In some cases, such as Israel, our alliances have been built on cultural affinity, military necessity, and domestic political considerations. In other cases, such as Saudi Arabia, our considerations have been more commercial. The larger point of U.S. engagement in the region has been to ensure the freedom of crucial shipping lanes and the flow of oil—without which the global economy that sustains billions of people around the world would grind to a halt.
Lee Smith, Blowback
And then came Obama.
Taking into account Obama what has done in the Middle East, how does one describe Obama's policy in the Middle East?
Lee Smith examines a few possibilities--only to eliminate them:
- Obama as protector of human rights? That won't fly. After the Ahmadinejad's fraudulent re-election, protesters looked to the US for support--but none came, despite the documented cases of torture. Later, there was a little support, but now there is only silence. And let's not get started on Syria, where even the off-hand comment or two that we have finally heard has been minimal.
- Obama as master of realpolitik? No again. Obama has not constrained enemies of the US such as Iran and Syria. And when it comes to powerful allies like Saudi Arabia--Obama has alienated them. The result: the Saudis are not relying on the US alone for arms, and more importantly, they are seeking to create their own alliance--including Jordan, Bahrain and Pakistan as a counter to Obama's policies which in their failure to stop Iran are destabilizing the region. Then there is Obama's self-imposed tension with Israel.
Why is it failing?
What are--and will be--the consequences?
Read on.
Technorati Tag: Middle East and Obama.
12 comments:
as usual content on obama here is devoid of statements of fact and devoid of comparisons to Bush.
pathetic partisan propaganda
you should really ramp up the level of seriousness here, or review the book the emporers new clothes until you understand it
as usual content on obama here is devoid of statements of fact and devoid of comparisons to Bush.
What does Bush have to do with this?
This article is a fraud. It should be removed from the Tablet. The writer has written some of the worst type of lies possible, namely, statements of fact- that are false. If a writer can’t be trusted on account of his deceit to write true statements of fact, he must be ignored and the editor of a journal must prevent the inclusion of such pieces of lies.
So just one example Smith writes about is Obamas remark about the 1967 borders in his Mideast Speech. Unfortunately Smith has lied on purpose about this. Smith’s whole article is weaving together fantasies of the mind of Obama while referring to half considered events that he doesn’t even record accurately. Smith is a joke and he writes for the Weekly Standard, another joke. Here is what he fictionalized: “Obama picks fights with Israel and then suddenly demands the Jewish state return to its 1967 borders as a condition for negotiating a peace agreement with the Palestinians—and is publicly rebuked by the Israeli prime minister, with the support of the U.S. Congress.”
Firstly, Obama never picked a fight with Israel. Ask Smith to name one disagreement that Obama has with Israel that wasn’t started by GW Bush as policy or isn't a faint echo of a reality started by Bush.
It was George bush who gave his major U.S. policy speech in the Rose Garden May 26, 2005 telling the world that U.S. Policy was based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps ( i.e. vetoable by the Palestinians) and that natural growth( Road Map) must be terminated. (This goes all the way back to the Bush policy of the Roadmap despite Ariel Sharon's 20 objections.)
part 2 from Leonard Moscowitz since there was a charachter limit"
Here are Bush’s exact public words: “ Israel must remove unauthorized outposts and stop settlement expansion….Any final status agreement must be reached between the two parties, and changes to the 1949 Armistice Lines must be mutually agreed to.”
And Bush said this after Ariel Sharon initiated the Gaza Withdrawl but didn't even wait to see what the result would be, which was terror. Then Bush approved elections containing Hamas despite this being a capitulation to Hamas. So any Obama idea regarding negotiations with the Abbas Fatah when Fatah is in a technical unity government with Hamas ( in the latter, there is no nafka minah- there are no implication- to dealing with Abbas’ Fatah while excluding Hamas from the negotiations, and certainly there is no implication of a final agreement without a Hamas acceptance of at least peace or no violence with Israel, whereas in the former Bush allowed a real life vote of Hamas and he allowed it to stand instead of invading Gaza) Furthermore there is no comparison with Bush allowing Hamas to vote …..with Obama talking to the Muslim brotherhood that has foresworn terror against Israel ( exactly what Bush and Obama’s demands are for TALKING to the Palestinians ( nevermind a unity government- that is a different issue)
A policy of no terror against Israel –is like Bush negotiations Lebanon ( who has hezbolah in a unity government)
See the full text at this link.
