Commentary

I will sum up the transition in U.S. foreign policy as follows: in the Bush era, since September 2001, U.S. foreign policy entailed the orchestration of crisis that played on the twin themes of the “war against terror” and “those who aren’t with us are against us.” The Barack Obama era opened with the two central chords, “diplomacy first” and “those who aren’t with us could be with us, and those who can not be won over will be isolated and boycotted before recourse to force.”

U.S. President Barack Obama   REUTERS

Obama has taken pains to make it clear that the “us” involved is pretty much the same, only having changed insofar as to make it possible for him to become president. Nor is he the one who brought this change, and the change was hardly sudden. It required enormous sacrifices from African Americans and decades of sustained efforts on the part of civil rights movements in order to bring the White House within his grasp. The new president represents the Democratic wing of that “us.” Yet he is promoting the greatest possible continuity with what went before and the greatest possible bipartisanship, to which testify keeping Robert Gates as secretary of defense and designating George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East (Mitchell was cosponsor of the Mitchell-Tenet plan that preceded the roadmap). The neoconservatives are out.
The ruling establishment is settling down in Washington without seeking to shake the world or ignite democratic “revolutions” in the manner of neoconservatives. Perhaps the economic crisis is helping Obama pursue the economic and social programs that his party has long wished for but had been unable to promote in the past. The crisis has handed him the arguments he needs to push for the resuscitation of a Keynesian central government hand to guide the country out of stagnation and to bring into effect a Roosevelt-like “New Deal,” albeit one naturally fundamentally different to its predecessor. Obama has vowed to make the U.S. independent in its energy needs by leveraging alternative sources of energy. To rhetorically spur this drive forward he has conjured up nasty images of oil exporting nations with their hands around the throat of the American spirit. He has simultaneously pledged to look for ways to get the world to work together to curb global warming. Such commitments, which he has stressed in all speeches and statements since taking office, lead to the conclusion that U.S. foreign policy will shift toward greater cooperation with the major industrialized nations in the search for alternative sources of energy and that this drive will be spurred not only by the desire for a cleaner environment but also by the idea that oil is a dirty sort of energy, as though it had a curse on it, perhaps an Islamic curse, or one that courts Muslim blackmail and terrorism, and other such myths that have arisen since the well began to run dry in Texas and that have been passed down to the Obama era — like the Israeli lobby.

Now that lobby remains totally unchanged, and it has come lock, stock and barrel into the Obama era, with its customary taunts of anti-Semitism against all who disagree with it and its hymns to the security of Israel, the supposed one and only democracy in the region. We have been treated to the full gamut of clichés in Obama’s political and cultural oratory: in his address to AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), during his visit to Israel, and in his recent speech to State Department staff. He has left no doubt that the point of departure for his Middle East strategy is the firm and resolute commitment to the security of Israel.

The ceasefires in Gaza came in time for the new U.S. president’s inauguration, conducted in accordance with the well-known rights and rituals of the American secular religion. Obama was thoroughly immersed in the spirit of it all, so much so that he delivered an address of the purest tradition, with consummate oratorical polish, pulling all the right knobs and buttons to the synthesized flutter of the wings of history, in crude imitation of the nation’s founding fathers, as though the speech had been crafted to be taught to high school civic classes. He did not try to represent another face of American history, the history of the slaves, of the Native Americans, of oppressed workers or of other persecuted minorities. Nor was his English anything but that passed down from the oppressors of slaves and the exterminators of the indigenous peoples.

One cannot read much in that celebratory speech, other than that it confirmed that Obama and his campaign had been assimilated into the establishment through the liberal affirmation that there is no contradiction between the defense of “American values” and the defense of “American national security.” All that remained of the famous tide of change that Obama had championed was the convergence of the opponents of the war on Iraq with the conservatives who criticized democratic evangelism in the Islamic world and those who feared the erosion of the American Constitution, judicial autonomy and civil rights due to the fallout of the war on terror. Therefore, the John Hancock on the orders to prohibit torture and close down Guantanamo were symbolically fitting as the first steps of this new president, graduate of Harvard Law School, and they were fitting for the enlightened wing of the American establishment whose enlightenment stops at America’s borders.

