Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: The humiliation of Barack Obama

 
The humiliation of Barack Obama
As he prepares to singularly veto Palestine's statehood bid, he must be 
thinking to himself: 'This isn't right'.
 
Robert Grenier
Last Modified: 20 Sep 2011 10:40
 
Sooner or later, it's going to happen. Most likely, the moment will come 
just before his first head-of-state meeting in New York. Or perhaps it 
will happen just before his first side-bar meeting with Binyamin 
Netanyahu. Or then again, it may come as the cumulative reaction to a 
series of embarrassing encounters with fellow world leaders. But the 
moment will come.
 
At some point this coming week, during his visit to the this year's 
opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, US President 
Barack Obama is going to have a nearly irresistible urge. He is going to 
want to stand up to his hovering political handlers and the smothering 
bureaucracy which tries to dictate his every move, summon his personal 
dignity, and say "Enough".
 
In April of 1995, President Clinton played host to then-Prime Minister 
Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan. US-Pakistan relations were in sharp decline. 
A few years before, the US had begun to implement sanctions mandated by 
the so-called Pressler Amendment, under which Pakistan was to be 
punished with a complete cutoff of aid and of military sales if it were 
found to be pursuing a nuclear-weapons capability. The first President 
Bush had made such a finding, and now the ties between the two countries 
were being progressively cut.
 
At the heart of the growing ill-feeling between the two nations was the 
US cancellation of a previously-agreed sale of 28 F-16 fighter aircraft. 
The Pakistanis had realised when they signed the purchase deal that it 
might be cancelled if the Pressler Amendment were invoked. Now, given 
the law and the previous assertion of Pakistani culpability from 
President Bush, there was no longer any question of delivering the 
aircraft. But there was another wrinkle.
 
The Pakistanis had paid enormous sums of money which they could ill 
afford, in advance, for the airplanes.  And now, according to the US, 
not only could the Pakistanis not have the warplanes, but they couldn't 
have their money back, either. You see, the money wasn't there anymore; 
it had been spent by the contractor. The planes had been built. There 
was no provision under US law to provide appropriated funds to 
compensate the Pakistanis.
 
Yes, the F-16s could perhaps be sold to another country and the proceeds 
given to Pakistan, but that, too, might require approval from a hostile 
US congress, and would most likely not be forthcoming. In short, there 
was nothing to be done. And as if to add insult to injury, the 
Pakistanis were also being charged a hefty annual storage fee for each 
plane - each plane that they could not have.
 
Defending the indefensible
 
When the entire US foreign policy/national security apparatus begins to 
move in one direction, it is an impressive sight. A vast bureaucracy 
churns out elaborate rationales for its decided policy, and these are 
mind-numbingly repeated in dozens of different ways for use in dozens of 
different fora. This was a classic case in point.
 
I saw it myself from inside the State Department bureaucracy, where I 
was serving at the time. Justifications for the patently unjustifiable 
were delivered to the Pakistanis at all levels. They were mouthed by 
State Department and White House spokesmen, repeated in Congressional 
testimony, delivered to the press in many different settings, elaborated 
in written responses to inquiries from congressmen and the public, to 
say nothing of internal communications in the Executive Branch.
 
All of this bureaucratic momentum hurtled forward towards the climactic 
moment when President Clinton would deliver the same message, in person, 
to Prime Minister Bhutto.
 
The preparations for such encounters are, again, highly impressive. Huge 
briefing books requiring hundreds of man-hours are drawn up. They 
contain scene-setters, and backgrounders, and elaborate policy 
justifications, backed up with legal briefs organised under 
alphabeticised tabs, followed by detailed talking points designed to 
turn the president into a virtual ventriloquist's dummy. And then the 
whole lot is coordinated and cleared up through the system, through the 
secretary of state, and the National Security Council, to the president 
himself.
 
And so it was here. But in this case, at the very end, having carefully 
studied all this codified nonsense, this monument to bureaucratic 
inertia, and just before walking in to meet with Bhutto, when he would 
have to look the Pakistani prime minister in the eye and defend the 
patently indefensible, Clinton did something no one - but no one - in 
the bureaucracy would ever have anticipated.
 
With simple, clear-eyed common sense and the innate sense of justice 
with which God has endowed most five-year-old children, he said, simply, 
"but this is not fair". And then, wonder of wonders, he walked in and 
said just that to Bhutto.
 
Here are Clinton's words recorded moments later, when the two leaders 
emerged to speak before the press:  "I have already made it clear to 
you, and I don't think any American president has ever said this before, 
I don't think it's right for us to keep the money and the equipment. 
That is not right. And I am going to try to find a resolution to it."
 
