President Obama’s Middle East speech yesterday revealed an astonishing reversal of worldview — but, sad to say, presented a deeply troubling policy shift on Israel.
Worldview first: Most of the president’s stirring salute to the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests might well have been delivered by George W. Bush.
It was Bush, after all, who in 2003 affirmed America’s commitment to a “democratic revolution” in the region — and decried “60 years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East . . . for the sake of stability.”
In that respect, yesterday’s speech was Obama’s essential embrace of the Bush Doctrine and its underlying foundation — the active promulgation of democracy in the Middle East.
Almost forgotten was the apologetic tone of Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, in which he listed America’s past affronts to the Muslim world and extended an open hand to Iran with a plea for engagement.
Yesterday, by contrast, Obama blasted Tehran’s “intolerance” and “hypocrisy” — and cited what he very pointedly refused to note two years ago: “its illicit nuclear program and its sponsorship of terror.”
It was also welcome to hear the president — finally — come down hard on Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, charging he has “chosen the path of murder and the mass arrest of [his] citizens.”
Likewise, the president noted the “multiethnic, multisectarian democracy” taking root in Iraq (which, ironically, would never have happened had President Bush heeded Obama’s opposition to Operation Iraqi Freedom).
All of which makes his game-changing embrace of a key Palestinian demand — a future state based on the pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations — so terribly disturbing.
Yes, he reassured Israel of his commitment to its security and right of self-defense, stressing that any Palestinian state would have to be demilitarized.
But it’s the timing that makes the declaration all the more significant — and not just because he’s scheduled to meet today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Obama’s endorsement of the demand comes just as Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas forged a formal unity agreement with the blood-stained terrorists of Hamas, who are committed to Israel’s destruction — and as Abbas reiterated his insistence on UN recognition of a Palestinian state this fall.
That, Abbas says, allows him to pursue international sanctions against Israel “from the position of one UN member whose territory is militarily occupied by another.”
As Jackson Diehl wrote in The Washington Post, “this is a formula for war — or ‘the third intifada,’ as Palestinians are already calling it.”
Yes, Obama said that “Palestinian leaders will have to provide a credible answer” to the question of “how can one negotiate with a party that [refuses] to recognize your right to exist.”
But he failed to acknowledge the obvious: You can’t.
So, in that respect, the speech offered little that was new.
But Bush sure must have loved the rest of it.