Speeches that are made to go down in history are generally snubbed by history. In all events, the more important speech was that Obama delivered to the State Department on 22 January in which he announced the appointments of George Mitchell as his envoy to the Middle East and Richard Holbrook as special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan. Obama wanted to deliver two messages. The first was to signal, through his mere appearance at the State Department only two days after he was sworn in, the new emphasis on the role of American diplomacy after eight years of having been marginalized in favor of the armed forces and other security agencies. The second was to underscore the difference between his administration and the outgoing one. That difference is to be found entirely in the Middle East as a focus of U.S. policy, not simply because of the importance of this region to the U.S. but also because of the moral and strategic questions involved with regard to Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and everything connected with these countries, including the baseline of the security of Israel (as opposed to Palestinian rights).

Contrary to McCain, who favored remaining in Iraq along the lines of South Korea, Obama has always stressed the need to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible. He has advocated stipulating a timeframe that would force the current Iraqi leadership to resolve issues among themselves and that would simultaneously permit for a gradual withdrawal so as not to leave a security vacuum. As Democratic candidate, Obama famously broke the taboo concerning talking with Iran. In fact, this was nothing revolutionary but rather a return to traditions established by previous conservative administrations since Kissinger’s overtures to what the U.S. then regarded as one of the world’s dangerous dictatorships, namely China at the height of the hysteria over its cultural revolution. In this case, talks will aim to strike a historical deal in which Iran would give up its uranium enrichment activities, help bring stability to Iraq and stop supporting “terrorist movements” (meaning Hizbullah and Hamas), all in exchange for the recognition of the regime in Tehran, the legitimization of an Iranian regional role, its acceptance in the “international community,” and perhaps even the reestablishment of full diplomatic relations.

Obama and his team do not believe that the Bush administration really wanted to establish a Palestinian state, nor that the “Bush vision” that Palestinian negotiators praised in accordance with their obligatory periodic sycophancy towards the Americans was more than a public relations gambit. They also suspect that the Israeli unilateral disengagement from Gaza was a Sharon-Bush formula for indefinitely postponing the creation of a Palestinian state while the Judaisation of Jerusalem and settlement expansion in the West Bank continue apace and the Palestinians preoccupy themselves with electoral politics and power struggles. However, they do believe that the U.S. must devote itself fully to the peace process from day one. Yet what the Palestinians and Arabs need is not a peace process but a just peace that fulfils the rights of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of a just peace on the horizon, which means that reviving the peace process is essentially a means of perpetuating a camouflage for Israeli occupation and Israeli terrorism.

Obama’s position on this issue does not bode well. This applies to both substance and approach. He is still using the terms and tools of the Bush administration, dividing the Arabs into “moderates” and “extremists” solely from the perspective of Israeli security demands. Worse, he made no reference whatsoever to Israeli crimes in its brutal, gratuitously bloodthirsty war on Gaza. After expressing his regret over the loss of civilian lives on both sides, in Gaza and the “south of Israel,” he proceeded to justify the Israel aggression. No democratic country in the world would agree to stand by with its hands tied behind its back while missiles are being fired on it, he said, parroting between the lines the Israeli narrative of a peace-loving democratic country in a savage region full of evil terrorists who have bombarded it mercilessly with missiles for years until its long-suffering patience wore thin and it finally determined to act, and when it did it acted swiftly and with resolve. So goes the script and we heard a version of it on 27 January from E.U. Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Louis Michel. He, too, regretted — not condemned — the loss of civilian lives. He then held the “terrorist” Hamas movement responsible for the Israeli attack and accused “both sides” of violating international law.

