Foreign Policy In Focus

President Obama said during his State of the Union address that he would focus on things he could do alone — without having to depend on a badly divided, partisan Congress. And the powerful imagery he summoned in support of voting rights — real, implementable voting rights, based on the example of a 102-year-old voting rights hero, could and should indeed be a critical focus of executive energy. His story of Desiline Victor waiting six hours to vote in North Miami even brought members of Congress — at least some of them — to their feet in a powerful ovation.

But Obama didn’t seem to include in the list of “things he could do alone” the solo, individual decisions that are fundamental to the role of commander in chief. And that role could include, without Congress having to have any role in it, bringing home all the troops from the failed war in Afghanistan. Ending it. Totally. Quickly.

Bringing home half the troops this year reflects the pressure of massive public opposition to the war — but it’s far from enough. All 66,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan should be pulled out by the middle of this year. And that role of the president, without Congress, could include announcing that the “winding down” of the U.S. war in Afghanistan won't be transformed into an expanding drone war waged in shadows across the world.

When Obama claims that budget cuts “would jeopardize our military readiness,” he is signaling a rejection of what his own nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, acknowledged is the need to cut the “bloated” military budget.

And crucially, when we look at areas in which the President can make executive decisions, independent of the whims of a paralyzed, partisan congress, is there any clearer example than the Obama administration’s strategy of targeting and killing “terror suspects,” along with unknown numbers of civilian “collateral damage” in Obama’s Global War on Terror 2.0? 

We heard a claim about those drone assassinations during his address, that “we have kept Congress fully informed of our efforts.”

There's no way that would fly, given recent revelations of the administration’s efforts to claim a legal right to murder anyone, U.S. citizen or not, who they “believe” may be guilty of something they identify as a terrorist attack. So Obama went on. “I recognize that in our democracy, no one should just take my word that we’re doing things the right way. So, in the months ahead, I will continue to engage with Congress to ensure not only that our targeting, detention, and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world.”

What about the KILLING of the people he calls terrorists, beyond detention and prosecution? The reference to checks and balances referred back to the Justice Department’s claim that “due process” didn’t necessarily mean anything having to do with courts and judges, the claim that a decision by a “decision-maker” — not even necessarily the president — was enough to qualify as due process sufficient to take someone’s life, way beyond taking their liberty and their pursuit of happiness.

Focusing on the executive actions you can take without Congress is a great idea, Mr. President. But not unless that focus includes reversing the individually taken military actions that brought such disgrace on your administration’s first term.

Phyllis Bennis is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. Her books include Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN. www.ips-dc.org

Is barring Mitt Romney from the presidency a good enough reason to pass on voting for a dream ticket?

This author has read every argument for why progressives should re-elect President Obama. He not only agrees with many of them, but his head tells him to vote for President Obama. He knows, though, that once in front of the voting machine, his heart will refuse to abide by the cold-blooded calculus that dictates progressives cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate.

Admittedly, I might be acting out of the vestiges of youthful political purity that I've failed to scour from my political consciousness. That's one voter's shortcoming. But President Obama has come up short on many count, from his affinity for Wall Street and drone strikes to his lack of same for civil liberties. He then added insult to injury by supporting a "grand bargain" on social programs that sells out those who depend on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

When all is said and done, relying on voters to put aside their visceral dislike of a candidate's policies and still vote for him is a risky policy. Progressives and those further left thus find themselves in the same position as tea partiers holding their noses while voting for Mitt Romney. It's long been the province of the right to vote against, instead of for. However much my vote is "wasted," I prefer to vote for someone and his policies.

Especially when the most appealing presidential ticket of my lifetime -- Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala -- is gracing the ballot. As I posted previously.

Ms. Stein and Ms. Honkala's key platform, reports Yana Kunichoff at Truthout, "is the Green New Deal, a jobs program which she says will both build on the success of the New Deal in the 1930s and also help move the United States toward a sustainable, green economy." As an example of their foreign policy platform, which fundamentally revolves around drastically cutting military spending, let's examine excerpts from their stance towards Israel and Palestine.

