Category Archives: Barack Obama

Nuclear terrorism and climate change

Graham Allison, who has for years been issuing graves warnings about the danger of nuclear terrorism, writes about last week’s nuclear security summit in Washington:

With all the immediate challenges demanding President Obama’s attention today, his choice to invest so much of his own mind-share and political capital in an issue seemingly so remote is remarkable.

We are accustomed to the triumph of the urgent over the important. In assembling the largest number of heads of foreign governments by an American president since FDR invited leaders to San Francisco to create the United Nations, this president demonstrated his ability to distinguish between the vivid and the vital.

The question remains: So what? How is the world different today? How will it be different a year from now?

To score this undertaking, it is necessary to assess performance on four dimensions. First, what is the single largest national security threat to the lives of American citizens? Far-fetched as it still appears to many, President Obama’s answer is unambiguous. As he said Monday: Nuclear terrorism is “the single biggest threat to U.S. security, short term, medium term and long term.”

Nuclear terrorism — a bigger threat to American security than climate change? Hardly.

The critical difference is that unlike the threat of nuclear terrorism, with climate change there will probably be no singlular event that will result in any particular political leader being called to task to explain how they could have allowed this unfolding calamity to happen.

So when it comes to the exercises in self-protection that consume a significant amount of time and energy for the world’s political leaders, the issue of nuclear terrorism is indeed more vexing than climate change. Obama’s attention to this issue does not — at least as far as I’m concerned — indicate his willingness to distinguish between the vivid and the vital.

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Obama: Middle East peace “is a very hard thing to do”

Amid swirling rumors and grand propositions, President Obama spoke yesterday on the so-called peace process and among peace-process professionals his words will be duly noted as an effort to “manage expectations”.

But for those of us who do not have an investment in the idea that the show must go on, what he said can be boiled down to this: Obama doesn’t see the necessary desire among the antagonists for the conflict to be resolved any time soon or under any amount of American pressure. No imposed US peace plan. No big speech in Jerusalem.

I think that the need for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and the Arab states remains as critical as ever.

It is a very hard thing to do. And I know that even if we are applying all of our political capital to that issue, the Israeli people through their government, and the Palestinian people through the Palestinian Authority, as well as other Arab states, may say to themselves, we are not prepared to resolve this — these issues — no matter how much pressure the United States brings to bear.

And the truth is, in some of these conflicts the United States can’t impose solutions unless the participants in these conflicts are willing to break out of old patterns of antagonism. I think it was former Secretary of State Jim Baker who said, in the context of Middle East peace, we can’t want it more than they do.

But what we can make sure of is, is that we are constantly present, constantly engaged, and setting out very clearly to both sides our belief that not only is it in the interests of each party to resolve these conflicts but it’s also in the interest of the United States. It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.

So I’m going to keep on at it. But I think on all these issues — nuclear disarmament, nuclear proliferation, Middle East peace — progress is going to be measured not in days, not in weeks. It’s going to take time. And progress will be halting. And sometimes we’ll take one step forward and two steps back, and there will be frustrations. And so it’s not going to run on the typical cable news 24/7 news cycle. But if we’re persistent, and we’ve got the right approach, then over time, I think that we can make progress.

And who will be most reassured by this message of persistent hope on the long and winding road to Middle East peace? Why, the Israelis of course. Surprise, surprise.

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Can Obama erase ‘Bush nostalgia’ in the Middle East?

Shadi Hamid writes:

While President Obama’s domestic position has been strengthened considerably by the passage of health-care reform, there is nothing – yet – to suggest global support for American foreign policy will follow suit. Outside the US, there is a sense of “Bush nostalgia,” including in a rather unlikely place – the Middle East.

This is particularly the case for Arab reformers who, while disliking the Bush administration in almost every way, were fully aware that Bush’s “freedom agenda” helped usher in a promising moment for Arab reform.

On the Obama administration’s relative lack of pressure, Esam al-Erian, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood leader, sounded almost wistful of political openings that came about under Bush: “[Now President Mubarak] can do whatever he wants internally…. It feels like we’ve gone backward a little bit,” he said.

Indeed, the excitement Arabs felt after Mr. Obama’s historic Cairo speech became the backdrop for the mounting disappointment of the last nine months. Instead of making a clean break with past US policies, the current administration has reverted to the neorealism of President Clinton and the first President Bush, with its emphasis on competence and pragmatism.

Now as then, US policy continues to be anchored by a cynical bargain with Arab autocrats: If they faithfully support US regional objectives, the US turns a blind eye to their suppression of domestic dissent. It’s business as usual.

