A case of broken promises

IN our part of the world, we have come to define the appeal of President Obama’s administration these last six years less by its process — as in the peace process in Palestine and the war process in Syria — and more by its etiquette.
Earlier this week, Obama decided to cut short his three-day official sojourn in India in order to visit the Kingdom, where he paid his respects after the death of King Abdullah and met Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman. Clearly, this was intended to be more than a meeting between two heads of state, one of a world power and the other of a regional power. It was to cement a relationship between Washington and Riyadh that goes back seven dates, predating in its significance any other formalized with any other Arab capital.
The encounter between the Kingdom and the US began, as Arabs in touch with their history well know, in the immediate aftermath of the historic Yalta Conference in 1945, when King Abdul Aziz and President Franklin D. Roosevelt met aboard the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake, representing the official opening of Saudi-US relations at a time when the Middle East was considered a sideshow in the great war.
Alas, the promises that Roosevelt (who was two months from death) gave the Saudi king about Palestine and the national rights of its people were never kept. And remain to this day not kept.
Ordinary Saudis, along with other ordinary Arabs, continue to have a bone to pick with Washington over its Palestine policy, a policy characterized by a wink and a nod to Israeli leaders to go ahead with their half-a-century-long occupation and colonization of Palestine, while US officials simultaneously verbalize their commitment — and the duplicity here rankles — to an independent Palestinian state free of the dictates of foreign occupiers and those occupiers’ arbitrary rule of the gun.
Consider this: Last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a speech at Davos where he gave lip service to Palestinian rights. “The truth is that after decades of struggling with the (Palestine) conflict, we all know what the endgame looks like this: An independent state for Palestinians wherever they may be, ... a full, phased and final withdrawal of the Israeli army, a just and agreed solution to the Palestinian refugee problem ... and mutual recognition of the nation-state of the Palestinian people and the nation-state of the Jewish people... The Palestinians need to know that at the end of the day, their territory is going to be free of Israeli troops, that occupation ends.”
That’s all well and good. But when those same Palestinians, via their official representatives, the Palestine Liberation Organization, went to the Security Council at the United Nations recently in an effort to have a resolution passed that would have set a date for the end of that dreadful occupation, the US lobbied mightily behind the scenes to insure that the resolution did not gain the required majority for it to be considered for debate and a vote. And, most assuredly, as everyone and his uncle knew, the US at any rate would’ve exercised its veto power from the get-go.
Aside from Palestine, consider US’ Syria policy. Here we have a dictator who has ravaged his people, killing well over 200,000 of them, and sending millions of them fleeing from barrel bombs and poison gas to the surrounding countries, and yet here’s an administration that has inexplicably — some will aver, unpardonably — refused to assist those brave fighters from the Syrian opposition ready to give their in order to put an end to the brutalities of the regime. Where is America’s moral resolve, its steel?
Yet, despite these disagreements, the major building blocks of the Saudi-US relationship remain in place, defined these last 70 years by continuity and stability. Instead of rancor on Riyadh’s part, there is trust. As Fred Wehrey, an expert on Arab Gulf states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, was quoted as saying by the Christian Science Monitor earlier this week, “The Kingdom has done Obama a large favor by driving down the price of oil — and providing a boon to the US economy.”
When nation states disagree, they ideally agree to disagree. Heads of state sometimes are caught between the rock and the hard place, and the decisions they make are made under duress — in the US the duress of pressure groups who wield disproportionate power in domestic politics. Consider, in this regard, the case of former President Jimmy Carter who, convinced that foreign policy should be an extension of American moral values, called at the time, while still in office, for a “Palestinian homeland.” He soon had to eat his words, along with humble pie, and retrench on what was then considered a provocative call.
I for one like and respect President Barack Hussein Obama. As for agreeing with him on his country’s Palestine policy, or more recently its Syria policy, forget it.