel was not ready and which Israel was pressured to accept, hence Netanyahu’s air of defeat.

What came out of this foisted cease fire?

There was no talk of disarming Hamas or preventing the re-arming of Hamas….

And

The deal elevates Iranian proxy groups such as Islamic Jihad and Popular Resistance Committees who can serve as spoilers and decide to fire more rockets into Israel.

And

…this truce really elevates Hamas as a power player as opposed to an underground terror movement.

On a practical level, Hamas is left with some 8,000 rockets and associated launch facilities intact, its Command and Control facilities and personnel damaged but functional, and its cottage industry of in-Gaza rocket and launcher manufactury still functional.  The Israeli goal of crippling Hamas’ war fighting capacity was cut off midgame.

On the other hand,

“The goal must be a durable outcome that promotes regional stability and advances the security and legitimate aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians alike,” Clinton said in Cairo.  “We appreciate President Morsi’s personal leadership and Egypt’s efforts thus far.

Egypt’s president, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, now will be held accountable if Hamas or anyone else fires rockets from Gaza into Israel.  On the line is $1.5 billion dollars in U.S. aid to Egypt.

But what is the value of such an accountability and of this particular example of moral equivalence?  Islamic governments have a long and venerable history of putting their own interests above those of their people: we’ll cut off Egypt’s aid?  Pssh.  On the other hand, this “accountability” of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi Isa El-Ayyat can work to his favor.  With the Muslim Brotherhood universally and lethally anti-Israel (if there’s one thing these guys agree with Persian mullahs about, it’s that Israel must be destroyed), the rearming and refitting of Hamas through the Sinai and the Egyptian border with Gaza will simply make Morsi look good in the shower where it counts, the anti-Israel community.

On top of this, as Spiegel Online International reports, the Israelis were forced to elevate Morsi themselves in the eyes of anti-Israeli terrorists for helping the Israelis with Hamas:

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman saw it necessary to thank Morsi for his role in bringing about a truce.

And the US now accepts Israel and terrorists on the same plane.

So again, what has come out of this cease fire?  Increased danger to Israel, with an increasingly uncertain ally standing near it.

In yesterday’s Part I, I described the immediate outcome of the Obama Doctrine.  What can we expect from the future under this Doctrine, given the events to date and the Doctrine’s continuation?  Herewith some predictions.

President Barack Obama’s doctrine, with its timid response to the revolution for freedom in Libya and Obama’s confused cover-up of the terrorist murders of our Ambassador and three others there leave Libya vulnerable.  Libya’s government is too weak to resist the terrorists, as demonstrated by the Benghazi terrorist attack, and that nation will suffer another civil war, this time ending with the terrorists in charge: perhaps an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood holding the title, while giving cover to Ansar al-Aharif and AQIM, perhaps with either or both of those two openly in charge.

Hezbollah, currently bogged down supporting Bashar al-Assad in Syria, will recognize the costs there—including their distraction from their other goals—abandon al-Assad and move to take over Lebanon.  This will give Hezbollah a more secure access to the Mediterranean Sea (at least until the situation in Syria finally resolves), an easier border than the Golan Heights across which to attack Israel, and fewer distractions with which to do so.  Iran will figure out that a Hezbollah takeover of Lebanon provides net benefit to them, and they will, in the end game at least, aid the takeover.

Syria will continue, though, to receive unfettered Iranian and Russian aid, and with the rest of the world idly standing by—especially under the new absence of American leadership—doing nothing more than clucking its collective tongue, the government will continue to butcher its people.  The al-Assad regime will survive.  In the meantime, the civil war threatens to spread to Turkey, Israel, and Jordan.  After al-Assad reconsolidates his power, the nation will be an open sewer for terrorist organizations, perhaps including a returning Hezbollah.

Iraq will continue to lose what little faith they have left in the US and will move more openly against American interests in the Middle East.  Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki already has been moving Iraq to closer ties with Iran; this will accelerate.  Further, the Arab League representative for Iraq, Qais al-Azzawy has said

Iraq will invite (Arab) ministers to use the weapon of oil, with the aim of asserting real pressure on the United States and whoever stands with Israel.

