Dear President Obama,
I thought about what must be going through your mind as you try to fathom the implications of the crisis in Egypt. After letting Lebanon, and Tunisia go under, hasn’t anyone in the White House bothered to explain to you that anything outside of solid support for President Mubarak weakens the leadership of Egypt and plays into the hands of Iran, the real force behind the turmoil in the Arab world the past few weeks. Have no doubt President Obama, by articulating a naïve and unrealistic expectation of Democracy for the Arab masses you are creating a strategic vacuum in the Middle East. In case you didn’t now, a vacuum never remains, it will always be filled by the most potent power in the region, and for sure this is what has happened. The Muslim Brotherhood, World Jihad, Hamas, and of course Iran are all waiting in the wings to make their grand entrance
Somehow, I was assuming and hoping that at least in response to the massive demonstrations in Egypt someone in the White House would give you a wake up call to deliver a message that the West will not let Egypt fall as it did in the case of Lebanon and Tunisia. But in tune with the classical Obama Doctrine of abandoning Western oriented countries, you have once again abandoned your allies. President Carter will be forever associated with the legacy of losing Iran to the Ayotollahs, and your legacy President Obama will be forever associated with losing Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia.
Let’s talk American interests, oil went up 4 dollars a barrel yesterday in response to the riots in Egypt, the Suez Canal is a strategic canal as far as America is concerned, do you really think that the armed rebellion in Egypt and Sinai isn’t related to getting control of the Suez Canal. Can you imagine the implications of Islamic forces controlling the Suez Canal? Precisely when American interests are being directly threatened, you President Obama chose to take one step back, letting Egypt collapse.
Just the other day President Obama, you gave the following responses
"The United States will continue to stand up for the rights of the Egyptian people and work with their government in pursuit of a future that is more just, more free and more hopeful," “ Mubarak must take “concrete steps” to expand rights”, "The legitimate grievances that have festered for quite some time in Egypt have to be addressed
All of these related responses project only one conclusion, that America is willing to forfeit her responsibility to protect American interests and if that means that Mubarak has to go then so be it. Now I ask you President Obama, only a few days ago when you gave the State of the Union address in which you spoke about the necessity to work together with the Republicans, you received across the board support. More to the point, do you really believe that you will be taken seriously on the domestic front when your behavior in the international arena is so arrogant and detached from strategic reality, so much a reminder of your attitude and behavior prior to the mid-term elections.
President Obama, I have a story to share with you, yesterday I was in the Shomron visiting the Good Samaritans community with a representative of a major Jewish organization, the leader of the Samaritan community shared with us an anecdote: there was an Arab head of a clan who had two sons, one son would speak out disrespectfully to the father in public but would always fulfill his fathers requests, the other son would always be respectful and obedient in public but would never fulfill his father’s request. Our host then asked us, which son do you think the father picked to be the successor to the clan? His response was that the second son who was respectful in public was the chosen successor. This is what our Samaritan host suggested that in the Arab world, respect, not humiliating a parent or a leader is more important than actual results.
What you President Obama is projecting is the very opposite. You are humiliating and being disrespectful to the very leaders that need your support. President Obama, have you ever seen the documentary on the great whales that purposely beach themselves, they attempt over and over again to pound the coast till they succeed, and after they succeed, they die. This is what American foreign policy looks like, a giant whale committing suicide, and no one can stop it. The Middle East has been left with a weak American Administration that gives the impression that it has given up on the Middle East.
One final point President Obama, you know its ironic how the Egyptian crisis has once and for all disproved and unmasked the Israel-is-the-cause-of-Middle East-instability myth. From an Israeli perspective, one of the most striking elements of the evolving revolution in Egypt, Tunisia and other parts of the Arab world is the degree to which all of this is not about Israel.
For the tens of thousands of protesters who took to Egypt’s streets over the weekend, defying the curfew and calling for the departure of President Hosni Mubarak, Israel and the Palestinian Arabs were simply not on the agenda. The same was the case during the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia earlier this month, and in the demonstrations intermittently taking place in Jordan, Yemen, Algeria and Morocco. No cries of death to Israel, no signs to “lift the siege” of Gaza, no chants against housing projects in settlement. Nothing mentioned about the “occupation” as the root cause of all that is wrong in the Middle East. Do you think anyone has noticed? Have You ?
Kind Regards,
Ron Jager
Tidbits from Israel