The Status Quo We Can Believe In
Posted on June 4th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
|
Obama’s 2008 AIPAC speech reads very much like his 2007 speech, except that this one is perhaps even more overflowing with boilerplate pander lines than the last. Here was a new item that I think he neglected last year:
Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.
It is not clear to me how those who want to see Obama as an advocate of “even-handedness” will be able to maintain the hope that he represents any significant change in U.S. policy.
There were also some notable moments in self-contradiction:
And we should work with Europe, Japan and the Gulf states to find every avenue outside the U.N. to isolate the Iranian regime — from cutting off loan guarantees and expanding financial sanctions, to banning the export of refined petroleum to Iran, to boycotting firms associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose Quds force has rightly been labeled a terrorist organization [bold mine-DL].
As every Clintonite remembers, Obama hung the Kyl-Lieberman amendment around Clinton’s neck for months and used it as an example of how Clinton was embracing the policies of the Bush administration (while his supporters simultaneously praised Obama for taking a position on launching strikes into Pakistan that was the policy of the Bush administration). What did the Kyl-Lieberman amendment do? It labeled the IRG’s Quds force a terrorist organisation, which Obama at the time interpreted (not entirely absurdly) as a prelude to justifying a military strike. When it comes to talk at AIPAC, though, this sort of labeling becomes a good and right idea. The GOP has already latched on to this inconsistency and will keep hammering on it.
No doubt those who want to portray Obama as “weak” on Israel will conclude from this inconsistency that he says one thing to one group of people and another to a different group, which proves that he can’t be trusted, but what this really shows is that when he goes to an interest group’s conference he toes their line as carefully as he can. The lesson is that he can’t be trusted to take real political risks or challenge entrenched interests for the sake of anything approaching real policy change. What this tells me is that he will play antiwar and J Street-type voters for suckers with appealing rhetoric on Iran and then maintain the failed status quo.
Then there was another rather striking statement:
And then there are those who would lay all of the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of Israel and its supporters, as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all trouble in the region.
In the AIPAC speech, Obama thinks this is a very bad thing, but when he was talking to Jeffrey Goldberg he said something that his supporters insisted be read in exactly this way in order to deflect the unfair criticism that he was referring to Israel when he said:
But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy [bold mine-DL]. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.
So something that infects all of our foreign policy, namely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has nothing to do with trouble elsewhere in the region? Oh, okay.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
9 Responses to “The Status Quo We Can Believe In”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I am certainly not one to defend Obama, and you’ve got him pretty good here, but …
What he was criticizing was the idea that that conflict is the root of all the region’s troubles, not that it has - as it obviously does - something to do with them. Nevertheless, this falls far short of change I can believe in.
So I should vote for the bug with Leibermann whispering in his ear?
Even as BHO grovels at AIPAC, the folks at Neocon Central over at Commentary’s “conentions” blog are finding his grovel insufficiently supine. The link wouldn’t embed, so here ’tis: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/9721.
One can always ask of a candidate who slithers toward the center for the general, “Was he lying then or is he lying now?” In BHO’s case, even as he goes beyond conventional wisdom to pandering absurdities such as undivided Jerusalem, parts of which Jews never set foot in, he gets tagged as an “isolatonist”.
Perhaps this pander’s as meaningless as the repeated promise to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which never hapens
The fact is, he’s a Kumbaya internationalist, who no doubt prefers child-raping UN peacekeepeers to sending in the Marines, and while he may have a few anti-interventionist reflexes, in the end he really seems to stand for only modest changes in foreign policy.
Too bad, if true. One is reduced to the hope that he’s lying now, as opposed to before.
It is, as you say, troubling that he would pander to AIPAC like this. Part of me says, “Well, that’s just how you deal with the Israel lobby; you either go along with them or you get buried.” That part of me understands what he’s up against and would rather he not do anything that’s going to prematurely end his presidential campaign. Of course, another part of me wishes he would just tell these people exactly what kind of warmongering blood-revelers they are. It’s an ongoing internal conflict.
