[Peace-discuss] Obama connives

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Obama's defenders are bleating that he was "caught unawares" by the uprising in 
the Middle East. Nonsense. He was rather committed to continuing - in some cases 
even more brutally than his predecessors - the constant US policy in regard to 
the region: control the resources, regardless of cost. And the following shows 
that he and his administration know perfectly well what the reaction to those 
policies is. Throughout the Mideast, the US (with its chief client, Israel) is 
seen as the greatest threat by the population - 80%, as opposed to 10% who see 
Iran as the greatest threat. Meanwhile, Obama is here taking advice from the 
worst of the Clintonoid liberal interventionists - the awful Dennis Ross, even 
more awful Samantha Power, and support-staff awful Gayle Smith. --CGE]

February 16, 2011
Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a 
secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping 
political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, 
administration officials said Wednesday.

Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely 
flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the 
administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic 
rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said.

The 18-page classified report, they said, grapples with a problem that has 
bedeviled the White House’s approach toward Egypt and other countries in recent 
days: how to balance American strategic interests and the desire to avert 
broader instability against the democratic demands of the protesters.

Administration officials did not say how the report related to intelligence 
analysis of the Middle East, which the director of the Central Intelligence 
Agency, Leon E. Panetta, acknowledged in testimony before Congress, needed to 
better identify “triggers” for uprisings in countries like Egypt.

Officials said Mr. Obama’s support for the crowds in Tahrir Square in Cairo, 
even if it followed some mixed signals by his administration, reflected his 
belief that there was a greater risk in not pushing for changes because Arab 
leaders would have to resort to ever more brutal methods to keep the lid on dissent.

“There’s no question Egypt was very much on the mind of the president,” said a 
senior official who helped draft the report and who spoke on condition of 
anonymity to discuss its findings. “You had all the unknowns created by Egypt’s 
succession picture — and Egypt is the anchor of the region.”

At the time, officials said, President Hosni Mubarak appeared to be either 
digging in or grooming his son, Gamal, to succeed him. Parliamentary elections 
scheduled for November were widely expected to be a sham. Egyptian police were 
jailing bloggers, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the former chief of the International 
Atomic Energy Agency, had returned home to lead a nascent opposition movement.

In Yemen, too, officials said Mr. Obama worried that the administration’s 
intense focus on counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda was ignoring a 
budding political crisis, as angry young people rebelled against President Ali 
Abdullah Saleh, an autocratic leader of the same vintage as Mr. Mubarak.

“Whether it was Yemen or other countries in the region, you saw a set of trends” 
— a big youth population, threadbare education systems, stagnant economies and 
new social network technologies like Facebook and Twitter — that was a “real 
prescription for trouble,” another official said.

The White House held weekly meetings with experts from the State Department, the 
C.I.A. and other agencies. The process was led by Dennis B. Ross, the 
president’s senior adviser on the Middle East; Samantha Power, a senior director 
at the National Security Council who handles human rights issues; and Gayle 
Smith, a senior director responsible for global development.

The administration kept the project secret, officials said, because it worried 
that if word leaked out, Arab allies would pressure the White House, something 
that happened in the days after protests convulsed Cairo.

Indeed, except for Egypt, the officials refused to discuss countries in detail. 
The report singles out four for close scrutiny, which an official said ran the 
gamut: one that is trying to move toward change, another that has resisted any 
change and two with deep strategic ties to the United States as well as 
religious tensions. Those characteristics would suggest Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain 
and Yemen.

By issuing a directive, Mr. Obama was also pulling the topic of political change 
out of regular meetings on diplomatic, commercial or military relations with 
Arab states. In those meetings, one official said, the strategic interests loom 
so large that it is almost impossible to discuss reform efforts.

The study has helped shape other messages, like a speech Secretary of State 
Hillary Rodham Clinton gave in Qatar in January, in which she criticized Arab 
leaders for resisting change.

“We really pushed the question of who was taking the lead in reform,” said an 
official. “Would pushing reform harm relations with the Egyptian military? 
Doesn’t the military have an interest in reform?”

Mr. Obama also pressed his advisers to study popular uprisings in Latin America, 
Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to determine which ones worked and which did 
not. He is drawn to Indonesia, where he spent several years as a child, which 
ousted its longtime leader, Suharto, in 1998.

While the report is guiding the administration’s response to events in the Arab 
world, it has not yet been formally submitted — and given the pace of events in 
the region, an official said, it is still a work in progress.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17diplomacy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss