Barack Obama - Tag Search

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs issued a brief statement this afternoon on the death of Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi:

We express our deepest condolences on the passing of Egyptian cleric Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi. As the grand sheikh of Al-Azhar University, he was a voice for faith and tolerance who was widely respected in Muslim communities in Egypt and around the globe, and by many who seek to build a world grounded in mutual respect. Sheikh Tantawi graciously hosted President Obama last June in Cairo, and we remember well his hospitality. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and those who mourn him on this day.

Statement hasn't really been noticed in the Arabic press yet.

Evan added some details overnight to my post on Israel's latest West Bank settlement construction, including a statement from State Department spokesman PJ Crowley. State belatedly sent reporters a full transcript of Crowley's remarks -- and, as Evan said, it's pretty lukewarm stuff.

President Obama issued a few brief remarks yesterday afternoon, after polls closed in Iraq. Most of it was fairly standard stuff -- glad to see the brave Iraqi people exercising their right to vote, terrorists tried and failed to disrupt the election, etc. -- but he also made a slightly interesting comment about the withdrawal timetable.

I'm sure it will annoy Henry Kissinger and the Washington Post's editorial board, but I (for one) was glad to see this Washington Post story on the White House "keeping its distance" from the Iraqi elections. It reflects a sensible policy decision by the Obama administration: The U.S. has diminishing influence in Iraq, and its efforts to influence the elections have been decried as meddling, so a hands-off approach is best.

President Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, arrived in Ramallah last night to begin "pre-talks" to the "proximity talks" the United States hopes will occur between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the National reports. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone who has much faith in their ultimate success.

Another voice in Washington -- actually, another eight voices -- urging President Obama not to appoint an ambassador to Syria.

This time it's a group of Republican senators, who sent a letter yesterday to secretary of state Hillary Clinton that basically dubbed the nomination a concession to Bashar al-Assad. The letter asked if the Obama administration will sanction Syria for failing to meet its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations, and argued that the recent Assad-Hassan Nasrallah-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meeting should spike the nomination.

I nearly fainted earlier today when I glanced up at CNN and saw a reporter doing a live shot from... Iraq! I thought U.S. networks forgot the country existed -- but for a week, at least, it's back on television.

The reporter in question was CNN's Arwa Damon, and she was rolling clips of an interview with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who hinted at asking U.S. troops to stay beyond 2011 -- a decision that would require amending the Status of Forces Agreement.

My suspicion is that the Palestinian Authority views "proximity talks" as a test for the Obama administration's willingness to impose consequences on Israel. PA officials have hinted at using the talks to "reveal Israel's true intentions to the world."

And the administration seems to understand that dynamic: Ha'aretz reports this morning that Washington "will assign blame" if the talks fall apart.

Jeffrey Feltman, the U.S. undersecretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, is in Yemen this week meeting with officials from the Yemeni government. Feltman delivered a letter from President Obama to Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The text of the letter isn't public, but it reportedly pledged continued financial and military aid for the Saleh government.

You've probably heard that the Israeli planning commission last week approved 600 new homes in Pisgat Ze'ev in East Jerusalem. Pisgat Ze'ev is another one of those settlements, like Gilo, which is mostly Jewish and therefore unlikely to return to Palestinian control in a two-state settlement. So I'm not at all surprised by the commission's decision.

I've long believed that folks in Washington who want the U.S. to delay its withdrawal from Iraq are really advocating a long-term U.S. military presence in the country. Their basic argument -- Iraq still has problems, so the U.S. can't leave yet -- creates a slippery slope towards lengthy occupation. Tom Ricks is at least honest about this point in his New York Times op-ed today.

Two op-eds about Iran's nuclear program in the Washington Post this morning. Richard Cohen's cri de coeur for more irrational saber-rattling -- which worked so well when the Bush administration tried it -- does not merit a serious response.

Anne Applebaum's piece deserves a little time, though. She doesn't think President Obama will approve a U.S. airstrike on Iran, mostly because it's a stupid idea. But then she writes that Obama should prepare for the aftermath of an attack -- because Israel might decide to bomb Iran unilaterally.

The military is drawing up plans to delay the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, according to the Washington Post. I'm staunchly in the "withdraw on time" camp -- but (as I mentioned on Twitter yesterday) I'm honestly not too concerned about these reports. First, the backstory:

But Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Monday that he had briefed officials in Washington in the past week about possible contingency plans.