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Why Bibi won’t budge

Ever since David Ignatius revealed that President Obama is “seriously considering” proposing an American peace plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Washington’s Middle East hands have been ruminating on the significance of this report. Obama dropped in on a meeting of former national security advisers in the White House a couple of weeks ago, but if the people whose job it is to keep the dream of a peace process alive are to be believed, who was there was more significant than the president’s casual entry.

Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sandy Berger, Colin Powell, Frank Carlucci and Robert C. McFarlane — these are the heavyweights who can push Obama in the right direction. Right? Not unless Benjamin Netanyahu also gets pushed out of the way.

Larry Derfner lays out the reasons Bibi presents an immovable obstacle.

Which way will Bibi go? This seems to be the big question – whether Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will bow to American pressure, exchange his right-wing/religious government for a “peace coalition” and start taking down the occupation, or whether he will dig in.

I don’t think there’s any doubt about it – he’s going to dig in. This is not the prime minister who’s going to divide the land with the Palestinians.

To begin with, of the 69 MKs in an imagined Likud-Kadima-Labor-Meretz coalition, the great majority are totally opposed to paying the well-known price for peace – removing 100,000 settlers from the West Bank’s interior and relinquishing Arab Jerusalem to the Palestinians for their capital. No Likudnik sees this as anything less than treason, and all but a few Kadima members would agree. The peace coalition actually numbers no more than about 20 MKs, and even with the outside support of the Arab parties, they’re a hopeless minority, for now anyway.

Still, could a prime minister who has the president of the United States and the rest of the world bearing down on him convince the majority to do the deal? Could a prime minister with unusual powers of persuasion persuade the country to do what the democratic world has been asking it to do since 1967, on pain of losing its place in that world?

Maybe. If such a prime minister really believed Israel’s future depended on its ending the occupation. And Netanyahu doesn’t believe that for a minute. He’s spent his whole career preaching the opposite – that giving up the land conquered in the Six Day War would be the death of this country. This isn’t a talking point for him, it’s the worldview he was raised on, one he’s never abandoned regardless of the empty phrases he utters now and then to stroke the Obama administration. Netanyahu has opposed every peace process he’s ever been around. His view of the Palestinians is simple, clear and consistent – either we keep them down or they wipe us out.

And just in case anyone imagines that there is any other Israeli leader who could do what Netanyahu finds impossible, Derfner is clear: “No there isn’t. Not now, anyway.” Instead, it’s up to Israel’s friends “to make the status quo here intolerable.”

That’s a big leap from simply observing that the status quo is unsustainable.

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A presidential death warrant

American soldiers have to be trained how to kill, but for American presidents killing comes naturally.

Anyone who aspires to become president must surely ask themselves: am I willing to end someone else’s life, be that an individual or perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of people? After all, even though it’s not spelled out in the Constitution, it’s clear that a pacifist could never hold this office. Killing comes with the territory.

Even so, I can’t help wondering when it was the Barack Obama posed this question and decided, “yes I can.”

With candidate George W Bush we didn’t need to ask the question. He had a track record — as the Governor of Texas he presided over 152 executions. But with Obama, we may never know when he came to regard killing as a tolerable part of his job.

It’s hard to imagine that as a community organizer he ever entertained the idea that wiping people out could become a dimension of working towards the greater good, yet at some point he must have seen this coming and — from all the evidence we now see — not flinched.

But to contrast Obama and Bush as killers, here’s what’s scary and yet passes without comment: Obama’s approach is dispassionate, with no explicit moral calculation. Whereas Bush felt driven to assume an air of righteousness and moral superiority, casting his actions within a drama of good and evil, Obama presents the image of an administrative process through which, after careful analysis and legal and political deliberation, lives are terminated.

Under the morally insidious rubric of “procedures” — a notion that peels away personal responsibility by replacing it with impersonal rules-based behavior — the president, the CIA, the military, the administration, the media, and the American public are all being offered an excuse to look the other way. An unnamed official assured a Washington Post reporter: “[there are] careful procedures our government follows in these kinds of cases.”

When Anwar al-Awlaki, an American born in New Mexico is shredded and incinerated — his likely fate at the receiving end of a Hellfire missile — there will be no account of the last moments of his life. No record of who happened to be in the vicinity. Most likely nothing more than a cursory wire report quoting unnamed American officials announcing that the United States no longer faces a threat from a so-called high value target.

Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California and chairwoman of a House subcommittee on homeland security, was out prepping the media and the public on Tuesday when she called Awlaki “probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No 1 in terms of threat against us.”

Although it was only this week that a US official announced that Awlaki is now on the CIA’s assassination list, US special forces were already authorized and had made at least one attempt to kill the Muslim cleric who now resides in Yemen.

While both the military and the CIA make use of drones for the purpose of remotely controlled assassination, the fact that Awlaki is now considered a legitimate target for “lethal CIA operations” raises questions about the methods the agency might use.

Last summer CIA Director Leon Panetta shut down a secret CIA program which would have operated assassination teams for hunting down al Qaeda leaders. The news was presented as though the new administration was again distancing itself from the questionable practices of the Bush administration, yet at the time, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C Blair told Congress that the termination of that particular program did not rule out the future use of insertion teams that could kill or capture terrorist leaders.

One of the many ironies here is that the Obama administration appears to have abandoned one of the Bush era rationales for torture in favor of its own rationale for murder.

The most frequently used justification for torturing terrorist suspects has been the claim that in the scenario of a so-called ticking time bomb, vital information might be forced out of a suspect enabling an imminent act of terrorism to be thwarted.

Anwar al-Awlaki is supposedly just such a suspect. “He’s working actively to kill Americans,” an American official told the Washington Post. But whatever vital intelligence he might be able to provide, we’ll probably never know. Once dead he won’t hatch any new plots, but as for the ones already set in motion, well, we’ll just have to wait and see what sort of surprises may yet appear.

Needless to say, I am not suggesting that torturing terrorist suspects is any more acceptable than murdering them.

Ken Gude, a human rights expert from the Center for American Progress, argues that Awlaki is a legitimate target for assassination because of his claimed role in assisting the 9/11 attackers. On that basis, his killing would appear to be an act of extra-judicial punishment rather than the removal of a potential threat. But even if the administration sticks assiduously to its focus on future threats, it should not claim a God-like power to predict the future. Nor should it assume that the threat someone poses is necessarily diminished once they are dead.

In weighing the fate of Anwar al-Awlaki, this administration would do well to remember the case of Mohammed El Fazazi, a Moroccan cleric who from a Hamburg mosque preached to Mohammed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh and Marwan al-Shehhi, three of the men who participated in the 9/11 attacks, that it was the duty of a devout Muslim to “slit the throats of non-believers.”

Eight years later, Fazazi had a new message as he appealed to Muslims to air their grievances through peaceful demonstrations. He is helping turn young men away from violent jihad. But what would stir the hearts of such men now if rather than hearing Fazazi’s moderated message, instead they held the memory of a day he became a martyr when struck by an American Hellfire missile?

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Karzai’s troublesome independence

After Benjamin Netanyahu was recently insulted by President Obama during his March visit to Washington (Obama declined to offer him dinner), Israeli commentators struggled to make an appropriate comparison and for some reason thought this was treatment that the head of a small African state might expect — the rather transparent implication being that Netanyahu should get the kind of deferential treatment that Israelis apparently believe is reserved for white Western leaders.

Israelis could but won’t console themselves with the observation that Netanyahu has yet to be treated like Hamid Karzai.

Last month, Karzai got uninvited by the White House and then, adding insult to injury, an uninvited visit and reprimand from Obama. Karzai is now pissed off. I wonder why?

President Hamid Karzai lashed out at his Western backers for the second time in three days, accusing the U.S. of interfering in Afghan affairs and saying the Taliban insurgency would become a legitimate resistance movement if the meddling doesn’t stop.

Mr. Karzai, whose government is propped up by billions of dollars in Western aid and nearly 100,000 American troops fighting a deadly war against the Taliban, made the comments during a private meeting with about 60 or 70 Afghan lawmakers Saturday.

At one point, Mr. Karzai suggested that he himself would be compelled to join the other side —that is, the Taliban—if the parliament didn’t back his controversial attempt to take control of the country’s electoral watchdog from the United Nations, according to three people who attended the meeting, including an ally of the president.

The prospects of Karzai joining the Taliban are minimal but his threat highlights Washington’s dilemma: they want an Afghan leader who is compliant but doesn’t look like a puppet. They want someone who looks independent but does what he’s told.

The hypocrisy inherent in the American approach is no more evident than in the run-up to the highly-publicized offensive against the Taliban stronghold, Kandahar. Will President Karzai publicly approve the offensive, or merely accede to it, Doyle McManus asks. “He’s got to be seen as the guy who’s leading this fight,” a military officer says.

