sharply-worded critique Dana Millbank, has delivered a sharply-worded critique of Obama's handling of the Israeli State which the WaPo touted as follows:
Netanyahu's victory
Milbank: For all of Obama's pandering, the White House could have flown the white flag of surrender.
This is pretty harsh stuff coming from a paper that has consistently supported Israel and has been unstintingly pro-Empire since the end of WWII.
Millbank points out the actual situation and points to Obama's inability to do anything about Middle East peace.
Obama came to office with an admirable hope of reviving Middle East peace efforts by appealing to the Arab world and positioning himself as more of an honest broker. But he has now learned the painful lesson that domestic politics won't allow such a stand.
What does this mean for the future? Essentially that Muslims who had hope, as many of us have had hope that Obama was different, are sobering up. Well, "different" was just marketing--I think we all realize this now.
Even before Obama's surrender to Netanyahu, Muslims were losing faith that he would be the transformational figure who spoke to them from Cairo last year. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that the percentage of Muslims expressing confidence in Obama fell from 41 percent to 31 percent in Egypt and from 33 percent to 23 percent in Turkey.
I'm not that interested in what Millbank has to say on this. He represents a divide that is obviously growing in official Washington, but where the rubber hits the road Israel is still all-powerful in policy circles. Obama, in contrast, really has very little power and influence in his own government, in my view. His handling of HCR showed political weakness by making the starting point of his reform efforts a modified version of old Republican plans. Nowhere and at no time did he make it very clear what our system is and that there are excellent systems all around the world that cover everybody for half of what we pay. This astonishing fact is probably known by no more than 5% of the population of this country. In foreign and security policy he left the Bush administration policies in place pretty much as-is. The same was true for the financial crisis--his emphasis was no different from Bush. All he has done is provide some stimulus money some of which has gone to productive things and some to pork. He has handled the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico as if he had no power other than to pose. A powerful President, interested in the welfare of the country, would have taken over the operation rather than let BP continue it's cover-up of what is really happening. Executives of that company should be in jail today if there was such a thing as justice in this country--thre isn't. Instead the administration is not indicting Goldman-Sachs execs and traders or BP execs, but whistleblowers in government that harm the corporate/militarist agenda.
President Obama may or may not be a good person but he is not a good President--I'm not sure it's his fault either. I don't believe that the President has the power any more to act independently of the oligarchy. It appears that, regardless of his tendencies. he is not able to act without checking with the main actors in our political drama particularly, finance, military, big pharma and other medical industry players and so on. In foreign and security policy we are held hostage to Israel and it's lobbyists in Washington and it's intel agents in the U.S. intel and military community.
What is interesting is why did Millbank write this? Is it just his honest reaction or an expression of what important players believe in Washigton? I suspect the latter. It will be interesting to see if those that actually favor an Israeli/Palestinian peace actually have any power.
My own sense is the same as it was after the breakdown of the Oslo process during the Clinton administration. There is not a shred of hope for a settlement that is remotely favorable to the Palestinians. The U.S. supports, despite its rhetoric, Israeli settlement policy and has done so since Clinton this killed the peace process in the 90's for which Clinton is directly responsible. The rest has been posturing or just mechanism established for one of two possible scenarios: 1) a Palestinian "state" consisting of Bantustans operating in full apartheid mode as they are now only some stability; or 2) ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and its annexation. Those are the only possible outcomes. Why? Because until now there has been no coherent counter-force to the domination of the Israeli right on American foreign policy. Maybe this Millbank piece is a shot across the bow of the Israeli lobby that a counter-force exists.
We'll see how this plays out.