Israel Palestine Blogs

Hebron, 1990 (photo: Nathan Alpert)

Last week marked 22 years to the first Intifada, the Palestinian popular uprising which broke in Jebalia refugee camp following a deadly car accident near the Erez Crossing on December 8th, 1987.

Surprisingly enough, I hardly saw any mention of this on the Israeli media. It is not one of this nice “round’ anniversaries that editors love, like 10 or 25 years, but given the importance of the Intifada – alongside with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, it’s probably the central event of the decade in the Middle East – you would expect something.

On second though, perhaps this momentary amnesia is understandable. There is something about the first Intifada which doesn’t fit the Israel narrative regarding the relations with the Palestinians. We tell again and again the story of the peace-seeking-Israelis and the Arab-rejectionism, yet prior the first Intifada Israel had 20 years to hand the Palestinians some rights, but we didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Israel did promised to hand the Palestinians autonomy – not even independence, just a chance to manage their own business – as part of the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt, but when the moment came to deliver, we chose instead to built more settlements.

By today’s standards, the first Intifada was almost a peaceful struggle. There were violent demonstrations and stones throwing, as well as cases of stabbings, but rallies and general strikes played an important part in the protest. In the first few days, even weeks, the Intifada had no leaders – certainly not the PLO, who was just as surprised as Israel by the events. The Israeli Right likes to see every Arab move as part of “the phased plan” against Israel, but no reasonable person can find in the first Intifada this sort of well orchestrated attempt to destroy the Jewish state. It was a popular uprising. A violent one, perhaps, but given the living conditions of the Palestinians (Jebalia Camp, where the Intifada started, is said to be one of the most crowded places on earth, if not the crowded), the twenty years of military rule they suffered, the taking of their lands, and the total lack of hope that things might get better – the Intifada was justified.

It was not about destroying Israel. It was about the occupation.

More than ever, it is important to remember this fact. when it comes to the Palestinian problem, Israeli governments have been raising all sort of Issues, demands and sub-narratives, sometimes very successfully.  But in the last forty years, the fundamental problem is not security, because Israel wasn’t willing to leave the West bank or give the Palestinians their rights even when there wasn’t terrorism; it is also not some Arab governments’ refusal to normalize relations with Israel; it is not Iran or Syria, and it is not the lack of water or the question of access to holy places. All these are important issues that influence and are influenced by what’s happening between Israelis and Palestinians, but the heart of the matter is that Israel is keeping millions of people for 42 years now without civil rights, and without offering any serious solution to this problem.

Here is a naïve question: why is it the world that has to beg Israel to freeze the settlements or hand the Palestinians their rights? Don’t Benjamin Netanyahu or Ehud Barak – who take pride in “the only democracy in the Middle East” – understand that you can’t keep people with no rights for decades, so they must have Barack Obama explain that to them? And if Obama didn’t exist, and Netanyahu could have gotten everything his way, what does he think should be done with the Palestinians?

Me and some other reporters tried to ask Netanyahu this when he came to my paper just before the elections. He didn’t come up with a serious answer.

It’s not about Obama, It’s the occupation, stupid.

Bethlehem, 1989 (photo: Ayalon Maggi)

There are other people than the Palestinians who see themselves as being under occupation, and there are other nations fighting for independence, so many Israelis wonder why everyone is picking on them. certainly, the difference between a superpower like China and a small country like Israel plays a part here, but there is something else to consider: all other occupying forces, be that even Russia or Serbia, gave the occupied people the same civil rights their own citizens had. China believes it owns Tibet, so it annexed the land and made its people Chinese citizens. Israel hasn’t done even that: it doesn’t give the Palestinians the option to become Israelis, and it doesn’t give them the opportunity to be independent. Ours is a system that aims for Israelis to have it all – land and rights – and the Palestinians nothing.

Tul Karem, 1989 (photo: Israeli Tzvika)

Our national project is the occupation. We would like you to think it’s the high-tech industry (the current day’s version of the oranges Israel used to grow) but one can’t compare the investment – both governmental and private – in high-tech to our investment in the occupation, settlements and separation wall included.

Lately, keeping the Palestinians under our control has become incredibly complicated and expensive, and the fact that Israel is able to have a thriving economy at the same time is the real wonder (the 3 billion $ in military aid sure help). Under different circumstances, this was something to be proud of.

