Michael Scherer (Time-Swampland): The Scene In Cairo
The streets of Cairo are lined with police, thousands of them, standing erect every 20 or 40 feet, facing away from traffic to look for threats, even if that means looking directly at a wall. Instead of gun holsters, most wear water canteens on their belts.
At Cairo University, where Obama is set to speak, American protesters from Code Pink, the peace group that is a fixture of Capitol Hill, have set up shop with a bull horn, announcing that they have a letter from the Hamas government in Gaza that they would like to deliver to President Obama. (The Ministry of Information tightly controls permits for protests by Egyptians.) Several waves of security checks greeted attendees, including two magnetometers, three separate stations for the inspections of bags, and a dog sniff. Several hours before Obama was set to arrive, the Arabic cable network Al Jazeera interviewed a group of men outside the main hall. Another reporter identified the men as unofficial members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned group in Egypt, who the United States has invited to attend.
The site of the speech is the university's main auditorium, a gilded theater with two rows of balconies and a stage backed by red curtains. In the front rows, a group of Sunni Muslim clerics sat in prime seats, each of them wearing wrapped red and white turbans. The historical name for the room is the Gamal Abdel Nasser Hall, named for the former president of Egypt, who led the country between 1956 and 1970. In the early 1970s, the hall became the site of clashes between student protesters and the government, after then-President Anwar Sadat gave an four-hour address on Egyptian foreign policy here. Student groups, who wanted a more aggressive stance towards Israel, later took over the hall, and had to be forcibly removed by the Interior Ministry. Academic freedom remains an issue in Egypt, with the state appointing deans at universities, and restricting academic travel. In October, a blogger named Ahmed Abdel Kawi, who was a third-year journalism student at Cairo University, lost his university housing after criticizing government policy on his blog.
Obama's aides say he continued to work on his speech even as Air Force One flew in the early morning hours from Riyadh to Cairo. "He got engaged in this at a very early point and has basically provided all of the vision for what should be in the speech and a lot of the content," said Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's senior speechwriters on Wednesday in Riyadh. "For the last week he's really just been frequently holed up with his draft and editing it very heavily."
hilzoy: Settlement Freeze
From the NYT:
"Senior Israeli officials accused President Obama on Wednesday of failing to acknowledge what they called clear understandings with the Bush administration that allowed Israel to build West Bank settlement housing within certain guidelines while still publicly claiming to honor a settlement "freeze." (...)
The Israeli officials said that repeated discussions with Bush officials starting in late 2002 resulted in agreement that housing could be built within the boundaries of certain settlement blocks as long as no new land was expropriated, no special economic incentives were offered to move to settlements and no new settlements were built. (...)
But a former senior official in the Bush administration disagreed, calling the Israeli characterization "an overstatement."
"There was never an agreement to accept natural growth," the official said Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter. "There was an effort to explore what natural growth would mean, but we weren't able to reach agreement on that."
Even if there had been an agreement, so what? The Bush administration does not have the power to bind future administrations in perpetuity, especially not without writing anything down. In this particular case, any such agreement would have been incredibly unwise, not only for us but also for Israel.
There are a lot of things standing in the way of peace in the Middle East. But one is surely the fact that the Israeli government has never been serious about stopping settlement in the West Bank, and another is that while the United States has felt free to criticize the Palestinians for not living up to their commitments, it has never been serious about holding the Israeli government to its word. The fact that Obama seems to be in earnest about freezing the settlements is good for both parties.
I suspect that the relative lack of Congressional pushback against the Obama administration's willingness to get serious on this point is in part the result of the Israeli government's brutality in Gaza. The Israeli government has been acting as though it actually wanted to undermine American support for Israel, and cause people to ask: why, exactly, do we have to give Israel unconditional backing, no matter what it does? (Note: this is very different from wondering why we should support Israel at all.) It should not be surprised to find that its actions have consequences.
