12
news without borders
Obama, man of
peace? No, just
a Nobel prize
of a mistake
by Robert Fisk
LONDON: His Middle East policy is col-
lapsing. The Israelis have taunted him
by ignoring his demand for an end to
settlement-building and by continuing
to build their colonies on Arab land.
His special envoy is bluntly told by
the Israelis that an Arab-Israel peace
will take many years. Now he wants
the Palestinians to talk peace to Israel
without conditions.
He put pressure on the Palestinian
leader to throw away the opportunity
of international scrutiny of UN Judge
Goldstone’s damning indictment of
Israeli war crimes in Gaza while his
Assistant Secretary of State said that
the Goldstone report was “seriously
flawed”. After breaking his pre-election
promise to call the 1915 Armenian mas-
sacres by Ottoman Turkey a genocide,
he has urged the Armenians to sign a
treaty with Turkey, again “without pre-
conditions”. His army is still facing an
insurgency in Iraq. He cannot decide
how to win “his” war in Afghanistan. I
shall not mention Iran.
And now President Barack Obama
has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Af-
ter only eight months in office. Not bad.
No wonder he said he was “humbled”
when told the news. He should have
felt humiliated. But perhaps weakness
becomes a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Shimon Peres won it, too, and he
never won an Israeli election. Yasser
Arafat won it. And look what happened
to him. For the first time in history, the
Norwegian Nobel committee awarded
its peace prize to a man who has
achieved nothing – in the faint hope that
he will do something good in the future.
That’s how bad things are. That’s how
explosive the Middle East has become.
Isn’t there anyone in the White
House to remind Obama that the Israe-
lis have never obliged a US president
who asked for an end to the building of
colonies for Jews – and Jews only – on
Arab land? Bill Clinton demanded this
– it was written into the Oslo accords
– and the Israelis ignored him. George
W Bush demanded an end to the fight-
ing in Jenin nine years ago. The Israelis
ignored him. Obama demands a total
end to all settlement construction.
“They just don’t get it, do they?”
an Israeli minister – apparently Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – was
reported to have said when the US Sec-
retary of State, Hillary Clinton, reiter-
ated her president’s words. That’s what
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s crackpot
foreign minister – he’s not as much a
crackpot as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
but he’s getting close – said again on
Thursday.
“Whoever says it’s possible to reach
in the coming years a comprehensive
Obama agreement,” he announced before meeting
delivers a Obama’s benighted and elderly envoy George
speech at the Mitchell, “Or simply doesn’t understand the
Human Rights reality.”
Campaign Across Arabia, needless to say, the Arab
National potentates continue to shake with fear in
Dinner in their golden minarets. That great Lebanese
Washington. journalist Samir Kassir – murdered in 2005,
quite possibly by Obama’s new-found Syrian
chums – put it well in one of his last essays.
“Undeterred by Egypt since Sadat’s peace,”
he wrote, “convinced of America’s unfail-
ing support, guaranteed moral impunity by
Europe’s bad conscience, and backed by a
nuclear arsenal that was acquired with the
help of Western powers, and that keeps grow-
ing without exciting any comment from the
international community, Israel can literally
do anything it wants, or is prompted to do by
its leaders’ fantasies of domination.”
So Israel is getting away with it as usual,
abusing the distinguished (and Jewish) head
of the UN inquiry into Gaza war crimes
– which also blamed Hamas – while joining
the Americans in further disgracing the craven
Palestinian Authority’s “President” Mahmoud
Abbas, who is more interested in maintaining
his relations with Washington than with his
own Palestinian people.
He’s even gone back on his word to refuse
peace talks until Israel’s colonial expansion
comes to an end. In a single devastating sen-
tence, that usually mild Jordanian commenta-
tor Rami Khouri noted last week that Abbas
is “a tragic shell of a man, hollow, politically
impotent, backed and respected by nobody”.
I put “President” Abbas into quotation marks
since he now has Ahmadinejad’s status in the
eyes of his people. Hamas is delighted. Thanks
to President Obama.
Oddly, Obama is also humiliating the Ar-
menian president, Serg Sarkisian, by insisting
that he talks to his Turkish adversaries with-
out conditions. In the West Bank, you have to
forget the Jewish colonies. In Armenia, you
have to forget the Turkish murder of one and
a half million Armenians in 1915. Obama
refused to honour his pre-election promise
to recognise the 20th centuryis first holocaust
as a genocide. But if he can’t handle the First
World War how can he handle World War
Three?
Obama advertised the Afghanistan conflict
as the war America had to fight – not that anar-
chic land of Mesopotamia which Bush rashly
invaded. He’d forgotten that Afghanistan was
another Bush war; and he even announced
that Pakistan was now America’s war, too. The
White House produced its “Afpaki” soundbite.
And the drones came in droves over the old
Durand Line, to kill the Taliban and a host of
innocent civilians. Should Obama concentrate
on Al Qaeda? Or yield to Gen Stanley Mc-
Chrystal’s Vietnam-style demand for 40,000
theSun | TUESDAY OCTOBER 13 2009
EPAPIX
more troops? The White House shows the two
of them sitting opposite each other, Obama
in the smoothie suite, McChrystal in his bat-
tledress. The rabbit and the hare.
No way are they going to win. The neocons
say that “the graveyard of empire” is a cliche.
It is. But it’s also true. The Afghan government
is totally corrupted; its paid warlords – paid
by Karzai and the Americans – ramp up the
drugs trade and the fear of Afghan civilians.
But it’s much bigger than this.
The Indian embassy was bombed again
last week. Has Obama any idea why? Does he
realise that Washington’s decision to support
India against Pakistan over Kashmir – symbol-
ised by his appointment of Richard Holbrooke
as envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan but with
no remit to discuss divided Kashmir – enraged
Pakistan? He may want India to balance the
power of China (some hope!) but Pakistan’s
military intelligence realises that the only
way of persuading Obama to act fairly over
Kashmir – recognising Pakistan’s claims as
well as India’s – is to increase their support for
the Taliban. No justice in Kashmir, no security
for US troops – or the Indian embassy – in
Afghanistan.
Then, after stroking the Iranian pussycat
at the Geneva nuclear talks, the US president
discovered that the feline was showing its
claws again at the end of last week. A Revo-
lutionary Guard commander, an adviser to
Supreme Leader Khamenei, warned that Iran
would “blow up the heart” of Israel if Israel or
the US attacked the Islamic Republic. I doubt
it. Blow up Israel and you blow up “Palestine”.
Iranians – who understand the West much
better than we understand them – have an-
other policy in the case of the apocalypse.
If the Israelis attack, they may leave Israel
alone. They have a plan, I’m told, to target in-
stead only US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and their bases in the Gulf and their warships
cruising through Hormuz. They would leave
Israel alone. Americans would then learn the
price of kneeling before their Israeli masters.
For the Iranians know that the US has no
stomach for a third war in the Middle East.
Which is why Obama has been sending his
generals thick and fast to the defence ministry
in Tel Aviv to tell the Israelis not to strike at
Iran. And why Israelis leaders – including
Netanyahu – were blowing the peace pipe all
week about the need for international nego-
tiations with Iran. But it raises an interesting
question. Is Obama more frightened of Iran’s
retaliation? Or of its nuclear capabilities? Or
more terrified of Israel’s possible aggression
against Iran?
But, please, no attacks on Dec 10. That’s
when Barack Obama turns up in Oslo to
pocket his peace prize – for achievements he
has not yet achieved and for dreams that will
turn into nightmares. – The Independent