November 14, 2012
The New York Times
By ROBERT F. WORTH
When Ronald Neumann began his Foreign Service career in the
early 1970s, he sometimes carried a pistol to protect himself. It was a
reasonable precaution. American diplomats in those days lived without benefit of
blast walls or security advisers, even in volatile countries, and consulates
were at times housed on the ground floors of apartment buildings, with local
families living on the upper stories. Neumann worked with a freedom that is
scarcely imaginable for many diplomats today; he could go anywhere, by himself,
and talk to anyone. In the early ’80s, when he was the deputy mission chief in
Yemen, Neumann got wind of a threat to burn down the embassy building in the
capital, Sana. The Arab world was in turmoil at the time, after an Israeli
invasion of Lebanon and months of mounting violence. Much of the anger was
directed at Americans. The embassy was easily accessible to any passer-by, an
ordinary house in a residential neighborhood with no police protection. But
Neumann — whose boss was out of the country at the time — did not close it down.
Then things became more serious: there were rumors that angry Palestinians in
Sana were planning to attack Neumann’s house. Neumann, a taciturn Vietnam
veteran, took it in stride. “I brought a shotgun home from the embassy and
locked the front gate,” Neumann told me. “My wife asked me if there was anything
else we could do. I told her no. So she said, ‘In that case I’ve got some
curtains I’ve been meaning to wash; I might as well do it now.’ I remember
thinking, This is probably how they handled it when the Indian raids went down
in the old West; just stay inside and mend the saddles.”
Three decades later, after serving as an ambassador in three countries, Neumann
found himself marveling at how much his profession has changed. “The dangers
have gotten worse, but the change is partly psychological,” he told me. “There’s
less willingness among our political leaders to accept risks, and all that has
driven us into the bunker.”
Nothing illustrated those changes better than the death of J. Christopher
Stevens, after an assault by jihadis on the U.S. mission in Benghazi on Sept.
11. Stevens was a brave and thoughtful diplomat who, like Neumann, lived to
engage with ordinary people in the countries where he served, to get past the
wire. Yet his death was treated as a scandal, and it set off a political storm
that seems likely to tie the hands of American diplomats around the world for
some time to come. Congressmen and Washington pundits accused the administration
of concealing the dangers Americans face abroad and of failing Stevens by
providing inadequate security. Threats had been ignored, the critics said,
seemingly unaware that a background noise of threats is constant at embassies
across the greater Middle East. The death of an ambassador would not be seen as
the occasional price of a noble but risky profession; someone had to be blamed.
Lost in all this partisan wrangling was the fact that American diplomacy has
already undergone vast changes in the past few decades and is now so heavily
encumbered by fortresslike embassies, body armor and motorcades that it is
almost unrecognizable. In 1985 there were about 150 security officers in U.S.
embassies abroad, and now there are about 900. That does not include the
military officers and advisers, whose presence in many embassies — especially in
the Middle East — can change the atmosphere. Security has gone from a marginal
concern to the very heart of American interactions with other countries.
The barriers are there for a reason: Stevens’s death attests to that, as do
those of Americans in Beirut, Baghdad and other violent places. But the reaction
to the attack in Benghazi crystallized a sense among many diplomats that risks
are less acceptable in Washington than they once were, that the mantra of
“security” will only grow louder. As a result, some of the country’s most
distinguished former ambassadors are now asking anew what diplomacy can achieve
at such a remove.
“No one has sat back to say, ‘What are our objectives?’ ” said Prudence
Bushnell, who was ambassador to Kenya when the Qaeda bombing took place there in
1998, killing more than 200 people and injuring 4,000. “The model has become, we
will go to dangerous places and transform them, and we will do it from secure
fortresses. And it doesn’t work.”
When Chris Stevens was growing up in Northern California, American diplomats
organized their own security, for the most part. “Back then, you would exercise
your own judgment on what was dangerous, and plenty of guys were excited by the
risks,” said Richard Murphy, a retired diplomat who began his Foreign Service
career in 1955 and was ambassador to four countries. The term “terrorist” had
not yet acquired its modern force, nor had the idea that American diplomats
should not talk to certain unsavory groups. You were meant to talk to everyone.
One evening in 1962, Murphy was at the American Consulate in Aleppo, Syria, when
he heard about a coup attempt by military officers. It was a volatile time in
Syria; Murphy witnessed two other coups, with a revolving cast of generals and
revolutionaries. This time, there were large demonstrations. His bosses wanted
the Syrian authorities to provide reassurance that American citizens living in
the area would not be caught up in the conflict. So Murphy got into his car,
alone, and drove to the Aleppo Police Headquarters. There he found a scene of
chaos, with armed Syrian commandos shouting at one another. He recognized an
officer he knew lying dead on the floor. “The Syrians were not amused,” Murphy
recalled dryly. “They told me to get out of there.”
Even in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, diplomats in the field were free to
handle safety as they saw fit. On Sept. 18, 1982, Ryan Crocker, then the
33-year-old political section chief at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, drove to the
Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in southwest Beirut, where Christian militia
fighters had carried out a mass slaughter of Palestinians. “There was no
security, no nothing,” he told me. “That’s when I discovered what a massacre
looked like.” There were hundreds of bodies strewed on the ground inside the
camps, many of them mutilated; some had been booby-trapped with explosives. The
next day Crocker was asked to go back for a detailed body count. He drove to the
camps again, without a bodyguard. “No one gave it a second thought at that
time,” Crocker told me. “It was just what you did.”
That was about to change. Seven months later, on April 18, Crocker was in his
office at the embassy, making phone calls about the continuing security concerns
of Palestinian refugees. He was about to walk downstairs for lunch when a
tremendous blast knocked him across the room. He picked himself up off the
floor, scratched and dazed but unhurt, and opened the door of his office.
“Instead of looking at the suite of offices across the hall,” Crocker told me,
“I was looking out at the Mediterranean.”
The entire front of the building had been sheared off, and Crocker’s colleagues
in the neighboring office were dead. The bomb, delivered by a suicidal zealot in
a truck packed with explosives, killed 63 people, including most of the C.I.A.’s
Beirut staff and its top Middle East analyst. More bombings followed: at the
U.S. Marines’ Beirut barracks, where 241 servicemen died, and at the U.S.
Embassy again the following year. The bombings were an unprecedented blow to the
Foreign Service, and they reverberated in Congress.
One direct result of the attacks was the adoption of new standards for U.S.
embassies abroad: they were to have a 100-foot setback from the perimeter wall
to the building, along with barriers, blast-resistant materials and far more
restricted access. They were often removed to antiseptic suburbs, far from the
city centers where diplomats needed to be. I remember seeing an Arabic cartoon
produced years later that showed two tiny figures standing near the gate of a
towering fortress with an American flag on top. “How do you enter the U.S.
Embassy?” one figure asks. “You can’t,” the other replies. “You have to be born
there.”
Along with the new buildings came armies of security officers, who would
accompany American diplomats and advise them on what was safe and what was not.
They became an intrinsic part of the embassies’ engagement with host countries,
helping to determine who could go where and whom they could meet with.
“Before the Beirut bombings, we were prepared to take a substantially greater
risk than we did later,” Crocker told me. “You have to remember that ’83 was not
the first time we’d lost diplomats. I was an ambassador six times, and three of
my predecessors were assassinated. It was the cost of doing business in
dangerous zones. Congress accepted it; the public accepted it. The top priority
was getting the job done.”
By the time I became a foreign correspondent in 2003, the “Fortress America”
model was entrenched. In Lebanon, where I lived for several years, the U.S.
Embassy had long since moved to a well-guarded compound in the hills a half-hour
north of Beirut. In some ways it seemed more like a prison; diplomats based
there could not leave without advance permission, and when they did, they were
often surrounded by guards. Most journalists scarcely bothered to talk to them,
because we assumed they knew the country far less well than we did. It was not
quite so bad in other countries. But the U.S. Embassies in Yemen, Saudi Arabia
and, of course, Iraq, were so formidable that even I felt unwelcome visiting
them. British and European diplomats sometimes seemed more conversant with the
local culture than the Americans, despite their much smaller staffs and
resources.
In every post, I found dedicated and thoughtful American diplomats who knew the
country well and got out to meet people regularly (one of them was Chris
Stevens, whom I met in 2007). But many of them told me they had to put enormous
effort into overcoming the obstacles created by so many layers of protection.
All the ambassadors I spoke with said they had good working relationships with
the security chiefs, and they were grateful for their help in understanding
risks. But more junior diplomats told me the security officers exercised a
subtle influence on all kinds of decisions. “They don’t want to say yes because
it’s easier to say no,” one midlevel diplomat told me. “We all fight this battle
every day. My first thought on hearing about Chris Stevens’s death — aside from
the sadness — was that this is going to make it even harder for us.” Several
diplomats told me that if the security constraints get worse, they will consider
changing careers.
Outside the Middle East, the rules have shifted more slowly. Prudence Bushnell,
who became a deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1993,
told me she roamed around the continent with little fear for her safety. “I
would go to warlords and tell them to knock it off,” she said. “I didn’t ask for
security. I was in Rwanda just before it blew up, and just afterward. No
security. The F.B.I. wanted to bring in guns, and I told them they were crazy.”
That changed on Aug. 7, 1998, when Al Qaeda operatives detonated a huge bomb
outside the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. Bushnell, who was then ambassador to Kenya,
was in a meeting with the Kenyan trade minister in a building next door. She was
knocked unconscious by the force of the blast and cut by shards of flying glass.
The bomb had shattered the lightly guarded embassy and left hundreds of mangled
bodies across a smoking landscape. Most of the victims were Kenyans. After being
treated by a doctor in a nearby hotel, Bushnell began supervising recovery
efforts. Her grief was mixed with deep anger: she had repeatedly asked
Washington to move the large and vulnerable downtown Nairobi embassy and
reported credible threats, including one that warned of a truck bomb. She had
even written a personal letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,
Bushnell told me, urging her to do something.
Yet Bushnell, like other veteran diplomats who have witnessed some of the worst
horrors inflicted on Americans overseas, now wonders whether the reaction has
gone too far, leaving diplomats overseas at the mercy of Washington’s shifting
priorities. “I think we need to sit down and figure out, How do we do this?” she
told me. “We are in a new situation that requires a flexibility the State
Department doesn’t have.”
Barbara Bodine, who was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen during the Qaeda bombing of
the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, told me she believes that much of the security American
diplomats are forced to travel with is counterproductive. “There’s this idea
that if we just throw more security guys at the problem, it will go away,” she
said. “These huge convoys they force you to travel in, with a bristling personal
security detail, give you the illusion of security, not real security. They just
draw a lot of attention and make you a target. It’s better to fly under the
radar.”
To some extent, the increasingly militarized trappings reflect a more aggressive
posture: the United States now maintains a diplomatic presence in war zones like
Afghanistan and Iraq that might once have been seen as too dangerous for an
embassy. In the past, Washington instituted “tripwires” of deteriorating safety
that were supposed to compel an evacuation. “When in doubt, pull them out” was
an old State Department refrain. The United States pulled out of Afghanistan in
1989, after it descended into civil war and anarchy, and did not return until
2002. It pulled out of Somalia in 1992, after the collapse of the government
there, and has not returned. But in practice, the tripwires are ignored when
there is a compelling political reason to stay. And nowhere more so than when
the United States military is an occupying force.
Some argue that diplomacy and “soft power” are almost meaningless under such
conditions. Diplomats may be useful in gathering intelligence, but that is not
their primary purpose. For years, critics of the U.S. missions in Afghanistan
have been arguing that the billions of dollars spent there, and the noble
efforts to improve the lives of women, may prove wasted once the military is
withdrawn. “We’re still living as if it were the 19th century, where governments
control their territories and can guarantee the safety of a diplomatic mission,”
Bushnell said. “But in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, that is not true. If
you can’t influence, you leave.”
Chris Stevens was not a rebel or a Lawrence of Arabia, as some people suggested
after his death. He did not break the rules or fight with the security officers
who kept watch over him. He was a skilled and thoughtful diplomat, and like many
others, he chafed against some of the restrictions placed on him. He had an
unusual gift for empathy, according to his friends and colleagues, and that
allowed him to talk to people without seeming to pass judgment. It was a
valuable skill for an American working in a region where American policy often
inspires deep resentment. “Many American diplomats tend to stick to their own
community, at least socially, but Chris really sought out non-American
foreigners in Israel, and wanted to hear their point of view,” said Jonas Jolle,
a Norwegian diplomat who worked in Jerusalem when Stevens was posted there from
2003 to 2006. “Chris always listened enthusiastically, and everyone felt he was
on their side. This made him seem different to Arabs, even though he never
criticized Bush administration policy. Chris was one of the few diplomats I’ve
known who I really looked up to.”
When Stevens was named special envoy to Libya in April 2011, it was something of
a homecoming. He had spent two years there, from 2007 to 2009, a crowning moment
of a two-decade diplomatic career that had taken him to Syria, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt and Israel. So he was thrilled when he found himself climbing the gangway
onto a Greek cargo ship bound for Benghazi in early April 2011. It was a trip
that became almost legendary, both for the Libyans who came to love him and for
the myth that enveloped him after he died. The ship, crewed by crusty Greek and
Romanian sailors, was far from luxurious: Stevens shared a bunk bed with a
junior officer in a closet-size room. They soon found their toilet was broken,
emitting foul bilge-water smells as the ship rolled on the Mediterranean. They
were headed for a war zone, a city where Qaddafi sleeper cells and jihadists
lurked in the streets. Their assignment, to act as liaison to the rebels, was
wildly unorthodox by State Department standards; the new government was in
disarray, and no one knew how the war would end. But Stevens was in heaven. “He
found it romantic,” one of his colleagues on the ship told me. “It was an
adventure; he said we were like 19th-century diplomats, who sailed to their
posts.”
