The administration's most important success in 2011?  I'll go with the obvious: the Seal Team 6 takedown of bin Laden.  Never discount the vital national interest in visiting harsh justice upon those who mastermind mass slaughter on the American homeland -- even 10 years delayed.  The victims and their families deserved it.  The country yearned for it.  And the rest of the world needed a stark reminder that no matter how much time passes, no matter how far they run, the long arm of American retaliation will eventually reach out and touch those who opt to wage war against the United States.  Republican or Democrat in the White House, it makes no difference.  The message is the same, always the same:  Don't tread on me.

It was the president's finest hour.  His least charitable critics will demur.  In retrospect, they argue, he had to take the shot.  To have passed it up would have subjected him to intense criticism and ridicule.  A political catastrophe that would have sunk his presidency. 

Perhaps.  And yet.  The risks of giving the "go" order were substantial too.  The odds that bin Laden was not actually in the compound may have been as high as 50 percent. Several of the president's most senior advisors argued against the operation.  The potential geopolitical ramifications of a stealth raid deep inside Pakistan, the world's fastest growing nuclear weapons state and a breeding ground for Islamic extremism, weighed heavy.  As did the political and strategic costs of failure.  Images of the carnage at Desert One in Iran, and of Mogadishu's Black Hawk Down, could not but have haunted Obama's thoughts.  And still he went.  A quintessential presidential decision.  Lonely.  Courageous.  Necessary.  Good on him.

The bin Laden hit was part of a larger pattern of counter-terrorism successes that rightly should inure to the administration's credit.  Add to it the president's call to serve as judge, jury and executioner of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki on a remote highway in northern Yemen -- constitutional niceties and the qualms of Obama's liberal base be damned.  And more generally, the ten-fold escalation in drone strikes against al Qaeda targets in Pakistan that unquestionably have wreaked havoc on the organization's capabilities and morale.  Yes, the threat we face from bin Laden's evil spawn remains.  But the president has combatted it well, with a steeliness of spine, a quotient of ice in the veins, that deserves respect and appreciation.  His administration has kept the nation safe from further terrorist attack, despite the best efforts of a vicious and implacable foe.

As for the most important thing the administration got wrong in 2011?  Perhaps too predictably, I'll venture Iraq.  I don't believe the president ever really had the intention of maintaining a significant American military presence there.  Deep in his bones, he long ago resolved that the war was a huge blunder, a blot on America's moral character and a dangerous distraction from the real threats and challenges facing the nation. No amount of progress on the ground could convince him otherwise, or wash clean the stain of the war's original sin in his eyes.  Obama's mission from the get-go was to put Iraq into the nation's rear-view mirror, a goal from which he never really wavered.  The trick was to do it in a way that didn't immediately sacrifice all the hard-fought gains of Bush's surge, to create the prospect of a "decent interval" that would limit the potential for political blowback.

To placate those -- especially among the military's top brass -- who saw the strategic sense in consolidating a long-term partnership, the president authorized, albeit belatedly, negotiations to extend the U.S. troop presence.  But his heart was never in it.  As had been the case from the beginning of his term when it came to les affaires d'Irak, the president's involvement in the effort to get to "yes" was notable only for its absence. Anyone who'd ever spent any time working Iraq policy post-2003 could have told you from the start: A negotiation structured to limit the president's personal engagement in the muck and the mire of shepherding a deal through was in fact a negotiation structured to fail. And so it did.

Iraqi leaders certainly sniffed out long ago that Obama viewed them as the bastard step-children of Bush's failed policies, whom he hoped to kick to the curb at the first available opportunity.  They knew he had no intention of ever taking any real risks for them.  Predictably enough, when it came to the thorny issue of immunity for U.S. troops, they weren't about to take any for him either. 

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The floodgates of Arab diplomatic restraint on Syria have finally been breached. In the past few days, both the Gulf Cooperation Council and Arab League issued their first official statements on the situation, expressing alarm at the Syrian government's excessive use of force and calling for an immediate end to violence. Even more important, the Gulf's most influential leader, Saudi Arabia's plainspoken King Abdullah, followed up with his own personal blast at the Assad regime, declaring that "What is happening in Syria is not acceptable to Saudi Arabia" and calling for a stop to "the killing machine." For good measure, the King recalled his ambassador from Damascus, a step immediately echoed by Kuwait and Bahrain. (Fellow GCC member, Qatar, actually closed its embassy last month).

