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Obama The Pivot
THE ROVING EYE
By Pepe Escobar
The fabulous reclining Buddha at Wat Pho in Bangkok does not exactly subscribe to drone wars and “targeted assassinations” – not to mention bombing of civilian infrastructure. So the Buddha may have been puzzled – to say the least – when US President Barack Obama, right at the start of his whirlwind “pivoting” tour of Southeast Asia, and referring to Israel and Gaza, came up with this: “There is no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.”
So imagine the Buddha in nirvana, mercifully surveying the sorry landscape of this valley of tears, and duly noting that Obama’s drones do rain Hellfires from Pakistan to Yemen, while one of Israel’s trademark – extra-judicial – target assassinations, of Hamas military leader Ahmad al-Jabari, was the preamble to unleashing the latest chapter of Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza.
Call it the Obama Doctrine or good ol’ American exceptionalism; all across the Arab street Obama’s endorsement of Israel’s rampage was analyzed side by side with this perceptive bit of geopolitical analysis by Ariel Sharon’s son; “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too”. [1]
Final solution, anyone? Not even Obama – nor any other US president – would admit the possibility that Tel Aviv routinely engages in collective punishment-based state terrorism. After all, as Gold Meir once said, “There are no such thing as Palestinians”.
That renders the spinning of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton being sent to broker an Israel/Hamas deal even more ludicrous. The Obama administration has no power to guarantee its ally Israel’s promises to abide by a ceasefire. Still, a deal has to be broken – and the key broker is Egypt, under President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).
From the start, Morsi knew Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu could not go on bombing forever – what with the gruesome accumulation of “collateral damage”. He knew Bibi would have to back down, because a “flatten all of Gaza” bombing followed by a ground war would run the risk of bogging down Israel not only in the terrain of world public opinion but in the geographical terrain as well.