Much to the frustration of American planners, it turns out that Afghans, including Karzai, have minds of their own. How inconvenient.

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The president’s conscience, on hold

Dan Froomkin writes:

The White House counsel ideally serves as the president’s conscience.

But late last year, Barack Obama’s conscience was surgically removed.

Greg Craig, as Obama’s top lawyer, was the point man on a number of hot-button issues, the fieriest being how to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Craig argued for holding fast to the principles that Obama outlined before he became president, regardless of the immediate political consequences — an idealistic approach that, in a White House filled with increasingly pusillanimous pragmatists, earned him some powerful enemies.

After a steady drip of leaks over a period of months to the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets to the effect that his days were numbered, Craig finally resigned in November.

He was replaced by Robert Bauer, a politically adept consummate Washington insider whose expertise is in campaign finance law — in short, a man whose job is to win elections, not defend principles.

At the same time, Attorney General Eric Holder has been increasingly marginalized and cut out of the White House decision-making loop. So now the coast is clear for the White House to make important legal and national security calls on purely political grounds.

The only question that remains is whether Obama himself will have any last-minute qualms about turning his back on his own principles.

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Congress to Obama on Israel: Do what we say, not what we do

Following AIPAC’s lead, 327 members of Congress wrote a letter to President Obama last week whose core message resonates with the approach to politics favored by Pope Benedict: difficulties should be handled discreetly with the minimum of publicity. It’s a tried and tested practice that has throughout history been shown to be as rotten as it appears, yet it appeals to its proponents because those who follow this path have an immense tolerance for hypocrisy.

Thus, the letter to Obama read:

We recognize that, despite the extraordinary closeness between our country and Israel, there will be differences over issues both large and small. Our view is that such differences are best resolved quietly, in trust and confidence, as befits longstanding strategic allies.

As for differences between Congress and the administration, those are best handled through an open letter in which 327 publicity-conscious politicians can very visibly identify themselves as lackeys of the Israel lobby.

Had this letter to the president not been an open letter, I wonder how many signatures it would have got?

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Effortless, carefree war

What was the most significant thing about President Obama’s surprise trip to Afghanistan on Sunday? He wore a leather bomber jacket.

Or, to be more precise, the most significant thing about Obama’s six-hour visit was nothing that he said, nor the fact that he went, but that in the utterly trivialized view of war that American civilians are fed, the fact that Obama’s attire would merit comment.

A recently leaked CIA document said that the foundation of support for the war from America’s European allies might be weakening. “Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough” a CIA “Red Cell” special memorandum warned.

While the apathy of Europeans might be in jeopardy, American apathy appears to be as reliable as ever.

Contrary to Obama’s claim that the war in Afghanistan is a war of necessity, it is really a war of indifference — a war that continues because the people paying for it don’t care strongly enough to object to its continuation. Most importantly, Americans have by and large acquiesced to the notion that perpetual war is a condition of this era rather than a product of political policy. War has become an inobtrusive background noise in the American way of life.

Postscript: The “effortless” in the headline is an allusion to that forgotten expression: the war effort.

The fact that America’s wars of this last decade have required no war effort is one of the most telling ways in which these have not been wars of necessity. In a war of necessity, a civilian war effort is not merely required; it is unavoidable.

Whereas the civilian role in a war effort is an adjunct to the military effort, in a war that requires no war effort, there is no civilian role. There is instead a necessity that civilians be cocooned by an infantilism engendered by consumerism, which is to say, that they be easily pacified and rendered politically apathetic by having their trivial desires easily fulfilled.

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The loner in the White House

Howard LaFranchi, (in a rather superficial treatment), raises an interesting issue: Does it matter that Obama has no foreign friends?

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, sit down for dinner with the Obamas in the White House family dining room March 30, it will be a rare occasion for Barack Obama: a private, personal, perhaps even chatty evening with another world leader.

Fourteen months into the Obama presidency, one striking feature of an American president who took office to a swooning world is the absence of any strong personal ties – or even a go-to working relationship – with any other world leader. Where Ronnie had Maggie, and Bill and even George W. had Tony, Mr. Obama has no one leader. Instead, the former law professor has what seems to be a preference for big-themed foreign speeches (think Cairo; Prague, Czech Republic; Moscow; Accra, Ghana) and policy gatherings (his UN nuclear summit, the Pittsburgh Group of 20 economic summit, a White House nuclear nonproliferation summit in May) bereft of the warm and fuzzy.

