OPED | Monday, September 28, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Demagoguery at its best
Barry Rubin
Obama talks a lot, but yet to act
It is difficult to overstate the absurdity in context of President Barack Obama’s performance at the Israeli-Palestinian photo opportunity at the UN. The outstanding theme is his commandist style.
We will reverse man-made global warming, he has said. We will have a health care bill. This is like the style of an Arab dictator, proclaiming that his will is all and that uttering words make something so. It is not the style of someone helping two parties solve a problem or of a mediator.
But let’s allow William Shakespeare to explain it:
“Why, man, he stands on top of the narrow world
Like the Colossus of Rhodes, and we little men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves disgraceful graves.”
Yet this thundering, you-will-do-this style is combined with an extraordinary weakness, equally self-willed. Giving orders when you are tough is scary; giving orders when you are weak provokes derision. If America won’t use force or be tough or face confrontations or define enemies as such, then the gap between such arrogance and weakness is a chasm into which US foreign policy will fall.
This might wow them in elite salons of the United States but in lots of other countries, people have to lean against the wall to try to stop themselves from laughing.
Personal note: I don’t want to keep bashing Mr Obama, it’s simply that he keeps saying and doing things that defy satire and beg for the harsh criticism and exposure of absurdities that he is not getting in the mainstream media.
But how can one do otherwise when confronted with these statements by him:
“It is past time to stop talking about starting negotiations; it is time to move forward,”
Arab-Israeli negotiations have been going on for 60 years but Mr Obama really seems to believe they have just been waiting for him to give the go-ahead signal.
As I keep stressing the only reason there have been no negotiations for six months — a point the media never points out — is that Mr Obama introduced the demand that Israel freeze all construction on settlements. This issue had never prevented talks before but once Mr Obama raised the anti, well the Palestinians couldn’t be less militant than America’s President.
Instead, the New York Times tells us rather vaguely: “(Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud) Abbas has in the past refused to return to peace talks unless Israel freezes settlement growth in Palestinian territories.” Really? In the past like before January 20, 2009?
“There is a way, I think,” said Mr Obama in an interview with ABC, “to relaunch the peace process and not get bogged down with this question, because we’ve just wasted six months on this issue. We could waste another six months. I think that’s not good. I want to move on to peace.”
This could be called the stamping my little foot strategy. And incidentally I’d wager that Mr Obama has no idea of any way to resolve the conflict quickly. Those questions he doesn’t want to get bogged down with are basic and existential ones. And, again, it is his fault that six months have been wasted (he’s also wasted six months on confronting Iran, but that’s another issue).
Instead, Mr Obama wants to leap to permanent status. When was the last time that happened? Think back to 2000 when President Bill Clinton advanced to final status talks and that only after more than six years of preparation called the Oslo peace process. At Camp David the talks quickly fell apart and the Palestinians launched massive violence. And for the last nine years those involved have been saying that it was a mistake.
The best way to get the limited progress possible is not through grandstanding and demagoguery but finding solutions on small things that can strengthen the status quo and limit violence for the decades needed by the Palestinians to want to make real peace with Israel.
Yet perhaps Mr Obama thinks he’s Alexander the Great who, when faced with the Gordian Knot, rather than untie it merely cut through it with his sword. Mr Obama, who carries no sword, can’t do that with a dozen issues that could be listed at this point.
The fact that this man has no real experience in international relations is beginning to tell. No matter how good (or bad) the advisors are, they cannot fully make up for a President who hasn’t a clue of how to deal with an issue like this. I don’t want to be unfair but this seems literally to be true.
And then there’s his style. Mr Obama makes it sound as if countries must do things not because it is in their interest to do so (with American help, pressure, and even threats being part of that interest) but because he wants it and it will benefit him.
“We cannot continue the same pattern of taking tentative steps forward and then stepping back,” Mr Obama said. “It is absolutely critical that we get this issue resolved.”
But a man who knows more about these issues, Nahum Barnea, the Left-of-Centre Israeli columnist, put it this way: “The Americans discovered that they want an Israeli-Palestinian agreement more than the leaders of both sides desire one.”
Barnea might have more accurately written, “Should have discovered” because evidently the President hasn’t yet found this out.
Instead, Mr Obama stated, “It is time to show the flexibility and common sense and sense of compromise that’s necessary to achieve our goals.”
Flexibility? Common sense? Sense of compromise? What place is he talking about?
-- The writer is director of the GLORIA Centre, Tel Aviv, and editor of the MERIA Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader and The Truth About Syria.
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