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/05/20050526.html
Fuller text of GW Bush at the Rose Garden: ”Israel must continue to take steps toward a peaceful future, and work with the Palestinian leadership to improve the daily lives of Palestinians, especially their humanitarian situation. Israel should not undertake any activity that contravenes road map obligations or prejudice final status negotiations with regard to Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. Therefore, Israel must remove unauthorized outposts and stop settlement expansion….Any final status agreement must be reached between the two parties, and changes to the 1949 Armistice Lines must be mutually agreed to. A viable two-state solution must ensure contiguity on the West Bank, and a state of scattered territories will not work. ( There must also be meaningful linkages between the West Bank and Gaza). This is the position of the United States today; it will be the position of the United States at the time of final status negotiations…. ”
Furthermore After Bush got done saying the negotiations were to be based on the 1967 borders with swaps that must be mutually agreed to, and after Bush saying that natural growth of settlements had to stop, a reporter asked Bush in the Q & A portion in the Rose Garden “But Israel continues to build settlements and continues to seize Palestinian territories. What is your position, Mr. President?”
PRESIDENT BUSH RESPONDS TO THE REPORTER:Bush: “Well, I told you what my position was. And it’s exactly what I said when I was in Crawford { editor; after which came the 2004 infamous LETTER}, by the way, when Prime Minister Sharon was there, as well. I mean, when you say you’re going to accept the road map, you accept the road map. And part of the obligations of the road map is not the expansion of settlements. And we continue to remind our friends, the Israelis, about their obligations under the road map, just like we remind President Abbas about the obligations under the road map that the Palestinians have accepted. So nothing has changed.”
part 3 from Leonard Moscowitz since there is a 4000 charachter limit
Condi Rice:
Jerusalem Post January 8, 2009:
Condi Rice, who was accompanying Bush en route to Israel overnight Tuesday, said that “the United States doesn’t make a distinction between settlement activity in east Jerusalem and the West Bank and that Israel’s road map obligations, which include a building freeze, relate to settlement activity generally.”
http://newstopics.jpost.com/topic/George_W._Bush
GW Bush authored the "Road Map" which created this policy: The "Government Of Israel freezes all settlement activity including natural growth of settlements."
Condi Rice described the 2004 Bush letter as “the president’s acknowledgement that these changes have taken place and have to be accommodated. This president also said it needs to be mutually agreed [upon]. So the negotiation, the agreement itself, will finally resolve these issues, and we can stop having the discussion about what’s a settlement and what isn’t.” http://newstopics.jpost.com/topic/George_W._Bush
Bush at Annapolis in 2007 said “Any final status agreement must be reached between the two parties, and changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to. A viable two-state solution must ensure contiguity on the West Bank” Bush said at the time. “This is the position of the United States today; it will be the position of the United States at the time of final status negotiations.”
Rice: "US entirely opposed to Har Homa" HILARY LEILA KRIEGER, HERB KEINON AND KHALED ABU TOAMEH from Jerusalem Post: 01/08/2008 08:39
Rice tells 'Post' "Har Homa is a settlement the United States has opposed from the very beginning." Rice, who was accompanying Bush en route to Israel overnight Tuesday, said that "the United States doesn't make a distinction" between settlement activity in east Jerusalem and the West Bank and that Israel's road map obligations, which include a building freeze, relate to "settlement activity generally." Rice's comments underlined that the settlement issue will be high on the agenda of the talks between Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
This is just one of a hundred public statements from Rice, though this one was made while on route with GW Bush. Yet the Republican World and the Jewish Republican coaltion is silent.
