"A foreign policy of penance has won America no friends."

[unixronin]

That's the subtitle of Fouad Amaji's WSJ article about the failure of Obama as an international statesman.  His policy of abasement, and apology has convinced the Islamic world that he is a weak, vacillating, untrustworthy President with nothing new to say.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance.  No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity.  "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims.  The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

We who have sat here watching the trainwreck could have told him that.  Does the man have NO competent advisors at all? Or is the problem perhaps that he believes he knows better and won't listen to his advisors?

Comments

[hugh_mannity]

Yanno, back 30 years ago when I went to work in Bahrain, there were a couple of dozen pamphlets available from various corporations (Aramco, Brown and Root, Cable & Wireless, et al) giving Europeans and Americans a quick and dirty "how not to offend the locals and get yourself an exit visa" lesson.

It's not really arcane or specialised knowledge. Ergo my suspicion is that the man is too pigheaded to listen to advice.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

People in the US have little understanding of tribal society. On the other hand, tribal people have little understanding of the concept of "nation" . . .

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

A sense of honour would help.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Obama probably has an excellent understanding of tribal cultures; he is half-Kenyan, after all. & without apologies, how do you end a conflict? Perhaps it's just the opinion of the wingnuts who run the WSJ--Murdoch owns it, these days. Really, I wouldn't trust the WSJ opinion pages on anything. They've published some amazing garbage. I still remember them defending James Watt.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Obama probably has an excellent understanding of tribal cultures; he is half-Kenyan, after all.

But he never lived in Kenya, only lived with his Kenyan father for two years, both of them in Hawai'i, and only ever saw his father once again. Why should that convey any understanding of tribal cultures to him? If his father was a foreign exchange student in Hawai'i, he probably wasn't even a part of the actual tribal culture of Kenya himself.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Of course he has also visited his family's village in Kenya three times. Al-Jazeera footage here (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/27/obamas-grandmother-in-al_n_93792.html). It is about half an hour long.

Besides, I don't believe WSJ opinion pieces without independent confirmation, and the WSJ's publisher hates Obama.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Bah. Blaming President Obama for problems that have insoluble for over half a century sounds like begging the question (http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/begging.htm) to me. President Obama's predecessor couldn't solve Palestine or Iran, either. Or Afghanistan.

I couldn't find President Bush's last approval numbers in the Middle East, but I strongly doubt they were materially better than President Obama's. That would have been the a comparison of data points that would have made this something more than a highly visible rant.

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

Actually, this is a big part of the problem. Bush's (or Obama's) approval ratings in the Middle East are possible the single stupidest indicator of how well our foreign policy is going. The purpose of our foreign policy is not about being liked. Our foreign policy is about advancing our interests in the world.

For whatever reason, we've developed a desperate need to be liked everywhere and that is half of our problem...which makes solving the other half really hard, since many of the potential solutions will piss a lot of people off.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Again, I say "Bah." Putting the screws to Israel (http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090608_west_bank_settlements_and_future_u_s_israeli_relations) is not showing "a desperate need to be liked." Neither is doing the same thing to the Palestinians (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1070450.html).

Similarly, working with the IAEA and being part of the G5+1 regarding Iran is being part of the international community, something the first President Bush did wonderfully for Gulf 1. That's not a "desperate need to be liked." That's understanding that international problems require international solutions.

The second President Bush wanted Hussein al-Tikriti ("Saddam" was a nickname.) and used a flimsy pretext to get him. The rest of the world called Bullshit, but President Bush invaded anyway and tried to spin it as America doing the right thing alone. He ignored the fact that his father managed to do the right thing with the cooperation of many other countries.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Bah. Blaming President Obama for problems that have insoluble for over half a century sounds like begging the question to me.

I don't believe the article was blaming him for the problems. It's not as though he had anything to do with creating them. It is, however, pointing out that if he wanted to earn any respect that might perhaps go some way towards at least putting him in a position to try to help solve them, he went about it completely the wrong way.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Given the links I've already posted regarding President Obama playing hardball with Israel and the Palestinians, I don't think an assertion that "Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance" is at all valid.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I'm sensing an awful lot of "Monday morning Quarterbacking" going on. I don't think the Federal Lawsuit challenging Obama's US Citizenship is going to really make anything better, either.

What we need is a massive rally around the Libertarian Party for the next elections - and a clean sweep of both houses of Congress. The net progress of shifting from Democrat to Republican is "ZERO". And vice-versa.