Obama's speech was a travesty
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.
Thinking about the Cairo speech of the President, despite the claque that immediately arose to applaud and endorse it in the United States, it was, indeed a travesty.
Soothsaying is the art of fools. But my guess is that Obama’s words will be forgotten very quickly, ironically, the opposite of the prediction in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here…” The world has noted all these decades what Lincoln said there because it was a simple but cogent appeal to American values and a thumbnail resume of the Republic’s history until that time.
For someone who has preached to us on the necessity for truth, in private diplomatic encounters as well as in public declarations, the Obama oratory was a tissue of halftruths and outright fabrications. No, the United States does not have one of the largest Muslim populations among countries in the world. [What a really bizarre idea!] No, Islam was not a religion of peace – its spread in the first two centuries after Mohammed’s death was largely by the bloody sword. No, Islam does not have a history of tolerance, not even for the other two “religions of the Book” as Muslims sometimes call Christianity and Judaism, where it is the dominant religion. No, the Muslim world was not the only repository and bank of Greek and other ancient learning passed on to the modern world through the European Renaissance. No, algebra, printing, the compass were not invented by the Arabs/Muslim world.
A colleague suggests the coterie of fact-checking nerds traditionally kept in the White House basement to rein in the more expansive phrase-mongering of the speechwriters has been done away with in the Obama Administration and that was the problem. Maybe. I suspect worse.
For the speech’s statements of moral equivalences – the attempt to draw a balance sheet between acts of ignominious events in modern times – was equally askew. The past history of American relations with Islam and Muslim countries was totally distorted. Even the obvious overthrow of the Sadam dictatorship, one of the most brutal even in an often dehumanized part of the world, was ignored. Washington’s fight for Muslim majorities in Bosnia-Herzegovnia and Kosovo more recently was not even mentioned. The Bush Administration’s attempt to get the attention of the world – not least the Arab/Muslim world who collaborate with the government Khartoum – to the depredations in Darfur went unmentioned. The vast sums, U.S. government and private, expended in the past for aid to many Muslim-majority countries went uncounted. No word of how the U.S. is always at the head of the line to rescue victims – whether Muslim or not – in tsunamis in Indonesia or earthquakes in Pakistan. The unrequited search for justice and human rights through the UN organizations in predominantly Muslim countries went unclaimed. No, Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories is not the equivalent of slavery of black Africans. Nor did the departure – much of it at their own volition – of the Arabs from Mandated Palestine equal The Hollocaust. [In fact, he could have mentioned the flight of a million Jews from Arab and Muslim countries in the 1940s and 1950s, a majority of whom sought refuge in Israel.]
But then, if I am correct, that this speech will take its place shortly in the trashbin of history, why bother with it at all? Why not leave it to others to applaud its soaring rhetoric and the possibilities of healing world crises, however foolish those aspirations are?
The problem is that it indicates a worldview of the President of the United States of America which is totally adverse to reality. At best, it indicates that what is thought to be a shrewd and quick learning mind believes that simply by throwing out compliments and ambiguities about world history and the current state of international relations, progress can be made in the search for peace and stability.
Yes, ideas do have meaning and do play an enormous role in world affairs. Mistaken views of the world, too, can have the same or sometimes even greater effect. But simply by trying to schmooze over basic issues among the governments – and, yes, peoples and cultures – progress will be made in finding solutions is, at best, a very weak reed on which to lean American foreign policy.
Just a quick run down the roster:
A regime which is unequaled for its barbarity – it sacrificed as many as two million people in famine for its pursuit of military weaponry in the 1990s – rules in Pyongyang. It defies not only the U.S. but the world community in terms of expressions of UN Security Council resolutions, not only in building its own weaponry but selling it to pariah states. It refuses a compromise of massive economic aid to build a modern society in order to keep a dictatorial regime afloat by blackmailing its neighbors and the world with weapons of mass destruction. Repeatedly, Washington and other countries have engaged it in talks with virtually no preconditions. Result: zero.
Iran, its people caught in the grip of a perennial economic crisis, runs a regime which perpetuates discrimination against women and non-Islamic believers – even members of the competing Sunni persuasion of Islam – is aiming to acquire nuclear weapons in defiance of the world community. It has signed and violated commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its leadership threatens the extinctions of a neighbor, Israel. It has waged war against American forces in neighboring Iraq. It has harbored members of the Al Qaeda international terrorist network. Long negotiations with the European powers which have offered alternatives for acquiring peaceful nuclear power have achieved nothing. Yet the Obama Administration now believes that an open hand will be welcomed and proceeds to court dialogue without conditions.
The Communist dictatorship of Cuba maintains hundreds of political prisoners whose only crime has been opposition to a crippled, bankrupt, one-family despotism. Past gestures of conciliation including regulation of the flow of thousands of its citizens who want to escape to the U.S., interrupted only by Cuban restraint, have been broken off when the Castros would not permit political prisoners to escape their dungeons. The Obama Administration in its few weeks in office has made one after another gesture to the Castro regime without a corresponding concession from Havana. American insistence that vague assurances of movement toward democracy be the condition for reentry of Cuba to the Organization of American States, has now been rejected by Havana. Is that a negotiation which should proceed? And under what conditions?
At a time when vast sums of money are being appropriated for stimulating the economy, while the U.S. is engaged in two hard fought wars – neither of which have reached the point where the end is predictable – the Obama Administration is cutting back on defense spending. At the moment this is written when there is speculation of another missiles launch by Pyongyang, one that could theoretically reach North America, the Obama Defense Department has cut back on anti-missile defense research and procurement.
As we used to say in difficult times in the Great Depression, is that any way to run a railroad?