This piece started as an update on our main analysis of the results of Lebanon’s elections, but with the US and British media’s misreading, simplifications, and exaggerations spreading like kudzu, a separate entry is needed.
For Michael Slackman of The New York Times, it’s not just a question of Washington shaping the Lebanese outcome: “Political analysts…attribute it in part to President Obama’s campaign of outreach to the Arab and Muslim world.” You can slap the Obama model on top of any election to get the right result: “Lebanon’s election could be a harbinger of Friday’s presidential race in Iran, where a hard-line anti-American president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may be losing ground to his main moderate challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi.”
Simon Tisdall, normally a shrewd observer of international affairs, trots out the same simplicities in The Guardian of London: “It’s possible that watching Iranians will be encouraged in their turn to go out and vote for reformist, west-friendly candidates in Friday’s presidential election. Lebanon may be just the beginning of the ‘Obama effect’.”
Juan Cole has posted a more thoughtful assessment, even as he opens with the reductionist and sensationalist declaration, “President Obama’s hopes for progress on the Arab-Israeli peace process would have been sunk if Hezbollah had won the Lebanese elections.” And Howard Schneider of The Washington Post, although premature in his anointing of Saad Hariri as Lebanon’s next and primary leader (setting aside not only President Suleiman but also presuming that Hariri will be chosen as PM), sets out “the choice…between a showdown with his supporters, a showdown with Hezbollah or — the more likely outcome — a continued stalemate over the very issues voters hoped they were addressing in Sunday’s balloting”.
What stands out internationally is that the Lebanese still believe in parliamentary democracy and President Obama, so soon after his Cairo lecture, will recognise that this tiny country still believes in free speech and free elections. Another victory for Lebanon, in other words, beneath the swords of its neighbours.
This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the US political chat show, has just posted its interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, conducted in Cairo during President Obama’s tour. It’s little more than a puff piece, with Stephanopoulos (who served as an aide to President Bill Clinton) lobbing up questions such as, “The President has a very high-powered team: Vice President Biden, National Security Advisor Jones, Secretary of Defense Gates. You’ve got envoys for Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea. How do you fit in?” (Surprisingly, Clinton’s answer was not, “I make the coffee.”)
Stephanopoulos did toughen up a bit in subsequent questions. Clinton repeated Obama’s Cairo aspirations on the Israel-Palestine issue, holding the US line against an expansion of Israeli settlements. She maintained the general balance of “engagement” vs. “no nukes” on Iran, and she put out the rhetorical threat, in light of North Korea’s recent nuclear and missile testing, that the US might return Pyongyang to its list of states sponsoring terror.
Still, the fact that the best headline that This Week could cobble together was “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: Obama Has Passed ‘3 A.M. Test’” (rather than saying, for example, “My campaign charge was right: the President is a callow youth who wets his pants at the first sign of crisis) is testimony to the light weight of this interview.
Much has changed in US foreign policy since the Bush Administration pulled its ambassador from Damascus in 2005 to protest Syria’s suspected involvement in the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Since the advent of the Obama Administration, not only the hopes of change in US-Syrian relations but the quest to unblock the Palestinian-Israeli peace process has brought the prospect of dialogue.
The latest signal came on Thursday when two Democratic Congressmen, Senator Edward E. Kaufman of Delaware and Representative Tim Waltz of Minnesota visited Syrian President Assad. According to Syria’s official Arab News Agency, talks focused on “the necessity to remove obstacles that hinder relations and to promote stability in the Middle East”. Specifically, the exchange points to a visit to Damascus by President Obama’s envoy George Mitchell in June.
The Kaufman-Waltz visit is the fourth by US officials or legislators since January. Three days after the hard-line statement of the new Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, “Peace will only be in exchange for peace.”, Democratic Representative Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts and Republican Bob Inglis of South Carolina, met Assad. Read the rest of this entry »
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, conducted earlier this week, was broadcast today. While the discussion has already been overtaken by events in Pakistan and Iraq, we’ll be commenting on important clues to the future course of Obama foreign policy in an analysis tomorrow.
ZAKARIA: Secretary Gates, thank you for doing this.