But this is not the only toll the occupation has taken. Lately, Israel has become a paranoid and xenophobic, even racist place, with most public almost automatically hostile to any liberal idea. While young people in the US and Europe dream of a job in Amnesty or Unicef, to Israelis these are almost the names of terror organizations. Ha-ir, a Tel Aviv based magazine, ran a cover story about the fate of humanitarian workers and activists these days. It wasn’t a brilliant piece, but still, I recommend reading it (you can find it in English here). Maybe it’s enough to say that words like “peace” or “human rights” are so unpopular in Israel, politicians are avoiding them.

Every now and then some leftwing politician, party or organization claims we should grow a new agenda – talk about the environment, or immigrants’ rights, or civil liberties, or social benefits, or the relation between the state and the Jewish establishment – only to find out later that there is one issue you can’t bypass.

When people call for the deportation of immigrants and refugees these days, they do it in the same language they talk about the Palestinians, and it’s no coincidence that Israel is under a surge of conservative legislation. One can’t also imagine the forming of a national biometric database in a different political context.

Don’t get it wrong: ending the occupation won’t solve all of Israel’s problems, far from it. But without figuring out what to do with the occupation it won’t be possible to solve anything else. The Israeli democracy was problematic to begin with, with a legal and governmental system the favors the Jewish majority over the large Arab minority. If there was hope to turn the Jewish state into a real democracy as it matures, the occupation all but destroyed it.

The occupation, not anti-Semitism, is the reason for the anti-Israeli sentiment around the world. The occupation, and the Jewish automatic identification with Israel, makes it harder to fight anti-Semitism. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. The occupation makes Israel more and more isolated politically, and quiet rightly so. No reasonable person and no nation should accept what we are doing. The world gave Israel four decades to solve this issue, but enough is enough. Personally, I would never support physical attacks on Israelis, but all other moves, from demonstrations to boycotts, are fair game.

It’s the occupation, stupid.

Kung Fu Jew 18 posted a photo:

There must have been 300 santas going pub crawling yesterday, starting first in Prospect Heights and walking to Park Slope. So *that’s* how he really gets it all done!

Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S, is the Jewish state’s highest ranking envoy to the American government and, by extension, to the American people. One of his principal responsibilities is to ensure that, when push comes to shove, Americans –including American Jews– will support U.S. efforts to protect Israel’s core security interests.

That is why his recent attacks on J Street are undiplomatic and unwise. Oren said he has a problem with J Street because “it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments,” it is “outside the mainstream” and it is “fooling around with the lives of seven million.”

In fact, much to the chagrin of the anti-Israel far left, J Street is in complete agreement with the Israeli government and the American Jewish mainstream on the most important issues. It is left-of-center when compared to the rest of the organized Jewish community, but on the broad, global ideological spectrum, it is a decidedly moderate group.

Look at J Street’s official positions. It has affirmed that Israel needs to maintain its qualitative military edge and supports continued American aid to Israel. After supporting Obama’s approach to cautious engagement with Iran, it recently endorsed a Senate bill for tougher sanctions against Iran. It has not called for Israel to negotiate with Hamas, contrary to what Oren and others have implied. It has said that no progress can take place without a unity government that includes Hamas, and that if Israel wants to negotiate with Hamas, the U.S. should not stop it. That is an admittedly subtle distinction but an important one. J Street is actually more conservative than the Israel public on that question, since, as the Forward points out, 57% of Israelis favor talks with Hamas under certain conditions.

Most importantly, it is absolutely unthinkable that J Street would support an American government if it tried to impose conditions –e.g., borders, security arrangements– that the Israeli government believed would compromise Israel’s core security requirements.

Those are the big issues, the key existential questions of concern to “seven million people.” Israel would have a hard time if most American Jews and most of the American people did not agree with J Street on these matters. Yes, there have been some serious disagreements between J Street and the Israeli government over the Goldstone report and the war in Gaza. But the way to deal with them is to engage with J Street and explain why the Israeli government thinks they are wrong, not make them a cause celebre with public denunciations or try to completely marginalize them. In doing the latter, Oren is writing off a large swath of American Jews –and other Americans– who associate themselves with the positions of J Street and whose continued, active support will be needed in the dangerous days ahead.

An ambassador needs to cultivate potential allies, not insult them.