Stevens was not naïve. He had three decades of experience in the Middle East and
knew Libya as well as any American. He spoke the Libyan dialect of Arabic
fluently. He did not relish danger for its own sake. But in some ways, he really
was sailing back to an earlier era, when American diplomats were less tied down.
In Benghazi, Stevens and his team became de facto participants in a revolution.
They moved into the Tibesti Hotel, a 15-story tower overlooking a fetid lagoon,
where the lobby was a constant, promiscuous churn of rumors and frenzied
meetings among gunmen, journalists and spies. Unlike all his previous posts,
there was no embassy to enclose him. His room then was a dilapidated sixth-floor
suite full of gaudy gilded furniture and a four-poster bed; he seemed amused to
know that Abdullah el-Senussi, Qaddafi’s right-hand man, had often stayed there.
Stevens reveled in his freedom. He met people in their homes, ate with them on
the floor, Arab-style; cellphone photos were taken and quickly shot around the
Internet. He went running every morning and often stopped to chat with people on
the street, to the dismay of the security officer who ran alongside him. In
August, after a top rebel commander was killed by Islamists, Stevens drove out
to eastern Libya’s tribal heartland and spent hours sitting on the beach with
five elders of the Harabi tribe. The men ate grilled lamb and talked in Arabic,
sipping tea. Stevens did not push them for answers. He was building connections
that would pay off someday. “Chris said Benghazi was his favorite posting ever,”
said his friend Jennifer Larson, who later served as his deputy in Benghazi when
Stevens became ambassador this spring. “He was very, very happy.”
In the rush to assign blame after Stevens’s death, it was largely overlooked
that Stevens, as the top-ranking diplomat in Libya by that point, was the one
responsible for making final decisions about what kind of security was
appropriate there, how to use it and what qualified as safe and unsafe. He
decided to make the fateful trip from the embassy in Tripoli back to Benghazi in
September. That does not mean he was reckless. He knew the situation there far
better than any of the people who have commented on it since his death. He knew
that Libya’s government was both weak and politically sensitive; he had to weigh
his own safety against the risk of looking like an occupier.
In early September, Stevens’s girlfriend, Henriette von Kaltenborn-Stachau, flew
to Kabul for work. It was a routine trip, but Stevens was worried about her. “In
his last e-mail to me, he said, ‘I hope you will be safe in Afghanistan, that’s
the most important thing,’ ” she told me. “He never took danger lightly.”
Stevens and von Kaltenborn-Stachau had been involved for almost a decade, on and
off, though their careers prevented them being together as much as they wanted.
On the night of Sept. 11, von Kaltenborn-Stachau told me, she had a frightening
dream about Stevens. “In the dream, he was in a dark place, being pulled away
from me,” she said. “He didn’t want to go. I didn’t want him to go, but
something was pulling him away. I woke up, and saw the news from Benghazi.”
Two days after Stevens died, his body and those of the three other Americans
killed in the Benghazi attack arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, outside
Washington. As the families of the dead walked into a vast airplane hangar where
800 people were gathered, it was perfectly silent. “All you could hear was our
footsteps,” says Anne Stevens, Chris’s younger sister, a pediatrician in
Seattle. Four flag-draped coffins were carried in and laid on black tables. A
military band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” At one point during the
ceremony, Stevens’s mother, Mary Commanday, began to cry softly. President Obama
sat down next to her and offered her his handkerchief. During his speech, Obama
declared that the United States “will never retreat from the world.”
On the morning after Stevens’s death, Anne was the first family member Hillary
Clinton was able to reach by phone. She listened as Clinton explained what had
happened, and waited until there was silence on the other end of the line.
“Don’t let this stop the work he was doing,” his sister said.
Robert F. Worth is a staff writer for the magazine.
He last wrote about a
Louisiana pastor turned atheist.
Editor: Jillian Dunham
Can American Diplomacy Ever Come Out of Its
Bunker?,
NYT,
September
14, 2012
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER,
DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
and SULIMAN ALI ZWAY
WASHINGTON
— As four flag-draped coffins bearing the bodies of the Americans killed in
Libya arrived in the United States on Friday, new details emerged of Ambassador
J. Christopher Stevens’s final hours, alone, locked in a smoke-filled room in a
diplomatic mission under siege.
In a solemn ceremony at Joint Base Andrews outside the capital, President Obama
said the victims “laid down their lives for us all” and vowed to honor their
memory by never retreating from the world.
The arrival, broadcast live on news channels, proved an emotional culmination to
an episode that has rocked Washington and American embassies around the world,
even as details of those final fateful moments only now began to come clear.
When the attack on the diplomatic compound occurred, officials said, Ambassador
Stevens was separated from his security detail — and was located only later, at
the hospital in Benghazi, where he had been pronounced dead.
Officials in Washington said they were investigating that blacked-out period,
but as they conduct that inquiry, witnesses have emerged who said that Mr.
Stevens had fled to a room in the diplomatic compound, hoping to find safety
behind a locked iron gate and wooden door. But fires raged around the mission,
and Mr. Stevens, unable to escape the smoke and heat, died of asphyxiation.
Witnesses say he was eventually discovered by people who rushed to see what was
happening at the mission. They broke a window, spotted Mr. Stevens, who might or
might not have been unconscious at the time, and removed him from the room.
According to guards at the compound, the attack began at about 9:30 p.m.,
without advance warning or any peaceful protest. “I started hearing, ‘God is
great! God is great!’ ” one guard said. “I thought to myself, maybe it is a
passing funeral.” (All the guards spoke on the condition of anonymity for their
safety.)
“Attack, attack,” the guard said he heard an American calling over his
walkie-talkie as the chants came closer. Suddenly there came a barrage of
gunfire, explosions and rocket-propelled grenades.
“I saw the ambassador’s personal bodyguard — the one who was killed — running
toward the villa where the ambassador was,” he said. Armed only with a light
weapon, the bodyguard “was running there to protect him.”
Another Libyan guard said he saw Mr. Stevens escorted to the office in a wing
off the main mission building, the room with an iron gate behind a wooden door.
Three hours later, about 12:30 a.m., witnesses said that a crowd — possibly
looters — broke through a tall and narrow window and found Mr. Stevens.
The compound’s landlord, Jamal al-Bishari, said that while watching from nearby
he saw some people climb through the broken window and emerge soon after,
carrying Mr. Stevens.
The wing where Mr. Stevens had sought refuge contained at least three rooms and
two bathrooms, and aside from the extensive smoke damage it appeared on Friday
to be largely undamaged.
Very shortly after Mr. Stevens was seen carried out of the window, he arrived at
Benghazi’s main hospital, brought by a group of Libyan civilians, according to
Ziad Abu Zeid, a doctor there. In a separate interview he said that the
civilians did not seem to know that the American they were helping was the
ambassador, a well-known and popular figure locally but now covered in dark
soot. Dr. Abu Zaid said that Mr. Stevens was dressed and did not suffer any
trauma, aside from the smoke inhalation. Because of the soot covering his face,
the doctor said, he also initially failed to recognize Mr. Stevens. He said he
eventually did so from photographs posted by admiring residents on Facebook.
The doctor said he tried for at least 45 minutes to resuscitate Mr. Stevens. He
said he believed that officers from the Libyan Interior Ministry transported the
body to the airport and into United States custody.
State Department officials have said they do not know Mr. Stevens’s whereabouts
during the battle, who took him to the hospital or who carried his body to the
airport and into United States custody.
“We don’t know what happened with Chris Stevens,” Victoria Nuland, the State
Department spokeswoman, said Thursday. “We also had, we believe, acts of mercy
and generosity later at the hospital in Benghazi. We very, very much appreciate
this.”
American officials were also still trying to get more clarity on the arrests of
four men said to be involved in the attacks. But as they continue sorting
through intelligence, they have disputed suggestions floated in Washington and
abroad that the attack in Benghazi was premeditated.
“We have no indication that that’s the case,” an administration official said.
The current information available to the White House suggests that the protests
in Benghazi were spontaneous and spurred by the Cairo protests but evolved over
time as Islamic extremists took advantage of the situation, called in
reinforcements and weaponry and mounted an attack.
When Mr. Stevens’s coffin arrived at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington on
Friday, along with those of the three other Americans killed in the attack,
President Obama said: “Four Americans, four patriots — they loved this country,
and they chose to serve it and served it well. They had a mission, and they
believed in it. They knew the danger, and they accepted it. They didn’t simply
embrace the American ideal; they lived it, they embodied it.”
Mr. Obama called Mr. Stevens “everything America could want in an ambassador.”
Of the three others killed in the attack, he said Sean Smith, a Foreign Service
officer and an Air Force veteran, had “lived to serve.” Tyrone S. Woods, a
former member of the Navy SEALs providing diplomatic security, was “the
consummate quiet professional.” And Glen A. Doherty, also a former member of the
SEALs providing security, “never shied from adventure.”
“Even in our grief we will be resolute, for we are Americans,” Mr. Obama said.
“And we hold our head high, knowing that because of these patriots, because of
you, this country that we love will always shine as a light unto the world.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who looked stricken and seemed to be
fighting her emotions, echoed those sentiments. “We will wipe away our tears,
stiffen our spines and face the future undaunted,” she said. All four worked for
her, and she spoke slowly and with evident grief. She knew Mr. Stevens
personally, she said, praising his “goofy but contagious” smile, his “California
cool” and, mostly, his dedication and courage.
“What a wonderful gift you gave us,” she told his family. “Over his
distinguished career in the Foreign Service, Chris won friends for the United
States in far-flung places. He made those people’s hopes his own. During the
revolution in Libya, he risked his life to help protect the Libyan people from a
tyrant, and he gave his life helping them build a better country.”
Her voice grew stronger again as she called on leaders in the Middle East to
fulfill their obligations to protect diplomatic posts. “The people of Egypt,
Libya, Yemen and Tunisia did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny
of a mob,” she said. “Reasonable people and responsible leaders in these
countries need to do everything they can to restore security and hold
accountable those behind these violent acts.”
TRIPOLI/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations authorized military
strikes to curb Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, hours after he threatened to
storm the rebel bastion of Benghazi overnight, showing "no mercy, no pity."
"We will come. House by house, room by room," Gaddafi said in a radio address to
the eastern city late on Thursday.
Al Jazeera television showed thousands of people listening to the speech in a
central Benghazi square, then erupting in celebration after the U.N. vote,
waving anti-Gaddafi tricolors and chanting defiance of the man who has ruled for
four decades.
Fireworks burst over the city and gunfire rang out.
The U.N. Security Council, meeting in emergency session, passed a resolution
endorsing a no-fly zone to halt government troops now around 100 km (60 miles)
from Benghazi. It also authorized "all necessary measures" -- code for military
action -- to protect civilians against Gaddafi's forces.
But time was clearly running short for the city that has been the heart of
Libya's month-old revolution.
French diplomatic sources said military action could follow within hours, and
could include France, Britain and possibly the United States and one or more
Arab states; but a U.S. military official said no immediate U.S. action was
expected.
While other countries or NATO may play roles in military action, U.S. officials
expect the United States with its extensive air and sea forces would do the
heavy lifting in a campaign that may include airstrikes on tanks and artillery.
Gaddafi warned Benghazi residents that only those who lay down their arms before
his advancing troops would be spared the vengeance awaiting 'rats and dogs'.
"It's over. The issue has been decided," Gaddafi said. "We are coming
tonight...We will find you in your closets.
"We will have no mercy and no pity."
AIR STRIKES
Residents said the Libyan air force unleashed three air raids on the city of
670,000 on Thursday and there has been fierce fighting along the Mediterranean
coastal highway.
Ten of the Council's 15 member states voted in favor of the resolution, with
Russia, China and Germany among the five that abstained. There were no votes
against the resolution, which was co-sponsored by France, Britain, Lebanon and
the United States.
Apart from military action, it expands sanctions against Gaddafi and associates
imposed last month. Among firms whose assets it orders frozen are the Libyan
National Oil Corp and the central bank.
U.S. President Barack Obama called British and French counterparts David Cameron
and Nicolas Sarkozy and agreed to coordinate closely on their next steps.
Libya said the resolution, which also demands a ceasefire by government forces,
was not worth the paper it was written on.
Rebel National Council head Mustafa Abdel Jalil told Al Jazeera television air
strikes, beyond the no-fly zone, were essential to stop Gaddafi.
"We stand on firm ground. We will not be intimidated by these lies and claims...
We will not settle for anything but liberation from this regime."
It was unclear if Gaddafi's threat to seize the city in the night was anything
more than bluster. But at the very least it increased the sense that a decisive
moment had arrived in an uprising that only months ago had seemed inconceivable.
Some in the Arab world sense a Gaddafi victory could turn the tide in the
region, weakening pro-democracy movements that have unseated autocrats in
Tunisia and Egypt and raised mass protests in Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere.
Gaddafi's Defense Ministry warned of swift retaliation, even beyond Libyan
frontiers, to any military action against the oil-exporting nation.
"Any foreign military act against Libya will expose all air and maritime traffic
in the Mediterranean Sea to danger and civilian and military (facilities) will
become targets of Libya's counter-attack," the ministry said in a statement.
RETALIATION
John Drake, senior risk consultant at UK-based consultancy AKE said he did not
think Gaddafi would strike against oil facilities or oil companies. "He would be
hurting himself."
"We don't think they have the capability to impose a no-fly zone over the whole
country immediately, although they could try to impose one over Benghazi and
maybe also Tripoli," he said.
Proposals for action could include no-fly and no-drive zones, a maritime
exclusion zone, jamming army communications and intelligence help. Air strikes
would almost certainly be launched to knock out Libyan radar and air defenses.
