Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was speaking for the Obama administration this week when she issued a sharp demand: Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad should step down and now. The Obama administration is putting its Syria policy in line with its overall goal making the Mideast safe for democracy.
President Obama knows that democracy in the Middle East is not easy to attain. He has blamed the "Arab Spring" for the sharp uptick in oil prices here. That spike in oil prices was, along with the Japanese tsunami, one of the things that led to "a run of bad luck" for the U.S. economy, the president explained. We were coming out of the recession nicely, he said, until we were hit by these events beyond our control, he implied.
Tsunamis, yes, but we can reasonably ask whether our dependence on Mideast oil supplies could be lessened by easing the Obama administration's bans on drilling offshore and in the Arctic in our own country.
Despite this, the Arab Spring is where this administration sees hope and change. We'd prefer something tangible. So far, we've seen nothing in the Mideast but increased turmoil, worse tribal violence, greater influence for the Muslim Brotherhood, and more brutal persecution of religious minorities -- especially Christians.
Excepting oil, which they did not discover or develop, the entire Arab world has a GNP less than Denmark. This is clearly a result of tyranny and religious violence. Arabs -- both Christian and Muslim -- can thrive in Western countries. This proves that when they live in freedom, their natural gifts are equal to any people's.
An Arab diplomat once put it succinctly: "There are no nations here except Egypt; the rest are only tribes with flags." He was, of course, leaving out those tribes with one flag: Israel. The Israelis have built a nation, an economy, and a democracy.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in the air, bound for a White House meeting with the president, when Mr. Obama publicly called for Israel to reopen talks with its rejectionist Arab neighbors -- Palestinians and others. And, the president added, those talks should begin on the basis of the 1967 borders of Israel.
He wasn't talking about Israel's borders following the Six-Day War. He clearly meant Israel's borders prior to that war. In that war in June, 1967, Israel simultaneously engaged and militarily defeated Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. In that lightning clash, Israelis' victory reunited Jerusalem and added the historic Jewish territories of Judea and Samaria. That war also, very problematically, involved Israel in administering lands with large Arab populations.
The Israelis had been invaded in three major wars and in countless border skirmishes because those pre-1967 borders were indefensible. They cannot go back to what is really the Armistice Line of 1949.
Stung by criticisms from some of his most loyal backers in the American Jewish community, President Obama quickly backtracked. He began to emphasize the 1967 borders "with appropriate swaps." For him, Mideast politics may be a swap meet, but for Israel, it's survival.
What if Benjamin Netanyahu had countered in their famous May 20th White House face-off: "Okay, Mr. President, Israel will return to the 1967 borders when the U.S. returns to its 1898 borders."
"After all," the Prime Minister might have argued, "the United States was a continental power in 1898. Your territory stretched from sea to shining sea then and was wholly defensible. Of course, the 1898 U.S. borders would have excluded Hawaii, and made your long-form birth certificate invalid, Mr. President, but America's borders in 1898 made a lot more sense than Israel's borders in 1967."
That would have been an encounter even more entertaining than the Ultimate Fight Club match the president actually had with the Israeli leader.
It's only partly a joke. What right did President Obama have to dictate to the Israelis what their negotiating posture must be? He reportedly reacted angrily to Netanyahu's on-camera geography lesson.
Some questions arise: Why should any of the Mideast's tribes with flags choose democracy? How has the Obama administration treated the one unquestioned democracy the region has produced? When this administration ceases bowing to Arab despots and stops kicking the Mideast's only democracy around, then their appeals for liberty will have a basis in realism.
Woodrow Wilson, that other Nobel Peace Prize laureate, took America into World War I. He eloquently said, America must shed her blood "to make the world safe for democracy."
Because of his impracticality and stubbornness, he failed even to make democracies like France and England safe. Will Barack Obama follow the same dangerous path?
Ken Blackwell is the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission. Bob Morrison served in the Reagan administration in the Education Department. Both are Senior Fellows at Family Research Council.
Dr. Jeffrey H. Toney: Amidst Syria's Madness, A Voice of Reason
. . . and this obviously makes no sense. What is the difference between Egypt and the others?
I know you have your Talkin' Points and they have served you well....
Here are Reasons your Talkin' Point are just Utter Bullxhit !
1) Oil and Gas is sold on the international Market... and the prices are set for the international Market....Oil and Gas Prices are shaped by Internal market forces... not simply American
2) The Oil does not BELONG to American....
