President Ahmadinejad’s response to President Obama’s out-stretched hand has been as meaninglessly ritualised as was the original overture.
Just as Iran is not trying to build a nuclear weapon, and so can be said to have stopped doing so at any time that President Obama deems politic, so the Obama Administration is not, in any meaningful way, “supporting Israel”, and certainly not to the extent that Iran is “supporting” certain other people whom President Obama mentioned hardly or not at all. So this or a future President of Iran can always just say that the Americans have stopped doing so, and then have to face down nothing more than the equivalents of the Bush-era crazies on the subject.
Détente with Iran is now a fact, at least for America, and one trusts for Britain as soon as possible. As with his Eisenhower-like even-handedness over Israel and Palestine, President Obama’s Nixon-like thawing of relations with Iran as Nixon did with China (although it took Jimmy Carter, 30 years ago this month, finally to recognise the fact that the one China is China), and his impending conclusion of the war in Iraq as Nixon concluded that in Vietnam, recall the days when the Republican Party had much to commend it.
Like the above achievements, Eisenhower’s excoriation of the military-industrial complex, the calls for Europe to end the First World War by reverting to the 1914 borders (as advocated by Pope Benedict XV, and which would have precluded both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union), the ferocious championing of agriculture and rural communities, and the opposition to Clinton’s job-exportation and to his global trigger-happiness, all rank alongside the New Deal (strongly supported by rural, pro-farming Republicans in the West), Civil Rights, and other Democratic contributions.
No one can seriously claim that Nixon, for all his faults, was any more unsavoury a character than Kennedy. But he wasn’t pretty, he didn’t get shot, and he did get caught. There have been Democratic Presidents who might at a push have started the Iraq War. Clinton might have concluded Bush’s deals to export jobs to sweatshops, or issued his amnesty for the corresponding importation of those sweatshops themselves, as well as for the significant disadvantaging of the black and white working class by the transformation of America into a bilingual country. But no previous Republican President, including Bush’s father (whatever he might say now), would ever have done so.
The appointment of Hillary Clinton was still a very bad idea. But she does at least appear to be on some sort of leash. Her boss is unbound by her promise to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran (where there are more women than men at university) if instructed to do so by her campaign contributors Saudi Arabia (where women may not drive), Kuwait (the last country on earth to forbid women, as such, from voting) and the United Arab Emirates.
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One has to wonder, David, if you have some evidence for your bald statements relating to actual changes in US policy, as opposed to changes in rhetoric and style. Actual changes would come as a surprise to most Americans, even those who want a different US policy.
ReplyDeleteMy take is that Obama's policies will include subtle differences from those of Bush, the most important of which will be a change in rhetoric.
I might add that the party to whom a lot of the change of rhetoric regarding the Middle East is really directed at is Europe, not the Middle East. Expecting radically different policies from the people on whom Obama will rely for policy recommendations is not in the cards. It will not come from Mrs. Clinton - who, before it became an unpopular position among Democrats, favored the war in Iraq -, from Mr. Ross, with very well known views on both the Middle East and Iran, from Mr. Holbrooke, also with well known views on such topics or from anyone he has appointed including Mr. Mitchell, who holds conventional American views on the Middle East. And, needless to say, it will not come from Mr. Obama because he is, so far as anyone knows, entirely ignorant about the Middle East and Iran, having come to his opinions from information obtained from the advisers he now has.
It is worth wondering, as the obverse side of the coin, why would someone like Richard Holbrooke, who has cabinet level expertise, support policies which, if you are correct, he vehemently opposes? The same question for Mrs. Clinton. The same question for Mr. Ross.
I think you are fooling yourself, listening to rhetoric designed to quiet things down so that their actual policies can be pursued with less opposition from Europe and, to some extent, the Muslim regions.
"rhetoric and style"
ReplyDeleteWhich matter immensely, and were the sum total of Bush's Iran policy, although thank God for the term limit on that one, as on so many others.
"Actual changes would come as a surprise to most Americans"
Then they must be very surprised now that the change has happened.
"My take is that Obama's policies will include subtle differences from those of Bush, the most important of which will be a change in rhetoric"
There was nothing "subtle" about Bush's "rhetoric".
"Expecting radically different policies from the people on whom Obama will rely for policy recommendations is not in the cards"
So he has done it himself.
"Mitchell, who holds conventional American views on the Middle East"
If he does, then that makes him a foreign policy realist, not a neocon hawk. The Clinton and Dubya Administrations were not "conventionally" America. They were a 16-year aberration, now very visibly at an end.
"Obama is, so far as anyone knows, entirely ignorant about the Middle East and Iran"
Dream on! You don't agree with him, but that is not the same thing at all.
"It is worth wondering, as the obverse side of the coin, why would someone like Richard Holbrooke, who has cabinet level expertise, support policies which, if you are correct, he vehemently opposes? The same question for Mrs. Clinton. The same question for Mr. Ross."
They enjoy office. Who wouldn't? But it will be interesting to see how long they last, and who replaces them if/when they go.
Cuba will be next. And these things will change the GOP, sending it back to foreign policy realism when they see how popular it is in Middle America. So the anti-Iran crazies and the Miami lot needn't bother voting Republican instead.
The real, old America is back.
Thank God.