(Debka) "We're going to build the kind of coalition that allows us to lead, but also isn't entirely dependent on what we do,” said US President Barack Obama at a fundraiser at the home of former AIPAC head Howard Friedman in Baltimore Friday, Sept. 12. One wag translated this as meaning that the Middle East could go its own way so long as it retained a "US flavor.”
That was one way of defining the turbulent cross-currents set off in the Middle East by the US president's launch last Wednesday of his strategy for defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant with a broad coalition.
That was also exactly the kind of ambiguous comment, which the governments America is wooing to join the coalition, find so off-putting. The response of 10 Arab and Muslim leaders to Secretary of State John Kerry's recruitment bid in Jeddah last Thursday, Sept.11, was therefore just as equivocal.
Advertisement - story continues below
