Obama Blew It: Robert Fisk

Who cares in the Middle East what Obama says?

President Obama has shown himself to be weak in his dealings with the Middle East, says Robert Fisk, and the Arab world is turning its back with contempt. Its future will be shaped without American influence

Monday, 30 May 2011

This month, in the Middle East, has seen the unmaking of the President of the
United States. More than that, it has witnessed the lowest prestige of
America in the region since Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz on the USS Quincy
in the Great Bitter Lake in 1945.

While Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu played out their farce in Washington
– Obama grovelling as usual – the Arabs got on with the serious business of
changing their world, demonstrating and fighting and dying for freedoms they
have never possessed. Obama waffled on about change in the Middle East – and
about America's new role in the region. It was pathetic. "What is this
'role' thing?" an Egyptian friend asked me at the weekend. "Do
they still believe we care about what they think?"

And it is true. Obama's failure to support the Arab revolutions until they
were all but over lost the US most of its surviving credit in the region.
Obama was silent on the overthrow of Ben Ali, only joined in the chorus of
contempt for Mubarak two days before his flight, condemned the Syrian regime
– which has killed more of its people than any other dynasty in this Arab "spring",
save for the frightful Gaddafi – but makes it clear that he would be happy
to see Assad survive, waves his puny fist at puny Bahrain's cruelty and
remains absolutely, stunningly silent over Saudi Arabia. And he goes on his
knees before Israel. Is it any wonder, then, that Arabs are turning their
backs on America, not out of fury or anger, nor with threats or violence,
but with contempt? It is the Arabs and their fellow Muslims of the Middle
East who are themselves now making the decisions.

Turkey is furious with Assad because he twice promised to speak of reform and
democratic elections – and then failed to honour his word. The Turkish
government has twice flown delegations to Damascus and, according to the
Turks, Assad lied to the foreign minister on the second visit, baldly
insisting that he would recall his brother Maher's legions from the streets
of Syrian cities. He failed to do so. The torturers continue their work.

Watching the hundreds of refugees pouring from Syria across the northern
border of Lebanon, the Turkish government is now so fearful of a repeat of
the great mass Iraqi Kurdish refugee tide that overwhelmed their border in
the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war that it has drawn up its own secret plans
to prevent the Kurds of Syria moving in their thousands into the Kurdish
areas of south-eastern Turkey. Turkish generals have thus prepared an
operation that would send several battalions of Turkish troops into Syria
itself to carve out a "safe area" for Syrian refugees inside
Assad's caliphate. The Turks are prepared to advance well beyond the Syrian
border town of Al Qamishli – perhaps half way to Deir el-Zour (the old
desert killing fields of the 1915 Armenian Holocaust, though speak it not) –
to provide a "safe haven" for those fleeing the slaughter in
Syria's cities.

The Qataris are meanwhile trying to prevent Algeria from resupplying Gaddafi
with tanks and armoured vehicles – this was one of the reasons why the Emir
of Qatar, the wisest bird in the Arabian Gulf, visited the Algerian
president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, last week. Qatar is committed to the Libyan
rebels in Benghazi; its planes are flying over Libya from Crete and –
undisclosed until now – it has Qatari officers advising the rebels inside
the city of Misrata in western Libya; but if Algerian armour is indeed being
handed over to Gaddafi to replace the material that has been destroyed in
air strikes, it would account for the ridiculously slow progress which the
Nato campaign is making against Gaddafi.

Of course, it all depends on whether Bouteflika really controls his army – or
whether the Algerian "pouvoir", which includes plenty of secretive
and corrupt generals, are doing the deals. Algerian equipment is superior to
Gaddafi's and thus for every tank he loses, Ghaddafi might be getting an
improved model to replace it. Below Tunisia, Algeria and Libya share a
750-mile desert frontier, an easy access route for weapons to pass across
the border.

But the Qataris are also attracting Assad's venom. Al Jazeera's concentration
on the Syrian uprising – its graphic images of the dead and wounded far more
devastating than anything our soft western television news shows would dare
broadcast – has Syrian state television nightly spitting at the Emir and at
the state of Qatar. The Syrian government has now suspended up to £4 billion
of Qatari investment projects, including one belonging to the Qatar
Electricity and Water Company.

