Certainly, one of the big things Obama had promised to do when campaigning for the presidency was to bring American troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Actually, since the introduction of the surge by Bush in 2007, and the huge drop in violence in Iraq as a result, Bush himself had started the process of removing U.S. troops from Iraq.  Obama meanwhile had campaigned on the basis of a 16-month timetable for troop withdrawal.

Upon entering the White House in early 2009, Obama announced that combat operations would end in Iraq by August 2010.  Troops levels were to be reduced by that date to only some 30,000-50,000 troops (from the current 142,000 troops).  Troops remaining after that date would serve only in the training and advising of the Iraqi security forces.  And by the end of 2011 all American troops should be out of Iraq.

In June of 2009 American troops were withdrawn from the streets of Baghdad and other cities to give security duties over to the growing Iraqi forces.  At first violence increased, largely the work of insurgents of one variety or another.  But by the end of the year the Iraqi forces seemed to be gathering momentum in securing the safety of Iraqi streets.

And indeed, Obama was able to keep his timetable, at least to the extent of having reduced troop size to about 52,000 non-combatant troops still in Iraq as of August 2010.

In the meantime, in early March of 2010, Iraqis again went to the polls to elect 325 members of a new parliament.  The results were inconclusive as no single party or even coalition of parties gained an absolute majority so as to be able to form a new cabinet government.  Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya party gained the most votes (91 members) followed closely by the Islamic Dawa (State of Law) coalition party of the incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (89 members).  But a deadlock set in on Iraqi politics as no party was willing to compromise enough to form a coalition government.  Allawi's party was "moderate" Shi'ite with some Sunni support (and probably the preferred choice of most Westerners); Maliki's party was more narrowly Shi'ite and even in coalition with al-Sadr's militantly Shi'ites.  No one seemed to know how to patch together a coalition large enough to form a voting majority in Parliament.  Month after month negotiations dragged on.

Finally on December 15th (2010), nine months after the national elections, Iraq formed a coalition government under al Maliki after Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya party agreed to join as junior members even though they had received more votes than Maliki's coalition party.  Iraq finally had a government, though how it would handle tense relations among Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds, as Americans began pulling back as a kind of political referee, remained in question.

The year 2011 saw Obama attempting to negotiate some kind of understanding with the Maliki Government as to the character that continuing U.S. support was to take.  But the talks bogged down and in October Obama simply announced the full withdrawal of U.S. fighting forces in Iraq by the end of the year.  Not surprisingly, the day after the pull-out of the last of the American combat troops on December 18th, Maliki issued the warrant for the arrest of the Iraqi Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi (a Sunni), who fled to the Kurdish region of Iraq! Sectarian politics now had a free hand in Iraq.

Consequently, Iraq itself would continue to be a scene of ongoing sectarian strife, Sunni insurgents (involved closely with al-Qaeda) against the Shi'ite-dominant Government in Baghdad and the new (mostly Shi'ite) Iraqi Army.  Shi'ite mosques and holy sites were frequently bombed by a rising Sunni insurgency, and in mid-2013 occurred the spectacular escape from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison of 500 Sunni insurgents, including key al-Qaeda leaders.

In 2014 the Iraqi Parliament finally forced Maliki to step down.  His place was taken by Haidar al-Abadi, another Shi'ite (of course) but also a more moderate Westernizer (Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Manchester, England), who would try to bring greater Sunni and Kurdish participation in the Iraqi government, as well as a cleaning out of the personal corruption that had infected the Iraqi army under Maliki.  Relations with Arab neighbors, and Western societies (including the U.S. which sold $billions in military equipment to Iraq) improved greatly.  However, al-Abadi would gradually look more and more to Russia and Iran for serious assistance, as problems with the Sunnis (and their new Caliphate) continued to grow over the next years.  Al-Abadi would remain as Iraq's Prime Minister until October of 2018.