True, none of the various statements called on Assad to step down. All urged the regime to implement meaningful reforms immediately. But don't be fooled. For the extraordinarily cautious Abdullah to move out against Assad so aggressively -- after almost five months of sitting idly on the sidelines -- is a sure sign that he's betting the Syrian tyrant's days are numbered.

The final straw for the Saudis appeared to be Assad's Ramadan Rampage, during which Syrian troops have laid waste to the cities of Hama and Deir az-Zour. Up to 300 civilians may have been slaughtered, making it by far the deadliest week of the five month old uprising, where the death toll now stands in excess of 2,000 souls. And no doubt most distressing of all for the Saudi monarch is the fact that the vast majority of the victims are fellow Sunnis.

Weeks ago, a senior Saudi official told me that, from the beginning of the Syrian upheaval, the King has believed that regime change would be highly beneficial to Saudi interests, particularly vis a vis the Iranian threat. "The King knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria."

When pressed on why, then, the Saudis' response to the crisis had been so passive, my interlocutor essentially pinned the blame on uncertainty over U.S. policy. Risk-averse under the best of circumstances, the Saudis, he said, were especially loathe to take on the Iranian-Syrian axis on such an existential issue absent assurances of America's determination to see Assad gone. At least at that point in early July, the Saudis still claimed to "have no idea what outcome Obama really wants in Syria and what his strategy is to achieve it." 

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Pity poor Lebanon. Earlier this month, the murderous regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad imposed a government in Beirut dominated by the terrorist group, Hezbollah -- which, as it happens, we were reminded just this morning, likely carried out the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. Before our very eyes, the Lebanon of not-so-distant memory -- pluralist, free-wheeling, open to the West and the values of liberalism -- is being snuffed out by U.S. enemies. And by all appearances, no one can really be bothered, including, sadly enough, the Obama administration.

Six months ago, the pro-Western Saad Hariri (Rafiq's son) walked into an Oval Office meeting with President Obama as Lebanon's prime minister. He walked out a mere caretaker. Syria and Hezbollah chose precisely that moment to collapse his government. The immediate cause was Hariri's refusal to comply with the demand that he terminate his government's support for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) -- whose first indictments, handed down today, finger Hezbollah for carrying out the horrific bombing that killed his legendary father.

But the gambit to take down Saad was also widely understood to have a more strategic purpose, a humiliating slap at Obama and the United States. The message could not have been clearer: Such will be the fate of the United States' friends who dare defy the ascendant Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis. Obama, and Washington, can do nothing to protect you.

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One of the more curious aspects of President Obama's May 19 Middle East speech was his decision to devote so much attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The president's main theme, of course, was supposed to be the Middle East upheavals of 2011 and the United States' support for those seeking liberty after decades of tyranny. Indeed, in his speech, the president properly highlighted one of the region's great unspoken truths: that for years on end, autocrats of every stripe have cynically manipulated the conflict with Israel to divert their people's grievances outward. When provided half a chance to give voice to what's really on their minds, the Arab masses since last December have repeatedly demonstrated that their thoughts turn not so much to far away Palestine, but to their own mistreatment and degradation at the hands of corrupt, unaccountable despots. Contrary to the myth indulged by generations of Western diplomats, the real driving force of Middle East politics has proven not to be Israel's dispute with the Palestinians, but a freedom deficit that has left hundreds of millions of Arabs living lives of quiet desperation under the thumb of their own oppressive dictators.

Was this really the time, then, for the president to re-focus global attention on the imperative of resolving the Palestinian issue? To commit, in effect, the very transgression that he had just minutes before rightly criticized Arab leaders for, i.e., diverting attention from what really ails the Middle East -- the absence of humane, representative governance that has as its first priority addressing the legitimate needs of its own citizenry -- to the intensely emotional, but profoundly intractable issue of Palestine?

