Opinion | ||||
Obama's perfect storm | ||||
By opposing a Palestinian
statehood vote at the UN, Obama will continue to alienate Arabs and the wider
Muslim world.
Mark
LeVine Last Modified: 20 Sep 2011 15:41
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Perhaps the title isn't fair. The storm that awaits Barack Obama at the UN is
not entirely of his own creation.
He did not create half a century of US foreign policy based on support for
authoritarianism and occupation in the Arab and larger Muslim worlds. It was not
Obama, but his predecessors - going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt - who
cosied up to the Saudis and promised them unlimited protection in return for
unlimited access to all that oil.
It was not Obama but Richard Nixon who put geostrategic considerations ahead
of pushing for a robust and fair negotiating process to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian issue, when there were only a few settlements and Israelis
and Palestinians had not yet moved towards ideological extremism and terrorism
as their chosen means of communication.
It was not Obama but Jimmy Carter who toasted the Shah's health in 1977, as
Iran was primed to explode in revolutionary fervour (Mr Carter's introductory
joke - "There's one thing I can say about the Shah: He knows how to draw a
crowd", - did turn out to be prescient, but not in ways he imagined). Carter did
set a very high bar with the Camp David Accords - more than half of which were
devoted to the Palestinian issue - but he never pressed Israel to honour the
spirit of the Accords once it became clear that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin had no intention of doing so. This was a mistake that quite possibly cost
Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat his life.
And it certainly wasn't Obama who gave Taliban "freedom fighters" their first
billions in cash and US weapons, or who smiled while Saddam Hussein launched a
ruinous war on Iran and Israel entrenched its settlement enterprise. Ronald
Reagan will have to take the blame for those, if anyone's bothering to keep
score anymore.
Obama didn't launch the first Gulf War, or even the second.
He didn't waste the 1990s shepherding a peace process that only the most
incompetent of shepherds would have imagined would lead to the oasis of peace.
He can't be blamed for doing nothing to press US allies from Morocco to Pakistan
to clean up their acts and move towards democracy as the post-Cold War era of
globalisation, with all its promise, began to take shape. That was, of course,
Bill Clinton's affair.
The current president didn't ask to inherit two wars and the world's most
powerful and profitable military-industrial complex that feeds off - and directs
- these wars. How precisely do you take on a trillion-plus-dollar-a-year monster
that has spent the better part of a century not just protecting but constantly
expanding its turf, turning back any attempts by politicians to rein it in,
regardless of their party or the rationality of their arguments?
The game is rigged, but so what?
In fact, perhaps Obama never had a chance. He might have dined with
Palestinian professors back in Chicago, but there was no way he would have been
allowed near the presidency if he actually internalised the historical narrative
represented by Palestinian history and that of the Arab and larger developing
worlds. Yes, he's half African and grew up partly in Indonesia, and can give
really nice speeches about the need for the peoples of the world to build a
common future.
But more than anything, Obama is a product of the US political machine - from
Harvard to Chicago to the White House. And you don't go through that meat
grinder and come out at the other end with many principles left intact.
Even if Obama can't be blamed for the system - an-nitham, to use the
entirely appropriate Arab connotation of the term - he must take responsibility
for how many opportunities he has squandered and just how far US strategic
designs have moved from the emerging realities in the Middle East and North
Africa.
There are many arguments to be made for and against PA president Mahmoud
Abbas bringing a statehood bid before the UN. Indeed, in a seemingly strange
irony, one of the most eloquent arguments against the bid comes from Susan Rice,
the US Ambassador to the UN, who explained that "there's no shortcut, there's no
magic wand that can be waved in New York and make everything right ... The
reality is that nothing is going to change. There won't be any more sovereignty,
there won't be any more food on the table."
But of course, the reason for US opposition to the statehood bid - namely, US
policy that supports Israel's ongoing entrenchment of its occupation in the West
Bank against the wishes of the entire world - is left unstated. Indeed, Rice and
the Obama Administration are being patronising in the extreme by arguing that
the push for a vote represents a "miscalculation" and a "gap between expectation
and reality [that] is in itself quite dangerous".
Instead, the reality is that the Obama administration, and the US foreign
policy system it represents, are the ones who have badly miscalculated.
Palestinians understand quite well that this vote is largely symbolic. But
with nothing to lose and the US hopelessly titled towards Israel, if the
Palestinians can extract a political price by increasing the amplitude of the
wave of anger of the newly empowered "Arab street" (a term that after decades of
mis-use finally has some analytical bona fides) in response to the planned US
veto in the Security Council, Palestinians will for once have played their
historically bad hand well.