An Italian government source told Reuters Italy was ready to make its military
bases available. The airbase at Sigonella in Sicily, which provides logistical
support for the United States Sixth Fleet, is one of the closest NATO bases to
Libya.
Past no-fly zones have had mixed success.
The U.N. imposed a no-fly zone over Bosnia in the 1990s, although some analysts
say the measure did nothing to stop massacres such as the 1995 slaughter of more
than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica.
Former British foreign minister David Owen saw the vote as reflecting a serious
division in NATO and the EU, with Germany abstaining and declaring that the
venture carried "considerable dangers and risks."
"It's very late for this no-fly zone," Owen said. "Gaddafi's forces are very
close to Benghazi and may now push on."
The resolution followed a sharp shift in tone by the United States, which had
resisted calls to military action. Diplomats said Washington's change of mind
was influenced by an appeal to action by the Arab league and the prospect of a
Gaddafi government flush with oil wealth fomenting unrest in the region.
"Mission creep" poses a serious danger. Western powers, chastened by protracted
wars in two other Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, would be wary of
getting drawn into any ground action in Libya.
Rebels have retreated over the last two weeks as Gaddafi, dubbed the 'mad dog of
the Middle East' by president Ronald Reagan in 1986, has brought air power and
heavy armor to bear.
Residential areas of Ajdabiyah, a strategic town on the coast road to Benghazi,
were the scene of heavy fighting on Thursday and around 30 people were killed,
Al Arabiya reported.
On the approaches to Ajdabiyah, burned-out cars lay by the roadside while Libyan
government forces showed the foreign media artillery, tanks and mobile rocket
launchers -- much heavier weapons than those used by the rebels.
In Libya's third city, Misrata, about 200 km (130 miles) east of Tripoli, rebels
and residents said they were preparing for a new attack by Libyan troops, who
had shelled the coastal city overnight. A government spokesman said Gaddafi's
forces expected to be in control of Misrata by Friday morning.
(Additional reporting by a Reuters reporter in Benghazi,
Michael Georgy in
Tripoli,
Mariam Karouny and Tarek Amara in Tunisia,
Louis Charbonneau
and
Patrick Worsnip at the United Nations,
John Irish in Paris;
Writing by Ralph
Boulton; Editing by Michael Roddy)
Sat Feb 26, 2011
11:35pm EST
Reuters
By Maria Golovnina
and Louis Charbonneau
TRIPOLI/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council
unanimously imposed travel and asset sanctions on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi
and close aides, ratcheting up pressure on him to quit before any more blood is
shed in a popular revolt against his rule.
It also adopted an arms embargo and called for the deadly crackdown against
anti-Gaddafi protesters to be referred to the International Criminal Court for
investigation and possible prosecution of anyone responsible for killing
civilians.
The 15-nation council passed the resolution hours after Gaddafi's police
abandoned parts of the capital Tripoli to the revolt that has swept Libya and
the United States bluntly told him he must go.
In the oil-rich east around the second city of Benghazi, freed a week ago by a
disparate coalition of people power and defecting military units, a former
minister of Gaddafi announced the formation of an "interim government" to
reunite the country.
To the west in Tripoli, the 68-year-old Brother Leader's redoubt was shrinking.
Reuters correspondents found residents in some neighborhoods of the capital
barricading their streets and proclaiming open defiance after security forces
melted away.
Western leaders, their rhetoric emboldened by evacuations that have sharply
reduced the number of their citizens stranded in the oilfields and cities of the
sprawling desert state, spoke out more clearly to say Gaddafi's 41-year rule
must now end.
"When a leader's only means of staying in power is to use mass violence against
his own people, he has lost the legitimacy to rule and needs to do what is right
for his country by leaving now," an aide to U.S. President Barack Obama said of
phone talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel over Libya.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said the Security Council
measures against Gaddafi and 15 other Libyans, including members of his family,
were "biting sanctions" and that all those who committed crimes would be held to
account.
"Those who slaughter civilians will be held personally accountable," Rice told
the council after the vote. Speaking to reporters later, she praised the
council's "unity of purpose."
The death toll from 10 days of violence in Libya is estimated by diplomats at
about 2,000.
Talk of possible military action by foreign governments remained vague, however.
It was unclear how long Gaddafi, with some thousands of loyalists -- including
his tribesmen and military units commanded by his sons -- might hold out against
rebel forces comprised of youthful gunmen and mutinous soldiers.
London-based Algerian lawyer Saad Djebbar, who knows a large number of Gaddafi's
top officials, said that for Gaddafi staying in power had become impossible.
"It's about staying alive. (Gaddafi's) time is over," he said. "But how much
damage he will cause before leaving is the question."
TRIBAL LOYALTIES
One key element in the opposition's efforts to unseat him may be tribal
loyalties, always a factor in the desert nation of six million and one which
Gaddafi, despite official rhetoric to the contrary, tended to reinforce down the
years.
His former justice minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Ajleil, now gone over to the
opposition in Benghazi, was quoted by the online edition of the Quryna newspaper
as saying that an interim government, whose status remained unclear, would
"forgive" his large Gaddadfa tribe for "crimes" committed by the leader.
Such declarations may be intended to erode Gaddafi's efforts to rally supporters
into a do-or-die defense of the old guard.
Some of those closest to Gaddafi have been deserting him and joining the
opposition. On Saturday, Libya's envoy to the United States told Reuters he
backed Abud Ajleil's caretaker team -- though it was unclear how much popular
support that would have.
One of Gaddafi's sons, London-educated Saif al-Islam, again appeared on
television on Saturday to deny that much of Libya was in revolt. But he also
said: "What the Libyan nation is going through has opened the door to all
options, and now the signs of civil war and foreign interference have started."
Gaddafi, once branded a "mad dog" by Washington for his support of militant
groups worldwide, has been embraced by the West in recent years in return for
renouncing some weapons programs and, critically, for opening up Libya's
oilfields.
While money has flowed into Libya, many people, especially in the long-restive
and oil-rich east, have seen little benefit and, inspired by the popular
overthrow of veteran strongmen in Tunisia and Egypt, on either side of their
country, they rose up to demand better conditions and political freedoms.
Particular condemnation has been reserved for aerial bombing by government
forces and for reported indiscriminate attacks by Gaddafi loyalists and
mercenaries on unarmed protesters.
"Gaddafi is the enemy of God!" a crowd chanted on Saturday in Tajoura, a poor
neighborhood of Tripoli, at the funeral of a man they said was shot down by
Gaddafi loyalists the day before.
Now, residents said, those security forces had disappeared.
Locals had erected barricades of rocks and palm trees across rubbish-strewn
streets, and graffiti covered many walls. Bullet holes in the walls of the
houses bore testimony to the violence.
The residents, still unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals, said
troops fired on demonstrators who tried to march from Tajoura to central Green
Square overnight, killing at least five people. The number could not be
independently confirmed.
Libyan state television again showed a crowd chanting their loyalty to Gaddafi
in Tripoli's Green Square on Saturday. But journalists there estimated their
number at scarcely 200.
REVOLT CLOSES IN
From Misrata, a major city 200 km (120 miles) east of Tripoli, residents said by
telephone that a thrust by forces loyal to Gaddafi, operating from the local
airport, had been rebuffed with bloodshed by the opposition.
"There were violent clashes last night and in the early hours of the morning
near the airport," one resident, Mohammed, told Reuters. "An extreme state of
alert prevails in the city."
He said several mercenaries from Chad had been detained by rebels in Misrata.
The report could not be verified but was similar to accounts elsewhere of
Gaddafi deploying fighters brought in from African states where he has long had
allies.
Protesters in Zawiyah, an oil refining town on the main coastal highway 50 km
(30 miles) west of Tripoli, have fought off government forces for several
nights.
At Tripoli's international airport, thousands of desperate foreign workers
besieged the main gate trying to leave the country as police used batons and
whips to keep them out.
Britain and France followed the United States in closing their embassies.
Britain sent in air force troop carriers to take some 150 oil workers out of
camps in the desert.
Libya supplies 2 percent of the world's oil, the bulk of it from wells and
supply terminals in the east. The prospect of it being shut off -- as well as
speculation that the unrest in the Arab world could spread to the major
exporters of the Gulf -- has pushed oil prices up to highs not seen in over two
years.
(Additional reporting by Yvonne Bell
and Chris Helgren in
Tripoli,
Marie-Louise Gumuchian and Souhail Karam in Rabat,
WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration grapples with a
cascade of uprisings in the Middle East, it has come to a stark recognition: the
region’s monarchs are likely to survive; its presidents are more likely to fall.
In the rapidly changing map that stretches from Morocco to Iran, two presidents
have already tumbled: Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of
Tunisia. Administration officials said they believe that Yemen’s authoritarian
president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is in an increasingly tenuous position.
Yet in Bahrain, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has so far managed to weather a
surge of unrest, winning American support, even though his security forces were
brutal in their crackdown of protesters. Officials believe that King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia is also unlikely to be dethroned, while the emirs of the Persian
Gulf have so far escaped unrest. Even in Jordan, where serious protests erupted,
King Abdullah II has maneuvered deftly to stay in power, though he still has to
contend with a restive Palestinian population.
This pattern of kings holding on to power is influencing the administration’s
response to the crisis: the United States has sent out senior diplomats in
recent days to offer the monarchs reassurance and advice — even those who lead
the most stifling governments. But it is keeping its distance from autocratic
presidents as they fight to hold power.
By all accounts, that is more a calculation of American interests than anything
else.
“What the monarchies have going for them are royal families that allow them to
stand above the fray, to a certain extent,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, the
director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings
Institution. “It allows them to sack the government without sacking themselves.”
Many of the monarchs have run governments every bit as repressive as the
presidents’. And the American calculation of who is likely to hang on to power
has as much to do with the religious, demographic and economic makeups of the
countries as with the nature of the governments.
Arab presidents pretend to be democratically chosen, even though most of their
elections are rigged. Their veneer of legitimacy vanishes when pent-up
grievances in their societies explode. Most of the presidents oversee more
populous countries, without the oil wealth of the gulf monarchies, which would
enable them to placate their populations with tax cuts and pay raises, like the
kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan have done recently.
The Americans acknowledge that they have no choice but to support countries like
Saudi Arabia, and that all of the situations could change rapidly.
A case in point is Libya, where Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — neither a king nor a
president — has been brought to the verge of collapse with dizzying speed.
On Thursday, the administration failed again to evacuate diplomats and other
American citizens from Libya. A ferry chartered by the United States government
remained tied up at a pier in the capital, Tripoli, unable to sail to Malta
because of heavy seas in the Mediterranean.
The 285 passengers are safe, according to the State Department spokesman, Philip
J. Crowley, but they cannot leave the ship, which he said is guarded by Libyan
security forces. A hotel across the street from the pier has been the site of
gun battles between rebels and loyalists of Colonel Qaddafi, witnesses said.
The stalled evacuation has led the Obama administration to temper its
condemnations of Colonel Qaddafi’s government, because officials worry that the
Libyan government could take Americans hostage. But Mr. Crowley said Thursday
that the United States would support a European proposal to expel Libya from the
United Nations Human Rights Council, when it meets in Geneva on Monday.
Unlike in the case of Egypt, where President Obama spoke by phone with Mr.
Mubarak several times during the crisis there, neither he nor any other American
official has spoken with Colonel Qaddafi since the violence erupted. Secretary
of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was unable to reach the foreign minister, Moussa
Koussa, Mr. Crowley said, citing a technical glitch.
The under secretary of state for political affairs, William J. Burns, did speak
twice with Mr. Koussa, he said, and conveyed the administration’s “concern” that
Libya continue to cooperate with the evacuation.
The spotty American communication with Libya contrasts with the regular phone
calls Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have held with Arab monarchs. King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia pressed Mr. Obama in at least two conversations to back Mr.
Mubarak. Since his ouster, an administration official said, Saudi officials have
expressed some misgivings about their support for the former Egyptian leader.
So far, the kings appear to be hanging on.
The administration is sanguine that the Saudi royal family will survive any
upheaval, though some acknowledge that they misread the prospects for change in
Egypt. Earlier this week, King Abdullah, returning home from three months of
medical treatment abroad, announced a $10 billion increase in welfare spending
to help young people marry, buy homes and open businesses.
The administration has urged Saudi Arabia not to impede King Hamad’s attempt to
undertake reforms in Bahrain, an island connected to Saudi Arabia by a causeway
and dependent on the Saudis for political and economic support. Saudi Arabia is
rattled by the prospect of Bahrain’s Shiite Muslim majority’s gaining more
political power, at the expense of its Sunni rulers, in part because Saudi
Arabia has a substantial Shiite population in its east.
American officials have sought to keep the focus on what they insist have been
concessions made by Bahrain, where the Navy’s Fifth Fleet is stationed, as a
sign that the protests can prod the king, and the crown prince who will head the
dialogue with the protesters, in the right direction.
Similarly, in Jordan, King Abdullah, who faces a tricky situation because of his
majority Palestinian population, has signaled a willingness to cede some power
to an elected government or parliament. American officials and independent
experts say that they think that could allow him to hang on to power. The
administration’s clear hope is that all these kingdoms will eventually be
constitutional monarchies.
“That approach to Jordan or Bahrain is the right approach; these are countries
that have moved in the right direction, but not enough,” said Elliott Abrams, a
Middle East adviser in the Bush administration who has been a frequent critic of
the Obama administration. “Constitutional monarchy is a form of democracy.”
There has been far less unrest in other Persian Gulf states, like the United
Arab Emirates, Qatar or Kuwait — in part, experts say, because they are
essentially regal welfare states, where citizens pay no taxes and are looked
after by the government. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, when one
citizen marries another citizen, the government helps to pay for the wedding and
even to buy a home.
