Mideast speech breakdown

President Obama speech in Cairo last week has been largely hailed and hardly scrutinized.

Here’s a bit of both, stuff that caught my attention…

Look at this piece by Andrew Sullivan. About Obama’s genius in stating the obvious. It’s an interesting article.

For one thing, though some of Obama’s points in the Mideast speech were made previously by George W. Bush, Obama has street cred and Bush certainly didn’t.

It’s that biography that made a speech that echoed some of George W Bush’s themes reach a critical mass of credibility. But in many respects this was not a speech, as traditionally understood. It was an intervention.

This is actually a good point. Stay with it. 

The obvious critique that this was just a set of words seems to me to miss the point. An intervention begins with words because it requires the actions of others. You don’t get an addict to go into recovery by cuffing him and throwing him into an ambulance. You talk to him and his family and speak calmly about what everyone in the room knows to be true but no one will face. So, for me, the core sentence of the speech was obvious: “It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true.”

Okay. Sometimes stating the obvious, especially with rhetorical flourish, can be startling. Or, as Sullivan puts it…

For Obama to state this so plainly, so simply and so urgently as the first item of business in his foreign policy is a remarkable thing. He is doing with the Middle East what he did with America: if he explains it all clearly enough, maybe some actions will be taken.

But wait….back up a line or two before the praise for Obama schooling us all by telling us what “we all know”. To whom is all of this so obvious?

We all know that Iran has every right to peaceful nuclear energy; equally we know that Israel has every right to demand real and reliable assurances that such technology will not be directed at exterminating the Jewish state.

This is a misrepresentation of the huge importance of that part of Obama’s speech.

Here’s a transcript of part of Fox News Sunday’s panel discussion on this, and that’s where the scrutiny begins.

[President Obama] basically gave what was the weakest statement ever given by a president on the Iranian nuclear issue. He said nothing about enrichment. He didn’t even mention uranium enrichment. And he made it sound as if the entire dispute is over the interpretation of the nuclear proliferation treaty.

Specifically, they’re referring to a section of Obama’s speech that got little attention. (video and transcript here)

And a panelist says…

when you read those three paragraphs, they’re really startling. I mean, there are three U.N. security resolutions which the Bush administration went to a huge amount of trouble to try to get the Europeans signed on. The Russians and Chinese signed on. He doesn’t mention them.

Iran is in violation with its enrichment program of U.N. — this isn’t American Bush, you know, imperialism. This is the U.N. Security Council, and he doesn’t mention that fact. He really — he is really conceding an Iranian nuclear weapon and then the question becomes does Israel accept that.

Andrew Sullivan’s conclusion:

When you see how many delicate balancing acts are required to pull the grand bargain off in the region, scepticism is entirely justified. But I don’t believe Obama is naive about the difficulty of the task. He knows that unless a real attempt is made to avert peacefully a catastrophic nuclear arms race in the region, to save the Israelis and Palestinians from themselves and to reconstitute the image of America in the psyches of a vast young generation of Muslims, we face a darkness that could spread very fast globally and engulf us all.

And we have to wonder what kind of intervention he has planned for that.