It was GW Bush who took pride in the biggest peace offer yet :
“Ehud Olmert stated that on “August 31, 2008, three weeks before he resigned, he offered 100 percent of West Bank land ( 6.8% in land swaps), 10,000 Palestinian refugees returning to Israel’s final borders, and the holy basin of Jerusalem’s Old City coming under joint Israeli-Palestinian-American- Jordanian-Saudi control. He last met with Abbas on September 16 of that year – five days before he resigned, and more than six months before he left office – and Abbas did not respond or make a counteroffer.”
from Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/Features/FrontLines/Article.aspx?id=218340
* This offer for 100% of the mileage of the West Bank and parts of East Jerusalem is what GW Bush bragged about in his book Decision Points.
Furthermore Smith didn’t mention that it was Bush who demanded Hamas be allowed to vote in the PA elections despite Hamas having had then a position of killing the Jews. Yet Smith acts as if the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has a current policy of killing the Jews despite the fact that they forswore violence against Israel or against other Arabs.
4th and final part from leonard moscowitz since this is a 4000 charachter limit
Furthermore smith lied when he said Netanyahu rebuked Obama after his Mideast speech. The Republicans and the Jewish Republican coaltion certainly portrayed it that way, but nothing Netanyahu said in front of Obama after their private 2 hours together was a disagreement with anything that Obama had said- and it is easy to check by putting obamas speech side by side with Netanyahu’s words and see there is no contradiction.
Furthermore Obama came out from the private meeting before Netanyahu’s lecture to the cameras and Obama said, correctly, "friends will use different words" to describe policy. And then Netanyahu in front of Congress a few days later conceded publicly that Obama’s position was the same as his as follows:
” As President Obama said, the border will be different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. Israel will not return to the indefensible lines of 1967.” [end Netanyahu quote.”.]
Nonetheless the republicans before and after that speech created a hysterical fantasy that Obama did something different. They engaged in a vast right wing political lie with every Republican candidate for 2012 saying in one form or the other " Obama threw Israel under the bus".
And of course when Bush did the same stuff the Republicans and the Jewish Republican Coalition was silent from the Roadmap in 2003 through the Rose Garden Speech in 2005 and through Annapolis in 2007 through the 100% West Bank land give away offer by Bush and Olmert in 2008. All the Republicans were silent.
Arutz Sheva was perhaps the only Israeli organ that spoke up ( with respect for Bush and disdain for Sharon) when they exposed Bush and Sharon in an analysis on May 29, 2005 - http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/82861
But the republicans were quiet because they only speak up when they can lie about a democrat just like Smith does, and lie worse than they did about Clinton since Obama is not white and one of his parents was not born Christian, rather, born a moslem, so they use that to whip the hysteria up so that they lie about Obama's psychology toward the state of Israel.
Ask Smith to name one disagreement that Obama has with Israel that wasn’t started by GW Bush as policy or isn't a faint echo of a reality started by Bush.
I don't have a direct pipeline to Lee Smith, but one obvious example of Obama picking a fight with Israel is making the freezing of the settlements into a precondition of talks instead of a negotiating point to be discussed.
This has been pointed out by others and Abbas himself has been quoted as saying that he only insisted on the point because Obama himself brought it up.
Of course, you could make a case that this is not a case of Obama actually picking a fight so much as making an unforced error that led to the collapse of the talks.
Daled Amos stated : I don't have a direct pipeline to Lee Smith, but one obvious example of Obama picking a fight with Israel is making the freezing of the settlements into a precondition of talks instead of a negotiating point to be discussed. This has been pointed out by others and Abbas himself has been quoted as saying that he only insisted on the point because Obama himself brought it up.
With regard to Daled Amos’ first sentence:
The fact of the matter is that Obama has merely plagiarized Bush. Bush was glatt. Road Map, Rose Garden policy speech, and Annapolis created and reiterated the freezing of the settlements as a precondition of the talks toward a final settlement. It was to take place as outlined in the Roadmap. Every previous American president including Reagan and HW made it policy to stop settlements even prior to any negotiations about a final settlement and readers can read about this in public sources from 30 and 20 years ago.
What makes GW Bush singularly revolutionary when it comes to U.S. policy is that in 2002 he was the first U.S. President to actually enunciate as [1] written American policy ( i.e. The Road Map) tied to an international body ( ie. the Quartet ) requiring the total cessation of all natural growth. The Road Map is the rulebook for the conducting of negotiations. It has nothing to do with the final settlement other than a 2 state solution which GW bragged about on Irish radio when he stated he was the first president to make official US policy a 2 state solution.
This was an instantaneous condition of the talks- the specifics of no new natural growth is delineated precisely and Bush never equivocated thereafter despite the 20 Ariel Sharon objections. Obama had not even hinted at anything different in regard to the Roadmap specifics on territory growth until, unbelievably, he has at the end of 2010 defacto eliminated this condition ( in other words, obamas policy is defacto a revision of the Road map in terms of ignoring this natural growth up until the final settlement!)
{The Road Map and GW’s requests to stop all natural growth is of course a policy about the conditions of the negotiations and not the final settlement.} GW Bush reiterates the 2002 road map in 2005 at the Rose Garden ( quoted above) and then at Annapolis in 2007. It’s also in all the public statements of Powell and Condi all throughout their tenures. (The 2005 statement references his private conversations with Sharon in 2004 in Crawford and the infamous “2004 Bush Sharon letters” with Bush in 2005 making it clear as day that nothing in those discussions or in the letter allows for natural growth and nothing in the letter allows a settlement to be retained by Israel without mutual agreement between the parties. )
The difference with Obama on any and all of these points do not exist except in fantasies and propaganda. Obama’s entire policy conduct - is plagiarized from Bush.
part 2 in the next comment due to limits of charachters
signed Leonard Moscowitz
part 2 leonard moscowitz
Now what is the hysteria all about with regard to purported differences between Bush and Obama policy? Indeed in terms of game changers in what happened on the ground in the real world lies in the differences between Netanyahu and Abbas versus [1] Sharon’s unilateral behavior and [2] Olmert’s and Abbas’ relationship which grew to the point that by the time after Annapolis took place Olmert and Bush and Abbas conducted negotiations ( the leaked “Palestine Papers” contain expected details – all expected, with the few interesting exceptions of some unexpected Abbas positions regarding Jerusalem and some of the settlements and proposed swaps that were the subject of the negotiations.)
There was a decision made by all to keep negotiating despite Bush Condi and Abbas slamming Israel for natural growth. The reality is that the negotiations resulted in the 2008 West Bank offer of 100% of the land with 6.8 % swaps ( as quoted above) and a partial EJ offer.
Olmert didn’t entirely stop natural growth throughout the negotiations but didn’t initiate east Jerusalem building in what to that point had been Arab civilian locales of EJ. The fact that Olmert didn’t listen to the U.S. is the same as Netanyahu not listening with the difference being that Olmert quietly didn’t listen as is historically the case with Labor, where historically Labor feigns acceptance and then a little later does what they want to a certain degree. Likud’s Begin Shamir and Netanyahu have a long history of publicly disapproving, and reaping the Reagan HW and Clinton responses with Reagan and HW actually threatening real world responses ! ( Reagan actually carried one out for a while). Never did Obama even hint at a monetary threat.
The likud coalition also irritated its US ally in coming away in 2009 and 2010 as the highest leaking Israeli administration in history. There is ample reporting on this during 2009 and part of 2010 and that, more than the settlements, caused the real anger in the O Admin.
The point is this has nothing to do with Obama, which is my only purpose in writing this.
