President Obama’s Cairo, Egypt Speech: Change We can Believe in?

In his speech at Cairo University this past Thursday, June 4, 2009, President Obama openly admitted that the United States was responsible for the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953. He also announced an aggressive policy initiative designed to produce creation of a separate state for the Palestinians, who have been under occupation by Israel for the past sixty plus years. President Obama stated that the agreement to be reached would contain all issues in writing and not have any “sub rosa” agreements, like the previous  “Roadmap to Peace”, agreement in 2002, between the Israelis and Palestinians.² In that accord, Israel agreed not to build any additional settlements in the occupied West Bank region, however it was recently revealed by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that President Bush promised orally he would disregard that condition in the peace agreement.¹

These stunning revelations were given almost no attention during the Sunday morning’s battery of old media corporate news summaries. On “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace”, William Cristal and Charles Krauthammer criticized President Obama for talking nice to the Palestinians and ignoring Iran’s alleged plans for nuclear weapons capability. For the record, President Obama’s speech to his Arabic audience was interrupted thirty times with applause, primarily because he was the first American President to speak to them with respect and cultural deference.

The preoccupation with Iran’s nuclear development program concerns, of course, the possibility that they will expand their technology from peaceful energy production into ballistic missle tchnology. The assumption of many Western leaders is that Iran would then use that nuclear weapon against Israel. No opponent of Iran’s nuclear program has broached the question, “Why would they risk the certain retaliation that would destroy their own country?” The only person on the planet that fits that scenario is Kim Jong-il, of North Korea. A nuclear bomb dropped on Tel Aviv would take out millions of neighboring Arabs, as well. As goofy as Iranian President Ahmadinejad is, can he be in a position to unilaterally cause the destruction of his own country? To believe that the Iranians are pathologically suicidal is a real stretch, for me. Do not get me wrong, I do not feel that Iran having a nuclear weapon bodes well for anyone. However, could they present a more precarious possibility than currently exists in Pakistan, a country with an estimated 60 nuclear warheads at its disposal? Can the C.I.A. be relied upon to steer the U.S. through this perilous situation with sufficient intelligence? If so, they are going to have to get better in a hurry.

The C.I.A. has conducted covert foreign policy since its inception following W.W.II. Notably, most of their activity was in the Western Hemisphere, early on. In Guatemala in the ’50s, the C.I.A. was responsible for changing governments to please the United Fruit Company’s Guatamalan operations³. In the ’60s, they were involved in the Dominican Republic and were responsible for the demise of Che Guevara, a Castro revolutionary contemporary that attempted to export Cuban Communism to the South American continent. In the ’70s, they were behind the ouster of democratically elected socialist leader of Chile, Salvador Allende and replaced him with the brutal right wing Augusto Pinochet as dictator.

The recent flap with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, over whether the C.I.A. lied to her is not a stretch to the imagination, based on history, at least. The C.I.A.’s credibility became an issue most recently in former Vice President Dick Cheney’s vigorous attempt to rewrite the history of his involvement in urging the Bush administration to go to war in Iraq, as he now contends that C.I.A. director George Tenet, mislead them with false intelligence. In denouncing Tenet, Cheney went so far as to recant his consistent claim that Al-Qeada was involved directly with Saddam Hussein⁴ and said, in a complete reversal, that the C.I.A. never produced any evidence that such was the case. It makes one wonder if former Vice-President Cheney is aware that his statements are all recorded on video tape. “How could a man lie so?” you ask? The result of practice, no doubt.

For his part, President Obama put himself all the way out there on delivering a substantive peace initiative between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This conflict is the root cause of the accumulated hatred of the U.S, among Arabic countries. The favorability ratings of public opinion toward the U.S. among indigenous Arabs are in single digits, according to a 2007 Pew Research survey⁵. The American public is pitifully ignorant of the history of that region, which is the cause of Arab enmity toward us. In his speech, Obama stated the suffering of European Jews at the hands of Hitler’s holocaust and historical persecution are the basis of American sympathy and support for the Jewish homeland in the Middle East. For their part, Arab sentiment regarding that view is generally, “Yes, the Holocaust was terrible, but we had nothing to do with that”.

The state of Israel was created after WWII when several hundred thousand European Jewish refugees immigrated to Palestine, which had been a British Protectorate, as a result of the Sykes-Picot Agreement⁶ between England and France. The agreement divided the Middle East territory, which was formerly the domain of the Turkish Ottoman Empire following WWI, between the two European powers. As the Jewish immigrant population mushroomed, fighting broke out between the indigenous Palestinians. British authorities grew tired and frustrated of trying to maintain the civil order, and pulled out in 1948. In this power vacuum, the state of Israel was created and was attacked from virtually all sides. An atmosphere of peace has never existed since then. Wars, conflicts, and peace attempts have only served to make the situation increasingly complicated and polarized.

President Obama has committed his entire foreign policy A Team: Secretary of State Clinton, former Senator and successful negotiator of peace in Northern Ireland, George Mitchell, and former Bosnian negotiator and current US Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard C. Holbroke to the task. The paucity of leadership from the Palestinians and the fragile coalition of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government make the goal of two coexistent states daunting, at best. President Obama has managed to fill his foreign plate as full as his domestic plate in the short time span of less than five months. He has wasted no time in bringing change, as promised. However, is it, “Change We Can Believe In?” Time will tell, soon enough.

Source(s): ¹The U.K. Independent “Netanyahu cites secret deal with Bush to justify more settlements” published, June 3rd, 2009 • ²BBC “The Road Map: Full Text”, published April 30, 2003 • ³“Beneath the United States”, by Lars Shoultz,page 340. Harvard University Press, 1998 • ⁴CNN “Cheney: No Link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11″ published June 1, 2009 • ⁵Pew Research Center Publications: Foreign Policy, Not Public Diplomacy Mostly Determines How the World Views America” published November 1, 2007 •⁶ Department of State, “International Boundary Study No. 94 – December 30, 1969″ •