The economic weapon is the strongest one to be put into effect now, to assure of standing by the Palestinian people, in light of there being no military power that can stand in the face of Israel at the present time[,]

Iran has already shown disdain for the policy of talk.  The Obama Doctrine sanctions, such as they are given Russian and PRC veto of serious ones (and the ones they’ve permitted reduced to tissue by Obama’s waivers of them for Iran’s 20 largest trading partners), may be harming the Iranian people, but they are having no effect on the Iranian government and its drive for nuclear weapons.  Indeed, the Iranians are doubling the centrifuges they have in use for purifying uranium.

A nuclear armed Iran, which will occur within a year or two, will then move to destroy Israel—knowing that the Obama Doctrine has no answer now and will have no response later (and even if the US did respond later, that response will no meaning for an Israel that will be a smoking, radioactive hole).

Moreover, Iranian nuclear weapons will quickly find their way into the hands of terrorists, who will then target Europe and the US.

In the end, Iran has direct, empirical evidence of the Obama Doctrine’s practice of non-response: that vote of “Present” during the 2009 Iranian uprising.

Turkey is moving to open support for Hamas away from sub rosa, but effective, support for Israel.  That break will become complete within the year.

The rate of growth of Al-Qaeda’s strength in Yemen; in Tunisia, Libya, and the Maghreb in general; and in Egypt will accelerate.  Even the French have grown concerned about these terrorist groups’ inroads in Mali; the Sudan will become a safe haven, without even the current lip service to stopping them that the Sudanese government occasionally provides.

The Obama Doctrine’s failure will have repercussions beyond the Middle East, however.  With the American “pivot” toward Asia and the Obama administration’s sharp cutback on American defense capacity, we’ll have no choice but to disengage from Europe, and Russia knows this.  Now Russia will feel free to act overtly to reconstitute the geographical reach of the defunct Soviet Union.

With Russia having already threatened Poland with nuclear war over their earlier willingness to participate in an American missile program, and American timidity in cancelling altogether our missile defense under Russian pressure,  Poland is at risk of becoming, again, a Russian problem and not an American ally.

The Baltic States represent the Soviet Union’s best outlet into the Baltic Sea and from there to the North Atlantic.  Russia already has waged cyber war against Estonia; look for these nations to fall back into the Russian orb.

Russia already is moving to cut off our access through the ‘Stans to Afghanistan.  Aside from the relatively minor (to them) gain of poking us in the eye over this, our removal from the area will give the Russians a freer hand in reasserting their dominance over these border nations.

Russia will complete its occupation of Georgia, begun with the Georgian War in which the Russians partitioned, Sudetenland-like, that hapless nation.  This will accomplish two things: expand their access to the Black Sea and emphasize American weakness.  They’ve taken the first step in this by causing the election of an openly pro-Russia President, Bidzina Ivanishvili, to replace Mikheil Saakashvili.

An already expansive People’s Republic of China, knowing, or thinking they know, that we’ll do nothing meaningful to stop them, will move against the Republic of the Philippines, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Brunei, and Malaysia, all nations bordering the South China Sea.  Having already claimed the entire Sea as their territorial waters, the PRC will read the Obama Doctrine as giving them a free hand to press their claim politically and militarily, and they’ll force these unlucky nations to sign treaties acknowledging the PRC’s seizure.  Shots may well be fired, and some Philippine (and Japanese) naval vessels may well be sunk in the effort.  Under the Obama Doctrine, these nations will be left to their own devices, though, even as we talk about establishing closer ties with them (and they really would like a stronger American presence as a counterweight to the Chinese juggernaut) and we work with the Australians to rotate a few Marines through a northern port.  The Doctrine does not contain any means of material response to such aggression.

Look for the PRC, also, to act more openly and easily against the Uighurs in the western and southwestern PRC and against Tibet, which nation they’ve occupied since 1950.

The Republic of China also is at far greater risk.  The PRC views the RoC as nothing more than a rogue satrapy of the Communist government on the mainland.  The PRC will increase pressure against the US to stop selling arms to the Republic—we’ve already downgraded, at PRC behest, the F-16s we had previously agreed with the RoC to sell them—while the Red Army accelerates its drive to modernize its naval and air forces.

