AMERICA WRITES ITSELF OUT OF THE SCRIPT
Michael Young
Daily Star, July 12, 2012
Lately, the U.S. administration has been so preoccupied with domestic issues vital to President Barack Obama’s re-election, that you wonder where the Middle East stands in Washington’s future.
That’s not to say that American officials are ignoring the region. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has devoted much effort to Syria and Iran, while related American concerns further afield, such as those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, have also preoccupied decision-makers. The problem is more fundamental.… At such a revolutionary moment in the Arab world, when foreign policy certitudes are collapsing almost on a daily basis, the administration does not appear to have any long-term overriding vision or interpretation of the region to help define how the United States must act to advance its national interests.…
Developing a foreign policy strategy is complex, demanding clear direction from the president or a State Department mandated by the White House to take the lead in policy formulation. It entails interaction between different, often competing, government bureaucracies, which have to ultimately hammer out compromises (successful or not) that ensure everyone is on the same page. At some stage Congress, which controls the money, is brought on board, and usually will try to impose alternative paths of its own. Ideally, a strategy requires flexibility, so that Washington can adapt to political surprises, which tend to overwhelm the big ideas and can substantially rewrite the story.
But if crafting a strategy is never easy, articulating it so that foreign capitals and the public know what is going on is not rocket science. The administration will insert relevant references in speeches. Officials will write op-ed pieces and publish papers. Think tanks will be enlisted to disseminate or will pick up new policy vibes from the administration. And the president and his aides will get on an airplane and spread the good word. Time is valuable, so the time that a president devotes to an issue shows how important he thinks it is.
On the basis of all this, the Middle East seems to be a rather poor cousin in the Obama administration. After high-profile visits early in his term, Obama has kept away from the Arab world. Even in his speeches, his disinterest is palpable.…
For instance, in Syria, where the Americans have the capacity to politically cripple a principal regional rival, namely Iran, the Obama administration is still dependent on the goodwill of Russia and China, two countries that want to see American power reduced.…
Even the military involvement in Libya last year was done in spite of Obama’s manifest misgivings. The president allowed himself to be dragged into the conflict because he did not want to be accused of allowing a massacre in Benghazi. As in Egypt a few weeks earlier, the U.S. seemed to be caught off guard, propelled by events largely outside its control, for which it seemed inadequately prepared.
Most of the pillars sustaining American involvement in the Middle East since the end of World War II have collapsed. The relationship with Saudi Arabia has been severely shaken during Obama’s term. Egypt has entered a new phase of its history, one in which American influence is in decline. The so-called Palestinian-Israeli peace process is without a process and offers no prospects of peace.…
It is astonishing that at such a crucial stage in the Arab world, Washington is doing little hard thinking. Obama has written himself out of the script, a distant apparition alien to the peoples of the Middle East. But the region remains critical…and it can still bite the world in the rear end. When that happens, the Americans cannot afford to lead from behind.…
(Michael Young is opinion editor of Lebanon’s Daily Star.)
THE OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, July 3, 2012
The 2012 [US presidential] election will hinge on the economy, not on U.S. foreign policy, unless there is a major overseas crisis—an Israeli attack on Iran, an Iranian detonation of a nuclear weapon, a Middle East war, a North Korean attack, or something of that sort. That said, there is much to lament in the current administration’s foreign policy.…
What are the ten legitimate areas of criticism?
1. Securitygate. The Obama administration has leaked the most intimate secrets about U.S. covert operations—the cyber war against Iran, the Predator-drone assassination program, the Yemeni double agent, the bin Laden raid—in a transparent attempt to chest-thump over the once covert anti-terrorism efforts. This was a shameful thing, and we have not yet felt the full consequences of this disaster.
2. The administration initially did not care much about the Arab Spring, but was dragged into it by the looming fall of Hosni Mubarak. Leading from behind in Libya was incoherent, and what followed Qaddafi was more incoherent.… Obama remains ashamed of Iraq and ostracizes it (even as it so far remains the most stable of the new Arab consensual governments), and he makes no distinction between the Muslim Brotherhood and secular democratic movements. In other words, rather than encouraging those who thought the Arab Spring might offer a pluralistic society, Obama stood back as Islamists, Khomeini-style, took control, and he then ex post facto labeled them democrats, even though, as in the case of Hamas and the Iranian theocrats, they favor one free election, just one time.