In Afghanistan, Obama took a different tack than he had in Iraq.  To the great distress of his Democratic Party supporters, in February (2009) Obama announced that America would not at the present be leaving Afghanistan.  Instead Obama would be deploying an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan in continuation of Bush's recent surge effort against the Taliban.  But the Afghan surge seemed not to have the same effect in Afghanistan that it had in Iraq.  The Taliban insurgency seemed to be able to bounce back here and there as American troops made the effort to try to secure first one area and then another.  The Taliban's ability to retreat into Pakistan where Americans were not allowed to pursue them was a big part of the problem.  As long as they had the Pakistani sanctuary, they could not be seriously removed from the region.  Americans were profoundly handicapped in their efforts to clear Afghanistan of the Taliban insurgency.

A worried Afghan President Hamid Karzai began to conduct discussions with the Taliban, and suggested that America do the same.  In Karzai's thinking, America was becoming less reliant as an ally in terms of securing a political future for his regime. Americans were shocked that Karzai would be such an "unstable" ally (it was America, after all, that had put him in power), another indication that America really did not understand how politics worked in that part of the world.

Then in December Obama announced the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan during the next year (2010).  But to deflect a growing anti-war protest movement in America, he also announced that America would begin troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by the summer (July) of 2011.  This too put Karzai on the spot, for the Obama message was a bit ambiguous: where did America really stand in terms of securing the Afghan political future?  The Taliban took note of this and seemed to gain new boldness.

Meanwhile tensions with Pakistan began to grow over the way al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters easily found sanctuary (even training camps) inside Pakistan.  Then with WikiLeaks publishing tens of thousands of classified U.S. military documents in July (2010) it also became apparent that the Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI) was suspected by U.S. agents of actively supporting the Taliban.

Without any warning or prior approval from Pakistan (which the U.S. was not likely to get anyway) a team of two dozen Navy SEALs was dropped by two Black Hawk helicopters on the bin-Laden compound, located less than a mile away from the Pakistani Military Academy, the compound identified earlier to U.S. authorities by a former Pakistani intelligence officer (for the tidy sum of $25 million).  The Pakistani ISI had quietly put bin-Laden under something like house arrest, supposedly to keep him from troubling further Pakistan's diplomatic waters.  But on the other hand, ISI was not willing to give him up to any U.S. agents looking for him.

In the surprise operation, bin-Laden was killed on site, and his body flown out with the SEALs, and rather quickly transferred to a U.S. aircraft carrier and, after the performance of the appropriate Muslim burial rites, was dropped into the Arabian Sea.

The Pakistanis were furious, but in the end did nothing.  And thus closed a major 10-year-old chapter in American life.  And ... Obama came away looking very presidential!

Obama's announcement of a huge U.S. troop withdrawal in Afghanistan was accompanied by similar announcements coming from America's NATO allies working with the U.S. in Afghanistan: Great Britain, France, Belgium, Canada, Spain, Norway, etc.  The transition time was to be in the 2012-2014 time period, with whatever Western troops remained after that date to be there only for ongoing training purposes with the Afghan army.

In May of 2012 Obama flew to Kabul to sign an Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement pledging continuing American support for the Kabul government, although what that meant in specific terms was not entirely clear.  Only time would reveal the real meaning of this new American-Afghan alliance.

Not surprisingly, the withdrawal of American and NATO combat troops led to a large increase in Taliban attacks on Afghan troops and government-aligned villages, as well as insurgency attacks on Kabul itself.

Nonetheless, the end of 2014 arrived and, with great ceremony, the last of the Western combat troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan, although some 17,000 multinational (mostly NATO) counter-insurgency troops would be sent to Afghanistan beginning in 2015 (as well as "private" contract soldiers, made up largely of veteran U.S. and NATO troops) under the Resolute Support Mission agreement issued by NATO officials and even supported by the United Nations Security Council.  Their purpose was to train and otherwise support the Afghan Army in its effort to combat activities of the Taliban, and other insurgency groups operating from Afghanistan.

