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Obama Foreign Policy Tag

Posted by Mandy Nagy on March 03, 2014 31 Comments
President Obama has been meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today. From the Washington Post:
Seeking to salvage an elusive Middle East peace plan, President Barack Obama pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday to make the “tough decisions” needed to move forward on talks with the Palestinians.But facing a U.S.-imposed April deadline, the Israeli leader declared pessimistically that, “Israel has been doing its part and, I regret to say, the Palestinians have not.” Obama and Netanyahu spoke before an Oval Office meeting on a snowy Monday in Washington. The meeting marked a more direct foray by Obama into the peace negotiations, which he has so far largely ceded to Secretary of State John Kerry.
Barak Ravid, a correspondent with Haaretz Newspaper, posted tweets from the event - a handful are included below.  (Video added -- Transcript here)

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 02, 2014 21 Comments
Jeffrey Goldberg has carved out what for a journalist covering the Middle East is an enviable niche -- vigorously pro-Israel yet not anti-Obama. When Bibi Netanyahu lectured Obama on the Middle East in a White House press conference in 2011, Goldberg leapt to Obama's defense with the following declaration:
Dear Mr. Netanyahu, Please Don’t Speak to My President That Way
That niche is why Goldberg landed an interview with Obama on the eve of Netanyahu's visit to the White House, detailed in Goldberg's column today, Obama to Israel -- Time Is Running Out. The interview is best described as preparing the public for what is to come: The Obama administration twisting Bibi's arm off as to John Kerry's "framework" under the threat of the U.S. stepping aside from defending Israel against the worldwide, decades-long lawfare and boycott movement. It's the same threat John Kerry made several weeks ago, but now it's coming from Obama's own lips, as Goldberg noted (emphasis added):
On the subject of Middle East peace, Obama told me that the U.S.'s friendship with Israel is undying, but he also issued what I took to be a veiled threat: The U.S., though willing to defend an isolated Israel at the United Nations and in other international bodies, might soon be unable to do so effectively. “If you see no peace deal and continued aggressive settlement construction -- and we have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long time,” Obama said. “If Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach, then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.”
For Goldberg to characterize Obama's statement as a "veiled threat" is pretty significant. To me, it wasn't a veiled threat, it was just a threat.

Posted by David Gerstman on March 02, 2014 56 Comments
Please see Mandy for more coverage of the crisis here. As Brian and Neo have previously posted, during the 2012 campaign Mitt Romney was mocked by President Obama and his cheerleaders for highlighting the Russian threat to American interests. Romney wasn't the first Republican mocked for suggesting that Obama wasn't ready or willing to stand up to Russia's leader. In 2008, vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin warned of Russian troops invading the Ukraine.
In October 2008, after Russia's invasion of neighboring Georgia emerged as a foreign policy flashpoint in the homestretch of a heated campaign, Palin told an audience in Nevada, "After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next." Her prediction was derided by Foreign Policy magazine  as "strange" and "extremely far-fetched," but Palin, frequent media antagonist that she is, couldn't resist crowing about how events have played out.
Twitchy, it seems, never forgets. (In this case aided by Jammie Wearing Fool.) Gov. Palin is enjoying the vindication on Facebook.
Yes, I could see this one from Alaska. I'm usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as “an extremely far-fetched scenario” by the “high-brow” Foreign Policy magazine.
Twitchy (again) notes that the editor in question is digging deeper.

Hounshell_Palin_2014-03-02_064752

Earning himself an appropriate rebuke.