Even the Sarkozy dinner seems to be more an amendsmaker than a familiar, “Hey Sarko, why don’t you come on over for dinner and some one-on-one conversation?” When the Obamas were in Paris last year, Obama turned down a dinner invitation to the Elyseé Palace, ostensibly so he could take Michelle out for a private night on the town.

Obama’s cool, all-business demeanor with his global peers is all the more striking because it follows the polar-opposite style of George W. Bush.

It’s inevitable that Obama gets contrasted with Bush. After all, Obama got elected in large part by virtue of not being Bush. But the contrast in personalities tends to obscure a more important issue by casting this shift as something akin to a seasonal change — from warm to cool.

Stephen Hess is no doubt correct in pointing out that personal relations with foreign leaders may not ultimately dictate policy choices of an American president, but the significance of Obama’s aloofness may rest less on what we can predict about its specific political effects than in what it tells us about the president’s self-image and his relationships with others — not just other world leaders.

To the extent that an American president cultivates a rapport with his foreign counterparts, the significance in his doing so seems to be to be that at least to some degree he sees himself as part of a peer group. But to the extent that Obama does not believe he has peers, this will likely lead to a dangerous and corrosive form of isolation. The more isolated he becomes, the fewer checks and balances there are that can be applied to his own judgment.

And let’s not forget, this is an administration in which the president is surrounded by an exceptionally small inner circle of advisers who seem to prize their closeness above their capacity to advise.

Obama may be a great speech maker, but that doesn’t make him a great communicator.

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What’s worse than an insult?

The Shepherd Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem

[Updated below.] For Israel to announce new settlement construction in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem right when Joe Biden was visiting, was, Hillary Clinton said, “insulting” to the United States.

Now Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting Washington and what happens right before he goes to the White House to meet President Obama? Another announcement from Jerusalem, but this time it’s even more inflammatory than the last one:

The Jerusalem municipality has given final approval to a group of settlers construct 20 apartments in a controversial hotel in east Jerusalem, Haaretz learned on Tuesday.

The announcement comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington smoothing over ties with the United States over the latest settlement-related tensions, and hours before the premier was to meet with President Barack Obama in Washington.

The Shepherd Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was purchased by American Jewish tycoon Irving Moskowitz in 1985 for $1 million.

Moskowitz, an influential supporter of Ateret Cohanim and heightened Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, plans to tear down the hotel and build housing units for Jewish Israelis in its place.

The local planning council initially approved the plan in July, a move which angered Britain and the United States and prompted them to call on Israel to cancel the plans. The council issued its final approval for the project last Thursday, which now enables the settlers to begin their construction at once.

An existing structure in the area will be town down to make room for the housing units, while the historic Shepherd Hotel will remain intact. A three-story parking structure and an access road will also be constructed on site.

Jake Tapper adds:

Moskowitz is a supporter of Ateret Cohanim (“Crown of the Priests”), a religious movement that seeks to populate East Jerusalem with Jewish settlers. As the Yeshiva puts it: “The Yeshiva is the spiritual epicenter of a community of almost 1000 residents in the heart of the Old City in the so-called ‘Moslem’ Quarter. This area was in fact, prior to the Arab riots, largely inhabited by Jews. It is on this historical basis that we refer to it now as the Renewed Jewish Quarter.”

No word yet on reaction from the White House.

Ynet reports:

Hatem Abdel Kader, holder of the Jerusalem portfolio in Fatah, told Ynet that the decision was tantamount to “Netanyahu slapping Obama in the face in his own house.”

Abdel Kader added that “Netanyahu feels that AIPAC is on his side, that he owns the US and that no action, no pressure by the Americans can prevent him from going ahead with the construction.”

The Fatah official added that the construction’s approval proved that the reports of Washington’s acquiescence in the face of Israel’s plans to build in east Jerusalem were true.

“The new plans for the Shepherd Hotel prove that the dispute between the Administration and Israel was not real and pertained to the way the plans were presented, rather than to the construction itself. What the Americans are actually saying to the Israelis is ‘keep building – but I don’t want to know about it,'” he said.

Update: After Netanyahu and Obama’s closed-door White House meeting, Politico says: “any impression that Netanyahu’s trip would mark a renewal of the troubled relationship between U.S. and Israeli leaders had faded by the time the men met.” The meeting was “shrouded in unusual secrecy” and marked a transition in the administration’s dealings with the Israeli prime minister that has shifted from the “red hot anger” of last week to “an icier suspicion” yesterday, reflected in the fact that no official statements followed the awkward encounter.