Even so, an administration official noted, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi,
Mohammed bin Zayed, recently toured less prosperous parts of the United Arab
Emirates to hold town-hall-style meetings — at least a nod to democratic rule.
“The truly wealthy societies like Qatar, the U.A.E. and Kuwait have greater
advantages,” said Ted Kattouf, a former United States ambassador to Syria. In
many ways, he added, “the monarchies have more legitimacy than the republics.”
In Yemen, a lack of legitimacy is plaguing President Saleh and the prospect of
instability there poses national security problems for the United States, which
has had the government’s support for counterterrorism operations. Protesters are
demanding his resignation even after he pledged not to seek re-election. The
administration is pushing Mr. Saleh — a crafty authoritarian who has manipulated
factions in his country to cling to power for 30 years — to revive a stalled
effort at constitutional reform, though an official expressed pessimism about
the likelihood of progress.
“The republics — and hence, the presidents — are the most vulnerable because
they’re supposed to be democracies but ultimately are not,” said an Arab
diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They pretend people have a
voice, but this voice doesn’t exist. With the monarchy, no one’s pretending
there’s a democracy.”
February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
It’s a new day in the Arab world — and, let’s hope, in
American relations to the Arab world.
The truth is that the United States has been behind the curve not only in
Tunisia and Egypt for the last few weeks, but in the entire Middle East for
decades. We supported corrupt autocrats as long as they kept oil flowing and
weren’t too aggressive toward Israel. Even in the last month, we sometimes
seemed as out of touch with the region’s youth as a Ben Ali or a Mubarak.
Recognizing that crafting foreign policy is 1,000 times harder than it looks,
let me suggest four lessons to draw from our mistakes:
1.) Stop treating Islamic fundamentalism as a bogyman and allowing it to drive
American foreign policy. American paranoia about Islamism has done as much
damage as Muslim fundamentalism itself.
In Somalia, it led the U.S. to wink at a 2006 Ethiopian invasion that was
catastrophic for Somalis and resulted in more Islamic extremism there. And in
Egypt, our foreboding about Islamism paralyzed us and put us on the wrong side
of history.
We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United
States and Israel but not for the Arab world. For far too long, we’ve treated
the Arab world as just an oil field.
Too many Americans bought into a lazy stereotype that Arab countries were
inhospitable for democracy, or that the beneficiaries of popular rule would be
extremists like Osama bin Laden. Tunisians and Egyptians have shattered that
stereotype, and the biggest loser will be Al Qaeda. We don’t know what lies
ahead for Egypt — and there is a considerable risk that those in power will
attempt to preserve Mubarakism without Mr. Mubarak — but already Egyptians have
demonstrated the power of nonviolence in a way that undermines the entire
extremist narrative. It will be fascinating to see whether more Palestinians
embrace mass nonviolent protests in the West Bank as a strategy to confront
illegal Israeli settlements and land grabs.
2.) We need better intelligence, the kind that is derived not from intercepting
a president’s phone calls to his mistress but from hanging out with the
powerless. After the 1979 Iranian revolution, there was a painful post-mortem
about why the intelligence community missed so many signals, and I think we need
the same today.
In fairness, we in the journalistic community suffered the same shortcoming: we
didn’t adequately convey the anger toward Hosni Mubarak. Egypt is a reminder not
to be suckered into the narrative that a place is stable because it is static.
3.) New technologies have lubricated the mechanisms of revolt. Facebook and
Twitter make it easier for dissidents to network. Mobile phones mean that
government brutality is more likely to end up on YouTube, raising the costs of
repression. The International Criminal Court encourages dictators to think twice
before ordering troops to open fire.
Maybe the most critical technology — and this is tough for a scribbler like
myself to admit — is television. It was Arab satellite television broadcasts
like those of Al Jazeera that broke the government monopoly on information in
Egypt. Too often, Americans scorn Al Jazeera (and its English service is on few
cable systems), but it played a greater role in promoting democracy in the Arab
world than anything the United States did.
We should invest more in these information technologies. The best way to nurture
changes in Iran, North Korea and Cuba will involve broadcasts, mobile phones and
proxy servers to leap over Internet barriers. Congress has allocated small sums
to promote global Internet freedom, and this initiative could be a much more
powerful tool in our foreign policy arsenal.
4.) Let’s live our values. We pursued a Middle East realpolitik that failed us.
Condi Rice had it right when she said in Egypt in 2005: “For 60 years, my
country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in
this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”
I don’t know which country is the next Egypt. Some say it’s Algeria, Morocco,
Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia. Others suggest Cuba or China are vulnerable. But
we know that in many places there is deep-seated discontent and a profound
yearning for greater political participation. And the lesson of history from
1848 to 1989 is that uprisings go viral and ricochet from nation to nation. Next
time, let’s not sit on the fence.
After a long wishy-washy stage, President Obama got it pitch-perfect on Friday
when he spoke after the fall of Mr. Mubarak. He forthrightly backed people
power, while making clear that the future is for Egyptians to decide. Let’s hope
that reflects a new start not only for Egypt but also for American policy toward
the Arab world. Inshallah.
February 12, 2011
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON — The cheers of Tahrir Square were heard around the
world. But if you listened carefully, you might have heard cheering from another
quarter 7,000 miles from Cairo as well, in Dallas.
The revolution in Egypt has reopened a long-simmering debate about the “freedom
agenda” that animated George W. Bush’s presidency. Was he right after all, as
his supporters have argued? Are they claiming credit he does not deserve? And
has President Obama picked up the mantle of democracy and made it his own?
The debate in Washington, and Dallas, tends to overlook the reality that
revolutions in far-off countries are for the most part built from the ground up,
not triggered by policy made in the halls of the West Wing. But the lessons of
the Egyptian uprising will ripple through American politics, policymaking and
history-shaping for some time to come.
President Bush, after all, made “ending tyranny in our world” the centerpiece of
his second inaugural address, and, although he pursued it selectively, he
considers it one of his signature legacies. The very notion of democracy
promotion became so associated with him, and with the war in Iraq, that
Democrats believed that it was now discredited. Never mind that Republican and
Democratic presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan, had championed
liberty overseas; by the time Mr. Bush left office it had become a polarizing
concept.
Mr. Obama was seen by some supporters as the realist counterbalance who would
put aside the zealous rhetoric in favor of a more nuanced approach. He preached
the virtues of democracy in speeches, but did not portray it as the mission of
his presidency. When the Green Movement protesters of Iran took to the streets
of Tehran, Mr. Obama’s relatively muted response generated strong criticism.
By contrast, foreign policy specialists said, Mr. Obama’s embrace of the
Egyptian protesters in the last couple of weeks, if cautious at times and
confused by conflicting signals from others in his administration, seemed to
suggest a turning point.
“He got on the right side of this thing when a lot of the foreign policy
establishment was cautioning otherwise,” said Robert Kagan, a Brookings
Institution scholar who long before the revolution helped assemble a nonpartisan
group of policy experts to press for democratic change in Egypt. “And he got it
right. This may strengthen his confidence the next time this kind of thing
happens.”
For Mr. Obama, the challenge may be to define the spread of liberty and
democracy as a nonpartisan American goal, removing it from the political debate
that has surrounded it in recent years. Democrats who have long worked on the
issue have expressed hope that he can shed the goal’s association with Mr. Bush,
while framing it in a way that accounts for the mistakes of the last
administration.
“The stirring events in Egypt and Tunisia should reinforce what has always been
a bipartisan ambition because they are vivid reminders of universal democratic
aspirations and America’s role in supporting those aspirations,” said Kenneth
Wollock, president of the National Democratic Institute, a government-financed
group affiliated with the Democratic Party that promotes civil society abroad.
Finding the right balance has never been easy. Mr. Bush focused on democracy as
a goal after the invasion of Iraq found none of the weapons of mass destruction
reported by American intelligence agencies. He elevated it to a central theme in
his second inaugural address, according to advisers, to infuse the war on
terrorism with a positive mission beyond simply hunting down terrorists. His
argument was that more freedom would undercut radicalism.
But there was always an internal tension in his administration. Former Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld makes clear in his new memoir that he thought the
emphasis on democracy was misplaced, given the difficulties of transplanting
Western-style institutions in regions accustomed to autocracy. Then, in 2006,
the election of a Palestinian government led by Hamas quieted some of the
administration’s ardor for democracy.
Matt Latimer, a former Bush speechwriter, recalled in a recent column in The
Daily Beast that he prepared a ringing speech on democracy for the president to
deliver while in Egypt in his final year in office, only to have it watered down
at the last minute. “Demands for reform in Egypt became a mere ‘hope’ that Egypt
might ‘one day’ lead the way for political reform,” Mr. Latimer wrote.
Still, in recent days, former Bush advisers like Elliott Abrams and Peter Wehner
have written columns recalling the former president’s calls for change, and
crediting them with setting the stage for what would come later in the Middle
East, a region that skeptics often said would never move toward democracy.
Whatever the final language of the 2008 appearance in Sharm el- Sheikh, they
said Mr. Bush spoke to democratic ideals.
“He was right in saying, for the first time, that people in the Middle East
wanted freedom as much as people in any other region, and in beginning through
diplomacy and programs to help,” said Lorne W. Craner, a Bush assistant
secretary of state for democracy and currently president of the International
Republican Institute.
Mr. Craner said, “His message became conflated with the method of displacing
Saddam Hussein in Iraq,” and to too many, “the freedom agenda meant invading a
country and staying there while I.E.D.’s were going off.” But, he added, “Bush
placed us on the right side of history, and that served the interests of
democrats in the region, and the United States as well.”
Not everyone sees it that way, especially in the Obama White House, where the
assertion rankles deeply. “Was Bush right?” scoffed one Obama adviser who spoke
on the condition of anonymity. “Give me a break. How many democratic
transformations like this took place when he was in office?”
Several, actually, in Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan, where popular
risings also toppled entrenched ruling systems. But later events in those
countries also showed that such first steps did not necessarily point in a
straight line to lasting Jeffersonian democracy. Similarly, the change in Egypt
has only begun, as Mr. Obama pointed out on Friday. Its final destination is
still very much up in the air.
So, too, is Mr. Obama’s destination. Aides said he has been focused on the issue
of democracy abroad since the beginning of his tenure. Last fall, they compiled
a 17-page, single-spaced compendium of speech excerpts to show it. But he seems
to have found more of a voice in the last six months.
On Aug. 12, officials said, he issued a formal but unpublicized presidential
study directive seeking a review of political reform in the Middle East and
North Africa. The following month, he gave a speech at the United Nations in
which he declared that “part of the price of our own freedom is standing up for
the freedom of others.” And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton likewise
gave speeches pressing governments in the Middle East and elsewhere to reform.
Aides to Mr. Obama said he can make progress where Mr. Bush faltered because the
current president has made reaching out to the Muslim world a priority and has
de-emphasized the idea that the fight against terrorism means a war on Islam.
While Mr. Bush also sent such messages, Obama aides said the baggage of Iraq and
Guantánamo Bay undercut the impact.
“We do not make this about us,” said one senior administration official, who was
not authorized to be identified. “We very carefully say this is about the
people. We’re on the sidelines, we never talk about our values, we talk about
universal values. Does that create space for these things to happen?” Hopefully
so, the official said.
The question then becomes whether democracy promotion will again become a
bipartisan aspiration.
Damon Wilson, a former Bush aide and now executive vice president of the
Atlantic Council, said he was surprised that Mr. Obama did not take ownership of
democracy as an issue from the start. But with Egypt, he now has a chance to do
that, Mr. Wilson said, expressing hope that Republicans will not turn away from
the notion simply because Mr. Obama is embracing it.
“Of all the issues to fight on,” he said, “democracy
is not one where we should
be declaring partisan differences.”
February 5, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
and STEVEN ERLANGER
MUNICH — The Obama administration on Saturday formally threw
its weight behind a gradual transition in Egypt, backing attempts by the
country’s vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, to broker a compromise with
opposition groups and prepare for new elections in September.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking to a conference here, said
it was important to support Mr. Suleiman as he seeks to defuse street protests
and promises to reach out to opposition groups, including the Muslim
Brotherhood. Administration officials said earlier that Mr. Suleiman and other
military-backed leaders in Egypt are also considering ways to provide President
Hosni Mubarak with a graceful exit from power.
“That takes some time,” Mrs. Clinton said. “There are certain things that have
to be done in order to prepare.”
Her message, echoed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister
David Cameron of Britain, was a notable shift in tone from the past week, when
President Obama, faced with violent clashes in Cairo, demanded that Mr. Mubarak
make swift, dramatic changes.
Now, the United States and other Western powers appear to have concluded that
the best path for Egypt — and certainly the safest one, to avoid further chaos —
is a gradual transition, managed by Mr. Suleiman, a pillar of Egypt’s existing
establishment, and backed by the military.
Whether such a process is acceptable to the crowds on the streets of Cairo is
far from clear: there is little evidence that Mr. Suleiman, a former head of
Egyptian intelligence and trusted confidant of Mr. Mubarak, would be seen as an
acceptable choice, even temporarily. Opposition groups have refused to speak to
him, saying that Mr. Mubarak must leave first.
But Mrs. Clinton suggested that the United States was not insisting on the
immediate departure of Mr. Mubarak, and that such an abrupt shift of power may
not be necessary or prudent. She said Mr. Mubarak, having taken himself and his
son, Gamal, out of the September elections, was already effectively sidelined.
She emphasized the need for Egypt to begin building peaceful political parties
and to reform its constitution to make a vote credible.
“That is what the government has said it is trying to do,” she said. “That is
what we are supporting, and hope to see it move as orderly but as expeditiously,
as possible, under the circumstances.”
