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Restraint with the White House megaphone

Thursday, June 4, 2009

THEY COULDN’T HELP themselves, telling us about the plush red carpet in the library. Oh, and about catching Malia and Sasha skipping through on their way home from school.

Yes, both the BBC and NPR were completing their somber and serious tasks of interviewing President Barack Obama on the eve of his departure for that much-anticipated speech today in Cairo, aimed ambitiously at the entire Islamic world – but they just had to lord it a bit over their media competitors who didn’t get the prized “get”.

 

In terms, however, of such privileged bits of domestic detail, they were far surpassed by the full-fledged NBC News “Inside the White House” TV special (two hours aired across two nights) which is a forty year-old tradition with that network, usually conducted early in a new presidency - and in this case timed smartly for the Mid East tour and with a Brian Williams interview tacked into it.

 

Some substance in the interviews preemptively ruffled feathers in Israel – notably Obama’s tentative but nonetheless attention-getting idea (voiced, as it happened, to NPR) that he could be strong ally to the Israelis while unaccustomedly telling them the truth ... such as the unacceptability of their extending Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The mere phrase “part of being a good friend is being honest” has been enough to cause caniptions in much of Israel’s media.

 

But none of White House pre-tour interviews picked up on a recent odd mis-step by the often surefooted Obama (above left with Saudi hosts) -- on the Arab side of the Middle East’s always-complex territory.

As my colleague from the Institute of Palestine Studies, the incisive Nadia Hijab pointed out, the Palestinian Authority's President Mahmoud Abbas’ White House visit saw Obama depart from his usual careful reserve, saying “I want to publicly commend President Abbas”.

 

(This untypically rather patronizing praise was for Abbas having insisted that any Palestinian unity government would have to observe the "rules" - conditions for dealing with Hamas, that is - which were laid down by the Big Power grouping “the Quartet” comprising the US, Russia, the European Union and the UN.)

 

The “American embrace”, as Hijab calls it, this warm commendation before the White House press corps’ boom-mikes, is the last thing any Arab leader needs. In fact across vast stretches of the Muslim world these days, it amounts to a kiss of death.

 

Perhaps oddly, it was Vice President Joe Biden (often labeled gaffe-prone, and tarred that way again in this week’s new book from former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe – the first in a fresh rush of post-mortems of the Obama-Biden campaign) who played things with absolute political propriety during his Lebanon trip two weeks ago. He said firmly that he had “not come to back any particular party or any particular person”.

   

  

 

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NORMALLY OBAMA OBSERVES such correctness himself, together with an apt, non-Bushian degree of self-restraint – which is a world away from the messianic, “America-knows-best” approach that in recent years has disgusted so many worldwide. In this restraint he is hewing to the humility in foreign affairs expounded so determinedly by one of his heroes, Reinhold Niebuhr.

 

The mid-century theologian, who’s dead now for 38 years, has a re-issue newly-published of his seminal work “The Irony of American History” with a new introduction by Boston University professor, and former US Army colonel, Andrew Bacevich (who's been much admired in this column). The book's back cover carries Obama’s own words describing Niebuhr as “one of my favorite philosophers”, for voicing the stricture that “we should be humble in our belief we can eliminate [evil, hardship and pain] but we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction”.

 

What this blurb leaves out is how Obama, in an unrestrained and somewhat un-presidential mode, actually began that assessment - which he gave the New York Times columnist David Brooks a couple of months into his campaign.

 

“I love him”, said Obama enthusiastically, embarking on what Brooks decribed as "a rush of words" about the ethicist who taught at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary for thirty years while campaigning variously as an anti-Fascist, an anti-Communist proponent of Soviet "containment" and at the same time a critic of the Vietnam War.

 

Some observers have pointed to Niebuhr’s “realist” school of thought – avoiding what he decried as America’s “special temptations to vanity and arrogance” – as lying at the heart of Obama’s decision to deliver his major address today in an Arab county notorious for its authoritarianism.

 

Egypt’s inappropriateness as a venue for trumpeting a clarion call to progress is embodied by the occasion’s host, President Hosni Mubarak (above right) who has held on to dictatorial power for 28 years. But for all its undemocratic flaws the country does remain, it seems to Obama, an indispensible partner for reaching an Arab-Israeli settlement.

 

We will have to see if – in the presence of the man who rules the world’s second biggest recipient of American aid (after Israel of course) - Obama still manages to be truly candid, persisting in his adage that “part of being a good friend is being honest".

 

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