Does Obama reject the bipartisan foreign policy consensus? No. Is he more skeptical than the average politician? I think so. Is he better than McCain? Oh my, yes. I don’t have to agree with him 100% to understand that he is by far the best option available.
As John points out, your contradiction formulation lacks internal logic. Obviously Obama thinks the Israel-Palestine argument affects (and infects) the rest of the region’s political problems. He merely doesn’t think it’s the root of the region’s problems, which is not only not contradictory, it’s also has the benefit of being true.
As for bowing to AIPAC, well, it’s suicide not to, not just politically, but to have any hope of actually influencing Israel later on. The only way to get the Israelis to budge is to show them support first and foremost. And let’s be honest, only a crazy person actually thinks that a US President is going to solve this conflict. He can be marginally better or worse for the situation, but solving it is up to the Israelis and Palestinians themselves. And neither side seems very determined to resolve this soon on mutually agreeable terms. The idea that Obama should be slammed for not parting the waters of the Red Sea is a strange kind of criticism.
davegnyc & conradg,
If I am reading each of you correctly, Obama is, in effect, shading the truth when it comes to one of the most critical foreign policy questions, essentially hoodwinking the rubes so as not to get branded “anti-Israel” so that he can offer real change later on, or at least hope to move the ball forward so as to open some room for the Israelis and Palestinians can solve this problem themsleves?
“Does Obama reject the bipartisan foreign policy consensus? No. Is he more skeptical than the average politician? I think so. Is he better than McCain? Oh my, yes. I don’t have to agree with him 100% to understand that he is by far the best option available.”
Without question, leaps and bounds better than McCain. But this limited praise seems to contradict the candidate’s own stated desire to not only “end the war” but end the mindset that got us into the war. Is this just a rhetorical flourish up there with “Mission Accomplished”?
Adam01,
No, I don’t think Obama is hoodwinking anyone re Israel. I think he genuinely supports Israel. It’s just that changing policy towards Israel is not part of his change-agenda in foreign policy. He certainly does want to change the mindset that got us into the Iraq war, but that wan’t based on support for Israel, it was based on the notion of a militaristic remaking of the map of the Middle East. Obama has no such plans. He’s no neocon, and if that’s the measure of what “support for Israel” means these days, then yes, he’s definitely not as “strong” a supporter of “Israel” as McCain or Bush. But then “Israel” is just code for colonization of the Middle East, which is what it’s worst critics fear. Supporting the actual state of Israel and its people might mean rejecting the neocon notion of “Israel” as a way of remaking the Middle East in western, “democratic” ways, since the first Israel is put in greater jeopardy by the pursuit of the second.
“He certainly does want to change the mindset that got us into the Iraq war, but that wan’t based on support for Israel, it was based on the notion of a militaristic remaking of the map of the Middle East.”
Fair enough, but if you could kindly let me know how that works with Obama’s support of Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. Is Obama gung-ho for a militaristic remaking of the map of the Middle East, so long as it other nation’s doing the remaking?
“It’s just that changing policy towards Israel is not part of his change-agenda in foreign policy.”
Iraq, then, stands out as the only glaring exception from status-quo groupthink that so dominates official Washington thinking on such matters, and then only around the margins.
I’m not familiar with all the details of Obama’s support for Israel’s Lebanese war in 2006. My impression/guess is that it merely represents generic support for Israel against Hezbollah, rather than specific agreement with that particular action as the best way of handling things. In other words, I don’t think that Obama himself would necesarily recommend militaristic solutions like that in the future, and might well lobby against them behind the scenes, but if Israel did act, mistakenly or not, he’s still going to support them whenever actual conflict breaks out with terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. I think it’s reading more into his support than is there to think this means Obama favors militaristic solutions to problems such as these. In general I’d say he tries to find other ways to resolve them, but if that fails, he still supports Israel in any head to head conflict, even ones they engage badly and lose.