The explanation for the humiliation of Obama at the UN, where he gave the kind of speech a junior congressman might give at an AIPAC break-out session, is pretty simple. Obama was checkmated. Netanyahu and the GOP recognized immediately that the Cairo speech could have opened up a whole new chapter in America’s relationship with the Arab and further Muslim world. And so they, in active collaboration, did all they could to stop it in its tracks. They succeeded in handing Obama the clearest defeat of his first term.
The Obama goal was simple: win back global soft power in the war against Jihadist terrorism by demonstrating even-handedness again with the Israelis and Palestinians; use hard power much more effectively by lethally targeting al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The latter has been a big success. The former a major failure – fundamentally caused, as Judis beautifully explains, by Netanyahu’s adamant resistance to any serious attempt at a two-state solution on 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps, the only formula with any chance of success.
Many of us who supported Obama partly on his potential to transform America’s Muslim relations, especially in the wake of the extraordinary Arab Spring, have been crushed and angered. But the anger has by now led to total resignation. I mean: what, in the end, was Obama supposed to do? Many of the chieftains in his own own party – Reid, Hoyer, et al. – are more loyal to the Israeli prime minister and their core donors than to their own president. The GOP is even worse: actively going to Israel and colluding with the Likud against the US administration to enable more and more illegal settlements on the West Bank. AIPAC’s roll-call at its last conference revealed a veto-proof majority of Congress. Veto-proof. I doubt that was a message designed to be buried.
So any genuine attempt to put any serious pressure on Netanyahu would be immediately undercut by the Hill. So would have recognizing the Palestinian state at the UN. If Obama had followed through, the Congress would have responded by cutting off aid to the Palestinians, backing Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank, and would reveal triumphantly that even a president who has done as much for Israel as Obama (bunker-busting bomb sales, rescuing embassy staff in Cairo spring immediately to mind) cannot break out of the constraints any president is under when tackling this subject.
In that sense, I believe the pro-Greater Israel skeptics of the sincerity of Obama’s UN speech are largely right. Obama simply has run out of options. So he has cut his losses and capitulated – what any serious leader does when he recognizes the forces against him are so massive there’s no hope but to wait for a recapitalization after another election victory. Meanwhile, Netanyahu remains in Israel an extension of the GOP at home – and more secure than ever because the GOP has adopted wholesale the Christianist support for Greater Israel on theological grounds. What is at stake is nothing less than America’s global credibility as a power able to act in its own interests, outside the demands of religious fundamentalists and Democratic donors. That has now been revealed, when it comes to Israel, as essentially impossible.
We had a window. It’s important to remember who shut it, and tried to lock it tight.
Great post. However, the author might want to juxtapose this commentary
with the Saudi’s strong comments that failure to support Palestinians in their attempt to attain statehood status at the UN (even though it will accomplish little on the ground) will in fact jeopardize our alliance with the Saudi’s and throughout the middle east. When oil rises to $200 a barrel and when the price for a gallon of gas is $12.50 a gallon, when the economy dissolves owing to heightened fuel costs, when we face a severe depression in the face of massive deficit (something Roosevelt was not saddled with),
one can only anticipate severe blowback on the part of the public who already are shown in repeated polls to support a more even handed approach to middle eastern policy. This prediction only becomes far worse in a situation wherein our “shadow” state department” headed by Netanyahu, Lieberman, Barack, AIPC and their Republican co enablers, who have clearly high jacked US foreign policy in the middle east, lead us into a foolhardy war in Iran, a war for which we lack both financial and military resources to address even before energy costs blow through the ceiling.
Sullivan piling on Obama and the US’s likely veto
So many articles written by heavy hitters in regard to President Obama and the US’s likely veto of the Palestinians bid for statehood and how the US has and continues to lose credibility and influence
Hillary Mann Leverett really zings Obama
link to raceforiran.com
“But it is the Palestinian issue that highlights the extent of Obama’s craven ineptitude. In his address to the General Assembly last year, see here, Obama declared that, within the coming year, there should be “an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations—an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel”. (This was the sole “applause line” in the speech.) One year later, Obama used his speech today (which elicited, literally, no applause from the General Assembly as it was delivered) to lead the charge against United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state. And, as with his remarks about Afghanistan and Iraq, the level of intellectual dishonesty in Obama’s comments about Palestine was astounding even for a politician running for re-election. ”
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link to truthdig.com
Palestine Vote Showcases the Decline of American Power
Sep 27, 2011
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas listens as President Barack Obama speaks at the U.N. on Sept. 21.
By Juan Cole
The United States, castigated by its critics as recently as a decade ago as a “hyper-power,” is now so weak and isolated on the world stage that it may cast an embarrassing and self-defeating veto of Palestinian membership in the United Nations. Beset by debt, mired in economic doldrums provoked by the cupidity and corruption of its business classes, and on the verge of withdrawing from Iraq and ultimately Afghanistan in defeat, the U.S. needs all the friends it can get. If he were the visionary we thought we elected in 2008, President Obama would surprise everyone by rethinking the issue and coming out in favor of a U.N. membership for Palestine. In so doing, he would help the U.S. recover some of its tarnished prestige and avoid a further descent into global isolation and opprobrium.”
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James Zogby
A Disturbing and Dangerous Week at the U.N.
link to huffingtonpost.com
“This was a disturbing and dangerous week at the United Nations. After all the drama leading up to this session of the General Assembly, we come away with three troubling facts clearly established: the Palestinians, despite a valiant effort, are no closer to a state; the Israelis are more isolated, yet more emboldened than before; while the United States emerges from the week weaker and less trusted as a world leader.”