Mrs. Clinton expressed fears about deteriorating security inside Egypt, noting
the explosion at a gas pipeline in the Sinai Peninsula, and uncorroborated media
reports of an earlier assassination attempt on Mr. Suleiman.
The report was mentioned at the conference by Wolfgang Ischinger, a retired
German diplomat who is the conference chairman, just as Mrs. Clinton began
taking questions at the gathering of heads of state, foreign ministers, and
legislators from the United States, Europe, and other countries.
American officials said they have no evidence that the report is accurate. But
Mrs. Clinton picked up on it and said it “certainly brings into sharp relief the
challenges we are facing as we navigate through this period.”
A senior Republican senator at the meeting, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina,
voiced support for the administration’s backing for a gradual transition in
Egypt, saying that a Suleiman-led transitional government, backed by the
military, was probably the only way for Egypt to negotiate its way to elections
in the fall.
“What would be the alternative?” he asked.
Mrs. Clinton emphasized that American support for Mr. Suleiman’s plan should not
be construed as an effort to dictate events. “Those of us who are trying to make
helpful offers of assistance and suggestions for how to proceed are still at the
end on the outside looking in,” she said.
But in a hectic morning of diplomacy, Mrs. Clinton was clearly eager to build
support for this position. She met with Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Merkel, and Turkey’s
foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, who said the views of Turkey and the United
States were “100 percent identical.” Mr. Obama spoke by phone Friday with Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mrs. Clinton’s emphasis on a deliberate process was repeated by Mrs. Merkel and
Mr. Cameron. Mrs. Merkel harkened to her past as a democracy activist in East
Germany, recalling the impatience of protestors, after the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989, to immediately join democratic West Germany. But the process took
a year, and it was time well spent, she said.
“There will be a change in Egypt,” she said, “but clearly, the change has to
shaped in a way that it is a peaceful, a sensible way forward.”
Mr. Cameron said introducing democracy in Egypt “overnight” would fuel further
instability, saying the West needed to encourage the development of civil
society and political parties before holding a vote.
“Yes, the transition absolutely has to start now,” Mr. Cameron said. “But if we
think it is all about the act of holding an election, we are wrong. It is about
a set of actions.”
Mrs. Clinton highlighted the dangers of holding elections without adequate
preparation. To take part in Egypt’s new order, she said, political parties
should renounce violence as a tool of coercion, pledge to respect the rights of
minorities, and show tolerance. The White House has signaled that it is open to
a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that Israeli officials
and others warn could put Egypt on a path to extremism.
“The transition to democracy will only happen if it is deliberate, inclusive,
and transparent,” she said. “The challenge is to help our partners take
systematic steps to usher in a better future, where people’s voices are heard,
their rights respected, and their aspirations met.”
“Revolutions have overthrown dictators in the name of democracy, only to see the
process hijacked by new autocrats who use violence, deception, and rigged
elections to stay in power,” Mrs. Clinton said.
She also underlined the need to support Egypt’s state institutions, including
the army and financial institutions, which she said were functioning and
respected. Economic pressures are building in Egypt, she said, which has been
paralyzed by days of street demonstrations.
While this meeting was dominated by the political change sweeping through the
Middle East, the United States and Russia also formally put into force New
Start, a strategic arms control treaty passed by the Senate in December after a
long political battle by President Obama.
Mrs. Clinton and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, exchanged legal
documents ratifying the treaty, which puts new limits on strategic nuclear
warheads, heavy bombers, and launch vehicles. The United States and Russia have
45 days to trade details on the number, location, and technical specifications
of their arsenals. Inspection can begin in 60 days.
Relations between the United States and Russia began to thaw at this meeting in
2009, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called for the countries to
“reset” their relationship after the chilly Bush years.
In addition to the ratification of New Start, the day saw a meeting of the
Quartet, a group that deals with the Middle East and comprises the United
States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. This meeting was
intended to reaffirm support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, even
amid the turmoil in Egypt and the Arab world.
The United States was reluctant to hold the meeting, a senior Western diplomat
said, but the Europeans in particular wanted to make the point that change in
the Middle East was a new opportunity for peace, and that stagnation between
Israel and Palestine was a bad signal.
“Our analysis is because of the events in Egypt we must react and send a signal
the peace process is alive,” the European diplomat said. Another quartet meeting
will follow in the next month, he said.
Mrs. Clinton deflected a question about how the turmoil would affect Israel or
the peace process. In its eagerness to avoid the issue, the administration lined
up with Turkey. Mr. Davutoglu said, “It is better not to talk about
Israel-Palestine now. It is better to separate these issues.”
February 2, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER,
MARK LANDLER and MARK MAZZETTI
This article is by Helene Cooper, Mark Landler and Mark Mazzetti.
WASHINGTON — After days of delicate public and private diplomacy, the United
States openly broke with its most stalwart ally in the Arab world on Wednesday,
as the Obama administration strongly condemned violence by allies of President
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt against protesters and called on him to speed up his exit
from power.
Egypt’s government hit back swiftly. The Foreign Ministry released a defiant
statement saying the calls from “foreign parties” had been “rejected and aimed
to incite the internal situation in Egypt.” And Egyptian officials reached out
to reporters to make clear how angry they were at their onetime friend.
Separately, in an interview, a senior Egyptian government official took aim at
President Obama’s call on Tuesday night for a political transition to begin
“now” — a call that infuriated Cairo.
But the White House was not backing down. “I want to be clear,” said Robert
Gibbs, the press secretary. “ ‘Now’ started yesterday.”
The Obama administration seemed determined Wednesday to put as much daylight as
possible between Mr. Obama and Mr. Mubarak, once considered an unshakable
American supporter in a tumultuous region, with Mr. Gibbs once again raising the
specter of a cutoff of American aid to the Mubarak government if the Egyptian
president failed to bend.
“There are things that the government needs to do,” he said. “There are reforms
that need to be undertaken. And there are opposition entities that have to be
included in the conversations as we move toward free and fair elections.” Those
elections are currently scheduled for September, but the State Department
spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said, “The sooner that can happen, the better.”
The open rupture between the United States and Egypt illustrates how swift and
dramatic changes in Cairo are altering the calculus of the entire region and the
administration’s foreign policy agenda. Besides Egypt, there were upheavals this
week among other close American allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, and in the
long struggle to reach a Middle East peace. Israeli officials expressed concern
that Mr. Mubarak’s abrupt exit could jeopardize the 1979 peace treaty between
Egypt and Israel.
Even as the White House was trying to react to the latest flare-up of violence
in Egypt on Wednesday — Mr. Gibbs pointedly criticized attacks against the media
in Egypt and against “peaceful demonstrators” — officials at the Pentagon, the
State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House were
running various scenarios across the region in an effort to keep up with events.
What would the covert American war in Yemen look like if the supportive Yemeni
president were to be forced out? Will Mr. Mubarak’s successor duplicate his
support of the Middle East peace process? Will the shifts in the region benefit
Islamic extremists, who will try to capitalize on unrest, or will it show the
Arab street the power of a secular uprising?
“A full range of events are being discussed in many buildings throughout
Washington,” Mr. Gibbs said.
As evidence of how far the rift has gone, a senior Egyptian official reached out
to a reporter to criticize Mr. Obama’s remarks.
“There is a contradiction between calling on the transition to begin now, and
the calls which President Mubarak himself has made for an orderly transition,”
said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Mubarak’s primary
responsibility is to ensure an orderly and peaceful transfer of power. We can’t
do that if we have a vacuum of power.” He said that the Egyptian government has
“a serious issue with how the White House is spinning this.”
For the Obama administration and the Egyptian government, the flip from allies
to open confrontation has been fast. When former President George Bush was
briefed ahead of his recent call to Mr. Mubarak — a call Mr. Bush volunteered to
make because he was an old friend — Mr. Bush was given no instructions to push
the leader toward the exit, according to people familiar with the conversations.
“No one wanted the vacuum of power that would happen if Mubarak left too soon,”
said a former senior official who was consulted by the White House.
Now, though, administration officials are calling for visible steps from the
Mubarak government. At a minimum, the Obama administration wants to make sure
that political opponents of Mr. Mubarak are included in negotiations — which the
United States wants to see begin at once — over how to restructure Egypt’s
political system in a way that will take into account the grievances of the
protesters.
American officials do not want a repeat of past promises from the Mubarak
government for free elections that were followed by a shutting of the process to
its opposition. After watching Mr. Mubarak’s statement — in which he fell far
short of sweeping reform — Mr. Obama decided to toughen his own language
further, demanding that change begin immediately. “The language was crafted
after he spoke,” a senior administration official said.
“They want something better than when Mubarak said, ‘I want my Parliament to
amend the articles of the Constitution relating to the presidential elections,’”
said Brian Katulis, a foreign policy expert at the Center for American Progress.
“If you’re the opposition, you’re thinking: ‘This is the Parliament which was
elected in sham elections? No way.’ ”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Egypt’s vice president, Omar
Suleiman, in the afternoon to reinforce Mr. Obama’s call for Mr. Mubarak to
begin a transition immediately. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike
Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both called their counterparts on
Wednesday as well. Officials said the administration is worried about a call for
even larger protests on Friday, and said Wednesday’s clashes had narrowed Mr.
Mubarak’s options.
Mr. Obama’s private emissary to Mr. Mubarak, Frank G. Wisner, abruptly left
Cairo on Wednesday evening after only two meetings, one with the president and
one with Mr. Suleiman.
“We felt that he had done what he could do,” the official said. “They had a
conversation, and we felt that it had gone as far as it could.”
For the United States, the unfolding crisis is about much more than just a rift
with an ally.
With the popular revolts in Egypt and Yemen — and a government already deposed
in Tunisia — American counterterrorism officials are concerned that radical
factions in those countries could find a new foothold amid the chaos. The United
States is heavily reliant on foreign partners, and officials and outside experts
said that losing Mr. Mubarak or President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen would deal
a short-term blow to its counterterrorism campaign.
Or perhaps not.
“There’s part of this that’s dangerous to Al Qaeda,” said Juan Zarate of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was a top counterterrorism
official during George W. Bush’s administration. “If the street protests lead to
a peaceful, pluralistic transition, that does huge damage to the Al Qaeda
narrative,” he said. That narrative holds that authoritarian pro-American
governments should be deposed by violent jihad.
Still, some cautioned that it could take months or years for the long-term
impact of the recent uprisings to be revealed. Citing Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution
of 2005, Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University pointed out that the uprising
had the immediate impact of bringing down the country’s Syria-backed government
and causing the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, but six years later
the militant group Hezbollah is now Lebanon’s de-facto government.
Experts said Mr. Saleh might be able to navigate the shoals of popular unrest
more expertly than President Mubarak.
Described by American officials as a wily survivor, Mr. Saleh has spent years
dealing with strife inside Yemen, from Shiite separatists to militants linked to
Al Qaeda. Some in Washington questioned whether the pledge he made Wednesday to
step cede power in 2013 was sincere, or a clever tactic to appease his enemies
in Yemen.
“Saleh is used to dancing in the snake pit,” Mr. Zarate said.
January 29, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON
TWO different White Houses, two different speeches.
In June 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stood before an audience of
600 at the American University in Cairo, assailed the Egyptian government for
intimidating and locking up protesters and called for President Hosni Mubarak to
hold free elections. “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued
stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East,
and we achieved neither,” said Ms. Rice, infuriating the Mubarak government and
heartening opposition leaders like Ayman Nour, an oft-jailed Parliament member,
with whom she even held a meeting as part of her trip.
In June 2009, President Obama stood before an audience of 3,000 at Cairo
University, and took a far gentler tone. “I do have an unyielding belief that
all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a
say in how you are governed, confidence in the rule of law and the equal
administration of justice, government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from
the people, the freedom to live as you choose,” Mr. Obama said. But he then
added, “There is no straight line to realize that promise.” Mr. Mubarak’s
officials were euphoric after his speech; one called it “seminal.”
In the end, neither speech may have made much of a difference.
The chaos unfolding in Egypt is laying bare a stark fact, Middle East experts
say: In the Arab world, American words may not matter, because American deeds,
whatever the words, have been pretty consistent. Ever since that March morning
31 years ago, when Anwar el-Sadat reached out to clasp hands with Menachem Begin
on the North Lawn of the White House after signing the Camp David peace treaty
with Israel, the United States government has viewed the Egyptian government, no
matter how flawed or undemocratic, as America’s closest ally in the Arab world.
Even when Ms. Rice and the Bush administration were infuriating Mr. Sadat’s
successor, Mr. Mubarak, and calling for democracy in the Middle East, the
reality was that the two governments were still, at their core, allies. Mr.
Mubarak never forgave the Bush administration for the public flogging, officials
in that administration say, but he met with Ms. Rice and President George W.
Bush whenever they came through the region, and remained involved in Mr. Bush’s
late efforts to negotiate Middle East peace.
And for all their calls for democracy, when it actually began happening in the
Middle East, the Bush administration had to tack in the other direction.
Palestinian elections in 2006, which the United States pushed for, led to
victory for the militant Islamist organization Hamas, which the United States
promptly blacklisted. Enter Mr. Obama, who came to office in 2009 vowing that he
would make a major address from a Muslim capital early on, a promise he followed
up with the Cairo speech. Determined not to repeat what it viewed as the
mistakes of the Bush administration, the Obama administration limited criticism
of Egypt to private conversations, and pointedly declined to publicly
congratulate the government when it freed the jailed Mr. Nour, so as not to
embarrass it.
Now, with the ascendance of democracy advocates on the streets of Cairo,
Alexandria and beyond, the United States has been tacking furiously again — this
time to ally itself closer to the side of the protesters — while at the same
time not getting too far away from its friend, Mr. Mubarak. The White House
press secretary, Robert Gibbs, encapsulated the administration’s dilemma Friday
in words that made it clear that administration officials still hadn’t decided
what to do. “We will be reviewing our systems posture based on events that take
place in the coming days,” he told reporters, sounding like he was talking about
a NASA launch, not chaos in Cairo.