For all the president's laudable comments on the region's "winds of change," what should have been the primary message of his speech was quite predictably overwhelmed by the deluge of attention given to his revived foray into peacemaking. "Obama Seeks End to the Stalemate on Mideast Talks," trumpeted the New York Times. "Obama urges Israel to make push for peace," proclaimed the Washington Post. Talk about stepping on your own headline. A vital region of the world is convulsed by a process of historic transformation that carries both great promise as well as great danger for U.S. interests. Yet in the wake of a major presidential address on the issue, all we are left talking about is a new U.S. position to help solve a six decade-old conflict whose prospects for near-term resolution are effectively nil?

Of course, quite apart from serving as a major distraction from the most pressing threats and opportunities that currently confront the United States in the Middle East, the president's peace process play made little sense even on its own terms. Thanks in large part to the ham-handed diplomacy of Obama's first two years in office, peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians are (as noted above) largely frozen. There was no real prospect that anything the president said in his May 19 speech was likely to launch the process on a more virtuous path.

Quite the contrary. Coming on the eve of a visit by Israel's prime minister, without any advance warning or coordination between the two allies, the president's "1967 lines" gambit guaranteed yet another embarrassing contretemps and breach of trust with the United States' closest and most powerful Middle Eastern friend. Making matters worse was that the substantive tilt in favor of the Palestinian position came in the context of a brazen drive by the Palestinian Authority to defy U.S. interests -- first by foregoing direct negotiations with Israel in favor of a dangerous course of unilateralism at the United Nations; and second, by striking a unity deal with an unreconstructed Hamas. On top of it all came the unfortunate spectacle of Prime Minister Netanyahu having to dress down the President of the United States in the Oval Office, and Obama's efforts to "clarify" what his peace initiative really meant just days later in front of a pro-Israel audience. The cumulative effect was to reinforce all of the worst stereotypes of Obama that have unfortunately metastasized across the Middle East: a weak, unreliable, and incompetent leader whose first instinct is invariably to punish traditional American allies while rewarding those bent on undermining U.S. interests.

And all for what? To convince Europe to help derail the bid for U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood in September? Well, maybe. But, again, one has to ask: Why not do some advance coordination with Israel on what it would take to achieve this legitimate (and shared) strategic purpose? More importantly, why make the shift on "1967 lines" and endure all the subsequent costs without first securing guarantees that the Europeans will in fact deliver? Here, once more, the president simply plays to the most harmful caricature of himself, as a leader who actually believes that his august pronouncements are somehow a substitute for serious policy; a worrisome mix of arrogance and naiveté who is left playing the sucker that friends can never rely on to protect their backs and enemies increasingly believe can be challenged at little or no cost.

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As many others have lamented, the administration's fecklessness on Syria is rapidly turning into a national disgrace. It represents a moral and strategic failing of major proportions. If sustained, it threatens to rival the president's tragic decision in 2009 to stand by mutely as millions of Iranians rallied to drive a stake through the heart of a regime whose quest for nuclear weapons poses perhaps the greatest current danger to vital U.S. interests.

Since Syria's uprising began two months ago, the best estimate is that the Assad regime has slaughtered close to a thousand of its own citizens -- though the actual toll may well be much higher. Entire towns have been subjected to full-blown siege by Assad's crack military units. Mass arrests and torture of innocents, including children, is in full swing. The savagery on display certainly exceeds anything witnessed in Egypt during the 18-day revolt that brought down Hosni Mubarak. Not even Qaddafi was able to inflict this level of human suffering before NATO warplanes felt compelled to stay his bloody hand.

But whereas Obama moved with relative dispatch to condemn Egypt's Pharaoh and Libya's Mad Hatter to history's dustbin (at least rhetorically), in the case of Assad -- as with Iran in 2009 -- the president and his team have gone mostly silent, timid, and reactive. When the brutality spikes sufficiently every Friday, and the administration is embarrassed into issuing a statement of disapproval, it invariably has been coupled with some pathetic blather that Assad still has time to implement reforms -- which the good ophthalmologist's thugs, quite predictably, have interpreted as a sign of profound U.S. unseriousness and a green light to continue their killing spree a bit longer.