3. Russian reset is mostly a failure. Embarrassing the Czechs and the Poles over missile defense got us little. Putin has been no help with Iran. An occasional peep about Russian human rights was unceremoniously swatted down. Putin now assumes Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics fall under his own Russian Monroe Doctrine. A new loose axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea threatens to create a nuclear buffer to U.S. interests.
4. Obama has snubbed our closest allies, so much so that should the U.S. ever find itself again in need of a coalition, it is hard to imagine who would join it. Canada got mostly ingratitude for its presence in Afghanistan, and it is still furious over the Keystone Pipeline debacle. Our once closest ally, Great Britain, recognizes that the United States is now neutral on the Falklands (a.k.a. the Maldives), and that if Argentina were to invade again, the U.S. would probably withhold help. Israel knows that the U.S., at best neutral, votes present on the Middle East and does not much worry that Israel may soon be surrounded by Islamist frontline states. Whether we would fully supply Israel in its next war is legitimately in doubt. In contrast, Turkey, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood, for the first time in history, believe that America is more sympathetic to their causes than to Israel’s. Anti-democratic Venezuela and Cuba, and their Latin American kindred Communist states, also sense that the U.S. is a friend of such totalitarian movements.…
5. President Obama was quiet when nearly 1 million Iranian protesters hit the streets in the spring of 2009, almost as if he felt his own multicultural bona fides should be given a chance to finesse the Khomeinist theocracy.… It was a shameful decision at a rare time when the Iranian people were looking for pro-democracy affirmation—offering the last chance to stop the Iranian bomb without some sort of military intervention.
6. The new emphasis on Asia is so far in utter confusion. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are less, not more, assured that a diffident U.S. would come to their defense in case of an existential crisis. Are they still under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, or is the umbrella itself shrinking fast? Simultaneously borrowing from and lecturing China leads to the image of U.S. impotence.…
7. Despite the growing anti-democratic tendencies of the Erdogan government in Turkey, Obama has structured his Middle East policy around that government, unconcerned that its policy of insidious Islamization is a model for slowly subverting what follows from elections.
8. The apologies, contextualizations, and bowing were trivial gestures, but in aggregate they added to the sense of U.S. diffidence and decline.…
9. The addition of $5 trillion in national debt was disastrous in terms of U.S. foreign policy. It lost us what leverage we had over China. It destroyed any credibility in advising the European Union about its own financial meltdown. It curtailed options in the Middle East. Massive defense cuts loom. In this regard, the associated decisions not to open federal lands to new oil and gas leasing, and to cancel Keystone, were also strategically dense, given that an additional 2 to 3 million barrels of North American production would have given us greater leeway in the Persian Gulf and lessened our exposure to foreign creditors.
10. With a little deft diplomacy, Obama could have salvaged a vestigial American presence to monitor the security of Iraqi democracy and blunt Iranian subversion. The failure to attempt this was an especially ironic lapse, given that the administration now wants to radically increase U.S. troop levels in nearby monarchical Kuwait.…
(Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.)
OBAMA’S SPECTACULAR FAILURE
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, July 12, 2012
Two weeks ago, in an unofficial inauguration ceremony at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi took off his mask of moderation. Before a crowd of scores of thousands, Mursi pledged to work for the release from US federal prison of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.…
Otherwise known as the blind sheikh, Abdel Rahman was the mastermind of the jihadist cell in New Jersey that perpetrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His cell also murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York in 1990. They plotted the assassination of then-president Hosni Mubarak. They intended to bomb New York landmarks including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the UN headquarters.
Rahman was the leader of Gama’a al-Islamia—the Islamic Group, responsible, among other things for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. A renowned Sunni religious authority, Rahman wrote the fatwa, or Islamic ruling, permitting Sadat’s murder in retribution for his signing the peace treaty with Israel. The Islamic group is listed by the State Department as a specially designated terrorist organization.
After his conviction in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Abdel-Rahman issued another fatwa calling for jihad against the US. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden cited Abdel-Rahman’s fatwa as the religious justification for them.
