I don’t have many arguments with Roger Cohen’s latest column, After the War on Terror. He’s correct that the President’s interview on Al Arabiya marks the end of the war on terror; that words are important and that President Obama is a lot closer to Cohen own “Israel is wrong” belief than President Bush was. It’s just that Cohen believes these are good things, I believe they are bad.
Cohen writes:
Tony Blair, now also a Middle East envoy and Mitchell’s partner in Belfast, once put it to me this way: “The only reason we got the breakthrough in Northern Ireland was we did in the end focus on it with such intensity over such a period that every little thing that went wrong — and everything that could go wrong did at some point — was all the time being managed and rectified.†He described the approach as: “Any time we can’t solve it, we have to manage it, until we can start to solve it again.â€
Bush had the ideological framework wrong. Obama has righted it by ending the war on terror. Now comes the hard Middle Eastern slog of solve-manage-solve. It will need the president’s unswerving focus.
Barry Rubin, however, writes (on Facebook):
Second, two blocs contend for regional power. The better-organized, more coherent side is led by Islamist Iran, with junior partner Syria, Lebanese Hizballah, Palestinian Hamas, and Iraqi insurgents. Also on the Islamist–but not Iranian–side are Muslim Brotherhoods and al-Qaida. All want to destroy Western influence, Arab regimes, and Israel.
The other grouping consists of the other Arab states, Israel, and the West. Yet this alignment is weak, disorganized, and full of internal conflicts.
This illustrates the mistake Cohen is making. Cohen pretends that the West and the Iranian axis have enough in common that differences can be negotiated away. Prof. Rubin, on the other hand, is arguing that Iran’s interests diverge dramatically from those of the West. There is no managing and no accommodating Tehran.
Furthermore Fouad Ajami writes that this change is ironic.
The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the “parochial” man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor’s diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so.
Despite his oh-so-openminded approach to Iran (and other tyrannies) Cohen fails to grasp that he is acting as an apologist for its despotism. George Bush, for all his faults, tried to change the status quo in the Muslim world and make its citizens free. I had not remembered that President Bush had been interviewed numerous times on Al Arabiya. Unlike his successor, the former president was, at least at times, unapologetic for his actions and beliefs:
Q- But would these moments — I mean, these emotional moments, would they make you reconsider or rethink about what’s going on in our area now (Middle East)?
THE PRESIDENT: Not really. As a matter of fact, I leave most of the meetings reassured that the loved one, in this case, fully understanding what we were doing. See, I believe that, one, it’s noble to liberate 25 million people from a tyrant; two, that we cannot allow Iraq to be a safe haven for people who have sworn allegiance to those who have attacked us. In other words, I believe we must defeat the extremists there so we don’t have to face them here at home. And three, I believe the spread of liberty will yield peace. And I believe the Middle East is plenty capable of being a part of the world where liberty flourishes. That’s what I believe people want.
And so I leave those meetings saddened by the fact that a person has pain in her heart — and yesterday she had pain in her heart — but encouraged by the fact that her son died for a noble cause and a necessary cause. And that’s exactly what she told me.
President Obama’s outreach has been met with an angry slap, (via memeorandum) not a hand of conciliation. Apparently, Ahmadinejad did not have the benefit of reading Cohen’s column before reacting to President Obama’s words.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Obama’s interview makes him seem like a weak, naive fool to the hard men in the Middle East. They will try to walk all over him, convinced that he has no backbone. Obama does no understand the main lesson of the history of the last 75 years: You cannot appease an unappeaseable power. Iran, like Nazi Germany, is unappeaseable. Either the Ayatollahs will be overthrown first or they are going to provoke a massive war.
It’s curious that Bush, who so many oh-so-intelligent people consider a dunce, quickly gained a far more sophisticated understanding to the real causes of the terrorism and the long-term strategy to fight it, than they did. Most of the people who consider Bush a dunce still do not understand what is going on, what caused it, and how to fight it, and that includes Obama. He’d better learn PDQ.