The Iconoclast <http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_print_link.cfm/blog_id/35294#CurDomain URL%23/blog.cfm> Saturday, 28 May 2011 Walter Russell Mead: Netanyahu's Performance, Obama's Chagrin The Dreamer Goes Down For The Count Walter Russell Mead I had never thought there were many similarities between the pleasure-loving Charles II of England and the more upright Barack Obama until this week. Listening to his speeches on the Middle East at the State Department, US-Israel relations at the AIPAC annual meeting and most recently his address to the British Parliament the comparison becomes irresistible. "Here lies our sovereign king," wrote the Earl of Rochester about King Charles: Whose word no man relies on. Who never said a foolish thing Or ever did a wise one. This seems to capture President Obama's Middle East problems in a nutshell. The President's descriptions of the situation are comprehensive and urbane. He correctly identifies the forces at work. [no, he does not. He not only does not mention -- which is understandable for now -- but does not even allude to, does not seem to aware of, the overwhelming force of Islam, on the minds of Muslims, does not seem to be aware that the war against Israel is a Jihad. Netanyahu, for his own reasons, does not state it openly like this, but he understands this, and many in Israel who did not understand it are coming to, and so too are many, in Western Europe and North America, now coming to feel threatened themselves and connecting the dots, between the war on Israel, the war on Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the Muslims seeking to dominate, some through terrorism, others through other instruments of Jihad, in the countries of western Europe. ] He develops interesting policy ideas and approaches that address important political and moral elements of the complex problems we face. He crafts approaches that might, with good will and deft management, bridge the gaps between the sides. He reads thoughtful speeches full of sensible reflections. But the last few weeks have cast him as the least competent manager of America's Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time. He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies. He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street. He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya not, as he originally told us, for "days, not weeks" but for months not days. Where he has failed so dramatically is in the arena he himself has so frequently identified as vital: the search for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history. Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed. This last defeat - Netanyahu's deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama's foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties - may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered. Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum. The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent. It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter's School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla - or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole. The Prime Minister mopped the floor with our guy. Obama made his '67 speech; Bibi ripped him to shreds. Obama goes to AIPAC, nervous, off-balance, backing and filling. Then Bibi drops the C-Bomb, demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States. President Obama's new Middle East policy, intended to liquidate the wreckage resulting from his old policy and get the President somehow onto firmer ground, lies in ruins even before it could be launched. He had dropped the George Mitchell approach, refused to lay out his own set of parameters for settling the conflict, and accepted some important Israeli red lines - but for some reason he chose not to follow through with the logic of these decisions and offer Netanyahu a reset button. As so often in the past, but catastrophically this time, he found the "sour spot": the position that angers everyone and pleases none. He moved close enough to the Israelis to infuriate the Palestinians while keeping the Israelis at too great a distance to earn their trust. One can argue (correctly in my view) that US policy must at some level distance itself from the agendas of both parties to help bring peace. But that has to be done carefully, and to make it work one first needs to win their trust. Obama lost the trust of the Israelis early in the administration and never earned it back; he lost the Palestinians when he was unable to deliver Israeli concessions he led them to expect. The President is now wandering across Europe seeking to mend fences with allies (Britain, France, Poland) he had earlier neglected and/or offended; at home, his authority and credibility have been holed below the waterline. Everyone who followed the events of the last week knows that the President has lost control of the American-Israeli relationship and that he has no near-term prospects of rescuing the peace process. The Israelis, the Palestinians and the US Congress have all rejected his leadership. Peace processes are generally good things even if they seldom bring peace; one hopes the President can find a way to relaunch American diplomacy on this issue but for now he seems to have reached a dead end - and to have allowd himself to be fatally tagged as too pro-Israel to win the affection of the Europeans and Arabs, and too pro-Palestinian to be trusted either by Israel or by many of the Americans who support it. Internationally, this matters a great deal; domestically it matters even more. The President has significantly less capacity to act than he did a week ago. The Bin Laden dividend, already cruelly diminished by what <http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/04/obama-administration-takes-victory-lap-in -clown-car/> The Daily Caller said was the administration's "victory lap in a clown car", is now history. The GOP, in trouble recently as voters recoil from what many see as Republican extremism on issues like Medicare and public unions, will be able to use the national security card in new and potent ways. As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America. It means more. The existence of Israel means that the God of the Bible is still watching out for the well-being of the human race. For many American Christians who are nothing like fundamentalists, the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and their creation of a successful, democratic state after two thousand years of oppression and exile is a clear sign that the religion of the Bible can be trusted. Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don't 'get' Israel also don't 'get' America and don't 'get' God. Obama's political isolation on this issue, and the haste with which liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi <http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/05/after-rocky-week-netanyahu-seeks -out-friends-in-congress-for-support.php> left the embattled President to take the heat alone, testify to the pervasive sense in American politics that Israel is an American value. Said the Minority Leader to the Prime Minister: "I think it's clear that both sides of the Capitol believe you advance the cause of peace." President Obama probably understands this intellectually; he understands many things intellectually. But what he can't seem to do is to incorporate that knowledge into a politically sustainable line of policy. The deep American sense of connection to and, yes, love of Israel limits the flexibility of any administration. Again, the President seems to know that with his head. But he clearly had no idea what he was up against when Bibi Netanyahu came to town. As a result, he's taking another ride in the clown car, and this time it isn't a victory lap. I hope I'm wrong, but I think the next intifada got a lot closer this week. [the description here of Netanyahu's formidable performance, and the confusion exhibited by the Obama Administration -- now allowing itself to deeply believe in a three-month old "Arab Spring" and some absurd "transition to democracy" which, if it were really to be fully "democratic" in Tunisia, would threaten the secularists of the coast, and in Egypt, would be terrible for the Copts, and for those, including the one Obama calls "that Google guy," who thought they would inherit the earth but like the Iranian leftists who discovered that once the Shah had left, Khomeini and his epigones were going to suppress and murder them -- because it leaves out Islam, does not go far enough, does not offer the most damning criticism of the Obama Administration (and the Bush Administration) with their wasteful squandering of men, money, materiel, morale, and attention, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through war, and in Tunisia and Egypt and elsewhere through throwing more billions, and asking others too to do so, instead of allowing Muslim peoples to sink, and to be forced (as Ataturk was forced by circumstances) to confront, recognize, and analyze all the ways that Islam explains the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Muslimi states and societies. Only an intellectual elite, in the Muslim world, will grasp this at first, but even they won't begin to grasp it if many in the West do not do so, and express this view in a memorable and convincing manner]/ Posted on 05/28/2011 9:26 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald Comments 28 May 2011 MaryofArizona Awesome. So beautifully written. Thank you. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [email protected]. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [email protected] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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