A few hours later, his boss came out with the administration’s strongest posture
to date on behalf of the protesters, trying to get ahead of any potential
violent crackdown by the Mubarak government by calling on Egyptian authorities
to “refrain from calling for any violence against peaceful protesters.” But he
stopped short of calling for free and fair elections, limiting his remarks to a
request for Mr. Mubarak to address the grievances of the Egyptian people.
America, said Robert Malley, a Middle East expert at the International Crisis
Group, is in an impossible hole. “Every time we open our mouth, it runs a risk
of hurting the objective we’re pursuing,” he said. “The more we appear to be
backing the regimes we’ve been backing for decades, the more we place ourselves
on the wrong side of history and the more we alienate the constituencies who
could be coming to power.”
But, Mr. Malley added, “the more we side with the protesters, the more we’re
hurting the existing relationships and appearing to be fickle.” For instance,
the Obama administration’s latest distancing of itself from Mr. Mubarak may not
go over well. “It’s not clear to me that the protesters will take seriously
expressions of solidarity from a country that’s been backing autocratic
regimes,” Mr. Malley said.
Martin S. Indyk, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and a
former United States ambassador to Israel, agreed. “We’re in completely
uncharted territory,” he said. “This is a big deal with huge potential
consequences for U.S. strategic interests in a vital region.”
The strategic importance of Egypt, the experts said, lies in its role as the
cornerstone of American policy in the Middle East. The United States could not
have sustained the wars it fought in Iraq without logistical support from
Egypt’s government. Oil for Europe comes through the Suez Canal. Egypt is the
largest and most militarily powerful Arab country. And most important to the
United States, it is the crux of any American effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Mr. Sadat’s peace deal in 1979 with Mr. Begin made it next to
impossible for other Arab states to contemplate going to war with Israel, and
therefore opened a very slow — excruciatingly slow — process for the Arab world
to come to terms with Israel.
All of that is why both of those Cairo speeches, for all of their oratorical
differences, may not really have mattered at the end of the day, Middle East
experts said. American governments need a partner in Egypt who supports the
keystone of America’s Middle East policy, and Hosni Mubarak has been that
partner for 30 years. “The Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty is the pillar of the
structure in the Middle East,” said Edward P. Djerejian, a former American
ambassador to Israel and Syria. “If the ’79 agreement goes asunder, everything
falls apart. Everything falls apart.”
January 25, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration confronts the spectacle of angry
protesters and baton-wielding riot police officers from Tunisia to Egypt to
Lebanon, it is groping for a plan to deal with an always-vexing region that is
now suddenly spinning in dangerous directions.
In Egypt, where a staunch ally, President Hosni Mubarak, faced the fiercest
protests in years on Tuesday, and Lebanon, where a Hezbollah-backed government
is taking shape, the administration is grappling with volatile, potentially
hostile forces that have already realigned the region’s political landscape.
These were surprising turns. But even the administration’s signature project in
the region — Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations — became even more
intractable this week, with the publication of confidential documents detailing
Palestinian concessions offered in talks with Israel. The disclosure makes it
less likely that the Palestinians will agree to any further concessions.
In interviews in recent days, officials acknowledged that the United States had
limited influence over many actors in the region, and that the upheaval in
Egypt, in particular, could scramble its foreign-policy agenda.
So it is proceeding gingerly, balancing the democratic aspirations of young
Arabs with cold-eyed strategic and commercial interests. That sometimes involves
supporting autocratic and unpopular governments — which has turned many of those
young people against the United States.
President Obama called Mr. Mubarak last week, after the uprising in Tunisia, to
talk about joint projects like the Middle East peace process, even as he
emphasized the need to meet the democratic aspirations of the Tunisian
protesters.
Mr. Obama repeated this point during his State of the Union address on Tuesday,
saying, “Tonight, let us be clear: the United States of America stands with the
people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people,” a
reference, a White House official said, to the protesters in Egypt.
The White House warned Hezbollah against coercion and intimidation, and
officials said the United States might go as far as pulling hundreds of millions
of dollars of aid from Lebanon. The administration sent a senior diplomat,
Jeffrey D. Feltman, to Tunisia to express support for pro-democracy forces as
they prepared for elections after the ouster of President Zine el-Abidine Ben
Ali.
While there are important differences between North Africa and Lebanon, the two
situations pose similar challenges.
Some analysts argue that the United States should seize on Tunisia to advance
democracy across the Middle East — reprising the “freedom agenda” of the Bush
administration and providing Mr. Obama a rare opportunity to deliver on pledges
to build bridges to the Muslim world.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came closest to doing that in Qatar
two weeks ago, when she bluntly criticized Arab leaders for their autocratic
ways, a mere 24 hours before Mr. Ben Ali was driven from office. But Mrs.
Clinton’s speech does not augur a return to the Bush approach, officials said.
For one thing, clamoring for democracy did not work so well for President George
W. Bush, administration officials said. More important, a wave of upheaval could
uproot valuable allies. An uprising in Tunisia, a peripheral player in the
region, is not the same as one in Egypt, a linchpin. The Egyptian government is
a crucial ally to Washington, but the population is very suspicious of American
motives, and the potential for Islamic extremism lurks. “These countries are
going to go at a different pace,” said Daniel B. Shapiro, a senior Middle East
adviser on the National Security Council. “One couldn’t, or shouldn’t try, to
come up with a cookie-cutter ideal of how to approach it.”
The administration has tried to balance its ties to Mr. Mubarak with expressions
of concern about rigged elections and jailed dissidents in his country. But it
may find it harder to avoid singling him out if the crowds keep building in
Cairo, as separate statements of concern about the protests in Egypt, released
by the White House and State Department late Tuesday, suggested.
“The challenge for the administration is to find the right balance between
identifying the U.S. too closely with these changes, and thereby undermining
them; and not finding ways to nurture them enough,” said Aaron David Miller, a
public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
“They don’t yet know how to do that,” he said.
Some critics say the administration erred by putting the peace process at the
center of its strategy for the region, overlooking a restive Arab population.
“They put U.S.-Egyptian relations within the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict,” said Elliott Abrams, a Middle East adviser in the Bush
administration. “But what happens in Egypt originates in Egypt.”
Mr. Obama came into office determined to play down the Bush administration’s
Iraq-centered “freedom agenda,” the very public push for democratic change. In
his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo in June 2009, Mr. Obama said each
country should chart its own path to democracy and rejected military
intervention as a way to accelerate the process.
Instead, the administration has worked with pro-democracy groups to advocate for
freer media and assembly. It has pushed for outside monitors to scrutinize
elections in Jordan and Egypt. And it has encouraged social networks like
Twitter and Facebook to spread the word about pro-democracy movements — the very
networks that helped spread word of demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt.
“In giving us guidance as we develop our policies in the region, the president
was adamant that we take stock of the brittleness and hidden risks of the status
quo,” said Samantha Power, a senior director at the National Security Council
who handles human rights issues.
But critics say bottom-up efforts have failed to open up political space in Arab
countries. Despite the push for monitors in Egypt, its recent parliamentary
elections were judged less honest than elections in 2005. Steven Heydemann, a
vice president at the United States Institute of Peace, argued in a blog post
this week that the time had come for the United States to confront Arab leaders
more forcefully, demanding that they repeal emergency laws and scrap state
security courts, which they use to exercise arbitrary power.
Administration officials said they pressed Mr. Mubarak repeatedly not to
reinstate Egypt’s emergency law, which has been in place since 1981. He did so
anyway, but officials said he released virtually all the political prisoners
that were on a list compiled by Human Rights Watch. In his call with Mr.
Mubarak, Mr. Obama also linked the bombing of a Coptic Christian church to the
rights of religious minorities.
Still, critics say the pressure has been mostly in private, which does little to
build support among impatient young Arabs. Some analysts say the big question is
whether the administration should seize on Tunisia as a lever to push for change
elsewhere.
“If Tunisia works out, that could be much more of an inspiration to Arab
countries than Iraq ever was,” said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle
East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is an unexpected windfall.
That’s why they should be making the most of it.”
David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Tunis.
December 13, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special
representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2009 and a diplomatic
troubleshooter who worked for every Democratic president since the late 1960s
and oversaw the negotiations that ended the war in Bosnia, died Monday evening
in Washington. He was 69 and lived in Manhattan.
His death was confirmed by an Obama administration official.
Mr. Holbrooke was hospitalized on Friday afternoon after becoming ill while
meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in her Washington office.
Doctors found a tear to his aorta, and he underwent a 21-hour operation. Mr.
Holbrooke had additional surgery on Sunday and remained in very critical
condition until his death.
Mr. Holbrooke’s signal accomplishment in a distinguished career that involved
diplomacy in Asia, Europe and the Middle East was his role as chief architect of
the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. It was a coup
preceded and followed by his peacekeeping missions to the tinderbox of ethnic,
religious and regional conflicts that was formerly Yugoslavia.
More recently, Mr. Holbrooke wrestled with the stunning complexity of
Afghanistan and Pakistan: how to bring stability to the region while fighting a
resurgent Taliban and coping with corrupt governments, rigged elections, fragile
economies, a rampant narcotics trade, nuclear weapons in Pakistan, and the
presence of Al Qaeda, and presumably Osama bin Laden, in the wild tribal
borderlands.
One of his main tasks was to press President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to take
responsibility for security in his country and to confront the corruption that
imperils the American mission there. At times, Mr. Karzai refused to see him,
but Mr. Holbrooke was undeterred.
“He’s an enormously tough customer,” Mr. Holbrooke said during one of the
periodic breakfasts he had with reporters who covered his diplomatic exploits.
“As you’ve heard,” he added with a smile, “so am I.”
He helped his boss, Mrs. Clinton, whom he had supported in her presidential bid,
to persuade President Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan, while pressing
for more aid and development projects to improve the United States’ image there.
But he died before anyone knew if the experiment would succeed.
A brilliant, sometimes abrasive infighter, he used a formidable arsenal of
facts, bluffs, whispers, implied threats and, when necessary, pyrotechnic fits
of anger to press his positions. Mr. Obama, who praised Mr. Holbrooke on Monday
afternoon at the State Department as “simply one of the giants of American
foreign policy,” was sometimes driven to distraction by his lectures.
But Mr. Holbrooke dazzled and often intimidated opponents and colleagues around
a negotiating table. Some called him a bully, and he looked the part: the big
chin thrust out, the broad shoulders, the tight smile that might mean anything.
To admirers, however, including generations of State Department protégés and the
presidents he served, his peacemaking efforts were extraordinary.
When he named Mr. Holbrooke to represent the United States at the United
Nations, President Bill Clinton said, “His remarkable diplomacy in Bosnia helped
to stop the bloodshed, and at the talks in Dayton the force of his determination
was the key to securing peace, restoring hope and saving lives.” Others said his
work in Bosnia deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
Few diplomats could boast of his career accomplishments. Early on, Mr. Holbrooke
devoted six years to the Vietnam War: first in the Mekong Delta with the United
States Agency for International Development, seeking the allegiance of the
civilian population; then at the embassy in Saigon as an aide to Ambassadors
Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.; and finally in the American delegation
to the 1968-69 Paris peace talks led by W. Averell Harriman and Cyrus R. Vance.
Mr. Holbrooke was the author of one volume of the Pentagon Papers, the secret
Defense Department history of the Vietnam War that cataloged years of American
duplicity in Southeast Asia. The papers were first brought to public attention
by The New York Times in 1971.
As assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Carter
administration, Mr. Holbrooke played a crucial role in establishing full
diplomatic relations with China in 1979, a move that finessed America’s
continuing commitment to China’s thorn in the side Taiwan and followed up on the
historic breakthrough of President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 visit to China.
During the Clinton presidency, Mr. Holbrooke served as ambassador to Germany in
1993-94, when he helped enlarge the North Atlantic alliance; achieved his
diplomatic breakthroughs in Bosnia as assistant secretary of state for European
affairs in 1994-95; and was chief representative to the United Nations, a
cabinet post, for 17 months from 1999 to 2001.
At the United Nations, he forged close ties to Secretary General Kofi Annan,
negotiated a settlement of America’s longstanding dues dispute, highlighted
conflicts and health crises in Africa and Indonesia, and called for more
peacekeeping forces. After fighting erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo
in 1999, he led a Security Council delegation on a mission to Africa. He also
backed sanctions against Angolan rebels in 2000.
While he achieved prominence as a cabinet official and envoy to many of the
world’s most troubled arenas, Mr. Holbrooke was frustrated in his ambition to be
secretary of state; he was the runner-up to Madeleine K. Albright, Mr. Clinton’s
choice in 1997, and a contender when Mr. Obama installed Mrs. Clinton in the
post in 2009.
Foreign policy was his life. Even during Republican administrations, when he was
not in government, he was deeply engaged, undertaking missions as a private
citizen traveling through the war-weary Balkans and the backwaters of Africa and
Asia to see firsthand the damage and devastating human costs of genocide, civil
wars, and H.I.V. and AIDS epidemics.
And his voice on the outside remained influential — as an editor of Foreign
Policy magazine from 1972 to 1977, as a writer of columns for The Washington
Post and analytical articles for many other publications, and as the author of
two books. He collaborated with Clark Clifford, a presidential adviser, on a
best-selling Clifford memoir, “Counsel to the President” (1991), and wrote his
own widely acclaimed memoir, “To End a War” (1998), about his Bosnia service.
Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall Street. In the
early 1980s, he was a co-founder of a Washington consulting firm, Public
Strategies, which was later sold to Lehman Brothers. At various times he was a
managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First
Boston and a director of the American International Group.