This seeming ambivalence on the part of the administration is all the more puzzling when -- on top of the compelling moral calculus -- one also considers the potential strategic benefits to be had by the removal of the Assad family's 4-decade long criminal enterprise in anti-U.S. tyranny. The bill of indictment is too lengthy to review in its entirety. It includes a long alliance with the Soviet Union; master-minding the destruction of Lebanon; being a charter-member of the State Department's rogues gallery of terror-sponsoring states; an ever-deepening strategic relationship with Iran's Islamic Republic and its proxies in Hezbollah; playing host to the full panoply of Palestinian terror groups; perpetrating one of history's most egregious violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty through the covert construction, with North Korean assistance, of the plutonium-producing nuclear reactor at Al Kibar; and actively supporting the multi-year effort by Sunni insurgents, Saddamists, and al Qaeda jihadists to torpedo the U.S. effort to mid-wife representative democracy in Iraq. 

Again, the contrast with Egypt's Mubarak and Libya's Qaddafi is striking. The former was a longstanding ally, a linchpin for 30 years of the Middle East's pax-Americana whose disappearance, at least in the short term, could arguably turn out to be a net detriment to U.S. policy. The latter, though a historic foe responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American innocents, had in recent years bowed to U.S. demands to dismantle his nuclear weapons program and get out of the terrorism business, thereby relegating Libya to the margins of U.S. strategic concerns. The Assad family, by contrast, pere and fils alike, have for the better part of two generations (and seven U.S. presidencies) posed a clear and present danger to Middle East peace and security, and the advancement of U.S. interests. Next to regime change in Iran itself, it's hard to think of a more devastating blow that could be struck against the Islamic Republic than the collapse of its primary partner in crime, the dictatorship in Damascus, at the hands of a popular uprising. Yet it is here, with respect to Syria, that Obama balks.

At least initially, the president's wooly-headedness could be chalked up to his faux-realist determination to "engage" Assad. The goal, articulated from the start of his presidency, was to enlist Syria in a revitalized peace process with Israel and/or to crack the Iranian-Syrian axis by persuading Assad that his true interests lay not in playing wing-man to the expansionist theocrats in Tehran, but prospering under the patronage of a U.S. superpower willing to ply Syria with economic assistance, mediate an end to its conflict with Israel, and help recover the Golan Heights,

This was, of course, a huge conceit -- Obama playing Kissinger, but even better -- one that more or less blindly disregarded the entire sorry history of the United States' unsatisfying dealings with Baathist Syria under the tutelage of the Assad clan and their minority, Alawite regime. To be fair to Obama, it was a conceit that more than one -- indeed, most -- of his predecessors had similarly indulged, and with similarly disappointing results. Forever condemned to rule with a nagging legitimacy deficit, the Assads, lo and behold, simply refused to reprise the role played by Sadat when he switched strategic allegiances from the "resistance" camp to the peace camp. Despite U.S. protestations to the contrary, Bashar, like his father before him, was of the stubborn conviction that he actually understood better than Washington the formula for ensuring the survival of the family business -- and it most assuredly did not include permanently ending the conflict with Israel and addressing the real political, economic, and social needs of Syria's beleaguered citizenry. Not even Barack Obama's arrival on the world stage, which his most delusional acolytes promised would transform the very nature of international politics, proved capable of changing the cruel and sordid reality that was the Assad dictatorship and the type of Middle East it stood for. 

As proved tragically the case with Iran in 2009, Obama's insistence on sticking to his engagement strategy with Syria long past its sell-by date was also driven by an unfortunate brew of ideology and egotism. Obama seemed determined to show himself, evidence to the contrary be damned, the un-Bush -- sophisticated, nuanced, worldly-wise to the gray areas of world affairs inhabited by true statesmen like the one he fancied himself to be, in contrast to the boorish, black-and-white cowboy-ism of his dim-witted predecessor. Never mind that, truth be told, Bush himself spent the first few years of his administration on the fool's errand of reaching out to Assad the Younger in hopes of testing his alleged reformist instincts. And never mind that the West's most important breakthroughs with the Assad dynasty -- from Kissinger's disengagement agreement to Syria's participation in the Madrid peace process; from the eviction of PKK terrorist Abdullah Ocalan to the 2005 withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon -- all could be sourced to moments when the regime felt itself most profoundly weakened and under threat, its very survival possibly in play.

