According to Martin Peretz, Obama is influenced by Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman. Friedman is an apologist and admirer of Communist China and Zakaria thinks that the American era is over and is glad of it. Peretz compares Friedman’s wish that America were more like China to Charles Lindbergh’s wish that America could be more like Nazi Germany. Too bad that Obama does not take advice form the brilliant Fouad Ajami who writes op ed columns for The Wall Street Journal and other publication, who actually knows his stuff.
by Martin Peretz
Wowy, zowy, Obama is doing his own thinking on the Middle East and here’s the even worse news: He’s taking advice from Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria.
These pathetic tidings about the inner Barack Obama, who puts his very own twist on all things, particularly Arab and Muslim matters, and the other Barack Obama, who needs counsel from two political therapists, famous and even clever but not especially deep, come from the subtle and highly reliable journalist Mark Landler in The New York Times. These tidbits are not contradictory. Zakaria’s diagnosis, at least for the last few years, is that America is over, just plumb over. Or, to use the ill-omened word from his The Post-American World, “enfeebled,” which implies continuous decline. Enfeebled nations do not, after all, usually rise again. Zakaria was, however, more than a bit mortified by being called a presidential adviser, although it was he who labeled himself. He posted a statement on Saturday saying, well, that he didn’t really advise but spoke to Obama several times in face-to-face meeting about the Arab Spring (which, by the way, in my view is fast becoming Arab winter, like the east coast winter last season.) Anyway, if he is trying to establish a difference, it’s not a distinction.
But why should I paraphrase? Read it all here:
The characterization that I have been “advising” President Obama is inaccurate. Over the last few months I’ve had a couple of conversations with the president, off-the-record. At no point did President Obama ask me for advice on a specific policy or speech or proposal, nor did I volunteer it. I know that he has had similar meetings with other columnists.
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What’s strange about his putative advice is that Obama didn’t need it. He and Zakaria are in fundamental agreement. America is weak. America is poor. America is politically sundered. The only real difference between them is that the president believes that America is historically and morally compromised. But rising upper class minority Muslim from Bombay, rising American from Yale and Harvard (and now a member of the Yale Corporation, from which perch he counseled the president of the university and the university press not to permit images of the Prophet to appear in a book it was publishing, The Cartoons That Shook the World by Danish scholar Jytte Klausen), Zakaria was once a supporter of the great imperium. So I don’t know whether he thinks it is a matter of ethics. It’s more a matter of “can do” or “cannot do.” He thinks it cannot.
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He has numbed the nation’s idealistic impulses by playing it oh, so cool—not agitated by evil or especially perturbed by calamity. I wonder, in fact, how he maintained his energy and perseverance as a “community organizer,” since the vocation itself doesn’t have real gauges of success. Or maybe that was its secret. If there’s no recognized measure of achievement or, for that matter, of failure, you go on doing what you’re doing “till the cows come home.” Or until you get a real job. Obama appears to be allergic to passion, although he can get a bit nasty when some foreign leader doesn’t quite accept a simple remedy—his simple remedy—to an intricate strategic dilemma. Take the president’s irritable manner with Israel and its prime minister. Yup, Zionism is something he just doesn’t get. And also doesn’t like. (Did the Obamas’ Passover show seder include the crowning prayer, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” which even the Daily Kos said “ends every seder around the world”? I doubt it. But he did include a lame and certainly premature allusion to “modern stories of social transformation and liberation unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa.” From his mouth to God’s ears. Still, is this really the Passover of the Arabs? I am sure it is not.)
In contrast to Zakaria, Friedman is not embarrassed by being seen as the president’s counselor. His column is the closest thing there is to an up-front advice column, like Ann Landers and now her daughter, my old flame of half a century ago, Margo Howard. Tom even writes open letters to those he wants to exhort, advise, dissuade. It’s an old journalistic trick, the oldest trick in the book, really. When you are desperate for a hook you use this one. I should admit that I nurse a certain envy towards him and doubtless it is because of his sway over millions. We are friends but only because he is tolerant. In any case, my first tangle with him was after he published From Beirut to Jerusalem, which I reviewed hostilely in these pages. Anyway, Tom’s lens for seeing contemporary America is through contemporary China. He wishes America were China, almost the way some native fascists like Charles Lindbergh wanted America to be like Germany and the way ignorant but “idealistic” oodles of American intellectuals and radical Jewish immigrants wanted the country to be like Soviet Russia. The Chinese can do everything. America can do nothing. Except push the peace process.
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I wonder what Obama can really learn from Zakaria and Friedman, neither of whom know Arabic, neither of whom know the sources (arcane or simply erudite), both of whom jump from one fashionable topic to another. Today, it’s energy. No, that was yesterday. Wouldn’t the president have been better off and the country better off, too, if he had sat down with, say, Fouad Ajami, who doesn’t agree with him but has the learning to explain why. Maybe Obama should also sit down with Paul Berman, who has explored the ties between radical Arab politics and radical Muslim theology, a generally forbidden topic, especially in this White House. (Berman has done much of his essay writing in this magazine.) Or is it the president’s habit to talk only with people who agree with him?
In one of his almost weekly columns, Ajami has pinioned the administration’s “look away” attitude towards the Assad tyranny between both strategic and moral imperatives. Ajami quotes an exchange between The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg asks: “Would you be sad if his [Bashar Assad’s] regime were to disappear?” Hillary: “It depends on what replaces it.” Sequestered in this breezy answer is the Obama entourage’s firm belief in Assad’s moderation and reform commitments. Even now, after the massacre of nearly 1,000 Syrians, some—to be sure—nasty pietistic Muslim Brothers. (I hope you don’t attribute sexism to me if I remind readers that another secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was convinced of Papa Assad’s reforming instincts. Poor morally compromised lady: She was the one who, with Susan Rice, then her assistant secretary for African affairs and now our ambassador to the U.N., also labored hard and succeeded in keeping America from intervening in the Rwanda genocide.)
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Of course, it is not exactly the president’s lack of knowledge about the Arabs (and the Jews, for that matter) that has left his Middle East policy in shambles. It is the continuous Arab sandstorm of sanctimony and duplicity which has blinded him to the precise underlying realities the sandstorm was meant to conceal. He is a victim of their deceit and his own credulity. But it is even more than that: He believes in his own powers to discern and to persuade as a function of that discernment. Now that virtually every society in the region has upended Obama’s benign take of their reality, it remains to be seen whether he himself can adjust his inner lens to accommodate the brute bedrock.
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Syria is where the new paradigms of Arab history will be made. The brutality of the Assad dictatorship is legendary, and it has gone over 40 years from father to son. No one is willing to predict whether the family will survive or be taken out. If it survives, it will be more dictatorial than anyone imagined possible. If it is overthrown, it will be replaced by a regime equally cruel but more pious, much more pious. It is not easy for outsiders to decide what they want.
But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have already more than indicated that they prefer the continued dominion of Bashar Assad. You have to be pretty cold-blooded to make a choice like that. There are other consequences to this decision. Syrian dominion over Lebanon will continue. The Syrian alliance with Iran will continue. Syrian influence over Turkey will continue, perhaps intensify. Syrian intrusion in Iraq will continue. Syria might even get its chance to be on the U.N. Human Rights Council. Hey, and here’s a good thing: The Golan will remain a part of Israel.
Read the rest Tel Aviv Journal: President Obama’s Wrongheaded Middle East Counselors
Tags: Charles Lindbergh, Fareed Zakaria, Martin Peretz, Tom Friedman