We recognize that Jewish insecurity and fear of non-Jews is understandable in light of Jewish history of horrific oppression in Europe. However, we oppose as both discriminatory and ultimately self-defeating the position that Jews would be fundamentally threatened by the implementation of full rights to Palestinian-Israelis and Palestinian refugees who wish to return to their homes. …. We reaffirm the right and feasibility of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel. … We reject U.S. unbalanced financial and military support of Israel while Israel occupies Palestinian lands and maintains an apartheid-like system in both the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Israel toward its non-Jewish citizens. Therefore, we call on the U.S. President and Congress to suspend all military and foreign aid, including loans and grants, to Israel until Israel withdraws from the Occupied Territories, dismantles the separation wall in the Occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem, ends its siege of Gaza and its apart­heid-like system both within the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Israel toward its non-Jewish citizens.

Breaking the cycle of voting out of fear is a long process, but one that needs to begin at some point. At the New York Times, Susan Saulny wrote:

A general internist who grew impatient with the social and environmental roots of disease, Ms. Stein said, 'I’m now practicing political medicine because politics is the mother of all illnesses.'"

Meanwhile, Nora Caplan-Bricker of the New Republic wrote:

Stein says her campaign is like “political therapy” for people who have had “self-destructive relationships to politics, like being stuck in an abusive relationship.” And her supporters think it will eventually work: Greens between the ages of 27 and 92 told me they think it’s possible they’ll see a president from the party in their lifetimes—that if they keep offering “political therapy,” mainstream voters who are frustrated by politics will start to want it: maybe in four years, maybe in eight, maybe in 50 or more.

With a president like Romney, most Obama supporters will argue, we may not even last 50 years. But repeatedly settling for short-term emergency management won't bring us closer to long-term solutions that reduce the need for rescues.

For those considering it, voting for third-party presidential candidates is like deciding to have a baby: the time never seems right. That it requires a leap of faith can't be denied.

Research has shown that one of the main reasons Americans don't like politics is conflict between candidates and in Congress.

(Two notes: 1. Though the debate isn't about foreign policy, Focal Points couldn't help but weigh in. 2. The author is not a supporter of President Obama.) 

Acquiescing to the conventional wisdom that Mitt Romney won the debate last night is surrendering to the notion that appearances are all that matters while content counts for nothing.

Romney labors under the handicap of trying to make policies that are unpalatable to the public palatable, which requires him to contort himself or outright lie. Also, his organization seems to have viewed the debate as an opportunity to solidify his drift from the far right in hopes of winning swing voters. But, assuming they were listening and not just watching, that segment of the population, as well as his supporters -- not to mention his opponents -- can't help but be confused by the state of flux in which they found the candidate's message last night.

Let's, though, reduce ourselves to reducing the debate to appearances -- to wit, Romney's aggressiveness. First, seldom remarked upon is how, even in his most buoyant moments, tightly wound Romney seems. His presentation last night only made him look that much more excitable, a character trait that obviously doesn't befit a presidential candidate.

Second, both conservatives and progressives urge their candidates to go on the offensive and puncture what they perceive as the other's lies. But, arguably, much of the American public prefers that conflict and aggression be confined to reality TV shows.

One of my key electoral handbooks is Stealth Democracy: Americans' Beliefs About How Government Should Work (Cambridge University Press, 2002) by political scientists Elizabeth Theiss-Morse and John Hibbing. Using focus groups and polls, the authors, as you may know, determined that more of the American public doesn't participate in democracy because of an aversion to conflict in, say, town meetings and between candidates. The message that Americans are too soft for democracy aside, incivility in politics seems to make them as uneasy as corruption.

Like a spurned lover who doesn't get the message, President Obama may have clung to his dream of bipartisanship with Republicans too long. But, outside of Washington, civility and cooperation in politics are alive and well. Most Americans believe those are principles to which politicians should adhere. Viewed through that prospective, Romney may have seemed less like an attack dog than a mad dog.

Holding the director of "Innocence of Muslims," however objectionable a film, responsible for murder doesn't pass the legal smell test.

In his speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, September 25, President Obama denounced the now notorious film denigrating the Prophet Muhammad as "crude and disgusting." He also declined to call the film a catalyst for the tragic deaths of four Americans on September 11 at the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Instead, President Obama rightly reaffirmed America’s commitment to freedom of expression and shined a light on extremists.

At the heart of the discourse over the incident is the position that Islam forbids any depiction of its founder. This belief should be respected. In her initial speech condemning the deaths, Secretary Clinton noted that America has always stood for religious tolerance. And so we stand today.

Yet, rather than seizing an opportunity to explain the significance of depicting Muhammad and to explore various perspectives on the violence, some commentators and even world leaders, such as newly-elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, suggest that the film constitutes incitement. The implication is that by providing a representation of Muhammad – just like burning a Quran – the creator is inciting Muslims to commit violence. This argument conveniently shifts the blame to the filmmaker.

