Daily Times editorial May 21, 2011

Obama’s speech

US President Barack Obama’s much anticipated speech on the Middle East delineated his administration’s view of the Arab uprisings and the vexed, long standing question of Israeli-Palestinian peace. On the Arab uprisings, Obama threw his weight behind the revolts roiling the Arab world, but failed to satisfy critics about the administration’s uneven response that appears to discriminate between long standing enemies or thorns in the west’s side and allies useful to the US-led west’s agenda in the Middle East. To illustrate, all one has to do is trace the trajectory of Washington’s response to the uprisings in Libya (which has deteriorated, since the NATO intervention on the rebels’ side, into a protracted civil war) and Syria, where the regimes are daily and roundly condemned, with the ‘softly, softly’ approach to western allied regimes in Yemen and Bahrain to understand what the US is aiming for. In a changing world, and post-Osama bin Laden, the US and the west have realised that past reliance on monarchs and dictators to safeguard western interests in the region, both strategic and economic (let us not forget oil and gas), may no longer be the best option. The winds of change sweeping the Arab world are sought to be nudged in the direction of pro-western democracies, which may prove a better political shell for ensuring the smooth supply of oil and gas and guarantee Arab markets for the products of the west (especially weapons).
On the Israeli-Palestinian interminable conflict, Obama suggest a two-state solution along the pre-1967 borders with swaps of territory to satisfy both sides’ security and other concerns. Israel insists on a demilitarised Palestinian state, if and when it comes into existence, an outcome still in considerable doubt. Israel rejects the 1967 borders as ‘indefensible’ (but forgets to mention what happened in the 1967 war). It also continues to expand its settlements in the West Bank, to the irritation of the Palestinians. Sadly, the hope that Obama would indeed be more even-handed in this intractable conflict has proved mere wishful thinking. The US's vetoing a UN resolution criticising expanding settlements activity by Israel was a better reflection of Washington’s actual stance rather than the rhetoric Obama espoused in his Cairo speech. Judging by the fate of Cairo 1, it could be argued that ‘Cairo 2’ (the present speech) will go the way of the first, a forgotten remnant of a dashed hope. Nothing reflects the impasse to which the Israeli tail has reduced the US dog than the recent resignation of George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East. Mr Mitchell brought to the fraught Middle East table impeccable credentials as a respected negotiator. His departure spells the end of even the weak-kneed Obama attempts to restrain Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from creating ‘new facts on the ground’ in the shape of settlements expansion in the West Bank. Israel has made no secret of its desire to retain such settlements even if a two-state solution, by some miracle, becomes fact, and to maintain a military presence on the Jordan River, the boundary between Israel and Jordan, which offers Israel a good jumping off point for its aggressive intent against all neighbouring Arab states.
With Obama, it has become imperative to go behind his eloquent rhetoric and plumb the depths of his real policies, especially in the Middle East, where the rhetoric can be seen through easiest. The US and the west may desire to reshape the emerging new Arab world according to its desires, but history delivers the caution in such matters that the dynamic of change can spring unexpected surprises for those wishing to control the destinies of the Arab masses through a new ideological Trojan horse called democracy and a free market.