Still, the fact is, Obama didn’t turn Netanyahu away. The news that the Shepherd Hotel development had been approved prompted this: “This is exactly what we expect Prime Minister Netanyahu to get control of,” a senior U.S. official told POLTICO Tuesday evening. “The current drip-drip-drip of projects in East Jerusalem impedes progress.”

The transition from the Bush administration to the current administration has been in which the last secretary of state said the Israelis were being “unhelpful” whereas they are now described as “insulting” — either way, the status quo remains the same: Israel can do what it pleases whatever words of displeasure it might provoke.

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The American backbone deficit

Gideon Levy writes:

Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. Israel does not truly intend to pursue peace, because life here seems to be good even without it. The continuation of the occupation doesn’t just endanger Israel’s future, it also poses the greatest risk to world peace, serving as a pretext for Israel’s most dangerous enemies.

No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent and condescending Israel of today. That’s why this difficult, thankless task has fallen on the shoulders of an ally, as only it has the power to get things started. No agreement will come out of another endless series of futile diplomatic trips or peace plans to which no one intends to adhere. We have tried this enough in the past, and all for naught. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation program for Israel. The entire world, and ultimately Israel too, will applaud Barack Obama if he succeeds.

Expressing offense at “poor timing” and giving Israel’s prime minister the cold shoulder are not enough. This is the time for action, comprehensive and unwavering. America must now decide where it is heading and where it aims to lead Israel, the Middle East and the world. At issue is not just the future of 1,600 homes in Ramat Shlomo, but that of Israel itself. What is required is not merely extending the settlement construction freeze – whether or not it includes the occupied areas of Jerusalem – but applying pressure on Israel to begin withdrawing to its own borders. The means at Washington’s disposal – including assistance on security and economic issues, the campaign against Iran’s nuclear program and diplomatic support of Israel – can all be conditioned on an end to the occupation.

America must now decide whether it’s for us or against us. Will it make do with easing the sting of the insult to the vice president? Will it continue to give in to its powerful Jewish lobby? Will it keep passing itself off as a friend while acting as a foe? Or are we really playing by different rules now? Yes, it’s likely to hurt Israel, and even many Americans, but this is the opportunity. There will be no other.

I’m not holding my breath.

A few days ago, when Hillary Clinton read the riot act to Benjamin Netanyahu, the word was that she was reading from an Obama-approved script. The image was of an angry president being tough while maintaining his facade of cool.

Almost a week later there are signs that the latest manifestation of Obama toughness was yet another mirage. Obama’s characteristically bland assessment that there is no crisis in US-Israeli relations but merely “a disagreement in terms of how we can move this peace process forward,” will yet again confirm Benjamin Netanyahu’s understanding that he is dealing with a spineless president.

Can Clinton and Mitchell make up for the backbone deficit? If the latter ends up in Israel in a few days without Netanyahu having made any significant concessions and if the former shows up at the AIPAC conference next week and doesn’t manage to make a few of the participants piss in their pants, then we’ll know the answer is no.

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Obama gets kind of tough with Netanyahu

The Los Angeles Times says: “a dispute this week between the Obama administration and Israel has ballooned into the biggest U.S.-Israeli clash in 20 years.”

Tom Friedman says: “what the Israelis did played right into a question a lot of people are asking about the Obama team: how tough are these guys? The last thing the president needs, at a time when he is facing down Iran and China — not to mention Congress — is to look like America’s most dependent ally can push him around.”

But then Washington hit back — bam!

This is how Aluf Benn describes Obama’s get-tough approach:

Washington delivered its rebuke to Netanyahu through a number of channels. There was the extended censure by telephone from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a phone call from Biden, the summoning of Israel’s ambassador to Washington to the office of Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, the condemnation from the Quartet and, perhaps most important, a media briefing Clinton delivered during a CNN interview which escalated private rebukes into a full-blown public reprimand.

The reproofs were reminiscent of the “low chair diplomacy” the Turkish ambassador to Jerusalem was subjected to by the Israeli Foreign Ministry at the beginning of the year. The media was informed that the conversation between Clinton and Netanyahu lasted 43 minutes, “rather than 10 minutes as usual,” and that the prime minister barely uttered a word.

Obama himself reportedly worded the message to be delivered to Netanyahu during his weekly Thursday meeting with Clinton, lest the argument be made that it was merely the secretary of state scolding the Israeli leader, and not the U.S. president himself.

A State Department spokesman described the conversation using phrases which bring to mind a teacher castigating a student, not a working discussion with the leader of a friendly country and ally.

