Foreign Policy

The focus of the next year for President Obama will be the economy: He told reporters at his first post-election press conference today that his “No. 1 concern” would be to restore jobs and reduce the deficit. The middle classes now know that he feels their pain.

He certainly never mentioned foreign policy goals among his priorities, and no White House reporter asked him about them. Foreign policy was not among the voters’ concerns during the campaign.

If you recall, our Founding Fathers gave us advice as our country looked to the future. George Washington’s farewell address urged us to stay away from the affairs of Europe. He recommended our ties be commercial, not political. Thomas Jefferson remarked, “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Fast-forward over 200 years and we cannot say we have followed any of that guidance. This is no more evident example than the never-ending “War on Terror.”

If I were President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, I would be feeling a little nervous after watching Obama’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly this morning.

First of all, Obama made it clear that his administration is still holding open a door of diplomacy “should Iran choose to walk through it.” But it remains incumbent on Iran to prove to the world that its nuclear intentions are peaceful.

Then he turned to human rights. Now, the Islamic Republic of Iran is already paranoid about a “velvet revolution” that could threaten its power. That explains its crackdown on the Iranian opposition since Ahmadinejad was reelected in last year’s contested elections, after which hundreds of people were imprisoned, many tortured and at least three killed.

President Obama has been frightfully consistent embracing high-profile issues that make him look like the liberal king of the world. Often this forces pragmatism to take a back seat to glorious politics. The promotion of Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations while arrogantly ignoring nuclear Iran is one such situation.
 
If President Obama were to achieve world peace, he would be permanently romanticized in history among the greats. What better start than the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? After all, this war illustrates the greater conflict between the modern West and the Muslim world. If his administration could find a resolution to this historical conflict, it could nullify larger future battles.  
 
Consequently, Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations are high-profile events. However, when put in proper perspective, it’s a fairly low impact war; the conflict is just contained between the two.
 
These pointless negotiations are burning precious American resources and robbing us of the time our president should be spending vigilantly protecting America — namely from Iran. President Obama's apathy out of arrogance, or perhaps empathy, toward a nuclear Iran has to be the most astounding thing I have witnessed in recent memory.
 
A nuclear Iran is far more threatening than Palestinians to both Israel and America. Yet, it’s not high profile enough for our president to give this issue his necessary attention.
 
What must happen to jog this administration's common sense for them to have a revelation moment before this complex matter truly erupts? A suicide bomber strapped with nukes blowing away half of Tel Aviv or Baghdad? We need leadership that is willing to roll up their sleeves and get dirty to get the job done.
 
Armstrong Williams is on Sirius/XM Power 169, 7-8 p.m. and 4-5 a.m., Monday through Friday. Become a fan on Facebook- www.facebook.com/arightside, and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/arightside.

Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, contains loads of chewy nuggets. But one that risks getting overlooked, amid all the talk about whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai is “on meds” for manic depression, is Obama’s own judgment that “the cancer is in Pakistan.”

Despite all the administration infighting over an Afghan exit strategy last year detailed in the book, Obama is moving forward with his own plan. To my mind, he explained it in his last Oval Office address when he told the American people that his focus needed to be on digging out of the recession to help the middle class and that maintaining a war without end would not help achieve that goal. What will be critical is that when U.S. troops begin to pull out in July of next year, Afghanistan is not left in a worse mess than when the U.S. and its allies went in. Would it be politically justifiable to leave behind a failed state or a de facto partition of north and south? Read more...

The war in Iraq does not end with a victory march. There will be no sailors kissing nurses at Times Square. It ends with discord and dissent at the exact place where it started, Ground Zero. It did not even end. It just stopped.

In some ways we are worse off than when we started. Today when liberals oppose conservatives, they will do so in support of Islamic opinion instead of Marxist opinion, as in the debate today over the mosque near Ground Zero. Islam now has faces of dissent in opposition to the West worldwide with varied degrees of hostility, opposition and territoriality.

The Hill invites two established bloggers from either side of the ideological spectrum to sound off in original commentary.

The announcement of next week’s direct talks in Washington between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been greeted with buckets of cynicism. It’s a perfectly understandable reaction given the lack of progress toward a Middle East settlement since Mr. Netanyahu returned to office with the ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister.

Less attention, however has focused on the “why now?” question, whose equally predictable answer has been that the decision to convene the summit was driven by the domestic U.S. political agenda, with President Obama looking for a foreign policy victory before the November mid-term elections.

So, I have a nagging feeling the summit might yet turn into a game-changer. Why else would King Abdullah of Jordan and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak fly to Washington for dinner? I can’t believe President Obama invited them simply to thank them for delivering the Palestinians to the meeting.

As George Mitchell put it last week, when painting a house, it takes a frustrating amount of time to prime the building. But once that is done, the painting itself can be over very quickly. If you look at the language used by both Hillary Clinton and Mitchell last week, they both seemed quietly confident it is right to set a year’s deadline to solve the most intractable “final status” issues: the status of Jerusalem, the right of return of refugees and the borders of a future Palestinian state.

President Obama not only has the years of Mitchell’s Middle East experience to draw on — he is the author of the 2001 Mitchell report, which even then called on the Israeli government to freeze settlement expansion — but also that of Bill Clinton at Camp David. It would be irresponsible if the Obama administration had not already had some kind of understanding from the Israelis on the extension of the settlement freeze, which runs out on Sep. 26 and is key to the Palestinian participation in the talks.

Overcoming the Hamas problem in the context of a future Palestinian state looks insurmountable. It would also seem farfetched to suggest Prime Minister Netanyahu has changed. Yet, Mitchell says both the Israeli PM and President Abbas believe they can strike a peace deal in a year. Mr. Netanyahu seems to have convinced President Obama of his sincerity when they met in Washington last month.

One thing President Obama has tried to inject into political life is hope over cynicism — the latter never in short supply in the Middle East. We shall see next week if he can prove the doomsayers wrong.

I was talking to my good friend Alex Mistri, a man who spent a year working for the military and the State Department in Iraq, and I asked him what he thought about departure of combat troops from that beleaguered country.

He told me he was deeply ambivalent. He wished that the president had a just a little more patience to give the Iraqis a chance to get their coalition government together. On the one hand, he was happy to see that our policies over there have worked and that many of our troops are coming home knowing that they did a good job. On the other hand, he is deeply apprehensive that the cake isn’t ready yet, and by leaving, we give extremists a chance to destabilize the country.

The Hill invites two established bloggers from either side of the political spectrum to sound off in original commentary.