Letting both the US and Israel know that the continuation of the status quo
will no longer be painless is better than most other alternatives. It also
begins to create a narrative of fairness and equality for Palestinians vis-a-vis
Israel, since according to Obama's own words, Palestinians deserve no less than
Israelis a sovereign state of their own.
If the coming intifada can follow the best practices of the Arab democracy
revolts and remain largely non-violent in the face of the various forms of
violence Israel will likely deploy against Palestinians, this new narrative will
play an important role in beginning to level the diplomatic playing field
between the two sides, weakening the US position in the process.
Even the weak smell blood
Of course, a change in narrative is unlikely to threaten decades-long US
policy imperatives on its own, but it can make them much more difficult to
protect. In the process it would weaken Obama's standing at home and abroad,
something people around the region, and in the US, are beginning to sense more
clearly as summer turns to autumn.
Aside from the Palestinian issue, the other major element of the perfect
storm Obama is facing at the UN concerns US opposition to the pro-democracy
movements across the region. Most Arabs remember quite well how Obama refused to
the use the "D-word" - democracy - during the heat of the uprisings in
Tunisia and especially Egypt. Particularly in Egypt, the utter silence of the US
administration while the military junta continues with serious violations of the
rights of Egyptian democracy advocates has further tarnished Obama's image in
the bellwether country of the Arab Spring.
US unwillingness to press fully for the removal of Syrian President Assad or
Yemeni President Saleh, and its even starker silence in Bahrain - never mind
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and other monarchies that have managed to repress
their fledgling democracy movements - only further alienates the US (and Europe
as well) from the historic momentum of the region-wide protest movement.
These policies ensure that the US will be in a far weaker position when this
struggle plays itself out than it was at the start, when the US could have stood
firmly on the side of the young protesters. Supporting the overthrow of Gaddafi
won't score Obama or the US more broadly many points, because everyone
understand that Gaddafi was never a friend, but merely a useful client who, like
Saddam Hussein before him, could easily be sacrificed if doing so served broader
interests.
Indeed, the protesters know how deeply implicated the US has been in the
existing authoritarian order in the Arab world. If a few hundred Egyptians
almost tore apart the Israeli embassy, think what thousands might do next time,
especially if there is something resembling a real transition to democracy after
the upcoming elections and the government has to respect their sentiments.
The protesters understand full well that the three core US goals in the
Middle East - protecting key oil-producing allies and their clients, ensuring
the stability of the Israeli and Egyptian military complexes, and maintaining
the power of the larger US "weapondollar-petrodollar" complex - are inimical to
the interests of real democracy. As these protesters become empowered, Obama,
who began his presidency with such eloquent words about a new age of cooperation
and common purpose, will be left even more isolated in the region.
A system in retreat?
And as Obama looks weaker, the system will search for alternatives that can
shore itself up, even if it means further militarising the country, against the
needs of the vast majority of Americans. And with a weakened and even more
dangerous United States careening towards its own slow Armageddon, we might well
witness the "clash of civilisations" that neocons have long prayed for.
Only the civilisations in question won't be drawn from religion, tribe, or
nation. They'll be separated by money, power and utterly opposed visions of the
future: a global Arab Spring led by third world youth and their Western peers
(including, one might dare to hope, millions of unemployed working-class
Americans who will no longer sit and support their own impoverishment), versus
the dynamic of repression, expropriation, intolerance, and violence of a
"nitham" that has linked the world's elite - from Washington to Tehran
to Beijing - in a bloody embrace for decades.
It might not be fair for history to let Barack Obama take the fall for such
an outcome. But history doesn't care who's right or wrong. It only cares who's
smart or strong. And on both counts, it looks today like the US under Obama's
leadership is getting weaker and dumber, while its adversaries - from the Arab
street to the Chinese State Council - grow more adept at frustrating its wishes
with each passing year.
Barack Obama has very little time or manouevering room to change this
dynamic, but a bit of honesty at the UN would be a good place to start.
Mark
LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at
the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in
Sweden. He also is the author of Heavy
Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of
Islam and the soon-to-be-published
An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since
1989.
Follow
Mark LeVine on Twitter: @culturejamming
The views
expressed in this article are those to whom they are attributed and do not
necessarily represent al Jazeera's editorial
policy.
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Source:
Al Jazeera
|
Estados Unidos, donde todos son inmigrantes ilegales; todos, menos los que viven en las reservaciones indígenas
miércoles, 21 de septiembre de 2011
Obama's perfect storm
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