As last week’s speech makes clear, however, the incitement debate doesn't work. Along with our acceptance of people of all races and religions, America also honors a strong tradition of respect for freedom of expression, grounded in the U.S. Constitution. This tradition allows criticism of religion, including President Obama's own Christian beliefs, as he stated in his address. But violence holds no place in this equation.

Societies do place limits on rights of expression, and these conditions vary based on community beliefs. There is no absolute right to free speech – even in the United States. To push the debate forward, we must understand these relative norms. The internationally recognized crime of incitement, however, generally prescribes that there must be direct incitement to commit a crime. To be direct, the alleged inciter must have intended to induce his audience into the commission of the crime, or at least have been aware of the likelihood of its commission due to his conduct.

To call these actions incitement begs the question – what crime did the filmmaker induce or know he was likely to induce his audience to commit by lobbing it out into the Internet? Murder? The film may have been distasteful, insensitive, and created to inflame certain viewers. Accordingly, in a free society, protests against it should be permissible and legal. A disturbing assumption, however, anchors the incitement argument with respect to events in Libya: Islam permits individuals to commit violence in response to representations of Muhammad. It follows that the filmmaker knew acts of murder might be a consequence of his actions.

The “depiction equals violence” scenario puts the filmmaker on the legal hook. It seems incredulous, however, that the second largest religion worldwide would condone the murder of innocent civilians – diplomats from the very same nation that supported them, along with France and the United Kingdom, through the revolution. The alternative is too ridiculous, and horrifying, to entertain. As President Obama noted Tuesday, “There is no speech that justifies mindless violence.  There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents.” Reactions in Libya to the violence, including the statements of their newly elected Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur, indicate that many Libyans agree.

The more likely scenario, promulgated by President Obama, is that these murders are the work of extremists. Recent acts of destruction throughout Libya and in its neighbor Mali – in which Salafists have used bulldozers and pickaxes to damage Sufi mosques considered idolatrous, including ones in UNSECO World Heritage Site Timbuktu – support this phenomenon. The splintering of Islam, just like the factionalized components of modern day Christianity, is on the rise. As with relative free speech norms, the current state of Islam must enter the dialogue.

Blaming the filmmaker is not the answer. This approach is futile not only for its dangerous precedent for free speech and condemning views on Islam, but also because it is impractical in a digital era. As President Obama told the UN General Assembly, “In 2012 … the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete.” We must therefore drop the illusory incitement debate. The consequences of failure to do so are grave. Without an acknowledgement of the true causes of this violence, Libyans will continue to face the risk of being high jacked by extremists seeking to hinder the journey to democracy. In his speech, President Obama reminded us that when Ambassador Stevens died, Libyans said he was their friend; and so the United States should make the Libyans ours.

Annie Castellani is a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit law firm, the Public International Law & Policy Group, where she focuses on transitional justice, constitution drafting, and civil society development in Libya and other post-conflict nations. Her views are independent.

Should President Obama hold Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah's hand like George W. Bush did?

A reference to “personal” relationship appears five times in the headline story “In Arab Spring, Obama Finds a Sharp Test” by Helene Cooper and Robert Worth in the September 25 edition of the New York Times and there is an additional reference to the President’s alleged “impersonal style.” It seems, the report says, that much of the quandary the U.S. finds itself in the Middle East derives from the fact that Obama “has not built many personal relationships with foreign leaders.” One piece of evidence cited is that he was not on good enough terms with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Reading all this, my mind quickly went back to late April 2005 when the Times reported, “Mr. Bush even held the crown prince's hand, a traditional Saudi sign of friendship, as he guided Abdullah up the steps through a bed of bluebonnets to his office, the very picture of Saudi-American interdependence.”

The Cooper-Worth story cites an unnamed U.S. diplomat in Bahrain as saying that had Obama cultivated a closer relationship with the Saudi monarch “he might have bought time for negotiations” between the Bahraini authorities and the opposition. “Instead, the Saudis gave virtually no warning when their forces rolled across the causeway linking Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and the ensuing crackdown destroyed all hopes for a peaceful resolution.”

I suspect the word “virtually” is important here because Washington was warned in advance by Riyadh. In any case, if U.S. intelligence agencies remained unaware as the Saudis rounded up troops from other Gulf monarchies for the invasion of Bahrain, their powers of observation are woefully inadequate.