Odierno declined to describe the plans in detail and said he was optimistic they would not be necessary. But he said he was prepared to make the changes "if we run into problems" in the coming months.

This is where I always like to point out that the Pentagon has a plan on the books for invading Canada. That's why you have military planners: to prepare for contingencies. And with all the talk in recent months about how the U.S. should delay its withdrawal, I'm not surprised Odierno has a plan for that scenario.

I'd like to propose a new rule for the commentariat: If you're going to write an op-ed accusing President Obama of ignoring Iraq, then you must present specific policy prescriptions for the administration. What should he be doing that he's not doing? Pablum like Obama should pay more attention does not count.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks the world should immediately slap oil sanctions on Iran -- even if the United Nations doesn't approve.

Netanyahu told foreign Jewish leaders that if the world "is serious about stopping Iran, then what it needs to do is not watered-down sanctions, moderate sanctions ... but effective, biting sanctions that curtail the import and export of oil into Iran."

"This is what is required now. It may not do the job, but nothing else will, and at least we will have known that it was tried. And if this cannot pass in the Security Council, then it should be done outside the Security Council, but immediately.

Netanyahu didn't really elaborate, but for unilateral sanctions to really be effective, they would require a naval blockade -- an act of war. The U.S. has already gone about as far as it can with unilateral sanctions: Washington bans American individuals and companies from doing business with Iran, but it's unlikely that foreign firms -- Royal Dutch Shell, Russia's Lukoil, Chinese companies -- will sacrifice their Iranian contracts because President Obama asks them to.

The Washington Post has 600 words of hand-wringing conventional wisdom on its editorial page this morning: Syria is bad, Syria will always be bad, and engagement with Damascus is pointless.

I don't agree with the overall conclusion -- I agree with Andrew Tabler that engagement could bring a meaningful change in U.S.-Syrian relations (though I take issue with many other points in his essay) -- and the editorial also plays loose with the facts. Here's the most egregious example, referring to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

He has promised to check suicide bombers bound for Iraq but has never done so.

I guess Fred Hiatt and the gang over at WaPo don't have access to Lexis-Nexis? Or Google?

The New York Times and the Washington Post both have stories this morning about the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. But they come to strikingly different conclusions about why Baradar was captured. Here are Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung in the WaPo, casting the capture as a sign of increased U.S.-Pakistani cooperation:

The capture of senior Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistan represents the culmination of months of pressure by the Obama administration on Pakistan's powerful security forces to side with the United States as its troops wage war in Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

This is pretty much the standard narrative that has emerged since Baradar's capture was announced on Monday night: The Pakistani intelligence and security services have finally accepted that the Taliban poses a threat, and Baradar's arrest signals a new level of cooperation.

A bit of unequivocally good news: The White House today nominated Robert Stephen Ford as the next U.S. ambassador to Syria.

This is a guest post from Tom Evans, a journalist at the BBC in London.

The election of Barack Obama was accompanied by great hope that the damages wrought by the Bush administration's foreign policy could be mended over. Obama's campaign team emphasized the fresh approach that would follow an Obama victory. Much has been made of the apparent failure of his efforts so far: Coming face to face with the difficult realities of American foreign policy, the Obama administration has faltered.

The Arab-Israeli peace process remains deadlocked. After the early promise of the Cairo speech, in which the president indicated that pressure would be put on the Israeli government to halt settlement construction, his administration has fallen back on the easy answer that the Arabs must do more to ease Israeli worries. Thousands of miles away, one can hear Netanyahu's relieved sigh.

Despite a new strategy in Afghanistan, there has been little progress. Yesterday, the coalition's highly-anticipated Operation Moshtarak, intended to signal U.S. General Stanley McChrystal's emphasis on hearts and minds, was almost immediately clouded by the accidental killing of 12 Afghan civilians. And Guantanamo Bay, that persistent guilty conscience of American policy, remains open, despite promises to the contrary.

Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri's supporters descended on Beirut's Martyrs Square to mark the fifth anniversary of his father's assassination -- even though nobody is quite sure whether the younger Hariri's March 14 alliance has a future.

The rally, in the shadow of the Mohammed al-Amin mosque, has become an annual event in Beirut in the five years since Rafiq Hariri was killed by a massive car bomb. Television news reports say the crowd was smaller than in previous years -- but it still numbered in the tens of thousands.