With all the carnage of the past two months, one hopes that the president and his advisors prove capable of realizing that the chance of converting Assad into a viable strategic partner, if it ever existed, has long since passed. Reportedly, that moment of illumination did eventually come in the case of Iran, though only belatedly -- long after the Green Movement had been effectively crushed and an historic opportunity to advance U.S. interests had passed, perhaps indefinitely. It would be tragic, indeed, if a similar mistake was made in the case of Syria. 

Instead, the administration needs quickly to move off the sidelines, declare its full-fledged support for the aspirations of the Syrian people, and develop a serious strategy to expedite the collapse of Assad's rule and a peaceful transition to a new, more democratic order. Barring such an effort, we seem likely on a course that will lead to one of two highly undesirable outcomes: either the total suppression of the uprising (most likely), or a sectarian-based civil war that pits the largely Sunni forces of the regular army against the much smaller, but heavily-armed Alawite shock troops and security services whose very raison d'etre is ensuring the regime's survival. 

The key to a soft landing will be fracturing the regime's elite, particularly by convincing prominent figures in the Alawite community, especially within the security services, that their interests lie not in continuing to support Assad and his family in the commission of their crimes against the Syrian people, but in abandoning them and throwing their weight behind the popular movement for peaceful change. Such an effort would require assembling a diplomatic coalition of states most capable of influencing Syrian events, including the United States, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and perhaps Egypt. The office of the United Nations' Secretary General might come in handy as well, particularly in the form of its shrewd and energetic envoy, Terje Larsen, the Norwegian diplomat who proved such a useful ally in helping coerce Syrian troops out of Lebanon in 2005.

The network of contacts, political, military, and intelligence, that these states possess across the Syrian elite would need to be discretely tapped. Inducements -- financial, political, and otherwise -- would need to be offered. Assurances -- both in terms of a future role in the post-Assad order and security protections for the broader Alawite community as well as other minorities -- would need to be provided. Punishments in the form of economic sanctions, travel bans, and international prosecutions would need to be threatened and, as necessary, imposed.

Such commitments at the international level would ideally be matched by pledges from some representative group of Syrians that could credibly claim to speak in the name of the protest movement. That likely means supporting an opposition conference somewhere in Europe or the Middle East. While such an event would unavoidably be dominated by Syrians in exile, provision could be made to solicit through every means possible the views and preferences of those still inside. A visionary, inclusive platform for Syria's democratic future could be developed, one that reaches out to all Syria's communities as well as members of the current regime in a spirit of national reconciliation. A transitional leadership council might be elected -- with half its seats reserved for insiders who will be appointed once Assad is gone, if not before -- whose primary task would be working with the United Nations to draft a provisional constitution and organize free and fair elections. To underscore their selfless commitment to the nation, members of the transitional council might pledge not to stand in the first post-Assad elections.

Implementing such a strategy would no doubt be enormously challenging, requiring a major commitment of diplomatic resources, including the sustained involvement of the president himself. But the fact that it is hard and offers no guarantee of success cannot become an excuse for policymakers to abdicate their moral and strategic responsibilities to act on behalf of U.S. vital interests and core values. The bitter fact is that the administration's current non-policy almost certainly has us on a path that ends in national shame for the United States, national disaster for Syria, and a festering sore of instability and violence in the heart of a region vital to U.S. interests. We can, we must, try to do better.

As many others have lamented, the administration's fecklessness on Syria is rapidly turning into a national disgrace. It represents a moral and strategic failing of major proportions. If sustained, it threatens to rival the president's tragic decision in 2009 to stand by mutely as millions of Iranians rallied to drive a stake through the heart of a regime whose quest for nuclear weapons poses perhaps the greatest current danger to vital U.S. interests.

