The Barack and Mahmoud Show

BEIRUT -- I read the texts of the American and Iranian presidents' speeches at the United Nations, and my conclusion is that on both counts we have real reason to feel good but also to worry for the wellbeing of the Middle East and our wider world. Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are very different personalities, but they converge in their fascinating insistence on mixing sensible approaches to some issues with a lack of credibility that is politically numbing -- to the point that they nearly neutralize themselves as serious leaders.

Ahmadinejad has made the important point that the disagreements on Iran's nuclear plans can be resolved through diplomacy that Iran is prepared to pursue. Good point, and something worth exploring for anyone who is serious about reducing tensions in the Middle East and the world. Iran's insistence that it seeks a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue based on existing international regimes and safeguards should be put to the test through means more nuanced than the American-led approach of sanctions, threats, and insulting preacher-like moralizing.

Then the Iranian president reached into his bag of nuts and raised the possibility that perhaps the US government itself carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States for reasons linked to the American economy and Israel. I know that politicians sometimes make stupid statements as an occupational habit, but sometimes they cross this line and enter the realm of the truly irrational. To say that the US government orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks is not only factually wrong and politically insulting, it is also a sign of reckless and dangerous provocation, or sheer incompetence in the national leadership department -- both of which bode ill for Iran.

President Obama for his part put on a different kind of show that combined impressive passion and rationality with some old-fashioned political hypocrisy and insincerity. His statements at the UN on Washington's desire to keep pushing for a negotiated Arab-Israeli peace agreement were powerful and even moving at times, especially when he said, "...we can come back here, next year, as we have for the last sixty, and make long speeches. We can read familiar lists of grievances. We can table the same resolutions. We can further empower the forces of rejectionism and hate. We can waste more time by carrying forward an argument that will not help a single Israeli or Palestinian child achieve a better life. We can do that. Or, we can say that this time will be different - that this time we will not let terror, or turbulence, or posturing, or petty politics stand in the way...This time, we should draw upon the teachings of tolerance that lie at the heart of three great religions that see Jerusalem's soil as sacred. This time we should reach for what's best within ourselves. If we do, when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations - an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel."

This is compelling, compassionate and correct -- but not very credible. The United States has probably done more as an external actor to perpetuate the conflict than any other country in the world, mainly by pandering to Israeli rightwing extremists and their proxies and henchmen in Washington, and affirming UN resolutions and the legitimacy of democratically elected leaders in the Middle East with hysterical discrimination and inconsistency. For this same power to call for a drop in petty politics and posturing has zero resonance with anyone beyond the circle of Obama's speech writers, given the heavy American compliance with politics and posturing by pro-Israeli interests in Washington -- on issues, for example, like talking to Hamas the way the United States wants to talk to the Taliban.

There is merit in the new American activism to mediate peace, though, and perhaps some hope in the refreshing attempt to appear even-handed between Arabs and Israelis, and in the clear, repeated, presidential call for a sovereign Palestinian state. The consistent American support for Israel‘s security, while separating this from American criticism of Israeli colonialism in the occupied Arab lands, is also novel and probably historically significant. Obama also constructively suggests a way forward on the Israeli demand that the Arabs formally recognize it as "a Jewish state," saying that, "Israel is a sovereign state, and the historic homeland of the Jewish people."

Obama and Ahmadinejad are probably accurate reflections of their complex and often contradictory national political cultures. They won their posts largely because they know how to succeed in those messy environments, where the glory of great civilizations sleeps easily with both the recklessness of children and the dishonesty of thugs. Politics is a messy business, and it gets uglier when it mixes with sustained Zionist colonialism, Arab political passivity and mediocrity, and piqued Iranian nationalism.


Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.