Posted by David Gerstman on February 03, 2014 4 Comments
Thirty two years ago yesterday, February 2, 1982, Syrian President Bashar Assad's father, Hafez, began an assault on the city of Hama to put down a Muslim Brotherhood revolt against his regime. Two years ago NPR recounted:
The facts of that event are well-known, but the photographic evidence has been scant. Then, Syria's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood led an uprising centered in Hama, a central city of around 400,000. In response, President Hafez Assad, the father of the current president, ordered 12,000 troops to besiege the city. That force was led by Hafez Assad's brother Rifaat. He supervised the shelling that reduced parts of Hama to rubble. Those not killed in the tank and air assault were rounded up. Those not executed were jailed for years. To this day, the death toll is in dispute and is at best an estimate. Human rights groups, which were not present during the slaughter, have put the toll at around 10,000 dead or more. The Muslim Brotherhood claims 40,000 died in Hama, with 100,000 expelled and 15,000 who disappeared. The number of missing has never been acknowledged by the Syrian leadership.
As we know the lessons of the father have been well learned by the son. Kill enough people and no one will make you pay a price. Somehow the UN and Secretary of State John Kerry thought that they could get some sort of agreement to stop the killing in Syria. The latest round of talks ended on Friday, apparently in failure.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia raised expectations in January at a joint news conference in Paris that a way would be found to open humanitarian aid corridors and possibly establish local cease-fires in Aleppo and other cities and towns. But to the dismay of the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations, even those basic steps proved elusive.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 30, 2014 7 Comments
You might remember that Secretary of State John Kerry was quick to praise President Bashar al-Assad of Syria for completing the job of destroying all chemical weapons facilities in record time. According to the deal worked out in September with Assad's protecter, Russia, Syria was to rid itself of all of its chemical weapon compounds and production facilities. The first part of that obligation was to neutralize all of the factories so that they could no longer produce chemical weapons. Syria reportedly allowed that task to be completed on time.
Syria has destroyed its declared chemical-weapons production facilities, international inspectors said Thursday, marking a major step in the complex task of ridding the country of the weapons of mass destruction. The declaration came a day before a Nov. 1 deadline as the team overseen by the inspectors hewed to an ambitious schedule for destroying Syria’s entire chemical arsenal by the middle of next year — a far more rapid process than comparable efforts in other countries and one that must be implemented in the middle of a civil war.
A week later, Kerry publicly praised Assad.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 27, 2014 8 Comments
The Israeli public historically doesn't like when Israeli Prime Ministers feud with American Presidents, and take it out on the Israeli Prime Minister. It previously happened with Netanyahu and President Clinton in 1999 and earlier with Yitzchak Shamir and President George H. W. Bush. In the months before an Israeli election both Prime Ministers ran afoul of the American administration and lost the subsequent elections. There have been two high-profile clashes between Obama and Netanyahu of the sort that previously would have landed an Israeli Prime Minister in trouble back home.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 21, 2014 7 Comments
According to numerous press reports, the Palestinians have refused any meaningful concessions in the John Kerry-led peace talks.  No compromise on recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, on refugees, on borders, on security arrangements, on anything meaningful.  Instead, they are planning a diplomatic intifada to try to isolate Israel when the talks break down. But, the Palestinians are happy to pocket the dozens of convicted killers released as part of the inducement to get them the negotiating table. More important, they make their uncompromising positions as the baseline for future negotiations. This tactic of pocketing concessions while conceding nothing has a recent history. In May 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave Barack Obama a now famous talking-to in front of the cameras about the Middle East and the peace process: Columnist Jeffrey Goldberg would describe the incident like this:
It was an extraordinary scene: President Barack Obama, sitting impassively in the Oval Office in May as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured him, at considerable length and at times condescendingly, on Jewish history, Arab perfidy and the existential challenges facing his country.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 15, 2014 10 Comments
The columnist Michael Kinsley is reputed to have said that "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth." Earlier this week  an Israeli newspaper leaked private comments that Israel's Defense Minister, Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon made critical of Secretary of State John Kerry and expressing skepticism towards security guarantees proposed by Kerry:
"The American security plan presented to us is not worth the paper it's written on," Ya'alon said. "It contains no peace and no security. Only our continued presence in Judea and Samaria and the River Jordan will endure that Ben-Gurion Airport and Netanya don't become targets for rockets from every direction."
The description of Kerry by Ya'alon as "... determined and acting out of misplaced obsession and messianic fervor..." has caused a diplomatic row, even though the comments were made privately. The State Department expressed offense at Ya'alon's reputed remarks:
The remarks of the Defense Minister if accurate are offensive and inappropriate especially given all that the United States is doing to support Israel's security needs," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.
Given the heat he was taking, Ya'alon issued an apology asserting that he intended no offense. (My Right Word reminds us that President Obama, a few years ago, affirmed an ad hominem attack on Prime Minister Netanyahu made by then French-President Nicholas Sarkozy.)

