Special to WorldTribune.com

When President Barack Obama took office, he offered a familiar foreign policy vision that had been the refrain of the Left’s criticism of his predecessor: The U.S. would withdraw from the region’s conflicts and focus on its perceived root cause by prosecuting the Israel-Palestinian peace process.

Six years later, wars are raging in Libya, Syria, Iraq and now Yemen.

“The mood here is that we really are at a crisis point that is unprecedented in recent memory,” said Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow in the Middle East policy center at the Brookings Institution, who spoke from the Qatari capital of Doha in an interview with Politico.

The small White House team of advisers who dominate U.S. foreign and security policy, often overriding Pentagon and State Dept. traditional areas of responsibility, have been caught off guard by a chain reaction of Mideast developments, Politico reported.

“Obama officials were surprised earlier this month, for instance, when the Iraqi government joined with Iranian-backed militias to mount a sudden offensive aimed at freeing the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Nor did they foresee the swift rise of the Iranian-backed rebels who toppled Yemen’s U.S.-friendly government and disrupted a crucial U.S. counterterrorism mission against Al Qaida there.”

Administration officials have one card to play in midst of the ensuing chaos: “The truth is, you can dwell on Yemen, or you can recognize that we’re one agreement away from a game-changing, legacy-setting nuclear accord on Iran that tackles what every one agrees is the biggest threat to the region.”

  What happened? White House stunned as wars rage across the Middle East, WorldTribune.com