Category Archives: Barack Obama

Obama more interested in reading text messages than hearing about Syria

A New York Times report which chronicles President Obama’s handling, or to be more exact, hands-off approach to the Syria crisis makes repeated references to his “body language” which appears to have been more expressive than his utterances: “he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.”

In addition, Obama’s position on Syria was reportedly being expressed by his chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, who seems to have concluded that the indefinite continuation of the war would serve American interests.

[A] new American intelligence assessment at the beginning of 2013 revived the discussions about whether to give arms to the rebels.

In a reversal from what spy agencies had been telling administration officials for more than a year, the new assessment concluded that Mr. Assad’s government was in no danger of collapsing, and that Syrian troops were gaining the upper hand in the civil war. The pace of Syrian Army defections had slowed, and Iranian munitions shipments had replenished the stocks of army units that had once complained of shortages in arms and ammunition.

The opposite was true for the rebels, who were running out of ammunition and supplies. Morale was low, American spy agencies concluded, and Qaeda-linked groups like the Nusra Front were becoming increasingly dominant in the rebellion.

Besides the Syrian government’s gains, there was mounting evidence that Mr. Assad’s troops had repeatedly used chemical weapons against civilians.

Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.

In private conversations with aides, Mr. Obama described Syria as one of those hellish problems every president faces, where the risks are endless and all the options are bad. Those views would then be reflected in larger groups by Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Mr. McDonough.

“You could read the president’s position through Tom and Denis,” one former senior White House official said.

Slowly, however, Mr. Obama’s position began to change, in no small part because of intense lobbying by foreign officials. During a three-day trip to the Middle East in March, Mr. Obama met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who warned him that the Assad government’s chemical weapons could fall into the hands of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The pressure was even more intense the next day in Jordan, where Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon and Mr. Kerry had a late-night dinner with King Abdullah II. Jordan was straining under the weight of more than 100,000 Syrian refugees, and the king urged Mr. Obama to take a more active role in trying to end the war.

Jordanian officials were even offering to allow the C.I.A. to use the country as a base for drone strikes in Syria — offers that the Obama administration repeatedly declined.

By April, senior officials said, one of the major skeptics, Mr. Donilon, had shifted in favor of arming the rebels. Another strong opponent in the fall, Ms. Rice, had also shifted her position, partly because of the alarming intelligence about the state of the rebellion.

Mr. McDonough, who had perhaps the closest ties to Mr. Obama, remained skeptical. He questioned how much it was in America’s interest to tamp down the violence in Syria. Accompanying a group of senior lawmakers on a day trip to the Guantánamo Bay naval base in early June, Mr. McDonough argued that the status quo in Syria could keep Iran pinned down for years. In later discussions, he also suggested that a fight in Syria between Hezbollah and Al Qaeda would work to America’s advantage, according to Congressional officials. [Continue reading…]

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The psychological parallels between Barack Obama and Richard Nixon

Robert W Merry writes: In 1972, Duke University professor James David Barber brought out a book that immediately was heralded as a seminal study of presidential character. Titled The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, the book looked at qualities of temperament and personality in assessing how the country’s chief executives approached the presidency—and how that in turn contributed to their success or failure in the office.

Although there were flaws in Barber’s approach, particularly in his efforts to typecast the personalities of various presidents, it does indeed lay before us an interesting and worthy matrix for assessing how various presidents approach the job and the ultimate quality of their leadership. So let’s apply the Barber matrix to the presidential incumbent, Barack Obama.

Barber, who died in 2004, assessed presidents based on two indices: first, whether they were “positive” or “negative”; and, second, whether they were “active” or “passive.” The first index—the positive/negative one—assesses how presidents regarded themselves in relation to the challenges of the office; so, for example, did they embrace the job with a joyful optimism or regard it as a necessary martyrdom they must sustain in order to prove their own self-worth? The second index—active vs. passive—measures their degree of wanting to accomplish big things or retreat into a reactive governing mode.

These two indices produce four categories of presidents, to wit:

Active-Positive: These are presidents with big national ambitions who are self-confident, flexible, optimistic, joyful in the exercise of power, possessing a certain philosophical detachment toward what they regard as a great game.

Active-Negative: These are compulsive people with low self-esteem, seekers of power as a means of self-actualization, given to rigidity and pessimism, driven, sometimes overly aggressive. But they harbor big dreams for bringing about accomplishments of large historical dimension.