Who is therefore responsible for the hysteria? The answer has been before our very eyes. The responsible parties are the ones who communicate and bring on the hysteria. The Republicans, the Likud Coalition, the Jewish Republican Coaltion, and their allies like Malcolm Hoenlein and his organization and allies, charging
Obama with being 1-anti Israel, 2-throwing Israel under the bus, and 3- attempting to create a final settlement that will be different than the one that Bush and Olmert offered----- followed by the liberal and conservative media reporting false statements of fact, and sensationalizing them, and also sensationalizing conduct that is correctly reported, but which was not spun as anti-BUSH when Bush did the same thing.
In conclusion, The facts to rationally consider must be the totality of the US pro Israel government administration when determined by the only matters that matter: reality dictates the determinants:
[A] policy regarding military and intelligence alliances between US and Israel,
[B] US policy and action regarding the final negotiated settlement being the same as GW Bush, and
[C] the degree to which Israel has a free arm to protect itself.
The comparison with Bush is the way to do it- not in a vacuum, because a vacuum discounts American interests. We of course are not necessarily liking Obama’s, GW’s, Olmerts, and Sharons policies, or Clinton or HW or Reagan ETC…. My sole purpose in writing this is to point out that the wider community doesn’t know that they are being lied to by the reporting of falsehoods and the reporting of sensationalism in the form of spinning a story about Obama being anti-Israel while the media didn’t sensationalize ( or even cover!) the same story when the same conduct was engaged in by BUSH.
part 3 of Leonard Moscowitz due to charachter limits
(continued)
Obama is the same as Bush and Olmert and Sharon, and the deceit fostered by the above mentioned propagandists, lead the community to hold false beliefs about the Obama strategy. ( Obama recently said at the end of May, beginning of June, to a closed group of Jewish “leaders” that “WE” ( Obama and the audience) have the same goals, the tactics are sometime different ( if Obama was laying it all out there he would have said ‘ I am merely plagiarizing Bush- Netanyahu and Abbas’ relationship are the variables. I, Barack Obama, and GW, are the constants”. But of course he cant say that.
part 4 and final part of Leonard Moscowitz response to Daled Amos ( due to charachter limitations)
This part 4 is not important to read since the issue in this part is moot and unsubstantiated and even if the claim is true, it is irre;evant
________________
To respond to the second point of Daled Amos where he wrote about Abbas claiming Obama told him to require natural growth stoppage. I am not going to accept Abbas remark nor the context (the parameters ). I would request you point to the exact most comprehensive primary source on this point so we can see the context. I believe there is no context. I am not going to judge the overall reality of the Obama Admin’s over a 2 ½ year period based on hearsay of a one liner from a quote from Abbas without parameters and the context in which this was discussed. Therefore it is pointless to comment.
If it were entirely true it would mean that due to Netanyahu’s wild behavior out of the gates when he took office , Obamas response was to merely reiterate the Road Map conditions to tame Netanyahu into complying with previous Israel agreements as Bush sent Powell to read Ariel Sharon the riot act.
If it were true it would still not be relevant since Bush is the author of this and then Obama compromised into a temporary halt of settlement growth. Obama then has only demanded Abbas come to the table as evidenced in repeated ongoing media that goes uncontradicted, making the previous question moot. I would still like to see the most comprehensive source.
It is unambiguous though that multiple ongoing sources wrote of the Arab leaugue and Abbas discussions as to whether to give up on the Roadmap requirement to cease natural growth and enter negotiations anyway. This is very important because this is covered by all media and repeatedly so and it is evident the Arab league was calling the shots demanding Abbas not to negotiate without the natural growth stoppage requirement and then it was claimed that the Arab league ultimately caved in to allowing Abbas to decide- at least publicly-we can’t know more.
Every previous American president including Reagan and HW made it policy to stop settlements even prior to any negotiations about a final settlement and readers can read about this in public sources from 30 and 20 years ago.
And yet clearly they did not.
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