Back in October, I observed in a piece for the homepage:

With no forces on the ground in Iraq, the U.S. is now unable to defeat both sides in the proxy war there simultaneously — something we had accomplished just a few years ago. Instead, with limited airstrikes, the U.S. has in effect entered that proxy war in a subordinate role on the side of the Shiite extremists: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Shiite militias of Iraq.
Our principal allies in the Middle East, namely Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and the Arab kingdoms, can only wonder how the U.S. will manage being allied simultaneously with them and with their mortal enemies. Don’t be fooled by the Arab states’ support for current operations against ISIS. Under these circumstances, and with this strategy, America’s already-troubled relations with its allies in the region can only worsen.

Right on schedule, the United Arab Emirates has dropped out of a combat role in Obama’s tiny coalition. It reportedly decided to halt combat operations when Obama persisted in his refusal to forward-deploy search-and-rescue capabilities in Iraq, capabilities that could have saved the Jordanian pilot from his gruesome fate. But Obama’s strategy is riddled with fatal errors and contradictions at every level, the most important being that his strategy can only serve the interests of Iran, something that UAE has no interest in doing.

The Arab states have all but lost confidence in their American allies, and they are increasingly fearful for the future. Back in October, in one of those confident assertions of easily disprovable nonsense for which he will go down in history, Obama bragged, ”This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.” Now Yemen has fallen to Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. And, needless to say, if you’re looking for a successful model of anything, you won’t find it in Somalia.

Obama-coalition member Qatar, which has yet to drop a single bomb on the Islamic State, has started to grasp the reality of the situation. In a recent editorial, reported by MEMRI, the London-based Qatari daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi wrote:

The bizarre Washington–Tehran–Houthi axis that is taking shape reflects the patent distress of the Gulf states and of the Arab [world] in general. This continued erosion in the Arabs’ [ability to] play a role in Yemen reveals a comprehensive [Arab] crisis. The continued retreat before the Iranian onslaught – which has already managed to take over four Arab capitals… [namely] Sana’a, Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut – reveals the Arabs’ shame.
Had the matter been confined to Yemen, it would have been meaningless. But the long shadow of this U.S.–Iran alliance, [formed] under the slogan of war on the Islamic State and on the Al-Qaeda organizations, [including Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen], Ansar Al-Shari’a, along with the unconditional support lent by some Arab countries to this American agenda, creates historic circumstances [that allow] an unprecedented Iranian takeover of the region. As part of this takeover, the crumbling Sykes-Picot agreement will be replaced by protocols that will divide influence between Tehran, Israel and the U.S., while the Arab regimes, which are busy carrying out the plan of their enemies, will become the weak pieces in the chess game of the world’s nations, who will use them as pawns that cannot refuse to be moved [from place to place] . . .

We await with bated breath the release of Obama’s national-security “strategy.” Meanwhile, the debate goes on: Is Obama beholden to a deeply misguided strategy, or is he merely incompetent? I have long believed that to ascribe any strategy to Obama is to attribute to him far more competence and intelligence than he has. But the contrary arguments are starting to pile up in a consistent pattern of favoring Iranian interests above all, as brilliantly captured in this instant classic by Michael Doran, “Obama’s Secret Strategy.“