Ms Saberi’s lawyer Abdolsamad Khorramshahi and her father confirmed that the sentence would be appealed. The sentence was confirmed inside Iran by the Iranian Students News Agency, and there is a short item on the English-language website of Press TV.
The quick sentencing surprises me, as a judiciary spokesman indicated on Tuesday that it would be two to three weeks before the verdict was announced. It could be that judicial forces wanted to show “independence” from political pressure (ironic given that this is a politicised case) and moved quickly.
Alternatively, Iranian political elements — reacting to perceived US pressure or raising the stakes, both in internal Iranian political manoeuvring and in US-Iranian relations — pushed for a lengthy jail sentence. Read the rest of this entry »
HOST JOHN KING: General Petraeus, let me start with the threshold question for you, how many troops will it take? How long will it be.
PETRAEUS: Well, as you know, John, the president and President Bush before him have set in motion orders for troops that will more than double the number that were on the ground at the beginning of the year. We’ll get those on the ground. We’ll take a lot of effort with infrastructure, logistics and so forth, start employing those in the months that lie ahead. They’ll all be on the ground by the end of the summer and the early fall.
And along the way we’ll be doing the assessments. And among those assessments, of course, will be the kinds of questions about force levels, about additional civilians and other resources as well.
KING: General McKiernan, your commander on the ground, had been up-front that he needed even more troops. Why did the president say no?
President Obama has just spoken to unveil the strategy to win in Pakistan and Afghanistan. All the key points flagged up in headlines (and in our analyses today) were ticked: a “perilous situation” which would be met by the extra US training troops, a major increase in US civilian participation, the $1.5 billion in annual aid to Pakistan, and a campaign against corruption.
The language used by Obama, however, raises further concerns. He framed the campaign as one against “Al Qa’eda”:
This is not simply an American problem: far from it. This is an international security challenge of the highest order. Terrorist attacks in London, in Bali were tied to Al Qa’eda and its allies in Pakistan as were attacks in North Africa and the Middle East and Islamabad and in Kabul. If there is a major attack on an Asian, European, or Africa, it too is likely to have ties to Al Qa’eda leadership in Pakistan.
Reducing all the complex political, economic, and cultural dimensions of the situations in Pakistan and Afghanistan to the bogeymen of “Al Qa’eda” may be useful for US domestic politics, but it is a serious mis-representation of the insurgencies on both sides of the border. It does nothing to advance the American approach to local groups who are not simply acolytes of Osama bin Laden.
It looks like the Global War on Terror is alive, well, and being slapped bang on top of Kabul and Islamabad.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the leader of the Kadima Party, has ruled out a coaliation government with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, which finished a narrow second in last Tuesday’s election. Livni wrote in private note to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, captured by television cameras, “”I have no intention of being in a unity government headed by Bibi [Netanyahu] — and don’t hint that.”
Meanwhile, a clear sign that the Palestinian Authority is in trouble as it tries to maintain some position in Gaza. PA leader Salam Fayyad says that salaries of the Authority’s employees in the area are not being paid so the money can be used for aid projects. The PA has been hindered by Israel’s restriction on the movement of cash into Gaza, and its workers have now declared a strike. Read the rest of this entry »
This piece started as an update on our main analysis of the results of Lebanon’s elections, but with the US and British media’s misreading, simplifications, and exaggerations spreading like kudzu, a separate entry is needed.
This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the US political chat show, has just posted its interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, conducted in Cairo during President Obama’s tour. It’s little more than a puff piece, with Stephanopoulos (who served as an aide to President Bill Clinton) lobbing up questions such as, “The President has a very high-powered team: Vice President Biden, National Security Advisor Jones, Secretary of Defense Gates. You’ve got envoys for Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea. How do you fit in?” (Surprisingly, Clinton’s answer was not, “I make the coffee.”)
Much has changed in US foreign policy since the Bush Administration pulled its ambassador from Damascus in 2005 to protest Syria’s suspected involvement in the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Since the advent of the Obama Administration, not only the hopes of change in US-Syrian relations but the quest to unblock the Palestinian-Israeli peace process has brought the prospect of dialogue.
Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi 
HOST JOHN KING: General Petraeus, let me start with the threshold question for you, how many troops will it take? How long will it be.
Afternoon Update (4:15 p.m.): Israeli officials say 
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