The substance was no less damning than the form – Clinton spoke of an “insult” to the United States and of “harming bilateral ties.” She could not understand, she said, how such a thing could have been done in light of America’s strong obligation to Israel’s security. U.S. media interpreted these remarks as suggesting that Washington’s military support for Israel is hardly unconditional.

Clinton dismissed Netanyahu’s explanation that the decision to approve the housing plan was made without his knowledge, reminding him that as prime minister he is responsible for his government’s actions.

The statements from the United States were publicized Friday evening – Shabbat – while Israel was officially unable to respond, therefore affording the White House a media exclusive. The instinctive reaction from Netanyahu and his associates was to accuse Washington of a diplomatic ambush, to simply rely on the support of his backers in the United States. Indeed, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, was the first to charge the White House with “humiliating” the Israeli prime minister.

This week presents Netanyahu with a difficult decision. He may choose to visit Washington as planned to speak at the AIPAC conference, which would embarrass the preeminent pro-Israel lobby and put it on a collision course with the Obama administration. Senior U.S. officials will likely decline meetings with him, unless he agrees to at least some of Washington’s conditions. Canceling his flight, however, will be interpreted as acknowledgment of the crisis in U.S.-Israel ties.

High drama! But will it be of any lasting consequence? I really doubt it.

To put this in perspective we should not forget that the initiative the Obama administration is in a desperate effort to salvage — so-called proximity talks — is one that virtually no one had any confidence would accomplish anything in the first place. A successful resolution to the current dispute means getting this initiative back on a track that leads nowhere.

The Jerusalem District Planning and Building committee has canceled two meetings planned for this week. Big deal. It can reschedule them in a few weeks once America and the media are suitably distracted by current events. Indeed, the closer mid-term elections come, the greater this administration’s interests will be in restoring cordial relations with Israel.

Daniel Levy, a former adviser to then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, says the administration is trying to “lay down a marker with [Netanyahu] that they will not allow him to make them look weak,” and no doubt that is true, but this is a marker on a movable line.

Nothing Netanyahu does or refrains from doing will reverse the perception of weakness that was Obama’s own doing when he caved on the issue of imposing a settlement freeze. To insist that this Israeli prime minister avoid doing anything to embarrass the US president merely underlines the extent to which this president is already highly susceptible to appearing weak.

As for whether the Israeli government has any interest in making meaningful gestures of reconciliation with the Palestinians, Ma’an reports on the latest indication: an order from Israeli authorities for the demolition of a mosque in Nablus, right in the heart of the West Bank.

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Cornel West points out Obama’s hypocrisy on Israelis and Palestinians

Watch the clip above as Cornel West responds to this question:

The Obama administration talks about a new era of engagement. You spoke earlier about a “friendlier face of empire”. What does that mean? Is that just marketing? Or is there actually a change in US foreign policy these days?

Watch the whole 23-minute interview — if you live outside the U.S. in a location where Al Jazeera does not block access to its own videos.

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How the war on drugs gave birth to a permanent American undercaste

At TomDispatch, Michelle Alexander writes:

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

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Does Obama have a vision?

At Time, Mark Halperin writes:

Who would have thought that one of Barack Obama’s biggest missteps as president would be repeating some of the bad habits of George W. Bush? No single factor was more instrumental in Obama’s 2008 victory than his pledge to completely reverse the nation’s course once in the White House. Instead, over the past year, Obama has mimicked some of Bush’s most egregious blunders, leading to much of the political predicament in which the present decider finds himself today.

This is not to say that Obama has maintained Bush’s policies, although his administration’s continuity on issues ranging from Afghanistan to Wall Street has alienated the left. And he certainly hasn’t done himself any favors by failing to inspire the general public to rally around his agenda. But Obama’s stumbles atop the high-wire of running the federal government has created perhaps the greatest danger to his presidency, and they are oddly reminiscent of the misguided practices which tripped up his predecessor.

Reuters reports:

President Barack Obama will outline his administration’s vision for space agency NASA and an eventual trip to Mars during a conference in Florida in April, the White House said on Sunday.

Obama has had to defend his commitment to the space agency in the politically important U.S. state after submitting a budget to Congress that would cancel a program to return U.S. astronauts to the moon.

Obama wants to refocus NASA efforts on technologies to prepare for human missions to other destinations in the solar system.

In Mark Halperin’s analysis of the failings of the Obama administration the key word is “missteps”.

