Somebody get Obama a factchecker. Now!
January 28, 2009 by Procrustes
Since The Unpresident “reached out to the Muslim world” January 26th on the Dubai-based Arabic language Al-Arabiya satellite television, there has been a variety of reactions.
Fouad Ajami wrote today in the Wall Street Journal:
“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. [...]
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. [...]
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.
The New York Times informed us today that administration officials said Obama “intends to adopt a tougher line toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as part of a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development.”
However, the most interesting observation comes from Max Boot at Commentary Magazine, who first quotes from PSBHO’s Al-Arabiya interview:
“America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that. And that I think is going to be an important task.”
After scratching his head (which is what RBO would have done had we the stomach to actually dissect PSBHO’s performance; yes, pun intended), Boot did a little fact checking on what was going on in the “Muslim world” 20 or 30 years ago. He writes:
It turns out that in 1989 U.S. fighters shot down two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra. The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan, creating a vacuum that would eventually be filled by the Taliban. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death for “blasphemy.” Hundreds died in Lebanon’s long-running civil war while Hezbollah militants were torturing to death U.S. Marine Colonel William “Rich” Higgins, who had been kidnapped the previous year while serving as a UN peacekeeper in Lebanon.
And 1979? That was an even darker year-in many ways a turning point for the worse in the Middle East. That was, after all, the year that the shah of Iran was overthrown. He was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who launched a war against the West that is still unfolding. One of the first actions of this long struggle was the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran and all of its personnel as hostages. The same year saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to the growth of the mujahideen, some of whom would later morph into Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This was also the year that Islamic militants temporarily seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, an event that drove the Saudi royal family to become ever more fundamentalist.
In other news in 1979, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was hanged by General Zia al-Hak, inaugurating a long period when Pakistan would be under the effective control of the army in alliance with Islamic militants. That year mobs also attacked U.S. embassies throughout the Muslim world from Kabul and Islamabad to Tripoli. The one bright spot in 1979 was the signing of the Camp David Accord between the US, Egypt, and Israel, which did not, unfortunately, auger a “new” Middle East as many optimists hoped.
Before telling you Boot’s response to what he found, here’s what we’d like to know here at RBO — Does The Unpresident have a clue? We didn’t think so. Carry on.
Boot then nails it:
So this is the sort of “partnership” between the U.S. and the Middle East that President Obama would like to see? If his predecessor had suggested any such thing he would by now be a subject of ridicule for late-night comedians and daytime talk show hosts, and rightly so.
This is actually a revealing slip. To wit, it reveals two things: First, Obama’s profound ignorance about most aspects of foreign policy, including the recent history of the Middle East. A second, and related point, is his tendency to blame the ills of the region on the previous administration-something that is only possible if you started following the Middle East around 2001 and have little idea of what came before. It is then all too easy to claim, as Obama did on the campaign trail, that it was George W. Bush’s “disengagement” from the peace process and his “disastrous” war with Iraq that messed up the Middle East. Only someone with a longer view would realize how profoundly messed up the region was long before Bush came into office.
Ah. But let’s look at what The One had to say on Al-Arabiya about his familiarity with the “Muslim world”:
In all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I’ve come to understand is that regardless of your faith – and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers – regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.
Oh, now we get it. It’s about “common hopes and common dreams”. Why bother with facts?
Michael van der Galien at PoliGazette also picked up on The One’s lack of historical knowledge: “This remark is shocking on different levels …. Obama’s interview should cause a major scandal. Words matter, especially words spoken by the president.”
1. He told a Middle Eastern network that he considers America a “colonial power.” [which is going to come back to haunt him and all of us.]
2. It shows that Obama doesn’t know what he’s talking about when dealing with foreign policy / the Middle East. Those who know their history well know that things were not great 30 years ago (1979-1989). It wasn’t all peace and happiness in the Middle East. [...] The Middle East has been a troubled region for the last 1.5 century.
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