Mr Obama goes to Tehran

So Obama is already a lock-in for Time magazine's 2008 Person of the Year. And that's before he actually accomplishes anything. So what, exactly, will the guy do and how will he be remembered in fifty years time? The rule in American politics is that Presidents get elected because of the economy and then spend most of their time focused on international affairs. With the good ship Hillary hopefully on the team as Secretary of State, Obama will soon recognize the intractability of the problems in Detroit and on Wall Street and will instead turn his statesmanlike gaze outward, toward American relations with the rest of the world. 

We haven't had a genuinely bold moment in American foreign policy since Nixon went to China in February 1972 to bring the Beijing communists in from the cold. The obvious opportunity is for Mr Obama to go to Tehran and sit down with the bearded powers-that-be there to establish a firm American-Iranian raprochement. An Iranian trip early in his Presidency would be the most effective way for him to really turn Middle Eastern politics upside down. And it would be the key to solving most of America's most explosive foreign policy problems. Such a historic trip could accomplish the following:

1. The symbolism of Barack Hussein Obama breaking bread with with the Mullahs in Tehran would be much more effective way of ending the cold war between American and the Islamic world than either turning Afghanistan into Iraq, bombing northern Pakistan or endlessly hunting down the merely symbolic Bin Laden (who is probably dead anyway).
2. Allow Obama to gracefully withdraw most American troops from Iraq while ensuring there be no immediate Iraqi civil war.
3. Doing a deal on the Iranian nuclear capability which save Tehran's face but also ensure that an Iranian bomb remains potentiality rather than actuality.
4. Laying the foundations of a genuine Arab-Israeli peace by bringing the Syrians, Hezbollah and Hamas to the table and then forcing the Israelis to honestly negotiate a viable two state deal.
5. Showing the Arabs, particularly the Saudis and the Egyptians, that the Americans have alternative Moslem allies in the region.

So what are the chances of this really happening?  Low, I'm afraid, very low. As John Pilger reminds us, Obama's decision to pick the uncompromising Zionist Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff suggests that he's learnt nothing from the last fifty years of disastrously pro Israeli American diplomacy in the Middle East. The great Seymour Hersch said the same thing in Denmark on Sunday, when he spoke before me at Fagfestival.

So, Mr Obama, is you happen to be reading this: please go to the Tehran and bring the Mullahs in from the cold. Such a trip will guarantee you posterity. It might even win you another Person of the Year award from Time magazine.

Comments

[Mohamed]

in fact i don't like to write in politics, maybe because i grew up in middle east. even if i live since some years in south east asia but i still afraid to write in politics.. now i will try to control my fear for 10 minutes and in these few minutes i will solve the problems of America and the world... don't wonder!!! only try to read carefully what i will write..
First problem : Afganistan..
the solution : not many people know that before 11/9/2001 America has a good relationship with Taliban movement , Some of Taliban leaders visited America to discuss about investment in Petrol.. also in that time most of leaders of Taliban were angrey from Osama bin Ladin because he spoke many with international media.. in that time America didn't with that Bin Ladin leave Afghanistan... no need to speak about the past and why America bring bin Ladin TO Afhghanistan from Sudan in 1996!!? no need to open the closed file.. let us now try to solve the problem... the solution is very very easily.. only America sit down with Mulla Omar leadr Taliban and America tell him that it will leave Afghanistan under some conditions, he don't allow Bin Ladin to stay in Afhanistan... As soon as America leave Afganistan the government in Afghanistan will fall down, and Mulla Omar will not allow Bin Ladin to Stay in Afghanistan... in the same time America must speak with Leader of Taliban in Pakistan and it told him the same thing that it will not attack Bakistan again under condition he don't let Bin Ladin stay in Bakistan....
after that it's better America forgot Bin Ladin and it let him live in the mountain untill he die.........
*******
the second propblem Iraq ?
the third problem Iran ?
the fourth problem Israel and Palastin ?
the last problem and the very important problem is terrorism...
*******
if you want to continue i will do...
********
even if i work as novelist and i write in Fiction since and fantazia , but what i write above not immagination.. only i know the solution of the problem because i know the reason in the problem!!

[Vince Williams]

I fear John Pilger's 'filthy truth' is obscured by the incrustation of his own bile. Is he feigning this indignation, or does he really believe that a Democrat of whatever ideological stripe or ethnic color gets elected President of the US without making a deal with the Israeli lobby-- or that any candidate runs seriously without due homage to the purse strings of Manhattan or the votes of Moise's grandparents in their south Florida condo?

I would not deny that "the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class"-- even so honored a resident of academe as Thomas Sowell has fetched well and truly for the reactionary fellows of the Hoover Institution-- though I think he's on to something with his ideas about the dysfunctional Cracker culture of the South and its Black rednecks.

I'm confused when Pilger abjures the doctrine of the idiocy of the masses by way of a fawning drool over the shiny boots of the brave and enlightened editor of the Mirror, cousin Penn Jones Jr in Midlothian, Texas, just down the road from another thundering pulpit of the stubbornly antebellum Church of Christ.

But in what alternative universe do "Obama's first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted?"

In other words, how many American voters are even conscious enough politically to equate Zionism with US war-making in Iraq, notwithstanding the earnest cogitations of the more thoughtful citizens of that bleakness called Midlothian, if they were so inclined?

And how many of that pitiful minority would condemn Rahm Emanuel for propounding the same economic liberalization policies embraced these last few years by most of the West, and even by China, India, and Brazil to launch the so recent expansion of their economies?

Every once and future President-elect of this great, mightily flawed nation knows you got to dance with them what brung you, no matter the insincere lectern-pounding of such a poseur as Pilger.