Obama’s Most Important Battle with Congress — Part 2

We had hoped for the President Barack Obama who spoke at Cairo University in 2009, but he has grown frightened in front of the Republican opposition and bowed his head before Israel, despite personal tension with Benjamin Netanyahu, and we are the ones who have paid the price.

There are many issues facing the new Republican-controlled chambers of Congress. For the Arab reader, I’ve selected the most important issues of contention that will be reflected in Obama’s performance in his last two years in the White House:

– Republicans want to get rid of the health care plan that they’ve named “Obamacare;” they will try to obstruct or halt its most important items if they cannot abolish it completely.

– The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons took effect in 1988. Eight hundred American missiles able to carry nuclear weapons were destroyed, as well as 1,800 Russian missiles. Today, Russia is accused by the United States of breaching the treaty by testing a new intermediate-range missile. Congress would like to return to accumulating nuclear weaponry.

– The budget for the Department of Defense has been set at $585 billion, but lawmakers want an additional $70 billion to combat terrorism, but Obama is trying to tighten public expenditures.

– Obama wants to combat increasing global temperatures and reduce carbon emissions. Congress considers that stance to be against industry, so it opposes the president.

– The houses of Congress support building a shale oil pipeline from Canada to Florida Bay, and can possibly export from there. Spurred on by environmentalist groups, Obama opposes the pipeline.

– The president is seeking to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, one of the promises from his election campaign that he has not yet fulfilled. With 680 prisoners in 2013, the number fell to just 127 last year, and there are two groups of prisoners being released this month.

– The U.S. president has suggested lowering college tuition and said, “I want to bring it down to zero.”* The Washington Post editorial board responded saying that the idea is ambitious but not wise. This is also the opinion of Congress.

– Perhaps the most important battle of the coming months relates to the fact that the $1.1 trillion budget does not include financing the Department of Homeland Security, the financing of which will come to an end by the end of next month. Homeland Security is responsible for border surveillance. This all brings us back to the dispute over immigration.

To everything mentioned above, I add that the known Likudist American press, and the Likud writers in the biggest American newspapers, are against Obama and are in a secret alliance with Congress.** The most important reason for their opposition to Obama is that the president has not followed the dictates of Netanyahu completely and without discussion.

Can the reader fathom that the Likud publication criticized Obama because he ended the “good war” in Afghanistan after 13 years of killing innocent people without even bringing an end to the terrorism of the Taliban? He has likewise been attacked because in his remarks on the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, he said that the shooting was a “terrible terrorist attack,” and didn’t call it “Islamic terrorism” as the Likud media openly proclaimed. On Jan.8, the editorial board of The Washington Post asked why political prisoners had not been released three weeks after the American-Cuban agreement. On Jan. 12, The New York Times responded with a long analysis explaining that all the prisoners had been released.

Obama is not fighting, and cowardice is no policy but the road to political graves. We had hoped that the black president would have been bold.

*Editor’s Note: Obama made this remark in reference to community colleges.

**Editor’s Note: “Likudist” and “Likud” refer to the right-wing political party in Israel, to which belongs President Benjamin Netanyahu.