Since Syria's uprising began two months ago, the best estimate is that the Assad regime has slaughtered close to a thousand of its own citizens -- though the actual toll may well be much higher. Entire towns have been subjected to full-blown siege by Assad's crack military units. Mass arrests and torture of innocents, including children, is in full swing. The savagery on display certainly exceeds anything witnessed in Egypt during the 18-day revolt that brought down Hosni Mubarak. Not even Muammar al-Qaddafi was able to inflict this level of human suffering before NATO warplanes felt compelled to stay his bloody hand.

But whereas Obama moved with relative dispatch to condemn Egypt's Pharaoh and Libya's Mad Hatter to history's dustbin (at least rhetorically), in the case of Assad -- as with Iran in 2009 -- the president and his team have gone mostly silent, timid, and reactive. When the brutality spikes sufficiently every Friday, and the administration is embarrassed into issuing a statement of disapproval, it invariably has been coupled with some pathetic blather that Assad still has time to implement reforms -- which the good ophthalmologist's thugs, quite predictably, have interpreted as a sign of profound U.S. unseriousness and a green light to continue their killing spree a bit longer.

This seeming ambivalence on the part of the administration is all the more puzzling when -- on top of the compelling moral calculus -- one also considers the potential strategic benefits to be had by the removal of the Assad family's 4-decade long criminal enterprise in anti-U.S. tyranny. The bill of indictment is too lengthy to review in its entirety. It includes a long alliance with the Soviet Union; master-minding the destruction of Lebanon; being a charter-member of the State Department's rogues gallery of terror-sponsoring states; an ever-deepening strategic relationship with Iran's Islamic Republic and its proxies in Hezbollah; playing host to the full panoply of Palestinian terror groups; perpetrating one of history's most egregious violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty through the covert construction, with North Korean assistance, of the plutonium-producing nuclear reactor at Al Kibar; and actively supporting the multi-year effort by Sunni insurgents, Saddamists, and al Qaeda jihadists to torpedo the U.S. effort to mid-wife representative democracy in Iraq. 

Again, the contrast with Egypt's Mubarak and Libya's Qaddafi is striking. The former was a longstanding ally, a linchpin for 30 years of the Middle East's pax-Americana whose disappearance, at least in the short term, could arguably turn out to be a net detriment to U.S. policy. The latter, though a historic foe responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American innocents, had in recent years bowed to U.S. demands to dismantle his nuclear weapons program and get out of the terrorism business, thereby relegating Libya to the margins of U.S. strategic concerns. The Assad family, by contrast, pere and fils alike, have for the better part of two generations (and seven U.S. presidencies) posed a clear and present danger to Middle East peace and security, and the advancement of U.S. interests. Next to regime change in Iran itself, it's hard to think of a more devastating blow that could be struck against the Islamic Republic than the collapse of its primary partner in crime, the dictatorship in Damascus, at the hands of a popular uprising. Yet it is here, with respect to Syria, that Obama balks.

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As my friend Simon Henderson has been chronicling, "Bandar is back." Sidelined in recent years by some combination of illness and palace intrigue, Saudi Arabia's legendary former ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, is once again a major presence on the world stage. The Obama administration would be wise to take note. Working in tandem with the United States, Bandar's over-sized talents could prove a huge asset in efforts to shape the Middle East Revolts of 2011 in a direction that serves U.S. interests. Put to other uses, however, those same skills could lead to results that Washington may find, well, much less agreeable.

The reason that Bandar has been urgently called back into service is not hard to fathom. While many in the West have seen the promise of democracy and freedom in the political turmoil roiling Arab lands, the Saudis see little but disaster. They view everything through a single prism: their existential struggle with a menacing Iran that is hell-bent on collapsing the Middle East's existing order, unseating the House of Saud, and asserting a controlling influence over Islam's holiest sites in Mecca and Medina. For the Kingdom, there really is only one yardstick by which to measure emerging developments: Are they a net plus or minus for the Persian theocracy across the Gulf that seeks to assert its hegemony throughout the region?