By calling for Abdel-Rahman’s release, Mursi has aligned himself and his government with the US’s worst enemies.… Mursi signaled that he cares more about winning the acclaim of the most violent, America-hating jihadists in the world than with cultivating good relations with America.
And in response to Mursi’s supreme act of unfriendliness, US President Barack Obama invited Mursi to visit him at the White House.
Mursi is not the only Abdel Rahman supporter to enjoy the warm hospitality of the White House.
His personal terror organization has also been the recipient of administration largesse. Despite the fact that federal law makes it a felony to assist members of specially designated terrorist organizations, last month the State Department invited group member Hani Nour Eldin, a newly elected member of the Islamist-dominated Egyptian parliament, to visit the US and meet with senior US officials at the White House and the State Department, as part of a delegation of Egyptian parliamentarians. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland refused to provide any explanation for the administration’s decision to break federal law in order to host Eldin in Washington.…
Mursi is not the only Arab leader who embraces terrorists only to be embraced by the US government. In a seemingly unrelated matter, [last] week it was reported that in an attempt to satisfy the Obama administration’s urgent desire to renew negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel, and to satisfy the Palestinians’ insatiable desire to celebrate terrorists, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu offered to release 124 Palestinian terrorist murderers from Israeli prisons in exchange for a meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas.
Alas, Abbas refused. He didn’t think Netanyahu’s offer was generous enough.
And how did the Obama administration respond to Abbas’s demand for the mass release of terrorists and his continued refusal to resume negotiations with Israel? By attacking Israel.
The proximate cause of the Obama administration’s most recent assault on Israel is the publication of the legal opinion of a panel of expert Israeli jurists regarding the legality of Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. Netanyahu commissioned the panel, led by retired Supreme Court justice Edmond Levy, to investigate the international legal status of these towns and villages and to provide the government with guidance relating to future construction of Israeli communities beyond the armistice lines.
The committee’s findings…concluded that under international law, these communities are completely legal.…
The international legal basis for the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 was the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. That document gave the Jewish people the legal right to sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, as well as all the land Israel took control over during the 1948-49 War of Independence.
Not only did the Mandate give the Jewish people the legal right to the areas, it enjoined the British Mandatory authorities to “facilitate…close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.” So not only was Jewish settlement not prohibited. It was required.…
Whereas the Obama administration opted to embrace Mursi even as he embraces Abdel-Rahman, the Obama administration vociferously condemned Israel for having the nerve to ask a panel of senior jurists to opine about its rights. In a press briefing, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell banged the rhetorical hammer. As he put it, “The US position on settlements is clear.… We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.…”
In short then, for the Obama administration, it is all well and fine for the newly elected president of what was until two years ago the US’s most important Arab ally to embrace a terror mastermind indirectly responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. It is okay to invite members of jihadist terror groups to come to Washington and meet with senior US officials in a US taxpayer-funded trip. It is even okay for the head of a would-be-state that the US is trying to create to embrace every single Palestinian terrorist, including those who have murdered Americans. But for Israel’s elected government to ask an expert panel to determine whether Israel is acting in accordance with international law in permitting Jews to live on land the Palestinians insist must be Jew-free is an affront.
The disparity between the administration’s treatment of the Mursi government on the one hand and the Netanyahu government on the other places the nature of its Middle East policy in stark relief.… Obama believed he would convince the jihadists to put aside their hatred of America. Obama has implemented this policy for three and a half years. And its record of spectacular failure is unbroken.…
THE LOST TRIBE OF OBAMA
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post, July 15, 2012
Jews provide an estimated 50% to 60% of the entire funding of the Democratic Party, making them vital to President Barack Obama’s prospects for re-election. But many Jews are now questioning their commitment to Obama.… Only 64% of Jews who had donated to Obama’s 2008 campaign planned to support him again.
How could Obama have lost so many of his Jewish supporters, a group that gave him almost 80% of their vote in 2008? Obama blames Republicans for spreading bigotry, such as the claim Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, and counters that he’s as good as it gets for Jews. Obama reportedly told a group of rabbis visiting the White House in May that all of his Chicago friends were Jewish, that he’s well read on Judaism, and that he “probably knows about Judaism more than any other president.…” A New York magazine cover story, titled The First Jewish President, illustrated Obama in a skull cap.