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was born in Manhattan on April 24, 1941, to Dr.
Dan Holbrooke, a physician, and the former Trudi Moos. He attended Scarsdale
High School, where his best friend was David Rusk, son of Dean Rusk, the future
secretary of state. Richard’s father died when he was 15, and he drew closer to
the Rusk family.
At Brown University, he majored in history and was editor of the student
newspaper. He intended to become a journalist, but after graduating in 1962 he
was turned down by The Times and joined the State Department as a foreign
service officer.
In 1964, Mr. Holbrooke married the first of his three wives, Larrine Sullivan, a
lawyer. The couple had two sons, David and Anthony, and were divorced. His
marriage to Blythe Babyak, a television producer, also ended in divorce. In
1995, he married Kati Marton, an author, journalist and human rights advocate
who had been married to the ABC anchorman Peter Jennings until their divorce in
1993. He is survived by Ms. Marton; his two sons; his brother, Andrew; and two
stepchildren, Christopher and Elizabeth Jennings.
After language training, he spent three years working in Vietnam. In 1966, he
joined President Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House staff, and two years later
became a junior member of the delegation at the Paris peace talks. The talks
achieved no breakthrough, but the experience taught him much about the arts of
negotiation.
In 1970, after a year as a fellow at Princeton, he became director of the Peace
Corps in Morocco. He quit government service in 1972 and over the next five
years edited the quarterly journal Foreign Policy. He was also a contributing
editor of Newsweek International and a consultant on reorganizing the
government’s foreign policy apparatus.
He worked on Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976, and was rewarded with
the post of assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs. When
Ronald Reagan and the Republicans took over the White House in 1981, Mr.
Holbrooke left the government and for more than a decade focused on writing and
investment banking.
When President Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. Holbrooke was named ambassador
to Germany. He helped found the American Academy in Berlin as a cultural
exchange center.
He returned to Washington in 1994 as assistant secretary of state for European
affairs. His top priority soon became the horrendous civil war in the former
Yugoslavia, a conflict precipitated by the secession of Croatia, Slovenia,
Macedonia and Bosnia. Massacres, mass rapes and displaced populations, among
other atrocities, were part of campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims.
After months of shuttle diplomacy, Mr. Holbrooke in 1995 achieved a breakthrough
cease-fire and a framework for dividing Bosnia into two entities, one of Bosnian
Serbs and another of Croatians and Muslims. The endgame negotiations, involving
the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and
President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, unfolded in Dayton, Ohio, where a peace
agreement was reached after months of hard bargaining led by Mr. Holbrooke.
It was the high-water mark of a career punctuated with awards, honorary degrees
and prestigious seats on the boards of the Asia Society, the American Museum of
Natural History, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Council on Foreign
Relations, Refugees International and other organizations. He was 59 when he
left the United Nations as the Clinton administration drew to a close.
But there was to be one more task. As Mr. Obama assumed office and attention
shifted to Afghanistan, Mr. Holbrooke took on his last assignment. He began by
trying to lower expectations, moving away from the grand, transformative goals
of President George W. Bush toward something more readily achievable.
But his boss and old friend, Mrs. Clinton, expressed absolute confidence in him.
“Richard represents the kind of robust, persistent, determined diplomacy the
president intends to pursue,” she said. “I admire deeply his ability to shoulder
the most vexing and difficult challenges.”
David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.
June 5, 2009
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY
and ALAN COWELL
CAIRO — President Obama pledged on Thursday to “seek a new beginning between
the United States and Muslims around the world,” imploring America and the
Islamic world to drop their suspicions of one another and forge new alliances to
confront violent extremism and heal religious divides.
“We have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek,” he
said. “A world where extremists no longer threaten our people, and American
troops have come home; a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure
in a state of their own, and nuclear energy is used for peaceful purposes; a
world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all God’s
children are respected.”
He dwelled on Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan but reserved some of his sharpest
words for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He offered no major initiatives on
the Middle East peace process although he put Israelis and Palestinians on
notice that he intends to deal directly with what he sees as intransigence on
key issues, evoking the concerns of both parties but asking both to shift ground
significantly.
The speech in Cairo, which he called a “timeless city,” redeemed a promise he
made nearly two years ago while running for president. It was, perhaps, the
riskiest speech of his young presidency, and Mr. Obama readily conceded that not
every goal would be easily or quickly achieved.
“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims
around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one
based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be
in competition,” he said. “Instead, they overlap, and share common principles —
principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human
beings.”
His message was sweeping and forceful — at times scolding and combative —
promoting democracy in Egypt, warning Israelis against building new settlements,
and acknowledging that the United States had fallen short of its ideals,
particularly in the Iraq war. It also evoked a new and nuanced tone, and some of
Mr. Obama’s language drew appreciative applause from his audience of 3,000
invited guests in the Major Reception Hall at Cairo University.
Several times, for instance, he spoke of “Palestine,” rather than the more
ambiguous term often used by American leaders, “future Palestinian state.” And,
in reference to the Palestinians, he pointedly mentioned “the daily humiliations
— large and small — that come with occupation.”
He described the bond between the United States and Israel as “unbreakable,” and
urged Hamas, the Islamic militant group in control of the Gaza Strip, to stop
violence. But in his next breath, Mr. Obama said Israel must curtail its
expansion of West bank settlements and recognize Palestinian aspirations for
statehood. He also acknowledged that Hamas, which the United States labels a
terrorist organization, “does have some support among some Palestinians.”
“But they also have responsibilities,” Mr. Obama said, listing them as “to end
violence, recognize past agreements, recognize Israel’s right to exist.”
“Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be
denied, neither can Palestine’s,” Mr. Obama said. “The United States does not
accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction
violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time
for these settlements to stop.”
And, while Israel’s hawkish government has not accepted a so-called two-state
solution, Mr. Obama said: “The only resolution is for the aspirations of both
sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in
peace and security.”
“This is in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest and the
world’s interest,” he said. In the Middle East, “too many tears have been shed;
too much blood has been shed.”
The address drew initial support from Palestinians. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a
spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, called it “a good start and
an important step towards a new American policy.”
“It was honest, is the first word that comes to mind,” said Hossam Bahgat,
executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, an
independent human rights organization.
Mr. Bahgat, who attended the speech at Cairo University, said that one of the
most important elements of the speech was what was left out. “I think it was
remarkable the speech left out the term terrorism completely,” he said. “It may
have been a paradigm shift for the United States, away from using this
politically charged word.”
But others in the region faulted it. The President, some noted, did not offer
any new initiatives, did not lay out a time line for progress towards a Middle
East settlement and asked his audience to accept an view which gave equal weight
to Israeli and Palestinian concerns.
That part did not go down well, people in the region said.
“I feel it is important historically, but it will bring nothing new,” said Hasim
Fouad, 24, a reporter with the independent Egyptian newspaper Al Dustour.
Mr. Obama strode onto the stage to loud applause and a standing ovation in the
conference hall. He conceded that his speech came at “a time of great tension
between the United States and Muslims around the world.”
But he sought to explain that he represented the new face of American
leadership. He did not mention the name of George W. Bush, who preceded him in
office, and whose policies contributed to the mistrust.
“America is not and never will be at war with Islam. We will, however,
relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our
security,” Mr. Obama said. “Because we reject the same thing that people of all
faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children.” Mr. Obama
said: “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States
to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. But that
same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do
not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a
self-interested empire.”
Mr. Obama offered few details for how to solve myriad problems and conflicts
around the globe, but he offered up his own biography as a credible connection
to his audience. While the message touched upon a litany of challenges, it
boiled down to simply this: Barack Hussein Obama was standing at the podium as
the American president.
“I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a
greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum,” Mr.
Obama said, delivering a common greeting signifying peaceful intent.
Mr. Obama said the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001
caused “enormous trauma to our country.” He offered no direct criticism of the
previous administration, but reminded his audience that he has “unequivocally
prohibited the use of torture” and has ordered the prison to be closed at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
“The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases it
led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals,” Mr. Obama said. “We
are taking concrete actions to change course.”
The president divided his speech into seven sections, often sounding like the
university professor he was before he sought political office. He touched on
“sources of tension” from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, democracy, religious
freedom, women’s rights and economic development and opportunity.
He said the Iraq war had been a “war of choice that provoked strong differences
in my country and around the world.”
“Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the
tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded
America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to
resolve our problems whenever possible.”
By contrast, he described America’s military presence in Afghanistan as a
necessity after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan,” he said.
“We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be
confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan, and now
Pakistan, determined to kill as many Americans as possible. But that is not yet
the case.”
Turning to Iran’s contentious nuclear program, he said any nation “should have
the right to access to peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its
responsibilities” under international regulations to counter the proliferation
of nuclear weapons.
Iran maintains its nuclear enrichment program is for peaceful civilian purposes
but many in the West suspect it is designed to build a nuclear bomb. “This is
not simply about America’s interests,” Mr. Obama said, “It is also about
preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region
and the world down a hugely dangerous path.”
As his visit to the region began Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Obama was
greeted with reminders of the vast gulfs his address must bridge, as voices as
disparate as Al Qaeda’s and the Israeli government’s competed to shape how Mr.
Obama’s message would be heard.
In a new audiotape, Osama bin Laden condemned Mr. Obama for planting what he
called new seeds of “hatred and vengeance” among Muslims, while in Jerusalem,
senior Israeli officials complained that Mr. Obama was rewriting old
understandings by taking a harder line against new Israeli settlements.
Jeff Zeleny reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from London.
Helene Cooper
contributed reporting from Washington,
The following is a text of President Obama's prepared remarks to the Muslim
world, delivered on June 4, 2009, as released by the White House.
I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two
remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a
beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a
source of Egypt's advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between
tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality
of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the
American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country:
assalaamu alaykum.
We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the
world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy
debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of
co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More
recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and
opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries
were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.
Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many
Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.
Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority
of Muslims. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of
these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my
country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western
countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.
So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those
who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the
cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. This
cycle of suspicion and discord must end.
I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims
around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one
based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be
in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles
of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.
I do so recognizing that change cannot happen overnight. No single speech can
eradicate years of mistrust, nor can I answer in the time that I have all the
complex questions that brought us to this point. But I am convinced that in
order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and
that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained
effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one
another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of
God and speak always the truth." That is what I will try to do – to speak the
truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that
the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces
that drive us apart.
Part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I am a Christian, but my
father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy,
I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break
of dawn and the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities
where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.
As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam
– at places like Al-Azhar University – that carried the light of learning
through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and
Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order
of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens
and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.
Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry
and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.
And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the
possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.
I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first
nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in
1796, our second President John Adams wrote, "The United States has in itself no
character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims." And
since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have
fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights, started
businesses, taught at our Universities, excelled in our sports arenas, won Nobel
Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the
first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to
defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding
Fathers – Thomas Jefferson – kept in his personal library.
So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it
was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership
between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn't. And
I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to
fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.
But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as
Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a
self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources
of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution
against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal,
and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those
words – within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every
culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E
pluribus unum: "Out of many, one."
Much has been made of the fact that an African-American with the name Barack
Hussein Obama could be elected President. But my personal story is not so
unique. The dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone
in America, but its promise exists for all who come to our shores – that
includes nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today who enjoy
incomes and education that are higher than average.
Moreover, freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's
religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state of our union, and over
1,200 mosques within our borders. That is why the U.S. government has gone to
court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish
those who would deny it.
So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America. And I believe that America
holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in
life, all of us share common aspirations – to live in peace and security; to get
an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities,
and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity.
Of course, recognizing our common humanity is only the beginning of our task.
Words alone cannot meet the needs of our people. These needs will be met only if
we act boldly in the years ahead; and if we understand that the challenges we
face are shared, and our failure to meet them will hurt us all.
For we have learned from recent experience that when a financial system weakens
in one country, prosperity is hurt everywhere. When a new flu infects one human
being, all are at risk. When one nation pursues a nuclear weapon, the risk of
nuclear attack rises for all nations. When violent extremists operate in one
stretch of mountains, people are endangered across an ocean. And when innocents
in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective
conscience. That is what it means to share this world in the 21st century. That
is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings.
This is a difficult responsibility to embrace. For human history has often been
a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own
interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our
interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people
over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not
be prisoners of it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership;
progress must be shared.
That does not mean we should ignore sources of tension. Indeed, it suggests the
opposite: we must face these tensions squarely. And so in that spirit, let me
speak as clearly and plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe
we must finally confront together.
The first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its
forms.
In Ankara, I made clear that America is not – and never will be – at war with
Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a
grave threat to our security. Because we reject the same thing that people of
all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children. And it is
my first duty as President to protect the American people.
The situation in Afghanistan demonstrates America's goals, and our need to work
together. Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al Qaeda and the
Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice, we went
because of necessity. I am aware that some question or justify the events of
9/11. But let us be clear: al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The
victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other
nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet Al Qaeda chose to
ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack, and even now
states their determination to kill on a massive scale. They have affiliates in
many countries and are trying to expand their reach. These are not opinions to
be debated; these are facts to be dealt with.
Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no
military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and
women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We
would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident
that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to
kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.
That's why we're partnering with a coalition of forty-six countries. And despite
the costs involved, America's commitment will not weaken. Indeed, none of us
should tolerate these extremists. They have killed in many countries. They have
killed people of different faiths – more than any other, they have killed
Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the
progress of nations, and with Islam. The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills
an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person,
it is as if he has saved all mankind. The enduring faith of over a billion
people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of
the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of
promoting peace.