Passive-Positive: These are compliant presidents who react to events rather than initiating them. They want to be loved and are thus ingratiating—and easily manipulated. They are “superficially optimistic” and harbor generally modest ambitions for their presidential years. But they are healthy in both ego and self-esteem.

Passive-Negative: These are withdrawn people with low self-esteem and little zest for the give-and-take of politics and the glad-handing requirements of the game. They avoid conflict and take no joy in the uses of power. They tend to get themselves boxed up through a preoccupation with principles, rules and procedures. [Continue reading…]

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Malala Yousafzai meets President Obama, asks him to stop drone attacks

Gawker: Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani woman who was shot in the head by the Taliban for believing that women have a right to education, met with President Obama on Friday, thanking him for his support of education and asking him to stop drone strikes in Pakistan.

Passed over for a Nobel Peace Prize on Friday morning, Yousafzai met with the President, the First Lady, and their 15-year-old daughter, Malia, on Friday afternoon. While thanking the President for his support of education and assistance to Syrian refugees, Yousafzai pressed the President on the issue of drone strikes, a counterterrorism method he supports.

“I thanked President Obama for the United States’ work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees,” Yousafzai said in a statement after the meeting. “I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact.”

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How Obama’s effort to get re-elected may have prolonged the war in Syria

Michael Hirsh reports: Despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s frenetic efforts, preparations for the “Geneva II” peace conference on Syria’s civil war are already foundering. The rebel movement has become increasingly radicalized against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and more fractured. A newly confident Assad, meanwhile, has somewhat relegitimized himself as a signatory to a new chemical-weapons ban negotiated by the United States and Russia under U.N. auspices, which his government is tasked with implementing over the next year. Defying global opprobrium over his use of sarin gas, Assad has also positioned himself in a series of high-profile TV interviews as a preferable alternative to Islamist rebels who want to create a fundamentalist state.

All of which should prompt a reexamination of the first Geneva conference in the summer of 2012, on which Kerry’s new push for peace is based. According to some officials involved, perhaps the greatest tragedy of Syria is that, some 80,000 lives ago, President Obama might have had within his grasp a workable plan to end the violence, one that is far less possible now. But amid the politics of the 2012 presidential election—when GOP nominee Mitt Romney regularly accused Obama of being “soft”—the administration did little to make it work and simply took a hard line against Assad, angering the special U.N. Syria envoy, Kofi Annan, and prompting the former U.N. secretary-general to quit, according to several officials involved.

Former members of Annan’s negotiating team say that after then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on June 30, 2012, jointly signed a communique drafted by Annan, which called for a political “transition” in Syria, there was as much momentum for a deal then as Kerry achieved a year later on chemical weapons. Afterward, Annan flew from Geneva to Moscow and gained what he believed to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s consent to begin to quietly push Assad out. But suddenly both the U.S. and Britain issued public calls for Assad’s ouster, and Annan felt blindsided. Immediately afterward, against his advice, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice offered up a “Chapter 7” resolution opening the door to force against Assad, which Annan felt was premature.

Annan resigned a month later. At the time, the soft-spoken Ghanaian diplomat was cagey about his reasons, appearing to blame all sides. “I did not receive all the support that the cause deserved,” Annan told reporters in Geneva. He also criticized what he called “finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council.” But former senior aides and U.N. officials say in private that Annan blamed the Obama administration in large part. “The U.S. couldn’t even stand by an agreement that the secretary of State had signed in Geneva,” said one former close Annan aide who would discuss the talks only on condition of anonymity. “He quit in frustration. I think it was clear that the White House was very worried about seeming to do a deal with the Russians and being soft on Putin during the campaign.” One of the biggest Republican criticisms of Obama at the time was that he had, in an embarrassing “open mike” moment, promised Moscow more “flexibility” on missile defense after the election. [Continue reading…]

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Imagine

Graham E. Fuller writes: Is it possible that President Obama — without articulating it, perhaps without even fully intending it — may have strayed into the radical reforging of American foreign policy?

