going through the motions

Does President Obama seriously believe the Israelis and the Palestinians can achieve a peace deal? I doubt it. So what can he possibly hope to achieve by the planned year long peace talks? If the talks fail, as they almost certainly will, Obama will look even lamer than he does now. The only way the talks can succeed is for the US to threaten to dump Israel, by cutting off military and financial aid, unless and until Israel curtails its expansionary settlement building. I just don't see that happening. Obama backed off when Netanyahu called his bluff on settlements last year, and his entire Presidency is characterized by a general lack of backbone.

Unless the Israelis get a super push from the US they will happily continue down the expansionary path. The Israelis will talk and talk and talk. And as they talk the settlements will expand, and more and more Palestinian territory will be occupied and annexed. It's a wonderful stalling tactic for them. If the Palestinians walk out they will say they tried. If the Palestinians make concessions, as they always have, Israel will eventually renege on its part of the bargain. Just as the US broke just about every treaty it ever made with the Indians.

In the unlikely event that Israel's negotiators make concessions, either the Israeli parliament will reject it or the government will have to make war on the settlers. Why should they give up anything when they are winning, with America's continued backing all but guaranteed?

So why are the Palestinians there at all? Well it is only Fatah for a start, the party that lost in the Palestinians' last democratic election. Because Fatah relies on the limited foreign aid it gets to prop itself up. If Fatah walks out that aid is in jeopardy. But even Fatah has its limits. If the temporary partial freeze on settlements is not extended there is no way they can save face with their people. They would be conceding defeat before the process is even begun.

How can there be peace talks when one party continues to wage war? Israel's illegal occupation and annexation of Palestinian territory is what the hostilities are all about.

Only the US can put a peaceful stop to Israeli expansion and it simply won't. Israel intends to continue its unrelenting 60 year expansion until every Palestinian is either dead, permanently exiled or confined to concentration camps. The final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians only hope is for enough foreign military intervention to do at least some damage to Israel. If these hostilites do break out the US will find itself hopelessly trapped in the Israeli camp, and will pay ever more dearly for it.

a tragic figure

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

William Shakespeare 1564-1616: Julius Caesar (1599)



How could we better summarize the unfolding drama of the Obama presidency? Here is a man who held the nation in his hands on the night of his election. But in failing to seize that moment he has condemned his Presidency to limp from disappointment to tragic disappointment.

Certainly he was right to hold out the offer of bipartisanship until his inauguration. But once the Republicans showed their true colors he should have trampled them down and dispatched them with all guns blazing. And a man with his oratorical powers could have scattered them to the far corners and kept them hiding under their rocks for one, if not two congressional terms.

These were the stooges of the disastrous Bush presidency. The cowards who failed to speak up when conservative principles were discarded to the trash. The ignorant who didn't know any better. And the populists who didn't care. In a breathtaking political instant it was they who claimed the mantle of fiscal responsibility, and stole the moral high ground. Emboldened by Obama's weakness they managed to pull off the greatest "flip-flop" in American history. The people who all but bankrupted the country were suddenly the champions of government restraint. Not content with that, they painted their President as a Fascist and a Nazi, and made him the scapegoat for all the nation's ills. Like Dr Goebbels they succeeded in their "big lie" because they had the ruthlessness that Obama lacked, reinforced by a complete lack of moral responsibility, and aided and abetted by a servile media. How else could we have gone straight from Cheney's "deficits don't matter" to cries of "we'll all be ruined"?

As soon as these reptiles poked up their heads Obama should have hammered them down. They were the ones who lead the country into an ill conceived and disastrous war, who dragged down America in the eyes of the world, who decreased taxes while escalating spending, who mismanaged government, who failed to address the health care shambles, and who dared not burst the economic bubble. These disasters should have been labelled Republican disasters, as they truly were. And if at first the message failed to resonate with the American psyche, the accusations should have been repeated over and over until the reality sank in. The sudden conversion back to conservative values should have been ridiculed for the joke it was, and the Republic Party made to re-earn the respect of the American people.

But it wasn't just a matter of letting the Republicans off the hook. The instinct for seeking bipartisanship was a good one, but the way to realize it was to hammer the Democratic Party with the same, if not greater ferocity. The Party has been morally neutered and leaderless for over a decade. There is no unity of vision and nothing resembling a backbone. The Democrats dance to the tune of the same vested interests as the Republicans and are equally despised by the American public. Obama had the same mandate from the American people that Bush had. Reform the electoral system, clean up the corruption and drive the lobbyists out of the temple. And this is what he had promised to do. He had the people with him. He could have gone over the heads of Congress to the people, and shamed both parties into accepting his leadership.

He continued talking like a Washington outsider, but his actions contradicted his words as they began to do in all other areas. Rather than take Congress by the horns he chose to hand over the initiative for vital health care reform to a hopelessly ill-equipped committee of insiders. Perhaps he saw advantage in later playing the knight coming to the rescue of the maiden. But it looked more like Pontius Pilate not wanting to get involved with anything messy. Whatever his thinking, it proved a disastrous miscalculation. He was barely able to rescue himself. He has been playing catch up ever since. For the rest of his term he looks condemned to wade through "shallows" and "miseries". With astonishing rapidity the Democrats lost their Senate "super majority". But even a Democratic minority would have been enough for a President who had the option of appealing directly to the people.

If Obama had chosen to ride the tide in those early days his could have been a great presidency. But there is no recovering from a lost opportunity of this nature, as Shakespeare well knew. Like Hamlet, crippled by his early indecision, Obama can only earn his place in history now by sacrificing himself for the greater good.