Oren has written a history of the U.S. and Israel and no doubt remembers the early years of the Rabin administration and the Oslo process. He probably recalls that one of his predecessors, Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich, was pelted with eggs in one synagogue and hooted and harassed in others. He probably remembers when Likud supporters in the U.S. lobbied against the declared positions of the Israeli government, with the open encouragement of Benjamin Netanyahu.

I was a consultant to the Israeli Consulate in New York for a brief time during this period, and what I remember was that Israeli officials tried to engage with their detractors. They met with them, talked to them, tried to convince them of the errors of their ways. The Israelis knew that despite the terrible squabbling, despite incidents like the one in which Education Minister Shulamit Aloni was punched in the stomach by a right-wing Jew, these anti-Oslo forces could not be written off and treated as lepers and exiles. Down the road, Israel was going to need them on the most important issues.

No one is pelting Michael Oren with eggs. Why he won‘t meet with the J Streeters and speak to them in public is not just wrongheaded: it is mystifying.

Majd al-Assad

Majd Hafiz al-Assad, the younger brother of President Bashar al-Assad, died on Saturday December 12, 2009 at the age of 43.

Majd was the fourth of Hafiz al-Assad’s five children. He was born a year after Bashar al-Assad and two years before Maher. The first family of Syria went to great lengths to protect his privacy. Little is known about the president’s younger brother. Most news reports about him are brief or inaccurate.

By all accounts, Majed had a difficult and troubled life. From early youth, he showed signs of instability, erratic behavior, and a propensity for depression, despite having a reputedly warm relationship with his father.

He began to self-medicate from an early age, experimenting with narcotics and quickly became dependent. The family struggled to help Majd. His brothers sought to end relationships with a string of hangers on who enabled his bad habits and indulged his weaknesses. For a period in the mid 1990s, he was hospitalized in London, in an effort to break his substance abuse. Bashar al-Assad visited him regularly there and oversaw his care. Numerous efforts to intervene on his behalf and develop a constructive environment around him that might have relieved his periods of depression failed.

Majd is survived by his wife, Ru’a Ayyoub, who was born in 1976 and graduated in business and economics from Tishriin University in Latakia. They had no children.

Majd al-Assad will be buried in Qardaha in the family mausoleum next to his father (d. 2000) and brother Basil (d. 1994) following afternoon prayers on Sunday 13/12/2009.

Al-Assad Mausoleum in Qardaha where Basil was buried in 1994 and Hafiz was buried in 2000

Hafiz lies in state

Here is the announcement of his death from SANA.

President al-Assad Announces the Passing Away of His Brother Majd
Dec 12, 2009

Damascus, (SANA) – President Bashar al-Assad announced the passing away of his brother Majd Hafez al-Assad in Damascus on the morning of Saturday 12/12/2009 after suffering from chronic disease.

The pure body of the late deceased will be laid to final rest in the city of Qardaha following the afternoon prayers on Sunday 13/12/2009.

دمشق – سانا
نعى السيد الرئيس بشار الأسد شقيقه المغفور له مجد حافظ الأسد الذي انتقل إلى رحمته تعالى في دمشق صباح اليوم السبت 25 ذي الحجة 1430 هجري الموافق لـ 12/12/2009 ميلادي اثر مرض عضال.

وسيشيع جثمانه الطاهر إلى مثواه الأخير في مدينة القرداحة بعد صلاة العصر من يوم الأحد 26 ذي الحجة 1430 هجري الموافق لـ13/12/2009 ميلادي.

الفقيد الراحل مجد من مواليد محافظة اللاذقية عام 1966 ميلادية، يحمل إجازة في الاقتصاد من جامعة دمشق عام 1989، ومتزوج.

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Hannukah – the holiday of universal freedom!

Philosemitism shines forth! Jews are in! The American dream is but an extension of the ancient Hebrew’s struggles !

In case you don’t get the irony of a Hannukah song, sung by a Syrian American and written by one of the most conservative Senators in the U.S. senate – and a Mormon to boot – catch this reflection on the holiday- by a thoughtful Toronto Jew that appeared in yesterday’s NY Times.

By the way, and talking about cultural appropriation, didn’t Hatch’s mezuzah make you do a double take? I think I liked December better when all we had to put up with was non stop Christmas carols and manger scenes on every corner.

Happy Hannukah !