It’s important to keep in mind that, with no threat to the PRC extant, these forces are useful only for power projection and overt military aggression.  The RoC will be forced, at the least, into treaty “agreements” acknowledging closer ties to the mainland—including acceptance of a semi-autonomous condition wherein the PRC will accept responsibility for the defense and foreign policies of the RoC, while the RoC government will have a free hand in domestic affairs.  So long as those internal affairs, as with Hong Kong, comport themselves with PRC requirements.

The PRC likely will wait a bit to ensure we’re thoroughly bogged down in the Middle East.  However, this will be an unnecessary delay: we’d have to be involved before we could be bogged down.

Tyranny and violence will always flow to fill a power vacuum.  That flow is about to become a flood.

Update: Here is a demonstration of both the “leading from […]” and the walk-away from Israel that are components of the Obama Doctrine.  This video short shows AP reporter Matthew Lee trying to get a straight answer out of State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland concerning our “ally” Turkey’s branding of Israel as a terrorist state for the heinous crime of defending itself against Hamas’ terror rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and their children.

We are now seeing the outcome of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.  While he’s never actually articulated any policy, its tenets are clear.  Obama first began implementing it shortly after his inauguration four years ago with his World Apology Tour.

An additional tenet was made manifest with his “leading from behind” practice first employed when he voted “Present” during the Iranian people’s uprising later in 2009.  This was made explicit as the people of Libya struggled for so long to throw off a bloody despot and to achieve their freedom.  Europe was quickly supportive of the Libyan rebels in concrete ways, but they had to drag the Obama administration kicking and screaming to even background support.  In Syria, Obama stretched this aspect of his policy into “leading from nowhere at all,” sitting timidly by, tsk-tsking over the butchery of al-Assad’s murder of, now, 40,000 of his people, but doing nothing serious about it.

We got another tenet made clear as Obama elevated the UN, and through them Russia and the People’s Republic of China, to final arbiters of American foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Iranian nuclear weapons program.  This policy aspect granted Russia and the PRC the power to veto any meaningful action by the US.

The final leg of the Obama Doctrine appeared with Obama’s walk away from Israel—berating them for aggressively defending themselves (“they have a right to defend themselves” in the present Israeli-Hamas terrorist conflict rings hollow indeed); insisting that the Israelis withdraw to the 1969, and indefensible, borders as a precondition to negotiating with Hamas; refusing to meet with Israel’s Prime Minister while both he and Benjamin Netanyahu were in New York for a UN conclave and refusing a meeting in DC that later week or the next, to which Netanyahu volunteered to travel.

With this doctrine of rejection of American power and influence and its withdrawal, our and our allies’ enemies have grown ever more aggressive.  Rather than being a continued source of influence and stability in the Middle East, for instance, now we have the danger and open warfare.

The first overt event of the coming conflagration may have been merely a probe, a test to see whether this new American policy was real.  Our timidity vis-à-vis the Libyan revolt let that civil war go on for longer than it should have; a brittle, top-heavy, hated regime should have fallen far faster than it did.  The dragged-out civil war, though, left the new Libyan government weakened even more than new governments normally are, with far too many well-armed factions, both friendly and inimical to that government, in being.  The government’s weakness relative to the terrorist organizations (Ansar al-Sharif and the Libyan branch of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, for instance) was exacerbated by these terrorist organizations’ opportunity to use that extra time to accumulate vast amounts of arms alongside the legitimate rebels’ arming.

So, the test.  These terrorists were encouraged to take on the US, and taking advantage of the weakness of the Libyan government, they attacked our Benghazi consulate and succeeded in murdering an American Ambassador and three other Americans, potentially collecting valuable intelligence material, also, from the items so poorly secured through the fighting that for weeks after the attack private individuals and journalists (among others) were able to collect documents lying in the rubble.  The weakness of the Obama’s administration’s responses during and after the terrorists’ assault have been documented here, here, and here, among other places.  Given the success of Benghazi by the terrorists, and the lack of material response since then, abetted by the Obama administration’s confused cover-up of that attack’s parameters, there’s been a five-fold increase in terrorist Web sites inciting attacks against US allies and against the US.