Since we are NOT a Socialist Country.... and our Oil Industry has NOT BEEN NATIONALIZED..
The Oil Belongs the INTERNATIONAL COMPANIES that lease the land of sea Floor...
We get Royalties at a pre-determined Fee / by the Volume Pumped....
ie... BRITISH PETROLEUM owns and sales the Oil to us at International Market Rates.......
Period.....
Speculators are the major force behind Rising and Lowering of Prices...
When Economies appear to be on an Upswing... the Prices goes up because the market ASSUMES higher demand.... on a downturn...the Opposite is true
You would be surprised to learn just how much oil and reserves we have or control now. There is no compelling need to drill fresh wells. We should have the oil producers attest to their estimated reserves, give them 10% beyond that and then advise them all leases are null and void and any remaining oil belongs to the USA ! This will push us a little closer to the truth for now.
Congress's approval ratings are in the toilet, IMPO..........deservedly so.
While the Government of the US is busy criticizing what happens in foreign lands half a world away, it's own people are finding it harder and harder simply make a living.
The "children living in poverty" rate in the US should be a national embarrassment........ nearly 10 times as high as Denmark, and much higher than most of our Industrialized competitor countries.
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/salas.356/usa_vs._world
While we spend almost as much on our military, as the rest of the world combined......
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
Seems to me we don't exactly hold the high (moral) ground, when it comes to the debate of how people should be governed.
Whatever happened to the concept of "leading by example"?
Israel is not a democracy. It rules all of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank with an iron hand. For decades it has displaced Palestinians from their land, in violation of international law, to build Jewish only settlements. Does it grant citizenship rights to Palestinians who were born on the land it has seized? No. Does it grant citizenship rights to the millions of Palestinians who were born during the period of Israel's occupancy and live in the area it controls? No.
At best, Israel is an oligarchy, which limits citizenship and voting rights to only a portion of the population, just as the US did when slavery was legal and, even later, when Native American land was seized and occupied through the strength of US military power.
The rest of the world knows this. Awareness of it is growing amongst the American people, despite the continued pro-Israeli propaganda of people like Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Morrison and many others. The question is whether the American people will ever be ashamed enough of their country's complicity in Israel's segregated society to do something about it. That would apparently take a near 100% turnover in Congress, giving the fawning, sycophantic display Congress put on when Israel PM Netanyahu visited a few months ago.
Nah....the joke really is Ken Blackwell commenting on foreign policy issues.
If the authors of this article could see this, they would not reduce themselves to mere apologists for the Israeli regime. That would go a long way to reduce the anti-Israeli sentiment in the US.
If Obama is getting a tiny little bit of foreign policy rhetoric (we all know what the policies still are), then good for Obama for leading us to believe he actually believes the Arab nations will with increasing vigor embrace democracy, domestic and international.
It would also, of course, be encouraging to see Israel reduce its hard core resistance to democracy, domestic and international. But let's not daydream. That leads people to become apologists for less than stellar regimes.
Indeed, the USA has plenty of these, left and right of center, though they see different 'virtues' and 'faults' in our regime.
Personally, I think those apologists left and right see far more virtues than exist.
for more than 48 hours the israeli kids sit in their bomb shalters terrified and crying for this brutal attack from Gaza to stop!
praying 4 israel
and btw, every sane person knows that the palestinians are the agressors: shooting bullets and bombs at Israeli tourist buses!!!
That's the problem with war - as long as both sides think they're the abused ones, it never stops. And until Israel decides to live in peace with the Palestinians, nobody is going to have peace. So you have it exactly the way you want it - go bury your dead and ruminate about how unfair it all is.
Seriously, the idea that taking territory that adds less than a minute to incoming missiles flight time, that adds less than an hour to the drive time of most armoured vehicles, and that would mean adding one more missile to a nuclear attack designed to turn all of Israel into a sheet of glass makes any sort of strategic difference is rather laughable, as is the idea that adding territory that ties up a lot of Israeli military personnel in suppressing civilians decreases the burden on said military.
Stop sending millions of their migrants from their failed states to the West.
Stop spending billion on missionary efforts in the West.
Stop investing in Western businesses.
Stop financing, arming and supporting Jihadists, Wahhabists, Salafist causes int he West.
Stop using Western technology. Beign with stopping to buy Western air-conditioning, medical devices, jet travel and internet.
Then we'll talk about reducing footprints each others footprints.
By the way, I haven't heard of any Middle Eastern governments "shipping" their residents to the US. INDIVIDUALS make the decision to migrate.