Steve Clemons at the Washington Note reports today that Rep. Robert Wexler, who will be leaving Congress soon to head the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation, sent a letter to other members of Congress noting increasing support among Israelis toward President Obama, and stressing the need for Obama to address Israelis directly with a clear proposal to move the peace process forward. The basis for his letter rests on the results of a survey published by the New America Foundation which shows a much higher favorability rating for Obama than generally thought.

As his letter states:

After reviewing the New America Foundation’s national survey of 1,000 Israelis it is clear that there is greater support among the Israeli public for President Obama and American efforts to move the Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward than previously reported. These poll numbers suggest the Israeli public is willing to move the peace process forward with its ally, the United States, and under the right circumstances. It also suggests that President Obama has a unique window of opportunity to directly engage the Israeli public to pursue a course of peace in cooperation with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The poll, which was released yesterday, shows that Obama has a 41% favorability rating, much higher than the 4% which has been touted previously. As Wexler noted in his letter to Congress, with Obama’s unfavorability rating of 37%, this is only slightly higher than unfavorable attitudes toward Bush, who is generally seen as very popular among Israelis.

Wexler continues in his letter to stress the important role of the United States in pursuing a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict:

Additionally, the poll reports that by a 65% to 31% percent margin, Israelis believe that the United States is the only powerful country that Israel can count on in the world today. Further, they do not believe Israel will be able to build alliances with other powers if relations with the U.S. ever deteriorate. According to the poll, if President Obama were to put forward a peace plan based on the previous Taba talks, such a plan would receive the support of a majority of Israelis if Prime Minister Netanyahu is on board (53% to 45%), while the public is evenly split (48%) if Prime Minister Netanyahu rejects the plan.

This poll is a helpful reminder that the unbreakable bond shared by Americans and Israelis remains strong and that only through greater cooperation can we ensure peace, prosperity and security in the Middle East.

Link to original article on Progress Magazine

By John Lyndon – Executive Director of OneVoice Europe

As the old adage goes: ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’

Nowhere
is this truer than within the stifling, often toxic context of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this part of the world, one person’s
Independence Day is another person’s Naqba; one person’s occupation is
another person’s homecoming; and one person’s response is another
person’s precursor. Action and reaction, myth and reality – all have
become blurred, as uncompromisingly subjective and mutually exclusive
historical narratives stalk the land.

This, sadly, is often the
reality one must work within when trying to make progress toward mutual
compromise. Israelis and Palestinians largely define the last 62 years
of their history in opposition to one another. Blame is passed around
judiciously, and each sees the other as the ultimate reason that peace
has been so elusive and progress so temporary.

When faced with a
depressing reality such as this, a committed interlocutor really has to
walk down one of two paths. Should you try and transform the reality to
one more amenable to peace, common understanding and mature, collective
responsibility? It is indeed a tempting thought. Israelis and
Palestinians poring over each others’ perceived injustices, apologising
where necessary and strengthening their ties through cooperation,
collaboration, and joint reconciliation. The second choice however, is
to accept the context as you find it. Israelis and Palestinians have
reason enough to dislike, mistrust, and even hate one another. Instead
of putting the very limited time, resources and energy now available
into trying to make water flow uphill, why not devote all of your
efforts toward achieving a deal that respects rather than seeks to
transform each narrative?

The security threat Israel lives
under is due – primarily, but not exclusively – to the fact that they
occupy the West Bank and Gaza, and stand in the way of a Palestinian
state. Palestinians – primarily, but not exclusively – have employed
violent methods as a means to achieve said state, and end said
occupation. This calculus is simple, and blessedly free from moral
judgment or finger pointing: occupation and violence are two sides of
the same coin. Ending one will bring about the demise of the other.
This is one of the central beliefs of OneVoice, an international
grassroots movement with over 650,000 signatories in roughly equal
numbers both in Israel and in Palestine, and over 2,000 highly-trained
youth leaders. It aims to amplify the voice of Israeli and Palestinian
moderates, empowering them to seize back the agenda for conflict
resolution and demand that their leaders achieve a two-state solution
guaranteeing the end of occupation, establishing a viable independent
Palestinian state, and ensuring the safety and security of the state of
Israel – allowing both people to live in peace with all their
neighbours.