Having seen the outcome of this probe, we get the following, and it’s more concrete than mere Internet chatter:

Egypt expelled the Israeli ambassador on a manufactured beef, froze diplomatic ties with Israel, and lifted several restrictions at Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip.

Our enemies have not limited themselves to talking, however.  Having satisfied themselves with the outcome of the Benghazi test, the terrorists wasted little time moving forward, and we are now seeing the first overt blow struck against the US and our allies in response to the Obama Doctrine.

The Hamas “government” of Gaza greatly increased their terror rocket fire against Israeli civilian targets, finally forcing Israel to respond militarily: we now have Israeli air and artillery strikes against these terrorists’ rocket sites and specifically targeted personnel.  This war already is spreading in its scope and its participants.  Hamas is firing rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, reaching distances these terrorists had been unable to achieve heretofore, but now Iran is supplying them with the longer-ranged rockets.  Rockets are being fired into Israel’s Negev area from the Sinai—from within Egypt.  Of course, this could not occur without the active acquiescence of, if not outright participation by, the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt.

During this fighting, Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil travelled to Gaza and had this to say:

It isn’t a matter of individuals, not a matter of community. It is a matter of a nation. The Arab nation, the Islamic nation.  We are all behind you, the struggling nation, the heroic that is presenting its children as heroes every day.

Leading into that visit, in a demonstration of the fecklessness of the Obama Doctrine, US officials said that they’ve “been confused” by Morsi’s messaging but remain(ed) hopeful.

Further, while the Israelis had agreed to a cease fire during Qandil’s visit, Hamas continued their rocket fire on Israel.

And this:

Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdesslem visited Gaza on the heels of Qandil.

The decision by Mr. Abdesslem, like Mr. Qandil, to literally wade into the midst of fighting presents a bold—if symbolic—challenge to Israel’s government.  The political brinkmanship has diplomats worried that a new generation of Arab leaders, who are beholden to their voting publics for the first time, may feel compelled to take action against the Jewish state.

Neither men visited Israel; both nations are bent on Israel’s destruction and the removal of all vestiges of American influence in the Middle East.

And this from Israel’s Ambassador to the US Michael Oren:

Clearly, Hamas has felt emboldened by the changes in the region generally and that has redounded to their benefit.  The major problem as far as the Arab Spring’s issues impacts the ability of Hamas to import missiles is the greater accessibility to Gaza from Sudan and Libya.  And the flow of arms from Libya has been significant.  We’ve encountered arms already that have been fired at us that have been brought in from Libya as well as on the Sudanese route.  And the general situation in Sinai and the loss of effective controls in Sinai have facilitated the flow of advanced arms into Gaza.

Meanwhile, under the Obama Doctrine, we are turning our backs on Israel while continuing to send billions of dollars to Egypt.

Hamas and Egypt (to say nothing of Iran) are emboldened by the Obama administration’s first-term timidity in dealing with freedom in Libya, supporting freedom in Iran, responding to the al-Assad butchery of those 40,000, and his withdrawal from overt support for Israel.

Now that Obama has been reelected and, by his own words, is no longer accountable to the American people, those who’ve begun attacking Israel from Gaza over the last week plainly consider that they now have free hand with an isolated Israel that the United States no longer will support in any meaningful way.

American timidity in dealing with the Arab Spring, which originated as a series of rebellions against despotic governments in favor of freedom, has through our decision not to try to engage the region and help the rebels shape a truly free and peaceful collection of governments, facilitated terrorist groups’—Ansar al-Sharif, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, et al., —ability to shape the region to their own ends.  This has made arms flow throughout the region far easier, and, with the Libyan situation as an illustration, created a new source of arms, also: those arms flowing to Hamas about which Oren is so concerned.

What can we expect from the future under the Obama Doctrine, given the events to date and the Doctrine’s continuation?  I’ll make some predictions in Part II tomorrow.