For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union — or even the end of World War II — a linked body of enshrined foreign policy axioms may be quietly unraveling: American exceptionalism, American unilateralism, America as world policeman, moral commentator and hector, global hegemon and architect of a “world order.” Yesterday bombs were about to fall on Syria, now they are suspended. After months — years, decades — of talk about possible air strikes on Iran, suddenly we receive accounts of civil exchanges between the American and the Iranian presidents. These may only be false starts, but the larger implications beckon and burgeon. They start with the Middle East but radiate out to touch relations with Russia, China, Israel and the U.N., for starters.

Neoconservatives, hawks and liberal interventionists are aghast; progressives are heartened but holding their breath. Witness the mirror imaging in the U.S. media around these developments. The traditional nostrums don’t vary: The U.S. must draw red lines; lines once drawn must be acted upon; U.S. credibility is at stake; military readiness must be pumped to permanent alert in the Middle East to meet permanent security threats; American monopoly of decision-making must be jealously husbanded on all that moves in the world. Hawks stand with liberal interventionists, fearful that Obama is giving away the American store in acts of colossal naiveté, weakness and inexperience. Progressives perceive in these same acts the first glimmers of wisdom and rationality creeping into U.S. policy formulation — hints of strategic perestroika that just might rescue the U.S. from spiraling decades of foreign policy disasters that have undermined the country in countless ways: wartime presidents, global recoil from our policies, massive defense budgets, self-fulfilling proclamation of enemies, interventions, national paranoia, the building of a national security state, and pervasive intrusion into citizens’ private lives in the quest to keep America safe from tireless enemies. [Continue reading…]

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Obama decision on Syria good for U.S. democracy, but his case is weak

Peter Beinart writes: Everything about President Obama’s decision to ask Congress to approve military action in Syria is terrific — except for the action he’s asking it to approve.

By going to Congress, Obama is doing something profound. He’s acknowledging that the rules of the foreign policy game must change. Over the past 40 years, America’s presidents have gutted two key restraints on their ability to go to war. In 1973, Richard Nixon created an all-volunteer military, thus confining the direct burdens of war to a small subset of Americans who were legally barred from political protest and virtually ensuring that nothing as noisy and chaotic as the anti-Vietnam movement would occur again. Then, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush cut out Congress—launching invasions of Grenada and Panama on their own authority despite efforts by Congress itself (the War Powers Act) and the framers of the Constitution (Article One, Section Eight) to make certain it couldn’t happen.

The result was the creation of a “hubris bubble” in foreign policy analogous to the one that grew during the same stretch of time on Wall Street. Like the titans of Wall Street, America’s presidents kept making bets that paid off: Grenada, Panama, Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo. And the more they did, the more dismissive they became of the need for public oversight. It all went swimmingly. Until Iraq, when the deregulation of presidential war-making powers produced the foreign policy equivalent of a stock market crash. [Continue reading…]

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Obama is closer to Nixon than to MLK

Paul Rosenberg writes: Because Barack Obama is the United States’ first black president, there are many who still automatically associate him with Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. And with the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, it’s virtually a knee-jerk reaction to associate his presidency with the fulfillment of King’s dream.

But, as the almost-simultaneous sentencing of Chelsea nee Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison should remind us, a more accurate historical comparison to that time would link Obama to Richard Nixon, rather than King. Nixon, after all, tried to have Daniel Ellsberg jailed for revealing the Pentagon Papers, and Ellsberg himself has said, “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case.”

Elaborating further, Ellsberg said, “Various things that were counted as unconstitutional then have been put in the president’s hands now. He’s become an elected monarch. Nixon’s slogan, ‘when the president does it, it’s not illegal’, is pretty much endorsed now. Meaning not only Obama but the people who come after him will have powers that no previous president had.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama sells ambassadorships for $1.8m per post

The Guardian reports: Barack Obama has rewarded some of his most active campaign donors with plum jobs in foreign embassies, with the average amount raised by recent or imminent appointees soaring to $1.8m per post, according to a Guardian analysis.

The practice is hardly a new feature of US politics, but career diplomats in Washington are increasingly alarmed at how it has grown. One former ambassador described it as the selling of public office.

On Tuesday, Obama’s chief money-raiser Matthew Barzun became the latest major donor to be nominated as an ambassador, when the White House put him forward as the next representative to the Court of St James’s, a sought-after posting whose plush residence comes with a garden second only in size to that of Buckingham Palace.