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FORMER HEAD OF THE CIA’S BIN LADEN UNIT MICHEAL SCHEUER
Motivating enemies: Interventionists and the UN veto
link to non-intervention.com
By mike | Published: September 21, 2011
For most of a decade I have said in books, articles, interviews, and speeches that America’s war with the growing Islamist movement is motivated by the Islamists’ belief that U.S. foreign policy is an attack on their faith and brethren. Generally, this effort has been akin to yelling into a closet. The dominance of pro-Saudi and especially pro-Israel political influence and money in both political parties, the media, and the academy is just too strong to allow more than fleeting opportunities to tell Americans that they — and their soldier-children — are and will continue to be at war because of the impact in the Muslim world of the foreign policy of Washington and its NATO allies.
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Steve Clemons over at Washington Note
Obama Tells Palestinians to Stay in Back of Bus
link to thewashingtonnote.com
President Obama’s speech at the United Nations yesterday paled in comparison to the soaring, expectation raising addresses he gave early in his administration, particularly in Cairo, but also at past UN General Assembly gatherings. The President has lost his groove.
Obama opened with FDR’s line that “We have got to make, not merely a peace, but a peace that will last.” This was the perfect set up line for the President to describe how the United States was going to reinvent its leadership in an increasingly complex world where the old rules are not working.
President Obama could have described in his address a new set of global deals among the world’s last era powers and ones now rising — particularly Brazil, India, Turkey, China — and talked about the need for responsible stakeholders in the international system to deliver on a package of rights and opportunities for citizens of the world, perhaps a new Global Social Compact that America could help design but which would need to be supported, ratified if you will, by other of the world’s great powers.
Adam think you will be interested
September 26, 2011
Rupert Murdoch’s Weapons of Mass Destruction
The Hollywood Big Shot and Israel’s Nuclear Triggers
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/26/the-hollywood-big-shot-and-israels-nuclear-triggers/
In the wake of the 1973 Ramadan war, itself a clandestine operation of tipoffs by the Kingdom of Jordan, Zionist Milchan procured conventional weapons and ‘krytrons’ which trigger nuclear bombs. For those building nuclear weapons in their bedrooms, ‘krytrons’ haven’t changed much since their invention in the 1930’s for high-speed photography. They are electronic switches and, somewhat worryingly, a quick ‘shopping’ search on the internet revealed that you can buy them for around $20. Anyhow, then came Murdoch.
The director Terry Gilliam whose Brazil was made with Milchan-money said in Los Angeles Magazine, a decade ago, that “personally, I don’t know anyone who has ever made any money with Arnon.” Cynics might say that given Murdoch’s poor business sense (MySpace etc.) he was obviously a good partner proposition. In the same magazine piece, Milchan boasted “I consider him one of my best friends, and I think vice versa.” That’s quite a statement given he was trying to buy MGM with Murdoch’s Australian rival, Kerry Packer a year before he made the deal with News Corporation.
Milchan’s support for apartheid in South Africa, meanwhile, was absolute – though he was cleared of wrongdoing in the U.S. over a $300,000 commission paid to him by Raytheon on Hawk missiles. Nevertheless, his company became the largest defence procurer for the South African government. And Milchan was going into the nuclear weapons business with Israel and South Africa. He was even involved in Israeli nuclear testing at the South Pole. There was also a media angle According to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s Dangerous Liaisons,“the Rabin Government recruited…Milchan to launder cash..to purchase influential publications.” No wonder he gets on with Murdoch who uses influential print publications to cast his shadow over the body politic of nations to reduce regulation of his profit-making TV businesses.
But what did Rupert Murdoch know about his best friend, Milchan and his association with the license-less exportation of hundreds of nuclear triggers to Israel? Certainly, the Murdoch press has been unstinting in its support for Zionism. That doyenne of Middle East journalism, Robert Fisk, gave it as a reason for leaving The Times (of London) in 1980s when Murdoch’s henchman spiked his piece about the U.S. shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane killing 290 people including 66 children.
Still, the redoubtable U.S. Customs Department seemed to give up when they tried to subpoena Milchan’s financial records so perhaps there is nothing to link Murdoch’s partner with nuclear weapons trafficking. Records apparently were “missing”. Except that thanks to self-declared Israel-supporters, Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, we now know that Shimon Peres recruited Murdoch’s friend to work with German company GKT, part of the European consortium Urenco, which produced centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Milchan worked on an operation that involved photos of blueprints of centrifuges accidentally on purpose being left on a kitchen table so they could be photographed and sent to scientists in Dimona. It was Murdoch’s recently acquired Sunday Times that would then reveal Israel’s nuclear weapons facility in Dimona. And, of course, the whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was then honeytrapped out of Britain and into years of solitary confinement.
Perfectly correct statement. But re-election will not free Obama of this albatross, for there is always Congress to deal with and always the next election in two years.
His only chance for statesmanship is to make it clear that he cares little about re-election, is not chasing money, and then to vote a resounding YES on Palestinian statehood and then, himself, to introduce in the UNSC a resolution calling for removal within 1 year (and the clock is ticking) of all settlers, and dismantlement of all settlements and the wall, a schedule to which end is to be published by Israel in one month. And this resolution will be useless if it does not lay out sanctions to go into effect whenever Israel fails to meet the schedule.
It is possible that the American people, educated to know what he was up against and how the USA was tarnished over the last 20 years and more, would overwhelmingly re-elect him. Or not. But that is the ONLY statesmanlike path w.r.t. Israel and the occupation.
The great capitulator in all things progressive.