We also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is why we plan to invest $1.5 billion each year
over the next five years to partner with Pakistanis to build schools and
hospitals, roads and businesses, and hundreds of millions to help those who have
been displaced. And that is why we are providing more than $2.8 billion to help
Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend upon.
Let me also address the issue of Iraq. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of
choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world.
Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the
tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded
America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to
resolve our problems whenever possible. Indeed, we can recall the words of
Thomas Jefferson, who said: "I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power,
and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be."
Today, America has a dual responsibility: to help Iraq forge a better future –
and to leave Iraq to Iraqis. I have made it clear to the Iraqi people that we
pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources. Iraq's
sovereignty is its own. That is why I ordered the removal of our combat brigades
by next August. That is why we will honor our agreement with Iraq's
democratically-elected government to remove combat troops from Iraqi cities by
July, and to remove all our troops from Iraq by 2012. We will help Iraq train
its Security Forces and develop its economy. But we will support a secure and
united Iraq as a partner, and never as a patron.
And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must
never alter our principles. 9/11 was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear
and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to
act contrary to our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I
have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I
have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.
So America will defend itself respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the
rule of law. And we will do so in partnership with Muslim communities which are
also threatened. The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim
communities, the sooner we will all be safer.
The second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation
between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world.
America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It
is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the
aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be
denied.
Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and
anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I
will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were
enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million
Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.
Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with
destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and
only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories
while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims
and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty
years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in
the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that
they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large
and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation
for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on
the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of
their own.
For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate
aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is
easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by
Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and
attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if
we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to
the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met
through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and
security.
That is in Israel's interest, Palestine's interest, America's interest, and the
world's interest. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with
all the patience that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have
agreed to under the Road Map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them –
and all of us – to live up to our responsibilities.
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is
wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the
lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not
violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined
insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story
can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to
Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is
a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to
blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is
how it is surrendered.
Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The
Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions
that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some
Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling
Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an
end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to
exist.
At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist
cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the
legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous
agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these
settlements to stop.
Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can
live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian
families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's
security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank.
Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to
peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.
Finally, the Arab States must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an
important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities. The Arab-Israeli
conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from
other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian
people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognize
Israel's legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the
past.
America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public
what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. We cannot impose
peace. But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away.
Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time
for us to act on what everyone knows to be true.
Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a
responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians
can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of three great
faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a
secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all
of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of
Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.
The third source of tension is our shared interest in the rights and
responsibilities of nations on nuclear weapons.
This issue has been a source of tension between the United States and the
Islamic Republic of Iran. For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its
opposition to my country, and there is indeed a tumultuous history between us.
In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow
of a democratically-elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution,
Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S.
troops and civilians. This history is well known. Rather than remain trapped in
the past, I have made it clear to Iran's leaders and people that my country is
prepared to move forward. The question, now, is not what Iran is against, but
rather what future it wants to build.
It will be hard to overcome decades of mistrust, but we will proceed with
courage, rectitude and resolve. There will be many issues to discuss between our
two countries, and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the
basis of mutual respect. But it is clear to all concerned that when it comes to
nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point. This is not simply about
America's interests. It is about preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle
East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path.
I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do
not. No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.
That is why I strongly reaffirmed America's commitment to seek a world in which
no nations hold nuclear weapons. And any nation – including Iran – should have
the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its
responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That commitment is
at the core of the Treaty, and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it.
And I am hopeful that all countries in the region can share in this goal.
The fourth issue that I will address is democracy.
I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent
years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me
be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by
any other.
That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the
will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way,
grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know
what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a
peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for
certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are
governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice;
government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to
live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights,
and that is why we will support them everywhere.
There is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear:
governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and
secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America
respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the
world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful
governments – provided they govern with respect for all their people.
This last point is important because there are some who advocate for democracy
only when they are out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing
the rights of others. No matter where it takes hold, government of the people
and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: you must
maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights
of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you
must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the
political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone
do not make true democracy.
The fifth issue that we must address together is religious freedom.
Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia
and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia,
where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.
That is the spirit we need today. People in every country should be free to
choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind, heart, and
soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive, but it is being
challenged in many different ways.
Among some Muslims, there is a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by
the rejection of another's. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld –
whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt. And fault lines
must be closed among Muslims as well, as the divisions between Sunni and Shia
have led to tragic violence, particularly in Iraq.
Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We
must always examine the ways in which we protect it. For instance, in the United
States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill
their religious obligation. That is why I am committed to working with American
Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.
Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim
citizens from practicing religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating
what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards
any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.
Indeed, faith should bring us together. That is why we are forging service
projects in America that bring together Christians, Muslims, and Jews. That is
why we welcome efforts like Saudi Arabian King Abdullah's Interfaith dialogue
and Turkey's leadership in the Alliance of Civilizations. Around the world, we
can turn dialogue into Interfaith service, so bridges between peoples lead to
action – whether it is combating malaria in Africa, or providing relief after a
natural disaster.
The sixth issue that I want to address is women's rights.
I know there is debate about this issue. I reject the view of some in the West
that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do
believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no
coincidence that countries where women are well-educated are far more likely to
be prosperous.
Now let me be clear: issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue
for Islam. In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, we have seen
Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead. Meanwhile, the struggle for
women's equality continues in many aspects of American life, and in countries
around the world.
Our daughters can contribute just as much to society as our sons, and our common
prosperity will be advanced by allowing all humanity – men and women – to reach
their full potential. I do not believe that women must make the same choices as
men in order to be equal, and I respect those women who choose to live their
lives in traditional roles. But it should be their choice. That is why the
United States will partner with any Muslim-majority country to support expanded
literacy for girls, and to help young women pursue employment through
micro-financing that helps people live their dreams.
Finally, I want to discuss economic development and opportunity.
I know that for many, the face of globalization is contradictory. The Internet
and television can bring knowledge and information, but also offensive sexuality
and mindless violence. Trade can bring new wealth and opportunities, but also
huge disruptions and changing communities. In all nations – including my own –
this change can bring fear. Fear that because of modernity we will lose of
control over our economic choices, our politics, and most importantly our
identities – those things we most cherish about our communities, our families,
our traditions, and our faith.
But I also know that human progress cannot be denied. There need not be
contradiction between development and tradition. Countries like Japan and South
Korea grew their economies while maintaining distinct cultures. The same is true
for the astonishing progress within Muslim-majority countries from Kuala Lumpur
to Dubai. In ancient times and in our times, Muslim communities have been at the
forefront of innovation and education.
This is important because no development strategy can be based only upon what
comes out of the ground, nor can it be sustained while young people are out of
work. Many Gulf States have enjoyed great wealth as a consequence of oil, and
some are beginning to focus it on broader development. But all of us must
recognize that education and innovation will be the currency of the 21st
century, and in too many Muslim communities there remains underinvestment in
these areas. I am emphasizing such investments within my country. And while
America in the past has focused on oil and gas in this part of the world, we now
seek a broader engagement.
On education, we will expand exchange programs, and increase scholarships, like
the one that brought my father to America, while encouraging more Americans to
study in Muslim communities. And we will match promising Muslim students with
internships in America; invest in on-line learning for teachers and children
around the world; and create a new online network, so a teenager in Kansas can
communicate instantly with a teenager in Cairo.
On economic development, we will create a new corps of business volunteers to
partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries. And I will host a Summit
on Entrepreneurship this year to identify how we can deepen ties between
business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs in the United States and
Muslim communities around the world.
On science and technology, we will launch a new fund to support technological
development in Muslim-majority countries, and to help transfer ideas to the
marketplace so they can create jobs. We will open centers of scientific
excellence in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and appoint new
Science Envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy,
create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops. And today
I am announcing a new global effort with the Organization of the Islamic
Conference to eradicate polio. And we will also expand partnerships with Muslim
communities to promote child and maternal health.
All these things must be done in partnership. Americans are ready to join with
citizens and governments; community organizations, religious leaders, and
businesses in Muslim communities around the world to help our people pursue a
better life.
The issues that I have described will not be easy to address. But we have a
responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek – a world where
extremists no longer threaten our people, and American troops have come home; a
world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own,
and nuclear energy is used for peaceful purposes; a world where governments
serve their citizens, and the rights of all God's children are respected. Those
are mutual interests. That is the world we seek. But we can only achieve it
together.
I know there are many – Muslim and non-Muslim – who question whether we can
forge this new beginning. Some are eager to stoke the flames of division, and to
stand in the way of progress. Some suggest that it isn't worth the effort – that
we are fated to disagree, and civilizations are doomed to clash. Many more are
simply skeptical that real change can occur. There is so much fear, so much
mistrust. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward.
And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every
country – you, more than anyone, have the ability to remake this world.
All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is
whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit
ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on
the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human
beings.
It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than
to look inward; to see what is different about someone than to find the things
we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There is
also one rule that lies at the heart of every religion – that we do unto others
as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples – a
belief that isn't new; that isn't black or white or brown; that isn't Christian,
or Muslim or Jew. It's a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and
that still beats in the heart of billions. It's a faith in other people, and
it's what brought me here today.
We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to
make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written.
The Holy Koran tells us, "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and
we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."
The Talmud tells us: "The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting
peace."
The Holy Bible tells us, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called
sons of God."
The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God's
vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God's peace
be upon you.
January 23, 2009
Filed at 8:06 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By REUTERS
CAIRO (Reuters) - President Barack Obama has taken the Middle East by
surprise with the speed of his diplomacy but his first statement on the conflict
between Arabs and Israelis was strikingly similar to old U.S. policies.
Arab leaders in the meantime are jumping in with their own proposals in the hope
of helping to shape U.S. policy before the new administration sets it in stone.
Arab governments and commentators had expected Obama to take his time before
turning his attention to the Middle East, concentrating instead on the U.S.
economy and domestic concerns.
But the new president, only two days into office, appointed on Thursday a
special envoy for the region, veteran mediator and former Senator George
Mitchell, and said Mitchell would go to the Middle East as soon as possible.
Mitchell will try to ensure that an informal ceasefire between Israel and the
Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip becomes durable and sustainable, Obama
added.
One day earlier, Obama made telephone calls to Washington's long-standing allies
in the Middle East - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and King Abdullah of Jordan.
The conservative Arab governments saw the calls as an affirmation of their
privileged status -- another sign that Obama is sticking to traditional
approaches.
"It took two longs days before Obama dispelled any notions of a change in U.S.
Middle East policy," said As'ad Abu Khalil, Lebanese-born and pro-Palestinian
professor of political science at California State University.
"Obama's speech was quite something. It was like sprinkling sulphuric acid on
the wounds of the children in Gaza," he added.
But Obama's diplomatic activism and promises of engagement on Arab-Israeli
conflicts does at least address one of the conservatives' main grievances about
former President George W. Bush -- that he ignored the conflict for too long and
never put his full weight behind any Middle East peace plan.
A senior member of the Saudi ruling family, Prince Turki al-Faisal, said Bush
had left "a sickening legacy" in the Middle East and had contributed through
arrogance to Israel's slaughter of innocent people in Gaza over the past month.
"If the United States wants to continue playing a leadership role in the Middle
East and keep its strategic alliances intact ... it will have to revise
drastically its policies vis a vis Israel and Palestine," he added.
Jamal Khashoggi, editor of the Saudi newspaper al-Watan, said the Saudi
government was still optimistic about Obama, whom it sees as a possible friend
to the Muslim world.
"Even the few Saudi officials who liked Bush were disappointed with him in the
last two years," he added.
Maverick Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi took the opportunity of Obama's advent to
refloat his own pet proposal -- that Israelis and Palestinians live together in
one state.
"CONSTRUCTIVE ELEMENTS"
Prince Turki, a nephew of King Abdullah and a former ambassador to Washington,
said Washington should back the Arab peace initiative of 2002, which offers
Israel peace and normal relations in return for withdrawal to its 1967 borders.
In his policy statement on Thursday, Obama said the Arab peace offer contained
what he called constructive elements.
But he then called on Arab governments to carry out their half of the bargain --
"taking steps toward normalizing relations with Israel" -- without suggesting
that Israel should meet the parallel Arab demand for territorial withdrawal.
Obama gave full backing to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his
Western-backed prime minister, ignoring the political weight of Hamas and other
groups opposed to Abbas.
He repeated the controversial conditions which the Quartet of external powers in
2006 for dealing with Hamas -- recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and
accepting previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements.
Some analysts had speculated that Obama might bring a new approach to dealings
with Hamas and other Middle East forces which retain the right to armed struggle
against Israel.
Obama even linked ending the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza -- one of the
roots of the recent fighting -- to restoring Abbas's control of Gaza's borders.
That could perpetuate the present blockade for months or years to come.
U.S. reconstruction aid for Gaza will also be channeled exclusively through
Abbas, who has no control over Gaza.
The new president followed the traditional U.S. approach of relying on Egypt to
mediate between Israel and Hamas and to stop Hamas in Gaza receiving weapons
through smuggling.
But Egypt failed to bring Hamas and Israel together on an agreed ceasefire and
Israel says that Cairo's anti-smuggling efforts along the Gaza-Egypt border fall
far short.
Hamas dismissed Obama's first venture into Middle East policy making as more of
the same failed U.S. strategy.
"It seems Obama is trying to repeat the same mistakes that George Bush made
without taking into consideration Bush's experience that resulted in the
explosion of the region," the Hamas representative in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan,
told Al Jazeera.
The pro-Syrian Lebanese newspaper As-Safir added: "The new American President
inspired by Bush's positions ... Obama continues the Israeli war on the
Palestinian people."
"(Obama) disappointed many hopes set on his balance and moderate views toward
the Arab-Israeli conflict, since his positions allows Israel to continue what it
began in its last war on Gaza," the newspaper added.
