Obama’s First Blunder

One thing should particularly concern President Barack Obama: that he has over time become almost equally unpopular in the Islamic world as former President George W. Bush.

Things are not easy for Barack Obama. Even though he is the most intelligent American president in decades, he governs a country of which the international superpower is fading — and the electorate blames not his miserable predecessor, but him. Domestically, he has relied too much on the decency of his opponents, who have started, under the guidance of the Republican clique around Sarah Palin and Fox News, a permanent smearing campaign to tar him. Meanwhile, already a quarter of Americans believe that he is secretly a Muslim and was not born in America. In the eyes of normal people, both are not particularly capital crimes, but for the hysterical conservatives in America they are.

Majority

By wanting to bind what simply does not want to be bound, Obama dared too little to use the solid majority he possessed in Congress. He suffers — a general shortcoming in democracies, also in Holland — too much from the need to be liked, and dared too little to pound his fist on the table. In the area of foreign policy, that is sometimes needed — not in front of archenemies, with whom this helps little, but in front of supposed friends, who do not care about neat admonitions.

Splits

Obama’s main problem comes down to an impossible split: the international relations powers have changed considerably to America’s disadvantage, and most Americans, on the score of deeply rooted national feelings of superiority — God’s own country with a universal Manifest Destiny — refuse to face this and accept the consequence of it: that America can no longer flip the switch elsewhere when another country does something that can endanger the wasteful American way of life. Because the issue with this way of life is that it lives on the rest of the world, and that the upcoming BRIC countries [Brazil, Russia, India and China] now also want their “fair” share in material prosperity.

Distrust

Obama wrestles globally with an enormous distrust toward the intentions of America, a product of years of blindness for the opinions of other countries, culminating in the arrogant unilateralism of Bush.

The attitudes of China and Russia, of Brazil and Turkey concerning Iran, contain also a bit of revenge for what they consider years of contempt. And now that America, measured against its own pompous pretenses of the past, has failed and the credit crisis has also enormously weakened the country economically, these countries seize the opportunity to instill new relations in Washington.

One thing should particularly disturb Obama: that he has become almost as unpopular in the Islamic world as Bush. Of the goodwill that he fostered with his Cairo speech more than a year ago, nothing is left — and of course that has everything to do with the shortsighted Middle East policy, with which America lets itself completely be taken hostage by Israel. As one of Holland’s most talented diplomats, parting ambassador in Jakarta and Islamologist Nikolaos van Dam commented in a Volkskrant interview on Aug. 11 on the Wilderian delusions: “If you want to understand terrorism, then you have to concentrate on the social backgrounds, the political backgrounds. Those bring people to certain actions, their frustrations or ideals. Not the religion.”

Message

This is a message that the necessary self-appointed “Islam specialists” among Holland’s columnists should also take to heart — but they have long forgotten how to listen. The problem in our country is that even some more circumspect commentators, at one point in time, have slowly started to talk favorably of the twisted PVV ideology to not miss the connection with “the people” — or at least the most blatant part of the electorate that passes as such.

In the light of what Van Dam put forth, Obama committed a misstep the week before last — possibly the first real one during his presidency. He threatened Turkey with a weapons stop because of the attitude of Ankara toward Israel and Iran, namely if it does not improve the ties with the first country and does not make worse with the second.

Taliban

Not that I am such a big fan of weapons deliveries: they have, for Washington, often created more misery than fun. Because of that, it fights against self-created Frankenstein’s monster — see the once armed-against-the-Russians Taliban in Afghanistan and the military and nuclear help for the shah, from which currently the ayatollahs in Tehran still profit.

In case of the relations between Turkey and Israel, clearly the wrong country is being punished. The American reluctance, determined by internal electoral considerations, to call to order a quibbling Netanyahu forms a crucial element in the Arab aversion of America — and now thus also of Obama.

It is also essential for the growing sympathy that Iran enjoys among Arab Muslims. As Shibley Telhami, professor at the University of Maryland, recently formulated in the Los Angeles Times: “The angrier the public is with Israel and the United States, the less they worry about Iran, viewing it first and foremost as the “enemy of my enemy.”

A workable relation with Turkey is crucial for the West: It cannot allow itself to continuously offend Ankara, because it has not yet dealt with its own Holocaust guilt complex. That a country of 70 million inhabitants is geo-strategically of immeasurably larger importance than one of 7 million, a child understands. The serious thing is that in that respect, America is still too blinded by its own crooked worldview.