:: Nihal Singh

Obama puts fair play back in diplomacy

By S. Nihal Singh

Jun 11 : He came, he saw and if he did not conquer, President Barack Obama had a fair stab at it. His much-publicised speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, still being analysed by an army of analysts and experts around the world, was in essence a mood and tone changer in America’s troubled and often blood-spattered relationship with the countries of West Asia.

No US President in recent times has been as blunt as Mr Obama in setting out the problems the world’s sole surviving superpower faces in the region. Indeed, he laid out some important benchmarks: giving a final date for the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, a vow not to leave behind bases in Iraq and Afghanistan after eventual withdrawal from the latter country and, most significantly, balancing America’s "unbreakable" bonds with Israel with the "intolerable" situation of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Everyone knows about the nature of the US-Israeli relationship and Tel Aviv’s influence on Washington’s regional policy-making. It is still an open question whether the all-powerful Israeli lobby in Washington will frustrate President Obama’s moves. But no President had before Mr Obama publicly spelled out the misery of Palestinians each day, decade after decade, as Israelis expand their occupation and continue to enslave Palestinians with the complicity of a succession of occupants in the White House.

Against this game-changing backdrop, the question the world is asking is: Where does America go from here? The US administration seems to be moving to take advantage of the momentum gained by the Obama speech to begin moves on the ground.

The hard-working George Mitchell will again haunt the region, with secretary of state Hillary Clinton later putting in an appearance. But the stark truth is that President Obama will win or lose his initiatives in West Asia not in Tel Aviv or Baghdad or even Tehran but back home.

To anyone familiar with the ways of the American Jewish lobbies, it is clear that they will try every trick to outflank the US President. There are already suggestions that the Bush administration had privately agreed to settlement expansion. Breaking an unstated taboo, two American academics have written an entire book on how pro-Israeli groups work. Israeli lobbies influence key donations for electoral battles for the Senate and House of Representatives. And since West Asia berths in the US administration are filled for the most part by American Jews, Israel starts with a built-in advantage.

President Obama’s strategy is to try to put an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements, illegal as they are in the first place. It makes nonsense of any serious peace effort to build more and more homes on occupied territories and send more settlers while ostensibly conducting talks for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Little wonder then that the so-called peace process became a charade as Israel went on usurping more Palestinian land and throwing out more Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem. Palestinians contributed in part to their misfortune by fighting among themselves, split as they are into the Fatah and Hamas factions.

Putting an end to settlements’ expansion can only be a beginning to a long process that will partly depend upon the kind of support President Obama can muster for his more even-handed policy to West Asia’s seminal dispute.

There are some indications that American public opinion, traditionally underwritten by the Religious Right, is not as blindly pro-Israel as it has been. (Some of the most fundamentalist settlers on occupied land are American Jews.) But many Americans still identify terrorists with Muslims and the runaway success of Israeli expansion towards building a Greater Israel during the eight of the Bush presidency was partly the result of the American "war on terror" initiated in the wake of the terrorist attacks on American soil in September 2001.

What is worrying Israel is that, unlike his two predecessors who waited till the end of their second terms to seriously address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, President Obama has attempted to untie the Gordian knot during the first weeks and months of his administration. This implies that he is willing to take the risk of displeasing all that the American Jewish lobby represents to push forward a genuine solution.

However, President Obama’s moves are not free from ambiguity. It is not clear whether, in asking for concessions from the Arab states to Israel, he is seeking to soften US public opinion or really believes they should offer sops to Tel Aviv. It is perfectly in order that he should demand that Palestinians, particularly Hamas, refrain from conducting violent acts as long as Israel does not unleash its war machine. But to expect Arab states to open direct trade links with Israel and let it open economic missions after the Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip, which remains a vast prison, is an absurdity.

The need is for President Obama to make further bold moves before the Mitchell mission takes on the attributes of previous such diplomatic undertakings, with a so-called peace process disembodied from prevailing reality. There are enough foreign actors inhabiting West Asian space, with Britain’s Tony Blair performing a mission whose rationale remains a mystery.

Everybody understands that the one actor who can make a difference wears the Stars and Stripes, and that actor is hovering between its domestic pulls, its genuine strategic interests and peace in West Asia and the world.

President Obama was elected President as an agent of change. Such change relates not merely to domestic policy but also to the country’s relationship with the world. President George W. Bush sought to reorder the world after his fashion by starting a war to topple Saddam Hussein in order to resolve the seminal Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That experiment proved a disaster, with his successor now putting his faith in new diplomacy towards Iran, Palestinians and the larger Arab and Muslim world.

The world watches the outcome breathlessly.