Barack Obama’s UN speech goes from cutting to confused

The Daily Telegraph

Here’s a quick take on President Obama’s just-concluded address before the UN General Assembly:

1. There’s a reasonable chance he’ll have to give another speech reaffirming – sorry, “clarifying” – his commitment to a free and independent Palestine. In short, Barack barracked Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO’s heedless effort to unilaterally attain statehood via plebiscite. Obama, incensed that the Palestinians would go around him in this way after all the work he put into the “peace process,” stuck mainly to a US election-year script on the issue. GOP front-runner Rick Perry has accused this administration of selling-out Israel. So Obama tilted back: America has got an “unshakable” attachment to Israeli security (an old line); men, women and children in southern Israeli are being bombarded with thousands of rockets and mortars from terrorists in Gaza (true); Israeli adolescents grow up knowing that their counterparts in Arab countries are being taught to hate them (long true); and – in a nice little double-barreled blast aimed right between the narrowly spaced eyes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad- the Jewish state faces an existential threat to be “wiped off the map” and the Holocaust is a fact that cannot be denied.

One PLO representative in the audience was shown shaking his head “no” during some of this (contrast to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s blinkless, Aztec-faced stare throughout.). The full statehood bid at the UN Security Council may be averted anyway in a last-minute compromise, as Adrian Blomfeld just reported.

Still, I expect this speech will go down in the Arab Middle East about as well as Obama’s last big regional policy statement, the one about 1967-borders-plus-land-swaps, went down in Jerusalem. It’s amazing that Abbas and Netanyahu can’t strike a deal after both have learned the same hard lesson within the same year: if you embarrass the American president on the world stage, he embarrasses you right back.

2. The line on Syria was very good – probably the best part of the president’s speech (even if his rhetoric and action on the murderous Assad regime has only just caught up to morality). He described the Syrian protest movement as “peaceful.” He accused Damascus of murder, torture and mutilation of thousands of Syrian civilians. And he scandalized the General Assembly, still largely a miscreant’s club of dictatorships, theocracies and juntas, of doing zilch to help a beleaguered people. Also, we need UNSC sanctions. The Syrian flaks in the room looked furious. They ought to defect and seek US asylum before it’s too late.

3. Washington’s position on Bahrain has been muddled for months, owing to the fact that the US Fifth Fleet is hosted there. The Saudi-sponsored Sunni monarchy which rules this tiny but strategically vital Gulf state sees its own domestic protest movement, which is waged by a Shi’ite majority population, as an undisguised Iranian proxy offensive. Arbitrary killings, mass arrests and the rest of it have been perpetrated, as Saudi troops rolled in several months ago to lend a helping hand. Who knows what will happen, but Obama was better off leaving this topic out in the midst of so much Arab Spring praise than he was treating it to euphemistic gobbledygook about “meaningful dialogue.” There was also this hostage to fortune: “[W]e believe the patriotism that binds Bahrainis together must be more powerful than the sectarian forces that would tear them apart.” Uh-huh.

4. Nice try salvaging the US-Russian “reset” by referring to a new START treaty, paid for by a wholesale capitulation to the inescapable reality that is Russia’s refractory government. The country is headed toward fresh presidential and parliamentary “elections” where even the Kremlin-anointed opposition party leader, the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, has decided that he can’t handle being so closely stage-managed. Keep a couple of aspirin and copy of Bertolt Brecht’s Collected Works on hand if you choose to read about how the Speaker of the Federation Council (Russia’s senate) was just selected.

True, Obama smuggled through the back door new US policies that impose travel bans and asset freezes on foreign officials guilty of gross human rights abusers. But really, it’s very paltry that he didn’t have the courage to say the name Sergei Magnitsky. That’d be the fearless Russian attorney who exposed a $230 million tax fraud carried out by Moscow tax bureaucrats and Interior Ministry police officers (the sort of chaps who would have made Serpico blush). Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 for the very crime he uncovered. He died an agonised death in pre-trial detention under circumstances that an independent prison monitor termed “murder,” as his persecutors were cleared of any wrongdoing, given top state honours and promotions and allowed to launder millions in ill-gotten wealth through various Swiss bank accounts and dummy companies. The Medvedev-Putin “tandem” is a Punch and Judy show of KGB authoritarianism.

And where’s it been on the Arab Spring, so loftily described by this president? Russian state media is trying its hardest to depict the Syrian protestors as terrorists who ought to be “sanctioned” by the UN if the Assad regime is to be, but that doesn’t change the materialism driving siloviki cynicism. Putin does brisk trade with Assad, mostly arms deals which have amounted to $4 billion since 2006. According to Beirut’s Daily Star, Moscow had already sold Damascus “MiG 29 fighter jets, Yak-130 jet trainers, Pantsir and Buk air defense systems and P-800 Yakhont anti-ship missiles” and Assad still covets S-300 anti-aircraft missiles (these are good at shooting down Nato fighter jets). Syrians picking shrapnel out of their bodies should look for the fine print, “Made in Russia.”

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