As campaign finance chairman, Barzun helped raise $700m to fund President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. More than $2.3m of this was raised personally by Barzun, pictured, according to party records leaked to the New York Times, even though he had only just finished a posting as ambassador to Sweden after contributing to Obama’s first campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Obama as president reflects America’s role in the world

Gary Younge writes: Not long after the story into the National Security Administration’s spying programme broke, US president Barack Obama insisted the issues raised were worthy of discussion:

“I welcome this debate and I think it’s healthy for our democracy. I think it’s a sign of maturity because probably five years ago, six years ago we might not have been having this debate.”

In fairly short order, a YouTube compilation appeared, showing Obama debating with himself as he matured. Flitting back and forth between Obama the candidate and the Obama the president, we see the constitutional law professor of yore engage with the commander-in-chief of today. Referring to the Bush White House, candidate Obama says:

“This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not.”

Referring to the NSA surveillance program, President Obama says:

“My assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks.”

Candidate Obama says of the Bush years:

“This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

President Obama retorts:

“You can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices.”

The notion that a president’s record might contradict a presidential candidate’s promise is neither new nor particular to Obama. And we should hope that politicians evolve as their careers progress and new evidence and arguments come to light.

What makes these clips so compelling is that they show not evolution, but transformation. On this issue, at least, Obama has become the very thing he was against. They’re not gaffes. These are brazenly ostentatious flip-flops. And regardless of how much they cost him, Obama has clearly no intention of taking them back.

Given that he is not only defending but escalating the very things he criticised the Bush administration for, the accusation that many have made that he is “worse than Bush” on this issue, and others relating to privacy, security and drone attacks, is not unreasonable. Obama’s administration has denied more Freedom of Information Act requests than Bush did, and prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.

But the charge also misses the point. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s failure to defend the U.S. Constitution

Micah Zenko writes: When asked last September if he personally chose which individual terrorist suspects could be targeted with lethal force, President Barack Obama gave a response that would have astounded the founding fathers: “What is absolutely true is that my first job, my most sacred duty, as president and commander in chief, is to keep the American people safe.” This is false. As the presidential “Oath or Affirmation” in the Constitution reads: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

It is troubling that someone who lectured on constitutional law for a dozen years at the University of Chicago Law School would misidentify the president’s primary pledge and obligation. To be fair, his predecessor was similarly guilty. George W. Bush told a cheering crowd at the 2004 Republican National Convention: “I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people.” This interpretation was supposed to be corrected with the 2008 presidential election; then-Senator Obama had declared during the campaign: “I was a constitutional law professor, which means, unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution.”

Now in his second term, President Obama insists that his counterterrorism policies differ markedly from Bush’s. However, there are far more similarities than differences with regards to: non-battlefield targeted killings (an estimated 50 under Bush, and 387 under Obama); indefinite detention of suspected terrorists (approved by both through executive orders); broad surveillance authorities (as former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden admitted on Sunday, “NSA is actually empowered to do more things than I was empowered to do under President Bush’s special authorization”); and overclassification of government information (largely unchanged). Ari Fleischer, Bush’s former spokesperson and now public defender, recently tweeted: “Drone strikes. Wiretaps. Gitmo. O is carrying out Bush’s 4th term. Yet he attacked Bush 4 violating Constitution. #hypocrisy.”

The essential and enduring feature of both post-9/11 presidents has been their shared contention that their core objective — and by extension, that of the executive branch — is to protect U.S. citizens from one particular form of harm: terrorist violence. Both success and failure at achieving this objective have justified the expansion of additional authorities and tools. If there are no terrorist attacks, then all policies in place must remain, but when terrorist plots are revealed or the rare attack occurs, then additional tools and secrecy are mandated. Like a ratchet wrench, it only works in one direction. It does not matter if these presidential powers erode individual civil liberties or the ability of citizens to comprehend or evaluate the activities of the national security state. Again, the executive branch’s obligation is less to protect citizens’ constitutional rights than it is to protect citizens’ lives, but only from terrorists. [Continue reading…]

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The biggest Obama scandals are proven and ignored

Conor Friedersdorf writes: Prompted by Peggy Noonan’s claim in The Wall Street Journal that “we are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate,” Andrew Sullivan steps forward to defend Pres. Obama’s honor. “Can she actually believe this?,” he asks incredulously. “Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes? Has he traded arms for hostages with Iran? Has he knowingly sent his cabinet out to tell lies about his sex life? Has he sat by idly as an American city was destroyed by a hurricane? Has he started a war with no planning for an occupation? Has he started a war based on a lie, and destroyed the US’ credibility and moral standing while he was at it, leaving nothing but a smoldering and now rekindled civil sectarian war?”