Posted by David Gerstman on January 12, 2014 16 Comments

Exhibit A:

In June, 1999, shortly after Ehud Barak had defeated Benjamin Netanyahu to become Israel's new prime minister, Charles Krauthammer wrote a column title, Clinton Should Have Targeted Arafat Instead. Krauthammer noted that Arafat was going around the world to lobby support for accepting UN General Assembly resolution 181 as a basis for any peace deal.
What is that? An obsolete, defunct resolution passed by the General Assembly (unlike 242 and 338, not by the Security Council, and thus not even binding) . . . in 1947! It partitioned British Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. At the time, every single Arab state and the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee totally rejected 181. In fact, they invaded the area given to the Jews with the express purpose of wiping it off the map. They failed. And now 50 years later, the Palestinians are converts to 181. What's wrong with that?

Posted by David Gerstman on January 08, 2014 12 Comments
At the end of October the New York Times hailed President Obama's foreign policy as "pragmatic," while largely ignoring the consequences. The two month old article was written by the White House reporter, but a recent article written from Beirut, Power Vacuum in Middle East Lifts Militants paints a somewhat less flattering picture of the administration's foreign policy.
For the first time since the American troop withdrawal of 2011, fighters from a Qaeda affiliate have recaptured Iraqi territory. In the past few days they have seized parts of the two biggest cities in Anbar Province, where the government, which the fighters revile as a tool of Shiite Iran, struggles to maintain a semblance of authority. Lebanon has seen two deadly car bombs, including one that killed a senior political figure and American ally.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 03, 2014 3 Comments
When I was almost fifty four, it was a very good year It was a very good year for kindly faced clerics Whose Justice Minister was an executioner And Defense Minister waged an anti-American war When I was almost fifty four.
Nearly two years ago Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed President Obama about how he would deal with the threat from Iran. Given Goldberg's support for Israel, the interview was part of an administration campaign to tell Israel and Israel's supporters in the United States that "we've got Israel's back." It's unsettling now, that Goldberg has declared that For Iran, 2013 Was a Very Good Year.
Remember that interim Iranian nuclear agreement forged in Geneva on Nov. 24, the one accompanied by blaring trumpets and soaring doves? Would it surprise you to know that the agreement -- a deal that doesn’t, by the way, neutralize the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, just freezes the program, more or less, in place -- has not yet been implemented? Would it surprise you to learn that this deal might not be implemented for another month, or more? Or that in this long period of non-implementation, Iran is free to do with its nuclear program whatever it wishes? And that one of the things it is doing is building and testing new generations of centrifuges? Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, recently said , “We have two types of second-generation centrifuges. We also have future generations which are going through their tests.” Happy New Year, everyone.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 02, 2014 6 Comments
John Kerry is returning to the Middle East to present his peace plan. Two recent articles show the way the peace process is misrepresented in the media. The AP reports Israel, Palestinians Face Hard Choices.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would likely have to recognize Israel's pre-1967 war frontier as the starting point for border talks with the Palestinians, an ideological reversal that would put him on a collision course with his hardline base. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas fears he'll be pressured to recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, a step he believes would abrogate the rights of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.
The parallelism here is bogus. In the first place the idea that having the "pre-1967 war frontier" (more correctly they should be called "the 1949 armistice lines") as a basis for any peace deal is a departure from the original intent of Resolution 242. After the 1967, Six Day War, there was an international consensus that an Israeli return to its pre-war borders was a "prescription for renewed hostilities."

Posted by David Gerstman on December 31, 2013 24 Comments
Professor Jacobson has already offered a critique of the investigative story by  the New York Times regarding the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Other critiques have rolled in as well:
Fifteen months after the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the narrative of the attack continues to be shaped, and reshaped, by politicians and the press. But a New York Times report published over the weekend has angered sources who were on the ground that night. Those sources, who continue to face threats of losing their jobs, sharply challenged the Times’ findings that there was no involvement from Al Qaeda or any other international terror group and that an anti-Islam film played a role in inciting the initial wave of attacks. “It was a coordinated attack. It is completely false to say anything else. … It is completely a lie,” one witness to the attack told Fox News.
Since then, The Times has doubled down in support of its investigation and its conclusions with an editorial and an editor's note written by the paper's editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal. I'd like to add three more general observations:
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