But the estrangement of Jewish Democrats from Obama has nothing to do with his Muslim name and everything to do with how Jews now perceive him and his policies. This “Jewish president,” so confident of his knowledge of Jews, badly misread the Jewish community.…
Obama certainly is steeped in a Jewish milieu. The men most responsible for engineering his political strategies and running his campaigns—David Plouffe and David Axelrod—are both savvy Jews, as are most of his top economic advisors and his current and former chief of staff. J Street, the George Soros funded “pro-Israel” advocacy group, has Obama’s ear, having visited the White House numerous times since he became president.… But Obama’s familiarity with Jews extends well beyond this contemporary crew.
For starters, there’s Rabbi Arnold Wolf, a man said to have helped shape Obama’s views in the Chicago of the 1990s. Wolf is known for siding with the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was hijacking airplanes and conducting other terrorist acts, for chairing Breira, a radical anti-Israel organization that had tried to prevent the U.S. from supplying Israel with arms during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and for inviting the Chicago Seven, the radicals famed for their role in the Chicago Riots of 1968, to speak at his synagogue. Obama, who lived across the street from Wolf’s Chicago synagogue, often dropped by to discuss Israel and the Middle East with Wolf and like-minded Jews, giving Obama an insight into radical Jewish thought.
Wolf himself inspired and was inspired by Jewish radicals and revolutionaries—they included Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, two leaders of the Chicago Seven, and the revolutionary Jews who pervaded the anti-capitalist, anti-Vietnam War movement through the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society. Wolf, who was one of Obama’s earliest political backers, hosted a coffee party for Obama to aid his campaign, as did other members of this set, such as Weatherman founders Bernadette Dohrn, daughter of a wealthy Jew, and her husband, Bill Ayers. A Chicago Jew who did not meet Obama but who nevertheless profoundly influenced all in his progressive circle was Saul Alinsky, the legendary community organizer, who remains the gold standard in fighting the establishment.…
Surrounded as he was by radical Jews and their anti-capitalist, pro-Palestinian ideology, Obama could be forgiven for thinking that the Chicago crew he knew so well was representative of American Jewry as a whole, particularly since research by J Street confirmed for him that American Jews don’t support Israel’s “occupation” of Palestine, don’t support the right-wing government of Israel, and in any case don’t vote on the basis of America’s policies toward Israel. Obama’s Jewish advisors doubtless thought that offending Israel and its right-wing prime minister would play well to his Jewish base.
Hence Obama pointedly skipped Israel in his high-profile trips to Muslim countries in the Middle East and, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House, Obama denied his guest the customary photo-ops and joint press statement, and even refused to dine with him, curtly leaving Netanyahu and his aides without dinner arrangements and alone in the White House.…
This conduct, which shocked many Jews, began their reappraisal of Obama. While America’s Jews may not vote on the basis of Israel…neither do they want to see their co-religionists and the birthplace of their religion dissed.… Moreover, most American Jews are far from being radicals or anti-capitalist, as are many in Obama’s Jewish circle. Only 10% see themselves as either somewhat radical (8%) or largely radical (2%) and 58% believe they are “not at all” leftist, even though most Jews worry about global warming, favour abortion rights, support higher taxes on those earning more than $200,000, and want more government services and spending. (America’s Jews are in fact even less left-leaning than this survey suggests, because it excluded Orthodox Jews and those who had attended Jewish day school.)
If Obama’s stance toward Israel gave many Democratic Jews pause, his railing against the rich and the 1%, culminating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, motivated many to abandon Obama.… Occupy Wall Street, which Obama publicly endorsed, sent a chill through many Jews because of the division and hatred it unleashed.…
Will Obama get his alienated Jewish backers back? His fundraisers are certainly doing their best to explain that Obama’s position on Israel has been misunderstood, that many of Obama’s best friends are Jewish, that Obama doesn’t have anything against people becoming rich, that what Obama might say in public for political purposes doesn’t represent his private views. But many aren’t coming back.…
Summed up one of those in the 1% to an Obama fundraiser: “I just don’t think he likes us.”