An Obama critic, having overplayed her hand, gave Sullivan an opening to respond with what amounts to, “It isn’t as bad as Watergate, nor as bad as George W. Bush.” Let’s concede those points. I don’t much care what Obama’s Republican critics say about him. The scandals they’re presently touting, bad as two of them are, aren’t even the worst of Team Obama’s transgressions.

I have a stronger critique. Sullivan hasn’t internalized the worst of what Obama’s done, because his notion of scandal is implicitly constrained by whatever a president’s partisan opponents tout as scandalous. If they criticize Obama wrongly, he defends Obama proportionately.

To see what he’s forgotten as a result, let’s run once more through the first questions in Sullivan’s latest Obama apologia. [Continue reading…]

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Is Obama already a lame duck president?

The Guardian reports: It is not a comparison that many people thought would ever get much traction.

But, assailed this week by multiple scandals and at the mercy of a furious press, President Obama has endured a legion of pundits wondering if he is the 21st-century Richard Nixon – and whether his second term is already a lame-duck disaster.

Certainly conservative writers have leapt at the idea that the now beleaguered Obama can be mentioned in the same breath as the shamed 37th president who left office early after the Watergate scandal.

They have looked at revelations that the Internal Revenue Service singled out conservative groups and that the Justice Department targeted AP journalists in a secret sweep of their phones as signs that Obama’s administration is paranoid and over-reaching its power. Then they have added a healthy dose of outrage over whether or not the White House manipulated reaction to the death of four Americans in an attack on the US diplomatic mission in Libya.

“Benghazi, IRS – son of Watergate?” wrote conservative writer Cal Thomas amid a plethora of similar headlines. But it was not just the right wing. Liberal Democrat congressman Michael Capuano reacted to the IRS reports by saying: “There’s no way in the world, I’m going to defend that. Hell, I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing.”

Indeed, even Buzzfeed used an animation of Obama’s face morphing into Nixon’s.

Long-time Washington observers have been shocked at how rapidly it seems that Obama’s second term appears to have come off the rails. [Continue reading…]

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How Obama revealed himself to be an anti-Semite of the kind Zionists favor

David Bromwich writes: Compare what Barack Obama said in Jerusalem on March 21 with what he said in Cairo on June 4, 2009 and you find many similarities. Both were greetings by a recently-elected American president to a people who had come to doubt the worth of such a communication. In both cities, the improbable event was made credible by words expressing the most generous good intentions, and concluding with a proclamation of large hopes.

The Cairo speech carried two announcements with practical implications. First, “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.” Second, the president assured his Muslim audience that they would soon see evidence of his determination not to be at war with Islam. The first promise he failed to keep. On the second, the returns are not all in: the Iraq war is over but drone assassinations, favored by this president, have built up a new kind of war by the U.S. in the Arab world, and Obama’s presidency has done more to increase the likelihood of war than to improve the chances of negotiation with Iran.

Obama’s Middle East speeches of 2009 and 2013 were equally flattering to his audience on the chosen occasion. The ground of his respect for Muslims in Cairo was the authenticity of their religious faith and tribal roots. The ground of his respect for Israeli Jews was their religious and tribal roots and their national success. In the past, American presidents would have made this a secondary concern. The usual point of such a visiting speech is to admire the presence of liberty and basic political rights in the host nation (to the extent that these exist) and to ask the leaders and the people to advance the cause. Obama, in a cultural emphasis that was new, admired the Muslims in Cairo for being Muslim. Four years later, he admired the Israeli Jews in Jerusalem for being Jewish.

In fact, Obama went further in the case of Israel. He said in his speech of March 21: “while Jews achieved extraordinary success in many parts of the world, the dream of true freedom finally found its full expression in the Zionist idea.” Many apparently free but—-as our president has now judged—-actually not truly free American Jews will wonder what could have been in his mind when he committed himself to this straightforward endorsement of the Zionist idea. Can we imagine the president of the secular United States saying anything comparable about an Islamic nation? Pragmatic considerations aside, what prevents him from saying that “Shiite Islam found extraordinary success in many parts of the world but its dream of national realization has attained its full expression in Iran”? [Continue reading…]

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Has Obama forgotten everything?

