Explaining Barack Obama's circumspect reaction to the bombing of Gaza, his chief political advisor, David Axelrod, correctly noted that "we can only have one President at a time." But in three weeks that temporary pass for Obama will expire.
Hearing, like the rest of us, the great sucking sounds American jobs make as they disappear into the swamp that until recently was the American economy, President Obama will no doubt desire to concentrate his formidable intellect on the details of a rescue operation, particularly since its required character and dimensions remain disturbingly opaque even to our economic Laureates. But in this as in so many other instances of human desire, its fulfillment is doubtful.
The US has been embroiled in the Middle East for the better part of a century precisely because of the American elite's conviction, still sound, that political convulsions anywhere in that region threaten the health of the American economy when it is good and promise to aggravate its condition when it is bad. What follows is that even if his sole concern were the Great Recession already upon us, Obama could not ignore the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians that has for decades oozed poison into the bloodstream of America's relations with the peoples of the Middle East and beyond.
Since September 11th, 2001, the economy, however ill it may be, cannot be any President's sole preoccupation. So for reason of our physical as well as our economic security, as President, Barack Obama cannot await a more auspicious time to attempt to cauterize this chronic infection on the Middle East's Mediterranean flank.
The region is filled with burning fuses of varying length. Last Saturday the short one in Gaza detonated its explosive charge. How could it be otherwise? After all, Gaza and the so-called "West Bank" territories occupied by Israel during its 1967 war with Edypt, Syria and Jordan, are in effect open-air prisons filled with entire families to the gross number of roughly a million and one-half who are presumed guilty, whatever their other acts or omissions, of the crime of not being Israelis. Like the inhabitants of closed prisons around the world, they have no rights, whether among other things to leave or to enjoy due process in the event they are accused of plotting against the prison administration. And since their term is of indeterminate length, they have no future.
In the case of the prison of Gaza, for reasons of political and economic efficiency the heavily armed guards have been withdrawn to the periphery but with a license to re-enter whether by land or air and kill prisoners deemed to be planning or actually executing attacks (whether for revenge or in the forlorn hope of achieving liberation) on the prison guards or the society that employs them. As long as incarceration continues, fuses will remain short.
The unknown confronting Barack Obama is whether the detonation in Gaza, with its scenes of death, grief and mutilation broadcast to the entire Moslem world and with more of such scenes promised, will accelerate slower burning fuses in other parts of the region or will in the wider reaches of the Islamic world (including Europe) provide what one leading counter-terrorism expert calls the "biographical triggers" that launch young people already persuaded by the narrative of victimization woven into the fabric of contemporary Islam, to opt for jihad. A prudent man plans in this instance for worst case scenarios. And prudence in the pursuit of his ends is a hallmark of the President Elect. But what do the objective conditions of the conflict, as well as the prevailing American understanding of those conditions, allow him to do once he has resettled in the White House? To that question I will turn in my next blogs.