"Peace is hard?" Obama said that four times during his 36 minute speech at the UN this morning. Is that an excuse?
Marty Peretz laid the President's miserable record on the line yesterday at TNR, predictably eliciting much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the comment section. Rather than try to pick parts to excerpt, I'll jump to the conclusion because it's a pretty concise summary of the whole essay.
Marty Peretz laid the President's miserable record on the line yesterday at TNR, predictably eliciting much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the comment section. Rather than try to pick parts to excerpt, I'll jump to the conclusion because it's a pretty concise summary of the whole essay.
Poor Barack Obama. His adoring view of Erdogan has stimulated the Turkish regime to be a force not for stability in Cairo or reason in Ramallah. What's more, Obama's Palestinian initiatives have all collapsed. But the most striking collapse of his Arab politics has been in Syria where he posited that there were sensible and dependable men with whom Israel could make peace. Of course, that would entail giving up the Golan Heights (which are not the Great Plains) to Dr. Assad. The administration courted the family tyranny and its epigones. Responsible, reasonable, reserved. Two smart-assed Jewish boys were dispatched to play computer games with the Damascus elite. They were also enthused by the possibilities. I know that none of these people pulled the triggers on any of the thousands who are now dead. They just encouraged the clan to think they will get away with murder forever.Talk about your inconvenient truth. Nobody, certainly not Peretz (who was a big supporter of Obama in 2008), is happy that it's come to this. But saying it ain't so won't make it go away.
The fact that Obama so thoroughly misunderstands the Middle East, so thoroughly also misunderstands militant Islam, has blotted out for both the Arabs and the Israelis the bona fides of the official American intermediaries. It is not simply that some of them are biased, a bit to Israel, a much larger cohort to the victim mentality of the Palestinians and to the oil deposits of other Arabs. It is that this administration has been stupid about the whole region and entranced with the Palestinian narrative which is, to be utterly brash but candid, nearly wholly false.