From that vantage, the scorecard has not been good. The regime of Hosni Mubarak -- longtime Saudi ally; pillar of regional stability; stalwart opponent of the mullahs -- is gone. Yemen, on the Kingdom's southern border, teeters on the brink of anarchy. Most threatening of all, just miles off the Saudi coast, in tiny Bahrain -- a virtual protectorate of the Kingdom and the gateway to its oil-rich eastern province -- the Sunni al-Khalifa monarchy was pushed to the brink by Shiite protesters who, cheered on by Iran, dabbled dangerously with the idea of regime change. Brazenly challenged to defend one of their clearest redlines, the Saudis responded predictably, with a large-scale military intervention that underwrote a brutal crackdown to snuff out the escalating crisis. 

Exacerbating everything for Riyadh has been its overarching loss of confidence in the reliability of American power. Against all Saudi advice, the Obama administration actively worked to help engineer Mubarak's ouster. In Bahrain, senior U.S. officials were publicly pressing the ruling family to make bolder concessions to the protesters -- literally hours before Saudi tanks began to roll. More recently, a tardy and hesitant exercise of U.S. military might has failed to dislodge Libya's Colonel Qaddafi, the man who just a few years ago contracted the assassination of Saudi King Abdullah. And in stark contrast to Washington's very public effort to push aside its longstanding Egyptian ally -- "yesterday," to quote Robert Gibbs -- Team Obama has kept an embarrassingly low profile in the face of sustained protests and bloodshed in anti-American Syria, a regime that proudly serves as Iran's closest ally in the Arab world.

Facing a situation where the region appears to be spiraling out of control, and its most important outside partner veers between weakness, incompetence, and reckless naivete, the House of Saud has circled the wagons, brought all hands on deck, called in the A Team -- choose your metaphor. But it all leads back to Bandar -- one of the most dynamic, creative, and aggressive statesmen of the past 30 years -- being summoned out of diplomatic purgatory to help the Kingdom cope with what it sees as an unprecedented crisis. Make no mistake, the Saudis now feel themselves very much at war with Iran, albeit by other means, and the stakes as viewed from Riyadh are nothing less than the future of the Arab Middle East and the survival of the House of Saud. And the force of nature that is Bandar bin Sultan has clearly been placed at the forefront of the Kingdom's battle plan. 

I've lost count of how many times people have asked me in recent years, "Whatever happened to Bandar?" Now he's suddenly everywhere. Earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Gates visited Riyadh to see King Abdullah. Bandar was there. Days later, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon followed to deliver a message to Abdullah from President Obama. Again, Bandar was prominently featured in the photo-op. More interestingly -- and undoubtedly more worrisome -- at the end of March, in the wake of the Saudi intervention in Bahrain, Bandar was dispatched to Pakistan, China and India to rally support for the Kingdom's hard line approach to the region's unrest.

Bandar's formidable skills in the service of a Saudi Arabia that feels itself increasingly cornered and unable to rely on U.S. protection is a formula for trouble -- made even worse when the likes of Pakistan and China are thrown into the mix. No one should forget that, in the late 1980s, it was Bandar who secretly brokered the delivery of Chinese medium-range missiles to the Kingdom, totally surprising Washington and nearly triggering a major crisis with Israel. The danger today, of course, is that the Saudis feel sufficiently threatened and alone to engage in similar acts of self-help. Would they seek to modernize their ballistic missile force? Even worse, would the Kingdom go shopping for nuclear weapons or, at a minimum, invite Pakistan to deploy part of its nuclear arsenal to the Kingdom? Analysts have long speculated that Saudi money financed the Pakistani nuclear weapons program in exchange for a promise that when it became necessary, its fruits would be put at Riyadh's disposal. As the Middle East convulses and Iran relentlessly inches closer to achieving a nuclear weapons capability, has that time finally arrived?

Even short of these extreme scenarios, other troubling possibilities exist. During his trip to Pakistan, Bandar reportedly discussed contingencies under which thousands of additional Pakistani security forces might be dispatched to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia for the purpose of, in effect, cracking Shiite heads. Iran condemned the news, ratcheting up tensions further and increasing the risk that the situation could erupt into a full-blown Sunni-Shiite war. Additionally, no one can discount the danger that, with its back against the wall, the Kingdom might not once again fire up the old Sunni jihadist network and point it in the general direction of Shiite Iran -- leaving the rest of the world to deal with the nasty, unintended consequences of well-financed takfirists run amok.