In early 2011 (actually getting a start in late 2010 when a young Tunisian set himself on fire in protest against police corruption), street protests swept through the Middle East, country after country, as if on signal Arab youth got the message to hit the streets in revolt.  Actually, the same spirit soon infected other youth around the world (Greece, Italy, England, America, Japan) inspiring them to take up the same cause: to oppose the injustice of the political and economic systems they were living under.  They demanded, often quite violently, justice to reign throughout their lands.  What that meant was not always very clear, except it usually meant the toppling of the current governments or their societies' leading economic and social institutions, and their replacement (somehow) with more "progressive" political and economic regimes.

Blame cannot be laid at the feet of Obama, although one of the first acts of his presidency was for him in June 2009 to fly to Cairo (Egypt) and there deliver a speech entitled "A New Beginning," widely covered around the world.  He was intending to mend the "severely damaged" Muslim-American relations caused by the previous Bush, Jr. presidency.  He indicated that not only would he take a quite different stand with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian issue than had been the American case previously, but that he was going to work to improve relations with the Iranians.  He talked about seeking a new partnership with the Muslim world, especially to bring greater democracy, personal freedom, and economic development to that part of the world. Certainly it sounded as if America would therefore be willing to take a stand in support of those seeking a new realm of Western-style "justice" in the Middle East.

Actually, this speech to the people of the Middle East by-passed a number of allied governments in the region which had long been working closely with America in trying to keep Arab tempers from flaring into crisis mode, especially the Egyptian government which had been strong supporters of at least something of a working relationship with Israel.  Also the West needed no more oil or energy crises resulting from political disruptions.  Indeed, the West depended on very strong (some would even say authoritarian or dictatorial) allied Arab regimes to keep matters under control.  This was true in a number of cases, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with which America had been working closely to keep the Middle East settled down.

But now it seemed that Obama was sending a message to the Arab world that America's position was about to change.  Indeed it would, but with much wavering along the way (much like America's years under Carter).  Thus the Arab world soon found itself in confusion as to the exact nature of America's Middle East policy.

Unemployment (especially dangerous when occurring among well-educated and thus highly-expectant youth), high inflation rates, the hoarding of the society's wealth by a small number of families, and widespread government corruption, finally brought young Tunisian protesters out in huge numbers in January of 2011. The fact that these protests were well-covered by the media and immediately visible to the youth of the Arab world with their full access to that media via their computers and cell phones, made these protests develop an intense energy not only in Tunisia but also across the Arab world in general, where political perceptions of the Arab youth were very similar in nature.

By the middle of January, the Tunisian Government of Zine ben Ali had collapsed, with ben Ali fleeing the country to avoid arrest.  By the end of that month street protests were hitting hard in Algeria, Egypt, and Yemen (among others) and in February protests spread further across the Arab world, most notably to Libya and Syria.

In Tunisia itself the protests continued on and off as coalition governments were formed and then dissolved in the weeks and months ahead.  Elections were finally held in October for representatives to a new Constituent Assembly pledged to writing a new constitution for Tunisia, the new constitution finally presented for a vote in January of 2014.  In parliamentary elections held that October, most notably the Islamist political groupings that had grown during the period of protest received a major setback, when the secular Nidaa Tounes party took the lead instead.  The Tunisians clearly indicated that they did not want their country to turn itself into some kind of Iran-like Islamic Republic.

Before the end of January of 2011, the "Arab Spring" had come to Egypt as well, when thousands of youth gathered at Tahrir Square to protest the long-standing (almost 30 years) government of Hosni Mubarak, and the likelihood that his son Gamal was going to take over his father's position as the aged Hosni's health worsened.  Also, Egyptians were tired of living under the Emergency Law, which extended to the government unlimited police powers, enacted as far back as 1967 but in particular since 1981 when President Sadat was assassinated by Islamic jihadists.  Since that time the Emergency Law had been justified as a means of keeping a tight grip on the militant Islamic Brotherhood.