From the outset, Israel's settlement policy has been designed to create 'facts on the ground' that will be impossible to reverse. And 'natural growth' is not just a matter of adding a room to an existing house, or new "gardens and classrooms". Peace Now claims that the government plans to build 73,000 new homes in West Bank settlements under the rubric of "natural growth", and has already approved 15,156. The government disputes this figure: it says the real number that has been approved is "only" 11,530. That's still a lot of homes, for a lot of people, on land that virtually no one believes Israel is legally entitled to build on.
I agree with Joe Klein:
"The fact is, Israel has to do much more than freeze settlements: it needs to dismantle them, and open up the West Bank roads exclusively used by Jewish settlers to Palestinian use; and tear down the barrier wall in any locale that doesn't conform to the 1967 green line. It certainly needs to send a clear message to the extremists who are rioting on the West Bank today, in support of their illegal outposts--that this sort of behavior will no longer be tolerated. If Israel is going to demand--rightly--that the Palestinians control their terrorists, Israel is going to have to crack down on its own provocateurs."
- jayackroyd disagrees with Klein:
Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 3:54 am
with respect, I think you are missing the story here, Joe. Obama's widespread distribution of the speech is changing the diplomatic game. Combine that with (we will see if he really sticks with it) his plan (via NYT) to to tell the truth about the nature of mid east conflict and we are looking at a transformative approach to diplomacy in the region.
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I have just tweeted that this admin looks to be not R v D but rather graft v governance. that conflict is not partisan, but it is deep. Israeli claims of secret deals on settlements is just the icing.
Damascus
The buildup for President Obama's speech today in Cairo has been prodigious, and not least by the White House, which has held the sort of briefings for journalists that usually attend a State of the Union address and also plans to translate the speech into 13 languages. The expectations are enormous. Brother Howard Fineman, writing in that other newsmagazine, compared the Cairo Address to Obama's Philadelphia speech on race last year, which helped to extricate him from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright situation and frame him as judicious moderate on racial issues. But the real purpose of this speech is not so immediate.
I'd say the best precedents are the two Berlin addresses given by American Presidents, at the beginning and the end of the construction of the Berlin Wall. John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech was a full-throated announcement of a continuing American policy--the protection of a free Berlin. Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech came near the end of the cold war, and was a full-throated call for a Soviet surrender.
The Obama speech will be neither, I'd guess--but it will contain elements of both. It will revise America's posture in the region, toward a more respectful, ameliorating stance than the arrogant pushiness that marked the Bush Administration, especially in the leadup to and prosecution of the war in Iraq. Obama has already begun laying the groundwork toward that, especially in his Ankara speech. But what comes next? The immediate question will be about specifics: what sort of promises or demands will he make? Will he again call on the Israeli government to halt its illegal settlements? Will he call on the Arab world, including Hamas, to officially recognize Israel--or make diplomatic gestures leading toward recognition--in return? Will he renew the "freeze for freeze" offer--a sanctions freeze if the Iranians stop enriching nuclear fuel--or will he send another signal to the Islamic Republic that the U.S. wants to begin comprehensive negotiations soon?
But the immediate signals are not nearly as important as the long-term change of tone. Obama is proposing diplomacy--and diplomacy moves slowly. As James Baker told Campbell Brown, when asked about how you achieve progress in the region last night:
Well, you get there by doing what the president is doing.
Show these people that we value the relationship that has existed for
many years between their countries and our country. Pay them attention,
which he is certainly doing. Meet with them, listen to their concerns. And explain to them the importance of U.S. policy goals. That's a way you get there. And I think it's very healthy that he is doing this.Sometimes things do happen quickly in diplomacy--Anwar Sadat tells Walter Cronkite that he's willing to open talks with Israel--but most often they don't. Obama is still setting the stage, putting the pieces into place. Those who see the speech as an attempt to solve a specific dispute or put pressure on a specific country are looking at this too narrowly. The President wants a general lowering of the temperature in the region. That will take some doing. This will be the start.
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