Obama buries Bush's war on terror

[babylonsister]

Obama changes the Middle East

This American president's empathy with the Arab/Muslim world could be a crucial first step in brokering peace.

By Gary Kamiya
Pages 1 2

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

President Barack Obama tours the pyramids Thursday outside Cairo.


June 5, 2009 | It was the most important speech of Barack Obama's young presidency. And he delivered big-time.

President Obama faced a daunting task in Cairo. He urgently needed to hit the reset button on relations between the U.S. and the Arab/Muslim world. Repairing a relationship that has been fraught with suspicion, misunderstandings and enmity for decades requires addressing many painful and complex issues. Above all, however, it meant confronting two critical ones -- the "war on terror" and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. George W. Bush's "war on terror," which culminated in his invasion of Iraq, foolishly treated all militant Islamist groups as America's enemies and made the paranoid neoconservative idea of a "clash of civilizations" a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a festering sore that has poisoned Arab and Muslim attitudes toward America for more than 60 years, and it has done enormous damage to America's -- and ultimately Israel's -- national interests. With great diplomatic skill, but above all with an empathy toward his audience unmatched by that of any previous president, Obama took on both of those subjects. And as a result, to judge by the mostly positive reaction from Arab and Muslim viewers, America's standing in the region just soared. The only people gnashing their teeth right now are al-Qaida and the dead-end extremists on Israel's far right.

Obama made it clear that Bush's "war on terror" was dead and buried. As was the case throughout the speech, his most crucial point was made more by what he did not say than by what he did. Obama never once used the words "terror" or "terrorists." And when he spoke of "violent extremists" whom America had to defeat, it was clear that he meant apocalyptic Islamist groups like al-Qaida, not militant national resistance organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah, or for that matter Islamist political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood. Fanatics like al-Qaida have little standing in the Arab/Muslim world, and Bush's ill-advised conflation of them with groups that do have popular followings only enhanced their popularity. By rejecting "terrorism" as the defining term for America's Middle East policy, and by abandoning Bush's amorphous and unwinnable "war" against it, Obama instantly recast America's entire relationship with the Middle East. The era of moralistic and self-defeating name-calling in U.S. Middle East foreign policy appears to be over.

But Obama's unprecedented comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were even more significant. Although that conflict has been America's single greatest foreign-policy liability for decades, for a number of reasons -- historical ignorance, Cold War alliances, sympathy for a state created in the wake of the Holocaust, domestic politics -- American presidents have always seen the crisis through an Israel-centric lens. Obama's speech represented a decisive change in that blinkered vision. If he has the wisdom and courage to follow through on it, June 4, 2009, may be remembered as the day when a just resolution to the world's most dangerous and intractable conflict came into view.

Obama did something no other American president has ever done: clearly and unequivocally state that the situation of the Palestinian people is intolerable. By uttering that one word, "intolerable," Obama made a profound moral commitment before the entire world to help the Palestinian people, by brokering a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis that will result in a viable Palestinian state. Obama's speech announces a new American approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which Washington truly recognizes both sides of this tragic narrative.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/06/05/obama_middle_east/

[Captain Hilts]

1. It's all good. nt

[bluestateguy]

2. We do have a terrorist threat in this country

It comes from the likes of people like Tim McVeigh, the "Army of God", Eric Rudolph, Jim David Adkisson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Scott Roeder, and Richard Poplawski.

They tend to be conservative, white, male and fundamentalist Christians. That's the War on Terrorism to me.

[HopeOverFear]

3. Right on