Craig Nelson: Obama betrays hope created by Cairo speech
[Craig Nelson is Associate Editor of The National]
It’s official: forget Cairo. Fold up the speech and throw it in the bin, or put it in that already bulging folder marked “Bad Faith & Broken Promises”.
That seems to be the unintended but unavoidably obvious message of the about-face by the US president Barack Obama and his decision last weekend to press ahead with Israeli-Palestinian talks despite Arab and Palestinian demands that Israel halt West Bank settlement construction first.
Interestingly, Mr Obama did not make the announcement himself. He put his travelling secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, up to it during a stop in Jerusalem on Saturday.
But make no mistake: the onus for the decision falls on Mr Obama himself. And in its vindication of violence over diplomacy and stalling over engagement, Mr Obama’s move ranked him alongside George W Bush, the man whose record he ran against to win the presidency.
It was Mr Bush who, in April 2004, endorsed Israel’s claim to parts of the West Bank seized in the 1967 Middle East War, a comparable victory for Israel’s policy of coercion over real negotiation.
Yet Mr Obama’s move is arguably more objectionable and, for those who supported him, far more deflating. By the time Mr Bush took the podium at the White House with Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister grinning at his side, to declare certain West Bank settlements permanent, there were few remaining illusions about what the US president was and what he stood for.
By then, in particular, the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as Mr Bush’s main pretext for invading that nation had been exposed as a sham...
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It’s official: forget Cairo. Fold up the speech and throw it in the bin, or put it in that already bulging folder marked “Bad Faith & Broken Promises”.
That seems to be the unintended but unavoidably obvious message of the about-face by the US president Barack Obama and his decision last weekend to press ahead with Israeli-Palestinian talks despite Arab and Palestinian demands that Israel halt West Bank settlement construction first.
Interestingly, Mr Obama did not make the announcement himself. He put his travelling secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, up to it during a stop in Jerusalem on Saturday.
But make no mistake: the onus for the decision falls on Mr Obama himself. And in its vindication of violence over diplomacy and stalling over engagement, Mr Obama’s move ranked him alongside George W Bush, the man whose record he ran against to win the presidency.
It was Mr Bush who, in April 2004, endorsed Israel’s claim to parts of the West Bank seized in the 1967 Middle East War, a comparable victory for Israel’s policy of coercion over real negotiation.
Yet Mr Obama’s move is arguably more objectionable and, for those who supported him, far more deflating. By the time Mr Bush took the podium at the White House with Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister grinning at his side, to declare certain West Bank settlements permanent, there were few remaining illusions about what the US president was and what he stood for.
By then, in particular, the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as Mr Bush’s main pretext for invading that nation had been exposed as a sham...