name: Yuram Abdullah Weiler

Quantum Change or Short Changed?

26 November, 2008

“In 2008, as in previous election years, serious candidates for the highest office in the land will go to considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one foreign country—Israel—as well as their determination to maintain unyielding U.S. support for the Jewish state,” conjectured John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard in 2007.[i]

 

The Professors were absolutely correct.  On 4 June 2008, then presidential hopeful and now President-elect Barack Hussein Obama stood before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and declared his loyalty to the Zionist regime.  “As President I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security,” he affirmed, emphasizing, “I will insure that Israel can defend itself from any threat from Gaza to Tehran.”  As if this wasn’t enough, in Nixon-like rhetoric he stressed, “Now let me be clear; Israel’s security is sacrosanct.  It is non-negotiable,” adding, “there’s no greater threat to Israel or to the peace and the stability of the region than Iran.”[ii]

 

Despite requiring their candidates to swear allegiance to Israel and failing to grasp that the real voting for U.S. President takes place in the Electoral College,[iii] most Americans will insist that the election is “democratic” and transparent.  As evidence exists to suggest the 2000 and 2004 elections were manipulated,[iv] I had the same fears about the 2008 election as the plaintiffs in an Ohio voting fraud case, who warned “The public has a need and right to know, before the next presidential election, that the top Republican IT expert shares a concern about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems to fraudulent manipulation, and that this is not just ‘conspiracy theory.’”[v]

 

Understandably, I conjectured that we would see Obama with a slight lead over McCain on election night only to wake up to news of another Republican coup by a narrow margin, but I was wrong.  As pre-election polls gave McCain less than 200 electoral votes and Obama over 300, more than the 270 required to assure victory,[vi] manipulation would have been difficult, but not impossible.  A Yale study concluded that a one-vote change per voting machine can reverse the outcome of a close election and, “an adversary willing to change a few more votes can swing states with much wider margins.”[vii]

 

In contrast to narrow margins in prior elections, the Obama win appears to be a clear signal that a majority of U.S. voters expect real change.  While post-election euphoria over America’s first Black President-elect is certainly understandable, do Americans have a rational basis for such optimism or is expecting a new president backed by recycled bureaucrats pushing the same old dogmas simply an exercise in self-delusion?

 

Obama gave the first hint of his foreign policy direction by selecting as his Vice Presidential running mate the hawkish Senator Joseph Biden, who voted for the Lieberman-Warner amendment in 2002 that authorized Bush’s invasion of Iraq.  Addressing the U.S. Senate, Biden insisted, “Saddam is dangerous.  The world would be a better place without him.  But the reason he poses a growing danger to the United States and its allies is that he possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons.”[viii] 

 

So far, Obama’s advisors and appointees do not justify expectations of significant change in U.S. foreign policy but rather imply a return to a Clintonian approach.  Among Obama’s top foreign policy advisors is Madeline Albright, who gained infamy for replying, “We think the price is worth it,” when asked about the deaths of over half a million Iraqi children due to the U.S.-sponsored sanctions.[ix]  Albright represents what one Council on Foreign Policy (CFR) staff member calls “muscular diplomacy,”[x] which apparently means a façade of diplomacy with economic sanctions backed by ultimatums and not-so-subtle threats of military force.

 

Also among Obama’s key foreign policy advisors are former Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and former Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice.[xi]  A protégé of Albright and characterized as both pragmatic and abrasive, Dr. Rice has been selected to head Obama’s foreign policy transition team.  She passionately favors sanctions, no-fly zones and military force to end the Darfur crisis, perhaps as a reaction to the weak U.S. response to the Rwanda genocide during her tenure in the Clinton administration.  “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required,” she recently confided.[xii]

 

In an essay emphasizing American exceptionalism entitled “Confronting Backlash States” Lake writes, “As the sole superpower, the United States has a special responsibility for developing a strategy to neutralize, contain and, through selective pressure, perhaps eventually transform these backlash states into constructive members of the international community.”[xiii]  In a later briefing, Mr. Lake exposes an obvious orientalist slant, stating, “As globalization proceeds, the Muslim world finds it cannot modernize without the Western values that accompany its innovations.”[xiv]

 

More disturbing is Obama’s appointment of Illinois Congressman, pro-Israeli hardliner and former Clinton chief fundraiser Rahm Israel Emanuel as his White House Chief of Staff.  Characterized as possessing a profane mouth combined with a vicious, attack-dog style, Emanuel is reputedly a devout Jew who sought permission from his Rabbi in order to work on the U.S. financial mess during the Jewish High Holy Days.[xv]  This should come as no surprise following Obama’s pandering before AIPAC, and his previous support of a Senate resolution condoning the brutal Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006.[xvi]

 

Most recently, neither Obama nor Biden criticized the illegal 26 October U.S. helicopter raid on Syria at Hwijeh village near Abu Kamal, which killed eight people.[xvii]  The attack "raises the serious possibility that, even under an Obama administration and an expanded Democratic Congressional majority, such militaristic policies may continue, " predicts Steven Zunes, professor of Politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.[xviii]

 

Understandably, many people in the Middle East share my pessimism, particularly those living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  “Arabs and Muslims are fed up with America's one-sided approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” states Dr Ahmed Yousef, political advisor to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, adding with reservation, "There is still a possibility for the relationship between the U.S. and the Middle East to be repaired, but it will require a quantum change in the attitude of the U.S. administration towards Arabs and Muslims if this is to occur."[xix]

 

Gazans, faced with shortages of food and medicine as a result of the ongoing Israeli siege,[xx] are even less hopeful of change in US policy.  “There is an American strategy in the Middle East and the Palestinian conflict - it supports Israeli policy,” laments Ibrahim Ibrash, a professor of political science at Al Azhar University, adding optimistically, “However, we hope that the new U.S. president will deal with the Middle East conflict and the Palestinian cause according to international agreements.”[xxi]

 

Hezbollah leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah also has warned against unrealistically optimistic expectations for change from an Obama presidency.  “I don't want to anticipate events, but logic dictates that we not bet on changes in injustice or believe that he will be more lenient or less unfair than his predecessor,” he recently remarked.[xxii] 

 

As was my prediction about the election itself, I may be wrong, but I don’t foresee a drastic change in U.S. foreign policy coming from an Obama administration —certainly not in the one-sided U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma.  I’m afraid those who have every right to expect a desperately needed quantum change in U.S. attitude and policies—Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Africans as well as Blacks, Latinos and other oppressed American minorities who supported Obama—are going to be short changed.

 

Yuram Abdullah Weiler

2008-11-25

 

End Notes

Posted by yuram 08:49 | General , Iraq , Palestine , Iran , Middle East , Lebanon , United States | Comment(5) | Permalink