Amid all these vast and epic events – Yemen itself may yet prove to be the
biggest bloodbath of all, while the number of Syria's "martyrs"
have now exceeded the victims of Mubarak's death squads five months ago – is
it any surprise that the frolics of Messrs Netanyahu and Obama appear so
irrelevant? Indeed, Obama's policy towards the Middle East – whatever it is
– sometimes appears so muddled that it is scarcely worthy of study. He
supports, of course, democracy – then admits that this may conflict with
America's interests. In that wonderful democracy called Saudi Arabia, the US
is now pushing ahead with a £40 billion arms deal and helping the Saudis to
develop a new "elite" force to protect the kingdom's oil and
future nuclear sites. Hence Obama's fear of upsetting Saudi Arabia, two of
whose three leading brothers are now so incapacitated that they can no
longer make sane decisions – unfortunately, one of these two happens to be
King Abdullah – and his willingness to allow the Assad family's
atrocity-prone regime to survive. Of course, the Israelis would far prefer
the "stability" of the Syrian dictatorship to continue; better the
dark caliphate you know than the hateful Islamists who might emerge from the
ruins. But is this argument really good enough for Obama to support when the
people of Syria are dying in the streets for the kind of democracy that the
US president says he wants to see in the region?

One of the vainest elements of American foreign policy towards the Middle East
is the foundational idea that the Arabs are somehow more stupid than the
rest of us, certainly than the Israelis, more out of touch with reality than
the West, that they don't understand their own history. Thus they have to be
preached at, lectured, and cajoled by La Clinton and her ilk – much as their
dictators did and do, father figures guiding their children through life.
But Arabs are far more literate than they were a generation ago; millions
speak perfect English and can understand all too well the political weakness
and irrelevance in the president's words. Listening to Obama's 45-minute
speech this month – the "kick off' to four whole days of weasel
words and puffery by the man who tried to reach out to the Muslim world in
Cairo two years ago, and then did nothing – one might have thought that the
American President had initiated the Arab revolts, rather than sat on the
sidelines in fear.

There was an interesting linguistic collapse in the president's language over
those critical four days. On Thursday 19 May, he referred to the
continuation of Israeli "settlements". A day later, Netanyahu was
lecturing him on "certain demographic changes that have taken place on
the ground". Then when Obama addressed the American Aipac lobby group
(American Israel Public Affairs Committee) on the Sunday, he had cravenly
adopted Netanyahu's own preposterous expression. Now he, too, spoke of "new
demographic realities on the ground." Who would believe that he was
talking about internationally illegal Jewish colonies built on land stolen
from Arabs in one of the biggest property heists in the history of "Palestine"?
Delay in peace-making will undermine Israeli security, Obama announced –
apparently unaware that Netanyahu's project is to go on delaying and
delaying and delaying until there is no land left for the "viable"
Palestinian state which the United States and the European Union supposedly
wish to see.

Then we had the endless waffle about the 1967 borders. Netanyahu called them "defenceless"
(though they seemed to have been pretty defendable for the 18 years prior to
the Six Day War) and Obama – oblivious to the fact that Israel must be the
only country in the world to have an eastern land frontier but doesn't know
where it is – then says he was misunderstood when he talked about 1967. It
doesn't matter what he says. George W Bush caved in years ago when he gave
Ariel Sharon a letter which stated America's acceptance of "already
existing major Israeli population centres" beyond the 1967 lines. To
those Arabs prepared to listen to Obama's spineless oration, this was a
grovel too far. They simply could not understand the reaction of Netanyahu's
address to Congress. How could American politicians rise and applaud
Netanyahu 55 times – 55 times – with more enthusiasm than one of the rubber
parliaments of Assad, Saleh and the rest?

And what on earth did the Great Speechifier mean when he said that "every
country has the right to self-defence" but that Palestine would be "demilitarised"?
What he meant was that Israel could go on attacking the Palestinians (as in
2009, for example, when Obama was treacherously silent) while the
Palestinians would have to take what was coming to them if they did not
behave according to the rules – because they would have no weapons to defend
themselves. As for Netanyahu, the Palestinians must choose between unity
with Hamas or peace with Israel. All of which was very odd. When there was
no unity, Netanyahu told us all that he had no Palestinian interlocutor
because the Palestinians were disunited. Yet when they unite, they are
disqualified from peace talks.

