He Could Care Less About Obama's Story

He Could Care Less About Obama's Story

By Reza Aslan
The Washington Post
Sunday, December 30, 2007; B03

Every time I hear about how Sen. Barack Obama is going to "re-brand" America's image in the Middle East, I can't help but think about Jimmy Carter's toast.

When the idealistic Democrat came to Iran in 1977 to ring in the new year with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country's much-despised despot, throngs of young, hopeful Iranians lined the streets to welcome the new American president. After eight years of the Nixon and Ford administrations' blind support for the shah's brutal regime, Iranians thrilled to Carter's promise to re-brand America's image abroad by focusing on human rights. That call even let many moderate, middle-class Iranians dare to hope that they might ward off the popular revolution everyone knew was coming. But at that historic New Year's dinner, Carter surprised everyone. In a shocking display of ignorance about the precarious political situation in Iran, he toasted the shah for transforming the country into "an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world." With those words, Carter unwittingly lit the match of revolution.

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As someone who once was that young Muslim boy everyone seems to be imagining (albeit in Iran rather than Egypt), I'll let you in on a secret: He could not care less who the president of the United States is. He is totally unconcerned with whatever barriers a black (or female, for that matter) president would be breaking. He couldn't name three U.S. presidents if he tried. He cares only about one thing: what the United States will do. That boy is angry at the United States not because its presidents have all been white. He is angry because of Washington's unconditional support for Israel; because the United States has more than 150,000 troops in Iraq; because the United States gives the dictator of his country some $2 billion a year in aid, the vast majority of which goes toward supporting a police state. He is angry at the United States because he thinks it has hegemony over almost every aspect of his world.

(snip)

The next president will have to try to build a successful, economically viable Palestinian state while protecting the safety and sovereignty of Israel. He or she will have to slowly and responsibly withdraw forces from Iraq without allowing the country to implode. He or she will have to bring Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Iran, to the negotiating table while simultaneously reining in Iran's nuclear ambitions, keeping Syria out of Lebanon, reassuring Washington's Sunni Arab allies that they have not been abandoned, coaxing Russia into becoming part of the solution (rather than part of the problem) in the region, saving an independent and democratic Afghanistan from the resurgent Taliban, preparing for an inevitable succession of leadership in Saudi Arabia, persuading China to play a more constructive role in the Middle East and keeping a nuclear-armed Pakistan from self-destructing in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination.

(snip)

In their glowing endorsement of Obama, the editors of the Boston Globe noted that "the first American president of the 21st century has not appreciated the intricate realities of our age. The next president must." True enough. But such "intricate realities" are not best dealt with through "an intuitive grasp of global politics" -- Obama's chief asset, according to the Globe -- but through an intimate knowledge of those realities and of the nuanced responses necessary to address them. Obama may possess all the intuition of a fortuneteller. But as chair of a Senate subcommittee on Europe, he has never made an official trip to Western Europe (except a one-day stopover in London in August 2005) or held a single policy hearing. He's never faced off with foreign leaders and has no idea what a delicate sparring match diplomacy in the Middle East can be. And at a time in which the United States has gone from sole superpower to global pariah in a mere seven years, these things matter.

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Reza Aslan is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and the author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122801899.html

I mean, that's even what the body of the story says.

Just asking.

And the candidate with all the foreign policy experience Obama lacks is...?