Mubarak responded to the protesters by shutting down the internet (understanding how the new generation of youth got themselves together for action), changed personnel in his cabinet, and appointed an Egyptian Vice President.  But this did not disarm the protesters, the numbers of which continued to grow rapidly ... and then became violent when Mubarak moved the military into Cairo to restore order.  In mid-February the Egyptian military command finally took full control of the Egyptian government (it had been the actual basis of Egyptian national power seemingly forever), arrested Mubarak, and promised to undertake various Constitutional reforms and hold elections that fall.

But the protesters were not inclined to vacate Tahrir Square, which, through the spring, the summer and into the fall, became the scene of increasing violence as clashes developed between those for and against the military government, that is, basically secular versus Islamist Egyptians.  At the same time the atmosphere of violence spread through the whole city, as Muslims now attacked Christian churches (Coptic Christians made up about 10 percent of the country's population).  By the end of November, the violence reached horrible proportions, just as the process of holding elections for the new People's Assembly was put in place.  Then the following May (2012), the first round of the elections were held for the presidency under the new Constitution. And in June, with legal questions of all varieties being fought out in the Egyptian courts, the final round in the presidential elections was held, with the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate Mohamed Morsi winning the election with 51.7 percent of the vote, and the secular candidate Ahmed Shafik winning 48.3 percent. It was a very close race, representative of the secular-Islamic cultural divide of Egyptian society itself.  There were, of course, claims and counter-claims as to the fairness of the elections themselves.

Obama was nonetheless quick to offer his congratulations to Morsi, claiming that these elections constituted a milestone in the country's transition to democracy. Maybe.  But it would be "democracy" Egyptian (or Muslim) style. Obama also announced that he was looking forward to working with Morsi on the basis of mutual respect and shared interests.  But there was little likelihood that America was going to have many shared interests with Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that stood solidly behind the bringing down of the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001.  Was Obama serious, or were these just nice words of diplomacy?

Shafik meanwhile understood clearly what his electoral loss to Morsi meant for him personally, and immediately left Egypt for the United Arab Emirates.  Soon thereafter Morsi issued an arrest warrant for Shafik, on charges of "corruption."  So much for Egyptian democracy.

In any case the protests in Tahrir Square continued, for the youth were looking for secular reform, not life under fundamentalist Islam.  At the same time, work on a revised constitution took a sharp political turn when secularists walked out rather than see the country come under a fundamentalist Islamic constitution.  The situation worsened when that November Morsi issued a Declaration authorizing himself to take whatever powers necessary "to protect the revolution."  The resulting reaction between protesters and police turned extremely violent.

By the next spring (2013), Egyptian youth had drawn up a petition with 22 million signatures calling for a new round of presidential elections.  Then on the day marking the anniversary of Morsi's inauguration (June 30th) not just Tahrir Square but street after street of Cairo was filled with angry protesters calling for Morsi to step down.  After a warning to Morsi by the Egyptian military to do just that – which, not surprisingly, Morsi refused to do – the Egyptian military under General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declared martial law and removed Morsi from power, putting Adly Mansour in place as Egypt's interim president.  The next year (2014), in a new round of elections (boycotted by the Muslim Brotherhood), Sisi would himself be elected by 96 percent of Egypt's actual voters as their new president.

Obama was very upset at the June 2013 setback to Egyptian "democracy" (although softened a bit in his ire by the widespread demonstration of Morsi's unpopularity in Egypt), and made the decision simply to cease further sales of strategic materials (such as the F-16 fighter jet) to the Egyptian military, as a demonstration of America's (or just Obama's) resentment against the fall of Egyptian "democracy" with the military takeover of Egypt.

What Obama seemingly failed to realize was that there were really only two serious options in the governing of Egypt, as there were only two social groupings well-enough organized to take political control of Egypt.  And one of those was not some secular political party, such as the kind that used to give some degree of "centrist" order to American politics¹ (namely, once upon a time, the Democratic and Republican Parties).  In Egypt there existed only the well-organized Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand and the rather Secular Egyptian military on the other, neither of which were ever likely to take on the "democratic" character that Obama presumably dreamed of.