No president or official with this approach and substance in mind can possibly work effectively to reach a just solution. The view completely ignores the fact that Israel is an occupying power, that it is far from meek and forbearing, and that it has imposed a cruel and belligerent blockade on Gaza. Anyone bearing such a view will produce no more than efforts to come up with “moderate” Palestinians and Arabs who rejoice at the paltry handouts Israel gives them so that it can use them as a shield and pretend that it is not against the Arabs but against extremists. This is a cynical racist game of playing mandate over a people whose official leadership refuses to act like national leaders and it cannot go on.

Yet within a very short space of time Obama has succeeded in adopting the supercilious language of this game when dealing with the Arabs and Muslims. He says, “Hamas must end its rocket fire; Israel will complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza; the United States and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime, so that Hamas can not rearm,” (Obama’s remarks to State Department staff on 23 January). Simply note where he uses “must” and where he uses “will.” This very haughtiness is what could make someone like Michel spout such remarks against Hamas without a peep from Hamas in response. Consider that, with all due respect to freedom of opinion in Belgium, the Belgian government will not even allow a Hamas representative to set foot in that country and if one did it would probably have that representative arrested if he issued a similarly provocative statement on Belgian territory.

According to the rules of the mandate game, which dates back to Oslo (the born in Europe made in the U.S. peace process), only Palestinians who unconditionally recognize Israel first will be recognized as candidates for the peace process. In insisting that Hamas recognize Israel, Obama has offered nothing new. He has merely repeated the same “conditions” of the Quartet that were introduced following the election of Hamas with the purpose of justifying the blockade. As long as this remains Obama’s position, the war in Gaza will continue with the same alliances though perhaps with slightly different instruments.

Arab governments should have protested the concept of the Quartet from the outset. According to this concept, the U.N., which presumably represents all countries of the world, has been reduced to a mere partner in a team led by the U.S. Moreover, it is shameful that the Arabs agreed to a person such as Tony Blair as the Quartet envoy. Why should the “people of the Middle East” possibly look favorably on the very man who was voted out of power by his own people precisely because of his Middle East policies, for the sake of which he lied in order to justify a war against an Arab people and then dragged his own country into that war?

What is left of Israeli war crimes and the heroic steadfastness of one of the most densely populated quarters on earth whose inhabitants had no way to escape a ruthless bombardment is the collusion between the E.U., the U.S. and some Arab countries to transform relief and reconstruction into yet another lethal weapon. It will be unleashed against civilians, of course, with the aim of following through on the bombardment as a means to pressure the resistance movements to bow to Israeli conditions. Meanwhile, if you had thought that this region had no more curiosities in store for you, you are in for a surprise. Suddenly, European countries are calling for Palestinian unity. Since when has Europe displayed such concern? Since it realized that this is the only way to rescue its Arab allies and force the resistance movements to accept the Quartet’s conditions.

The U.S. — the aforementioned “us” — has not changed much in a single bound. What has changed is that it is ready to talk with the “not with us.” Still, the purpose of the talk is to reach the same goals (or modified goals) through different means, means more commensurate not with justice and fairness but with America’s current notion of itself as an enlightened power.

The war on Gaza has not ended. It continues using the means described above: border crossings, the blockade, the Quartet’s conditions, the alliance with moderates and the emphasis on the role for Palestinian and moderate Arab security forces. Popular forces and their leadership must realize that it is too early to call off the protest movement calling for a freeze to relations with Israel and security coordination with Israel, and insisting on the opening of crossings, the lifting of the blockade and the prosecution of war criminals. The protest movement must be sustained, rather than starting and stopping in time with the horrors that appear on the television screen. The powers that are alienated from their people will not benefit much from Obama’s support, since he will not be firmer in his defense of them than his predecessor. Ultimately, it is those who hold on to their land and resist who will prevail, on the condition that they assess the current situation well, plan accordingly and forge the alliances needed to face the forthcoming challenges.

— Reprinted from Al Ahram.