Can the success of the Saudis and their Bahrain cohorts and much of the problems that have arisen in the region be even remotely traced to Obama’s alleged “character trait” and “impersonal style”? A dubious proposition at best. There is, however, another matter the Cooper-Worth history reveals that is of great importance: the inadequacies of major media reporting while events like the brutal crackdown in the gulf was transpiring.

“On March 14, White House officials awoke to a nasty surprise: the Saudis had led a military incursion into Bahrain, followed by a crackdown in which the security forces cleared Pearl Square in the capital, Manama, by force,” wrote Cooper-Worth. Sure. “The moves were widely condemned, but Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton offered only veiled criticisms, calling for “calm and restraint on all sides” and ‘political dialogue’,” they continued.

“The reasons for Mr. Obama’s reticence were clear: Bahrain sits just off the Saudi coast, and the Saudis were never going to allow a sudden flowering of democracy next door, especially in light of the island’s sectarian makeup,” wrote Cooper-Worth. “Bahrain’s people are mostly Shiite, and they have long been seen as a cat’s paw for Iranian influence by the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In addition, the United States maintains a naval base in Bahrain that is seen as a bulwark against Iran, crucial for maintaining the flow of oil from the region.”

“We realized that the possibility of anything happening in Saudi Arabia was one that couldn’t become a reality,” William M. Daley, President Obama’s chief of staff at the time,” told the Times reporters. “For the global economy, this couldn’t happen. Yes, it was treated differently from Egypt. It was a different situation.”

The problem is that neither the Times nor any of the other Western mass media told the story that way at the time. Why? Go back to the story about the hand-holding stroll through the garden at Bush's Texas address.

The April 25, Times Story by Richard Stevenson noted that while many things were discussed at the Crawford ranch, “the focus was on oil prices.”

“Officials from both sides emerged from the meeting to say there was agreement on the value of Saudi Arabia's signaling to global markets that it would push down prices over the long run as demand for energy increased,” the report said. “American officials said they hoped the Saudi policy might put immediate downward pressure on oil prices, even though the expansion plan has been public for weeks.”

“The crown prince arrived at the Bush ranch late Monday morning from Dallas, where he had met Sunday with Vice President Dick Cheney, who was briefed on the Saudi production plan,” read  the Times story. “Reflecting the importance of the meeting to the administration, Mr. Bush was joined for the meeting here by Mr. Cheney; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Mr. Hadley; Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; and Fran Townsend, the White House's homeland security adviser.”

What the Saudis got or requested in return for the never-stated-explicit promise to increase oil production is unclear but the report said “the two sides cited progress on a variety of fronts” and “Saudi officials said only technicalities remained in negotiating a trade deal with the United States, a big step toward Saudi Arabia's goal of joining the World Trade Organization. The two governments agreed to work toward making it easier for Saudi students and military officers to study and train in the United States.”

Saudi Arabia became a full WTO member December 11, 2005.

Unnamed Arab officials told Cooper and Worth that Obama is “a cool, cerebral man who discounts the importance of personal chemistry in politics.” “You can’t fix these problems by remote control,” said one Arab diplomat with long experience in Washington. “He doesn’t have friends who are world leaders. He doesn’t believe in patting anybody on the back, nicknames.”

More likely what they really meant is that Obama doesn’t get it on too well with despots. He seems to have hit it off quite well with the likes of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

As the UN General Assembly session was getting underway, Cooper and Worth wrote, “In many ways, Mr. Obama’s remarks at the State Department two weeks ago — and the ones he will make before the General Assembly on Tuesday morning, when he addresses the anti-American protests — reflected hard lessons the president had learned over almost two years of political turmoil in the Arab world: bold words and support for democratic aspirations are not enough to engender good will in this region, especially not when hampered by America’s own national security interests.”

Or the price of oil.

For that U.S. Presidents have for decades shown a willingness to hold hands with just about anyone.

President Obama is no anti-imperialist. And our country’s standing and reputation in the international community is being ill-served by the continuing drone attacks that take the lives of innocent women, men and children. The same can be said for framing the one-sided framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict the way the President did in his UN address September 25. Ditto for the continued suggestion that tyranny should be met with stern outside interference in Libya or Syria but not Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. The cause of Washington’s problems in the Islamic world is not personality but policy.

Carl Bloice, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, is a columnist for the Black Commentator. He also serves on its editorial board.