To minimize the risk that any of these dangers actually comes to pass, the Obama administration would be well advised to focus like a laser beam on repairing its breach of trust with Riyadh. The visits of Gates and Donilon to the Kingdom clearly had that intent and, by most accounts, succeeded in stemming the hemorrhaging in the relationship. But the effort will need to be sustained.

The administration would also be smart to re-establish a very strong line of communication to Bandar now that he's again playing a major role in Saudi policy. Bandar working without reference to U.S. interests is clearly cause for concern. But Bandar working as a partner with Washington against a common Iranian enemy is a major strategic asset. Drawing on Saudi resources and prestige, Bandar's ingenuity and bent for bold action could be put to excellent use across the region in ways that reinforce U.S. policy and interests: through economic and political measures that weaken the Iranian mullahs; undermine the Assad regime; support a successful transition in Egypt; facilitate Qaddafi's departure; reintegrate Iraq into the Arab fold; and encourage a negotiated solution in Yemen. Even in Bahrain, if anyone in the Saudi hierarchy is going to understand over time that a stable solution must eventually go beyond repression to include a renewed effort at real reform, it is likely to be Bandar.

In April 2002, then-Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia arrived in Texas for a meeting with President Bush. It was a tense time in U.S.-Saudi relations. The Crown Prince was said to be deeply disturbed by raging Israeli-Palestinian violence, and angered by President Bush's failure to heed his pleas to take aggressive action to stop it. The claim was heard that American passivity in the face of Israeli "aggression" was allegedly empowering Iran and rendering the Saudi alliance with Washington increasingly untenable.

The day before the summit, a front-page story appeared in the New York Times declaring that "Saudi to Warn Bush Over Israel Policy." In the article, an unnamed senior Saudi official offered this inflammatory threat:"

 It is a mistake to think that our people will not do what is necessary to survive, and if that means we move to the right of bin Laden, so be it; to the left of Qaddafi, so be it; or fly to Baghdad and embrace Saddam like a brother, so be it. It's damned lonely in our part of the world, and we can no longer defend our relationship to our people.

Everyone immediately knew that the quote belonged to the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar. Was it bombastic? Yes. Enraging? Certainly. But did it also reflect at least part of the Hobbesian reality faced by American foreign policy, however distasteful? Unfortunately, it did. So long as that remains the case, the United States would be wise to do its best not to leave Saudi Arabia, or Prince Bandar, feeling lonely. Putting the princes's 2002 proposition to the test is a risk that no one should be eager to run.   

A word about Lebanon. Given everything else happening in the Middle East, it's easy to lose track of that country's plight. The last time most Americans tuned in back in January, Hezbollah -- backed by Syria and Iran -- had successfully engineered a bloodless coup, using threats of violence and intimidation to collapse the democratically-elected government of Saad Hariri and nominate its own candidate for prime minister. The fact that they chose to do so at precisely the moment that the pro-Western Hariri was being hosted in the Oval Office by President Obama only underscored the extent to which the maneuver was not simply an assault on Lebanon's democracy and independence, but a calculated effort to undermine U.S. interests and power in the Levant. For many, it looked to be the final nail in the coffin of Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, the popular uprising in 2005 that ended three decades of Syrian military occupation and brought Hariri's March 14th coalition to power. Lebanon, it appeared, had truly gone dark.

But not so fast. Bloodied and bruised, March 14th is not yet cowed. In mid-February, on the sixth anniversary of the bombing that killed his legendary father, Hariri strongly denounced Hezbollah's coup and declared that March 14th would re-constitute itself as a full-fledged opposition to the Iranian/Syrian/Hezbollah project in Lebanon. He vowed to fight their effort to derail the international tribunal investigating his father's murder, which is widely expected to unveil indictments in the near future fingering Hezbollah's central role in the conspiracy. Even more daringly, Hariri recently doubled down when he announced that the disarmament of Hezbollah would be resurrected as the centerpiece of March 14th's political program to save Lebanon's democracy, sovereignty, and independence. True to his word, March 14th yesterday released "Independence 2011," a new political manifesto aimed at securing Lebanon's freedom by bringing Hezbollah's arms under state control and bringing Hariri-père's killers to justice.

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