Sadly, Obama's decision to cut back American support of the Egyptian military simply sent Egypt off in new directions in the quest for strategic allies, principally to France and Russia.  Consequently, America would lose significant positioning in the Middle East because of this move against Sisi and the Egyptian military.

¹Actually, thanks to Obama's policy of deep, deep social-moral "change," America itself would divide into two very hostile groups, those supporting traditional American culture, and those wanting it overthrown in every way possible.  Thus the "center" of American politics would simply disappear during those eight years of the Obama presidency ... and certainly not reappear as America entered either the Trump or the Biden eras.
     American politics itself would take on a "Third World" character – as a mob assault on Capitol Hill on the day of certifying national election results ... or as Congressional attempts to convict a president of some crime in order to throw him out of office (even have him carried off in arrest) have become part of the political game played in Washington ... not quite yet successful in operation, but certainly gladly attempted as a now-acceptable response to electoral dynamics.  American politics and Egyptian politics are thus taking on similar qualities.

This question of the rights of those most responsible for the unity and harmony of society to protect and maintain that very unity and harmony would be a legitimate question that would arise as well in the way the Arab Spring impacted multi-ethnic Syria, another Arab society held together only through the tight grip of its central authority.

Like Iraq, Syria was a country (never a nation) carved out of the old Ottoman Empire by the "victors" of World War One, France creating Syria as one of its League of Nations mandates (as well as Lebanon) and Britain doing the same with Iraq, Trans-Jordan and Palestine – ultimately for their own French and British imperial purposes.  However, twenty-five years later, after World War Two, France sent Syria off on its own journey, always a turbulent experiment in multi-cultural politics. Military coups were constant, one military regime overthrowing yet another.  The cycle had hopefully come to an end in 1961 when Ba'athist military officers (including Hafez al-Assad) took control of Syria, in order to pull it out of the Arab Union with Nasser's Egypt that Syria had joined three years earlier.  But political turmoil would continue to rock the country with yet more military coups changing the leadership within the Ba'athist Party itself.  Finally in 1970, Assad took full control of the Ba'athist Party and thus the country and the coups came to a halt.

Slowly but steadily Assad built up his personal power over Syria (basically outlawing all political activity other than what Assad himself allowed), with Arab Sunni, Shiite, Alawi, Druze, Sufi, Salafi Muslims, Kurdish Muslims, Arab Orthodox and Catholic Christians, and tribal groups of all varieties making up the wide and often contentious diversity of the Syrian population.  During this time, Syria was also caught up in wars next door with its neighbor Israel, as well as with Muslim militants at home (principally the Muslim Brotherhood).  Thus it was that in the early 1980s an Islamist uprising against the rather secular Assad regime had to be put down harshly by the Assad military.

However, also during this time Assad attempted to preserve good working relations with America and the West, even joining the West in the 1991 Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.

In June of 2000 Hafez al-Assad died, and his son Bashar was elected the next month as Syria's new President (he ran virtually unopposed).

There was hope that with the younger Assad in power, Syria might experience a "Damascus Spring."  But troubles grew quickly over demands for deep change by reformers, mounting demands finally (the next year) countered by Assad's military.  Additionally, Syria's peace continued to be shattered by problems with jihadist militants, whose camp, in 2003, Israel felt compelled to attack with its fighter jets.  Then in 2004, serious fighting erupted between Syrian Kurds and Arabs.  And in 2007 Israeli jets bombed a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria.

But the crisis that hit Syria with the 2011 Arab Spring would turn out to be the worst event ever experienced by Assad's Syria.  At this time Syria was suffering from a long drought, and massive farm failures.  Refugees had poured into Syria to escape the Iraq war next door, straining Syria's thinning social resources and adding to the growing unemployment rate and the slowness of the Syrian economy to grow (in comparison to other Arab states).

Spurred on by the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, in mid-March Syrian protesters filled Damascus's streets demanding various political and economic reforms.  It was confusing, as some wanted simply secular reforms, but many others demanded the move of the Assad regime to a more conventional Sunni Muslim character (Assad himself was Alawi, not Sunni).  In response, Assad ordered his military to disperse the protesters and arrest the leaders.  But over the next days, and then weeks, the protest marches continued to build.  Eventually some of the protesters took up the call for Assad himself to step down from power.