Gideon Levy writes: Barack Obama has decided to punish the Israelis: He is talking to them as if they were ignoramuses. The U.S. president has also decided to punish himself: He is betraying his principles, those that have won him international acclaim and the Nobel Peace Prize.

There’s no other way to understand what he said in his interview with Channel 2 on the eve of his visit here. The flattery he heaped on Israel’s leader considerably exceeded diplomatic protocol and even phony American manners. His denial of his values deviated even from the opportunism one might expect from a politician. Obama said he wants to “connect to the Israeli people.” This he actually did well; he told Israelis what they wanted to hear.

But from Obama we could have expected a lot more. When Obama said he admires Israel’s “core values,” which values was he talking about? The dehumanization of the Palestinians? The attitude toward African migrants? The arrogance, racism and nationalism? Is this what he admires? Don’t separate buses for Palestinians remind him of something? Doesn’t two communities living on the same land, one with full rights and the other with no rights, “ring a bell,” as they say in America?

To admire “core values” while knowing we’re talking about one of the most racist countries there is, with a separation wall and apartheid-like policies, means betraying the core values of the American civil rights movement that made the Obama miracle possible. Too bad he can’t fulfill his fantasy of wearing a fake mustache and wandering around to have conversations with Israelis; he would hear how they talk about blacks like him. Too bad he can’t sit in a cafe and “just hang out,” as he’d like. He’d hear which “core values” really move Israelis.

Obama wants to lower expectations of his visit. Well, they can’t get any lower. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s secrecy fixation

Glenn Greenwald writes: When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, his pledges of openness and transparency were not ancillary to his campaign but central to it. He repeatedly denounced the Bush administration as “one of the most secretive administrations in our nation’s history”, saying that “it is no coincidence” that such a secrecy-obsessed presidency “has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to the sunlight.” He vowed: “as president, I’m going to change that.” In a widely heralded 2007 speech on transparency, he actually claimed that this value shaped his life purpose:

“The American people want to trust in our government again – we just need a government that will trust in us. And making government accountable to the people isn’t just a cause of this campaign – it’s been a cause of my life for two decades.”

His campaign specifically vowed to protect whistleblowers, hailing them as “the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government” and saying that “such acts of courage and patriotism. . . should be encouraged rather than stifled.” Transparency groups were completely mesmerized by these ringing commitments. “We have a president-elect that really gets it,” gushed Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, in late 2008; “the openness community will expect a complete repudiation of the Ashcroft doctrine.” Here’s just one of countless representative examples of Obama bashing Bush for excessive secrecy – including in the realm of national security and intelligence – and vowing a fundamentally different course:

Literally moments after he was inaugurated, the White House declared that “President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history”. [Continue reading…]

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Obama helps promote myth of racially integrated Israel

I imagine the White House think it’s good to help promote the status of an African first — Israel’s first African-born Miss Israel. And no doubt Israeli leaders welcome a photo-op that is sure to be used to counter the charge that Israel functions as an apartheid state. Look! No apartheid here — as Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres sit with beaming smiles alongside Barack Obama and Yityish Aynaw. (Of course there won’t be any Palestinians at the table.)

The Guardian reports: It will be one of the hottest tickets in town. When the US president, Barack Obama, arrives in Israel on an official visit next week, one of the highlights for the country’s dignatries will be a dinner hosted at Israeli president Shimon Peres’s home. And among those set to dine with the two presidents is the first black Miss Israel, Yityish Aynaw.

When the president’s staff called to invite her to the dinnerAynaw, who was crowned just a few weeks ago, was understandably taken aback. “I didn’t believe this was happening,” she told the Jerusalem Post.

Aynaw arrived in Israel from Ethiopia when she was 12 years old. The beauty queen, who has worked as a sales assistant since leaving the army, has admitted that it was initially difficult for her to assimilate into Israeli society. Despite being 100,000 strong, the Ethiopian Jewish community is marginalised in Israel, where some rabbis have questioned the authenticity of their Jewish faith.

Meanwhile, in preparation for his Holy Land vacation, Obama has been busy playing the mood music: “In his interview Thursday on Channel 2, Obama made a supreme effort to let bygones be bygones and show friendship when he called Netanyahu ‘Bibi’ at least 10 times.”

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