NB - Excerpts from Dr. Fouad Ajami’s new book – hit the nail on the head SQUARELY.
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Ajami on Obama
By William Katz
30 January 2009
This is required reading. Johns Hopkins Professor Fouad Ajami has written the best critique so far of the Obama foreign policy, at least the policy we can make out. Ajami doesn’t like what he sees. His arguments are worth studying:
“‘To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,’ President Barack Obama said in his inaugural. But in truth, the new way forward is a return to realpolitik and business as usual in America’s encounter with that Greater Middle East…
“…Say what you will about the style — and practice — of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush’s presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005.”
As Johnny Carson used to say, “How quickly they forget.”
“The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the ‘parochial’ man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor’s diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so.”
Wonderfully stated. Obama did not use the word “democracy” once in his interview with Arab TV.
The fact is that, on the left, democracy means so very little.
“In his desire to be the ‘un-Bush,’ the new president fell back on an austere view of freedom’s possibilities. The foreign world would be kept at an emotional and cultural distance. Even Afghanistan — the good war that the new administration has accepted as its burden — evoked no soaring poetry, just the promise of forging ‘a hard-earned peace.’ The nation had cast a vote for a new way, and had gotten the foreign policy of Brent Scowcroft.”
Scowcroft, Bush 41’s national security adviser, never saw a dictatorship he didn’t like.
“Thus far the political genius of Mr. Obama has been his intuitive feel for the mood of this country…
…I suspect that he is on the mark in his reading of America’s fatigue and disillusionment with foreign causes and foreign places.”
How sad. Sounds somewhat like the 1930s.
“But foreign challengers and rogue regimes are under no obligation to accommodate our mood and our needs. They are not hanging onto news of our financial crisis, they are not mesmerized by the fluctuations of the Dow. I know it is a cliché, but sooner or later, we shall be hearing from them. They will strip us of our illusions and our (new) parochialism.”
September 11th, anyone?
“This war was never a unilateral American war to be called off by an American calendar. The enemy, too, has a vote in how this struggle between American power and radical Islamism plays out in the years to come.
“In another time, the fabled era of Bill Clinton’s peace and prosperity, we were mesmerized by the Nasdaq. In the watering hole of Davos, in the heights of the Alps, gurus confident of a new age of commerce pronounced the end of ideology and politics. But in the forbidding mountains of the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, a breed of jihadists that paid no heed to that mood of economic triumphalism was plotting for us an entirely different future.”
Finally…
“Here we are again, this time led by our economic distress, demanding that the world abide by our own reading of historical challenges. We have not discovered that ’sweet spot’ where our economic fortunes intersect with the demands and challenges of an uncertain world.”
Superb.
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