"Obama allied America with those...thirsting for freedom, &he did so in a subtle but remarkable way"

Putting America on Democracy's Side
In his Mideast speech, President Obama rejected Bush's blind allegiance to Israel and put himself squarely on the side of human rights.

by Peter Beinart

Can we now, after the president’s Thursday Mideast speech, finally stop calling Barack Obama a “realist?” Please. Ever since he emerged on the national stage more than three years ago, commentators have been claiming that Obama—unlike George W. Bush—places national interest, not human freedom, at the heart of his foreign policy. That narrative began with a wild misreading of Bush, the president who deepened America’s ties to a bevy of oil-rich tyrannies, especially in Africa; bear-hugged Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf; conducted business as usual with China; encouraged Fatah strongmen to try to militarily topple the Hamas government Palestinians elected in 2006; welched on U.S. commitments to build a functioning democracy in Afghanistan and, oh yes, oversaw the torture of terror suspects on at least three continents.

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The real difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama actually is what Bush said he was: a moral universalist. Bush’s universalism was mostly a mask for his Manichaeism. For him, a country’s human-rights record was largely a function of its acquiescence to American power. Thus, oppressive anti-American regimes and movements like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas were rightly denounced. But when governments lined up on America’s side in the “war on terror”—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt—they suddenly became “moderates,” as if that was a moral category rather than geopolitical one. This conflation of geopolitical categories with moral ones has a long history on the American right: think of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous claim that America’s anticommunist friends were merely “authoritarian” and therefore morally superior to the Soviet Union’s, which were “totalitarian.” But it reached its apex in the Bush administration, which deemed Israel—because it is America’s democratic ally—virtually incapable of violating human rights, even in the West Bank, where it is not a democracy. The more strongly a country backed America’s wars, the less Bush’s freedom talk applied to it, which helps explain why, when it came to the United States itself, Bush acted as if violating human rights was something America did not—indeed, could not—do.

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By embracing all—rather than only some—of the Arab spring, Obama also powerfully distanced himself from Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who supports Arab democracy so long as it never impairs his ability to forestall Palestinian democracy. Obama spoke strongly about Israeli security, and he has backed up those words by helping Israel build its potentially revolutionary antimissile defense system, Iron Dome. But when it came to a Palestinian state, he put more distance between himself and Netanyahu than he has since he lost the settlements fight. First of all, he called for a “contiguous” Palestinian state, something Netanyahu has never endorsed—a principle that if taken seriously would require Israel to dismantle not merely small, remote settlements, but large ones like Ariel, which Netanyahu has called “the heart of our country.” He said there could be no permanent Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley, something Netanyahu demanded as recently as this week. And although he said “Palestinian leaders will have to provide a credible answer” to Israeli anxieties about negotiating with Hamas given its refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, he didn’t repeat the Quartet (read: Bush administration’s) demand that Hamas accept all past peace agreements as a precursor to any negotiations. In other words, he didn’t say the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation makes peace impossible, as Netanyahu will likely do when he addresses AIPAC next week. That’s particularly important given the overall thrust of Obama’s speech, because reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah is the only path back to free elections throughout the Palestinian territories. Which is to say: Obama put himself on the side of Palestinian democracy, too.

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Still Obama allied America with those Arabs and Iranians thirsting for freedom, and he did so in a subtle but remarkable way. He invoked, as he so often does, the civil-rights movement. Not World War II, where American power served the cause of freedom. Not the Cold War, where American power did as well, at least in Europe. But the civil-rights movement: where an oppressed people struggling for freedom confronted American power, and won. It’s a more subversive analogy than we generally acknowledge, and one that should make everyone battling oppression in the Middle East—in Sana, Damascus, Cairo, Tehran, and Ramallah, too—smile.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-19/obamas-middle-east-speech-put-america-on-democracys-side-says-peter-beinart/?cid=hp:mainpromo3