By working in parallel, OneVoice can appeal to the
nationalistic enlightened self-interest of Israelis, through the work
of OneVoice Israel in Tel Aviv; and Palestinians, through the work of
OneVoice Palestine in Ramallah. With chapters located across the length
and breadth of both territories, OneVoice is building a coalition of
supporters: secular to religious, left to right wing. For Israelis,
it’s about building an understanding that the occupation hurts rather
than enhances Israeli security, and poses a threat to Israel’s future
as a Jewish and democratic state. For Palestinians, it’s about building
an understanding that violence and extremism hurts Palestinian national
ambitions, providing a convenient excuse to those who wish to
perpetually delay the establishment of a Palestinian state. Building
this realisation does not require Israeli and Palestinian agreement on
the past, rather it highlights the shared and mutually reinforcing
benefits of common understanding of both peoples’ futures: a sovereign
and viable Palestinian state, living side by side with a secure Israel
- both states at peace with all their neighbours.

Uniquely
in the region in which they inhabit, both Israel and Palestine are
democratic societies. There exists a mechanism within such societies to
transform even the most corrosive reality, should enough public
pressure is brought to bear. That is why OneVoice works tirelessly to
highlight hidden consensus both within and between each society,
mobilising ordinary people toward becoming genuine agents of change.
Through Town Hall Meetings, public rallies, youth leadership training
and ‘get out the vote’ campaigns, we aim to give the voices of
moderation and pragmatism the volume and impact that their numerical
weight deserves: 78% of Israelis and 74% of Palestinians are willing to
get behind a two state solution. Whilst these people may never agree
about what happened in 1948, 1967 or even in 2001 – they are in
agreement about what must happen in 2010: a serious, committed, and
successful push toward a two state solution and an end to violence,
occupation and insecurity. With over 300,000 Israelis and 300,000
Palestinians signed up to this common understanding of what must come,
perhaps the most important and transformative chapter in this entangled
shared history is yet to be written.

A week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a one-day
simulation of the broad international effort to address Iran’s nuclear
program, sponsored by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The participants were
divided into various teams (the United States, EU, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, and a "GCC"
team representing other Persian Gulf states), along with a control team that
supervised events (and played the role of the International Atomic Energy
Agency). Several prominent
journalists observed the proceedings and were also available to "leak"
information to. The
simulation was designed to begin on Dec. 1, 2009 and cover the next twelve
months, and various teams were able to negotiate face-to-face (bilaterally
or multilaterally), move military forces around, issue press releases, make
back-channel offers, etc.; in short, they could undertake virtually any action
that might have been possible in the real world.

The result, as has already been reported, was discouraging:
by the end of the game, Iran hadn’t agreed to halt enrichment, the P5+1
coalition was collapsing, and the United States and Israel were having what
could politiely be called a "candid and frank exchange of views." The sole piece of good news was that there had been no recourse to military force by the time the game ended.

Several participants have recently published
their own "take-aways" from the experience, which they appear to have found
sobering. Writing in the Washington Post, David Ignatius (who was
one of the journalists in attendance) suggested that although it was only a
simulation, the game nonetheless "revealed some important real-life
dynamics-and the inability of any diplomatic strategy, so far, to stop the
Iranian nuclear push." The
head of the "Iranian team," former NSC aide Gary Sick, has offered reflections of
his own in a recent piece in The National,
noting that "By the end of the game, the Americans
had driven away all their ostensible allies, and wasted immense time and
effort, while Iran was better off than it had been at the beginning." Sick also suggests that "the moves of
the US team were quite similar to the strategy actually employed by the United
States over the course of the last three administrations."

I thoroughly enjoyed the
experience but drew a different set of conclusions from it.  (I was on the U.S. team, and was
assigned the role of SecDef Robert Gates). My
conclusion at the end of the game was that one could draw no firm
conclusions from the experience, and my principal concern was that
participants would be tempted to do just that.

In my view, what one might
call the "external validity" of the game was limited by three unrealistic features.

First, the timetable of the
game was extremely compressed. In
effect, we were trying to simulate a full year of negotiations in a mere six hours. Thus,
each hour of the game covered
two months, which meant that a team could send a message to another
team and receive a reply in due course, only to discover that a month
or more had passed and
the original message was now effectively obsolete. More to the point, the breakneck pace of the game did not
allow for any time for reflection, for the weighing of alternatives, or even
the formulation of clear or novel strategies. (Each
team was given about twenty-five minutes to plan its
approach before the game began, and I like to think U.S. leaders do a
bit better than that in real life. Heck, Obama just spent several months deciding what to do in Afghanistan). Yes, time is a precious commodity and policymakers are often forced to
juggle multiple commitments, but I believe a more realistic timetable would have produced very different results. 