If you have not served in America's foreign policy bureaucracy, if you 
have not seen this from the inside, you cannot imagine the effect which 
these words would have had - to have a fully elaborated policy position 
publicly repudiated by the president, completely and unexpectedly, at 
the last possible moment, and on a world stage. It must have been 
wonderful. Alas, having seen all the preparation, I was not there for 
the denouement, having moved on to another job. I would have given 
anything to see it.
 
Could it happen again?
 
But this was a comparatively minor issue, followed by few people outside 
South Asian policy circles. So just imagine, if you can, something 
analogous happening at the UN this week, when President Obama has to 
justify current US policy regarding the Palestinian bid for 
international recognition as a state.
 
We all know what the Americans have been saying: That what President 
Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is doing is counter-productive, that it is a 
repudiation of the Oslo Accords, that it is an attempt to avoid the 
necessity of reaching a negotiated solution with the Israelis. We have 
seen the US policy juggernaut gearing up, as the same arguments are 
repeated by US envoys to the Palestinians and to the Quartet, elaborated 
publicly by the secretary of state and by the White House spokesman, and 
delivered in dozens of other fora, both great and small.
 
However, repeating the same thing, loudly and insistently, does not make 
it so. President Obama knows this very well. He understands the 
Israeli-Palestinian issue backwards and forwards. He knows the peace 
process is at a dead end.
 
Early in his administration, he tried to revive negotiations by 
mandating a complete West Bank settlement freeze, only to be forced 
embarrassingly by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to back down. When 
this past May he had the temerity to publicly tell the Israelis that 
their current policy towards the Palestinians is untenable and 
unsustainable, and to modestly suggest a negotiating formula to break 
the impasse, he was publicly chastised by Netanyahu and had to submit to 
the humiliation of seeing the Congressional leaders of his own party 
repudiate him in favour of the Israeli prime minister.
 
In response, though he cannot admit it, Obama has washed his hands of 
the Palestinian issue. He knows he can do nothing more. And yet, the 
issue will not go away.
 
Now, once again, he is being forced to publicly support an Israeli 
policy position fundamentally opposed to his own. He knows fully well 
that Netanyahu has no intention of permitting formation of a viable 
Palestinian state, and that the Palestinians have little choice but to 
pursue their current course at the UN.
 
He likewise understands that the US' lonely support for Israel and the 
inevitable US veto of the Palestinians' bid for full UN membership will 
undermine, perhaps terminally, the US position in a democratising Middle 
East, and will expose the US' nominal support for popular Arab rights as 
a fraud.
 
The human dimension
 
All of this is well understood. We can all see it coming. And yet what 
is often forgotten is the human dimension.
 
For the leader of a great nation, at certain points the public becomes 
personal, as it did for Bill Clinton one day in April, 1995. I do not 
know President Obama personally, but my sense is that this is a proud 
man. He does not see himself as an ordinary politician, but as a 
transformative leader. He has attempted self-consciously to carve out 
such a role for himself in the context of US relations with the Muslim 
world, but he has been repeatedly stymied, publicly and disgracefully.
 
It is one thing to have to sacrifice principle in the face of political 
reality. All politicians are forced to do so at various points. But it 
is another to do so in a highly public manner, to have to mouth patent 
falsehoods in one-on-one meetings with fellow world leaders, who know 
better and who will think less of you as a result.
 
This is what lies in store for President Obama in New York, and he knows it.
 
For one as busy as a US president, there are many distractions, many 
ways to avoid confronting the unpleasant. But at some point, when the 
president is alone with his briefing book in New York, it is going to 
strike him. He will feel a tightening in his chest, and he will have an 
urge to pick up this plastic-bound tome to craven political expediency 
and hurl it at someone, and then to walk out and say what he really thinks.
 
We all know that the president will do no such thing. He will suppress 
this urge, for to do otherwise would spell political suicide. No, the 
president will swallow his anger, and do what he must do. But it is 
worth giving some consideration, as the US again undermines its security 
and its global position, pointlessly and gratuitously, in blind 
allegiance to an ungrateful and self-destructive ally, that we will also 
be watching something else, something far more personal: The public 
mortification of Barack Hussein Obama.
 
Robert Grenier is a retired, 27-year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine 
Service. He was Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center from 2004 
to 2006.
 
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not 
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/2011919102245537768.html
 
 
-- 
Sostieni Rete ECO
 
http://rete-eco.it/it/sostienici.html
 

 moment will come.
http://youtu.be/AaDgUuwpmwk