Journalists these days love judgement-free terms like this. Another favorite is “recalibrate”. These words evoke an image of political conduct that suggests Washington is a machine (usually poorly oiled) and the president is the master mechanic. He will do swimmingly well if he can just figure out exactly where to apply the lubricants. Up steps an old hand like Halperin, happy to advise which are the squeaky wheels that need fixing.

No doubt Obama is lacking in executive experience but unfortunately his problems seem to run much deeper than that. If he is unencumbered by Bush’s ideological rigidity, this appears to have less to do with being his being more intellectually nimble than with his being more shamelessly cynical.

The latest example of Obama’s cynicism is that he isn’t willing to ditch the scientifically unjustifiable objective of a human mission to Mars. One can only assume that this decision is driven by his fear that to abandon such a project would make him appear less adventurous, less visionary than his predecessor — even though when Bush announced that objective it was decried by scientists unwilling to indulge in the former president’s comic-book fantasies.

If Obama’s problem is less mechanical and more attitudinal, what’s he going to do? Tell us he realizes that in his first year he approached his job with too much cynicism but he’s recently had some good discussions with Axelrod and once again he’s rediscovered his inspirational core?

Of course cynicism isn’t a misstep and it can’t really be fixed — only exposed and condemned.

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Belafonte on King and Obama

Harry Belafonte interviewed on PBS:

Barack Obama is first and foremost a man. He is flawed. He has his contradictions. He has revealed those contradictions.

There is a question that we have: do we get behind him and push him to become what we know he should be? Or do we lay back, watch him drift, watch him capitulate to the enemy and then say, “Ah ha! We knew it all along.”

Is not his conclusion to be ours? Is not his fate also to be ours? What role do we as a people play in forcing the mission to go where we know it must go?

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Obama wants to expand America’s military reach

As President Obama prepares to present his first Nuclear Posture Review, the news is that he’s about to announce plans to eliminate thousands of nuclear weapons from the United States arsenal. So good so far — but it gets worse from here on in.

If a smaller arsenal might look like a step towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, the fact that this president wants to retain a first strike option is not a step in the right direction. Worst of all are the designs for a non-nuclear future in the shape of what is called “Prompt Global Strike” — the ultimate form of remote warfare through which the US could strike any target on the planet in less than an hour.

This is how the New York Times describes the new class of non-nuclear weapons:

The idea, officials say, would be to give the president a non-nuclear option for, say, a large strike on the leadership of Al Qaeda in the mountains of Pakistan, or a pre-emptive attack on an impending missile launch from North Korea. But under Mr. Obama’s strategy, the missiles would be based at new sites around the United States that might even be open to inspection, so that Russia and China would know that a missile launched from those sites was not nuclear — to avoid having them place their own nuclear forces on high alert.

Better than firing nuclear weapons, isn’t it? Of course. But the one virtue of strategic nuclear weapons is that their use has seemed unthinkable to a point where we’ve gone 65 years without their use — apart from in testing.

To call Prompt Global Strike a “non-nuclear option” is to imply that it is some kind of relatively benign alternative to nuclear force. On the contrary, what we’re looking at here are two classes of weapons of mass destruction: one whose primary function is that they be held in reserve as a diabolical threat; the other system is very much designed for use. Indeed, one can imagine that at some point in his or her term of office, every American president will make a point of showcasing American power with a prompt global strike.

Noah Shachtman describes how this would work:

A tip sets the plan in motion — a whispered warning of a North Korean nuclear launch, or of a shipment of biotoxins bound for a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon. Word races through the American intelligence network until it reaches U.S. Strategic Command headquarters, the Pentagon and, eventually, the White House. In the Pacific, a nuclear-powered Ohio class submarine surfaces, ready for the president’s command to launch.

When the order comes, the sub shoots a 65-ton Trident II ballistic missile into the sky. Within 2 minutes, the missile is traveling at more than 20,000 ft. per second. Up and over the oceans and out of the atmosphere it soars for thousands of miles. At the top of its parabola, hanging in space, the Trident’s four warheads separate and begin their screaming descent down toward the planet. Traveling as fast as 13,000 mph, the warheads are filled with scored tungsten rods with twice the strength of steel. Just above the target, the warheads detonate, showering the area with thousands of rods-each one up to 12 times as destructive as a .50-caliber bullet. Anything within 3000 sq. ft. of this whirling, metallic storm is obliterated.

If Pentagon strategists get their way, there will be no place on the planet to hide from such an assault.

What Prompt Global Strike is really about is turning inter-continental ballistic missiles (minus nuclear warheads) into usable weapons.

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