Of course, cynicism grows the longer you live in the Middle East. I recall,
for example, travelling to Gaza in the early 1980s when Yasser Arafat was
running his PLO statelet in Beirut. Anxious to destroy Arafat's prestige in
the occupied territories, the Israeli government decided to give its support
to an Islamist group in Gaza called Hamas. In fact, I actually saw with my
own eyes the head of the Israeli army's Southern Command negotiating with
bearded Hamas officials, giving them permission to build more mosques. It's
only fair to say, of course, that we were also busy at the time, encouraging
a certain Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. But the
Israelis did not give up on Hamas. They later held another meeting with the
organisation in the West Bank; the story was on the front page of the
Jerusalem Post the next day. But there wasn't a whimper from the Americans.

Then another moment that I can recall over the long years. Hamas and Islamic
Jihad members – all Palestinians – were, in the early 1990s, thrown across
the Israeli border into southern Lebanon where they spent more than a year
camping on a freezing mountainside. I would visit them from time to time and
on one occasion mentioned that I would be travelling to Israel next day.
Immediately, one of the Hamas men ran to his tent and returned with a
notebook. He then proceeded to give me the home telephone numbers of three
senior Israeli politicians – two of whom are still prominent today – and,
when I reached Jerusalem and called the numbers, they all turned out to be
correct. In other words, the Israeli government had been in personal and
direct contact with Hamas.

But now the narrative has been twisted out of all recognition. Hamas are the
super-terrorists, the "al-Qa'ida" representatives in the unified
Palestinian leadership, the men of evil who will ensure that no peace ever
takes place between Palestinians and Israeli. If only this were true, the
real al-Qa'ida would be more than happy to take responsibility. But it is
not true. In the same context, Obama stated that the Palestinians would have
to answer questions about Hamas. But why should they? What Obama and
Netanyahu think about Hamas is now irrelevant to them. Obama warns the
Palestinians not to ask for statehood at the United Nations in September.
But why on earth not? If the people of Egypt and Tunisia and Yemen and Libya
and Syria – we are all waiting for the next revolution (Jordan? Bahrain
again? Morocco?) – can fight for freedom and dignity, why shouldn't the
Palestinians? Lectured for decades on the need for non-violent protest, the
Palestinians elect to go to the UN with their cry for legitimacy – only to
be slapped down by Obama.

Having read all of the "Palestine Papers" which Al-Jazeera revealed,
there is no doubt that "Palestine's" official negotiators will go
to any lengths to produce some kind of statelet. Mahmoud Abbas, who managed
to write a 600-page book on the "peace process" without once
mentioning the word "occupation", could even cave in over the UN
project, fearful of Obama's warning that it would be an attempt to "isolate"
Israel and thus de-legitimise the Israeli state – or "the Jewish
state" as the US president now calls it. But Netanyahu is doing more
than anyone to delegitimise his own state; indeed, he is looking more and
more like the Arab buffoons who have hitherto littered the Middle East.
Mubarak saw a "foreign hand" in the Egyptian revolution (Iran, of
course). So did the Crown Prince of Bahrain (Iran again). So did Gaddafi
(al-Qa'ida, western imperialism, you name it), So did Saleh of Yemen
(al-Qa'ida, Mossad and America). So did Assad of Syria (Islamism, probably
Mossad, etc). And so does Netanyahu (Iran, naturally enough, Syria, Lebanon,
just about anyone you can think of except for Israel itself).

But as this nonsense continues, so the tectonic plates shudder. I doubt very
much if the Palestinians will remain silent. If there's an "intifada"
in Syria, why not a Third Intifada in "Palestine"? Not a struggle
of suicide bombers but of mass, million-strong protests. If the Israelis
have to shoot down a mere few hundred demonstrators who tried – and in some
cases succeeded – in crossing the Israeli border almost two weeks ago, what
will they do if confronted by thousands or a million. Obama says no
Palestinian state must be declared at the UN. But why not? Who cares in the
Middle East what Obama says? Not even, it seems, the Israelis. The Arab
spring will soon become a hot summer and there will be an Arab autumn, too.
By then, the Middle East may have changed forever. What America says will
matter nothing.

The Independent