But this commotion now involved all sorts of different groups coming out to protest, not only to protest against the Assad regime, but also to march in support of Assad.  Thus Syrian groups increasingly found themselves in violent opposition to each other.  In short order, Syria was falling into a full-blown civil war.

Then at this point the international community (Russia, America, Iran, Turkey and others) decided to intervene in the chaos, to bring "justice" to Syria.  Obama, for instance, in August of 2011 denounced Assad for his blocking of democracy in Syria, and declared that it was time for Assad to step down.  However, such international moral assistance was absolutely guaranteed to make the Syrian chaos worse, much worse (how was it that Obama missed this critical understanding of things?). Russia and Iran, however, took the path of support of Assad in his efforts to crush the rebellion.  At the same time, America, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia (even Israel) decided to support one or another rebel group – on the part of the Americans, principally a group that called itself the Syrian National Coalition (but actually hardly a national coalition!).

Thus international reactions varied depending on how a country viewed the matter of Assad trying to break the spirit of the rebellion: was his strong use of various weapons (chemical weapons, some major missiles and bombs) warranted or not? In August of 2012, Obama declared that Assad's actions violated all standards of humane treatment of his people.  He threatened Assad, warning him that America would react strongly (???) if he crossed a "red line" in continuing to use such means of repression, especially the chemical weapons.  But this did not slow up Assad, who continued their use, and forced Obama into an embarrassing retreat when he failed to deliver on whatever punishment he had in mind to back up his threat. 

At first Russia's President Putin agreed to step in to try to mediate between Assad and Obama (supposedly to get Assad to give up tons of his chemical weapons), but ended up instead moving closer in support of Assad (who managed to keep some of his chemical weapons anyway). 

It was at this point that America (in concert with Saudi Arabia) began secretly to ship arms, even tanks, to Assad's opponents, thus heating up the civil war.  Saudi Arabia of course did so in the hopes of strengthening the position of the Sunni Muslims hoping for a new Sunni Muslim Fundamentalist government in Syria.  Is this also what Obama wanted by undercutting the Secular government of Assad and his Ba'athists?  Had America learned nothing from the Iraq disaster?

Meanwhile, individual Sunni Muslims from around the world came to chaotic Syria to support a new Islamic Caliphate (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) that, because of all this social chaos, had succeeded in establishing itself in the heavily Sunni border region of Eastern Syria and Northwestern Iraq. This founding and rapid growth of ISIS under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (chosen by a special Shura council as Caliph in 2014) was finally proving to be a matter of great concern to Obama.  The Caliphate was attracting the following of young Sunni Muslims from around the world, with its graphically displayed (via the internet) beheadings of "infidels," the blowing up of Shi'ite mosques, and even the destruction (August 2015) of the formerly well-preserved 2000-year old Roman town of Palmyra.

The world was shocked by such behavior.  But the Muslim militants were greatly pleased to bring the infidel world to such shock, and planned more of exactly such demonstrations of Islamic piety.

At the same time, some ten million Syrians, approximately half of the Syrian population, found themselves uprooted by the violent civil war, and by the behavior of the ISIS fanatics who executed indiscriminately Arabs, Kurds, Turks – even European journalists (70 or more) trying to cover the Syrian story.

As of early 2018, some 5½ million Syrians had left the country and taken up residence in dismal refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq.  Others made their way towards Europe – Greece, Italy, France, Germany being their destination (Germany alone took in well over a million refugees, including some also from Iraq and Afghanistan).

The Syrian quest for "democracy" and "civil rights" had become a humanitarian nightmare of monumental proportions.  And America found itself unable to offer any counsel or support that could help restore peace to Syria.  Meanwhile, both Russia and Iran now found themselves well-placed strategically in the pivotal Middle East country of Syria as major Assad allies.  America was a big loser in this round of global competition.