Second, trying to simulate a
complex multiparty negotiation with four or five-person "teams" was problematic,
particularly when some team members (myself included), had to leave the game
temporarily to teach their regular classes. This constraint required me to be absent for 90 minutes, which in terms
of the game’s timetable meant that the U.S. Secretary of Defense was
effectively incommunicado for three "months." The same problem sidelined the person who played the Secretary
of State for a similar period. Moreover,
given
that team members had no staff and thus no subordinates to give orders
to, there was no one to delegate to and it was impossible to conduct
continuous consultations with all of the relevant
parties, even when both sides may have wanted to. What must have looked
to some like Bush-era "unilateralism" was instead simply an unavoidable artifact of the game’s structure.

Third, the composition of
the different teams was unavoidably slanted.
The U.S., Russian, Chinese, Iranian teams were all populated with and led by Americans,
while the Israeli team was made up entirely of Israelis and the EU team was
composed of Europeans. To have
confidence in the validity of the results, therefore, you have to assume that
each of the teams actually played the way that their real-life counterparts
would have. That might be true in
the case of the U.S., Israeli, and European teams (though I wouldn’t assume it),
but it’s obviously more of a stretch with the others.

These difficulties are not
the fault of the game’s organizers, who faced obvious constraints in putting
the exercise together. Ideally,
such a simulation would have been played over a long week-end and covered a
shorter time period, but it would have been far more difficult to assemble an equally
impressive array of participants for an entire weekend. Putting together a genuinely
multi-national participant list (including appropriate Iranians?), would have been even harder if not impossible.  

The bottom line is that one ought to be exceedingly wary about drawing any conclusions about
what this artificial exercise actually teaches. To
me, its real value is not as a crude crystal ball that allows us to
divine the
future, or even as an analytical device that helps us identify
particular barriers to resolving some thorny diplomatic problem. After all, it’s not exactly headline news to discover that
resolving the Iranian nuclear issue isn’t easy, that there are certain tensions
within the P5+1, or that Iran’s objectives are at odds with those of the other participants. 

Rather, the potential value of such
an exercise lies in forcing participants to take on different roles and see how a
problem looks from a wholly different perspective. With hindsight, I wish we had mixed things up a lot more:
with some Israelis on the Iran team, with real Russians, Chinese or EU citizens
playing on the U.S. or Israeli side, and so forth. That might have taught us about some of the
sources of misunderstanding that have made this issue so hard to resolve,
whatever the actual "outcome" of the game might have been. 

JOE KLAMAR/AFP/Getty Image

As the season has arrived in which “Peace on Earth” fills the airwaves and resonates from church choirs, the recent choice of President Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize becomes ironic as well as iconic. The icon is obvious, as no president since John F. Kennedy has elicited such fanfare at his entry into office. As the chairman of the Nobel committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, introduced President Obama, it was clear that in part the real choice was the man who pledged to reverse the isolationist and publicly entrenched private sectoring of George W. Bush. Had our previous president not been the bearer of two made-for-Hollywood wars in the guise of a nebulous “War on Terror,” Obama would have had to wait his turn. The irony is manifold. American dissatisfaction with the costly war in Iraq led to a political surge for the Democrats for a change; the man who pledged to end the war mongering is still saddled with the two wars he did not start. On the home front, the financial tsunami he inherited now tarnishes virtually every attempt to pull the economy out of its cross-the-boards harm from the combustable engine of Wall Street to the reckless drivers on Main Street.

The liberals and centrists who voted to give hope a chance have all too soon decided not to give it much of a chance. Those who actually prefer to call themselves liberals no doubt hoped that Obama was just politicking when he touted centrist positions to secure some of those Red State votes. But the man from Illinois, who kicked off his run with the symbolic capital of an earlier president-to-be from Illinois, is decidedly centrist, the mad ravings of vanity pouting Glenn Beck and publicity whoring Sarah Palin notwithstanding. If you want to probe the postmodern meaning of irony, just listen to what President Obama said about war in being honored as a man of peace: (more…)