As a candidate, Barack Obama insisted that the United States was paying a heavy reputational price for violating international standards of human rights. “We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary,” he promised in one campaign speech. Obama is not, of course, responsible for the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which carried the day on Florence. But he has not, with a few exceptions, changed the practices, or the underlying logic, that make the United States such an outlier in the West. Obama has not done nearly as much as he expected, and his supporters hoped, to restore the damage incurred by the Bush administration. This has been one of the great failures of his time in office.
Obama voices US concern over Venezuela democracy
…President Obama made his comments in an interview with the Venezuelan newspaper, El Universal.
He said the US was closely watching the build-up to Venezuela’s general elections, due in October 2012, when President Chavez is seeking re-election.
“We have felt great concern at actions taken to restrict the freedom of the press and to erode the separation of powers that are so necessary for a democracy to flourish,” he said.
“We are concerned about government actions that have restricted the universal rights of the Venezuelan people, threatened basic democratic values, and failed to contribute to the security of the region.”
Mr Obama said the US did not “pretend to dictate” foreign policy to sovereign nations but said Venezuela had not benefited from its close ties with Cuba and Iran.
“It is up to the Venezuelan people to determine what they gain from a relationship with a country that violates universal human rights and is isolated from much of the rest of the world,” he said.
Review from Foreign Affairs:
The three distinguished editors of this collection have produced a balanced overview of the Obama administration’s Latin America policy. The volume describes the high hopes that Barack Obama’s election engendered throughout the region and skillfully lays out why the honeymoon is waning: although Obama has significantly altered U.S. policy in the region, the change has been less than Latin America (and these writers) would have liked. The chapters written by non-U.S. scholars are particularly lucid and should help readers understand why Latin Americans feel so disillusioned with the United States. The book eschews a hemisphere-wide grand strategy in favor of engagement on select issues, a more modest approach than one usually finds in books about U.S. policy. Even as policymakers in Washington confront unprecedented challenges to U.S. interests around the world, attempt to revive a sputtering U.S. economy, and brace themselves for the upcoming presidential election, they would do well to heed this book’s spot-on recommendations for U.S. policy toward the restless region to their south.
Man who said he planned to kill Obama held over murder
MILWAUKEE (Reuters) - A 41-year-old man who told investigators he planned to eventually assassinate President Barack Obama awaited possible extradition to South Dakota on Wednesday on charges including murder linked to the plot, prosecutors said.
James Vernon McVay told authorities after he was arrested near Madison that the killing of a 75-year-old woman was the first of several he intended to commit as he traveled to Washington, D.C., where he planned to use a rifle to kill Obama, according to a South Dakota criminal complaint.
“I’m going to kill and kill until I get him,” McVay told investigators, referring to the president.
Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said that in 2009, while in jail in Nebraska, McVay had also made threatening statements toward protectees of the Secret Service.
Obama in jubilant Ireland: `I’ve come home’
And my little Irish-American liver swells with pride.
Obama avoids calling Armenia deaths genocide
Barack Obama, the US president, has for the third straight year failed to brand the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks genocide despite repeatedly vowing while campaigning to get elected that he would do so.
Obama honoured Armenian victims - mostly Christians numbering 1.5 million - on the anniversary of their massacre in the World War I but only confined himself to using the Armenian name for the slaughter, Meds Yeghern, in paying tribute “to the memories of those who perished”.
The president said the 1915 killings represent “one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century” as Armenians marked 96 years since the mass killings, marching through Yerevan, the capital, to the Tsitsernakaberd memorial dedicated to the victims.
As a candidate in 2008, Obama said he would ensure “a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide”. But since 2009, the president has declined to use “genocide” in the face of furious resistance from Turkey, a key NATO ally.
He insisted his view of what took place has not changed since the campaign, adding: “A full, frank, and just acknowledgement of the facts is in all our interests.”Ankara’s ambassador in Washington promptly rejected Obama’s criticism.
“We deeply regret that POTUS [Obama’s] statement on 1915 events reflect an inaccurate, flawed and one-sided political characterisation of history,” Namik Tan tweeted, calling the comments “unacceptable” and “unwarranted”.
“The US should encourage normalisation and dialogue and not hamper it with one-sided and politically motivated statements.”
Obama's Libya speech: Did it outline where intervention is headed?
In his speech at the National Defense University in Washington, Obama began with an affirmation of American exceptionalism. The US plays a “unique role” as an “advocate for human freedom,” said the president.
It was in this spirit that he decided to order US participation in the Libya air assault after it became clear that Mr. Qaddafi would stop at nothing to retain his grip on power, Obama said.
“We knew that if we … waited one more day, Benghazi – a city nearly the size of Charlotte – could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world,” said Obama.
Answering critics who have said that coalition intervention would have been more effective if it had come sooner, Obama noted that it took a full year before the international community made a similar move to protect civilians in Bosnia during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
The results so far have been good, said the president: Qaddafi’s forces have been stopped.
“So for those who doubted our capacity to carry out this operation, I want to be clear: The United States of America has done what we said we would do,” Obama said.
The president made it clear that his goal is for the Qaddafi regime to fall. But he also insisted that regime change was not a goal of the coalition action, per se.
The US went down that road in Iraq, he said, and the cost in money and US lives was very high.
“That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya,” said Obama.
As to what happens now, Obama underscored that NATO is taking over the operation, though whether Americans will accept this as proof that the US is stepping back is less than clear. He said the US will work with other nations to undermine Qaddafi.
He did not outline what targets US forces and their allies might attack going forward in their anti-Qaddafi campaign.
“The United States will not be able to dictate the pace and scope of this change. Only the people of the region can do that. But we can make a difference,” said Obama.
Pharaoh's End
Protests rocked Egypt, calling into question whether President Hosni Mubarak’s regime can survive. Foreign Policy asked five top experts how Barack Obama should respond to the growing signs of revolt on Egypt’s streets.
The U.S. should vote for a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements
…President Obama’s challenge in Cairo in June 2009 that the “United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” laid down a strong marker. But it has seemed designed to continue the flimsy distinction between the “illegitimacy” of settlements and their “illegality” under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the practice of all U.S. presidents for the past 30 years of avoiding condemnation of Israeli settlements as “illegal” in the U.N. and elsewhere under international law.
It was not always this way. After the 1967 war and until 1981, all U.S. administrations condemned settlements as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In 1978, an opinion by the State Department’s Legal Advisor formalized this, echoing an opinion in 1967 by Theodor Meron, legal counsel to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which all Israeli governments have rejected, that “settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention” — which Israel had signed.
But in 1981 President Reagan disagreed with his predecessors, saying in a press conference that settlements were “not illegal,” and the former U.S. policy lapsed. Reagan was influenced by advisors who supported Israel’s right to the Occupied Territories and others who thought IDF-defended settlements would protect Israel’s security. Nevertheless, neither the Reagan administration nor any successor adopted a new legal analysis supporting the legality of settlements, and the 1978 State opinion remains on the books.
The U.S. policy since 1981 of finessing the legal issue, blocking U.N. action, and, with rare exceptions, soft-pedaling U.S. opposition to settlements until President Obama’s strenuous effort to win a freeze, has been very costly. At the time of Reagan’s about-face, there were only 16,000 settlers in the West Bank, compared to over 300,000 today, and 59,000 in East Jerusalem compared to over 200,000 today. This huge growth makes an Israeli-Palestinian peace vastly more difficult, even as Egypt and Jordan have made peace, the Palestinian leadership has opted for a two state formula, and the Arab League has offered normal relations to Israel in return for a negotiated peace.
The traditional U.S. policy of blocking the U.N. and application of international law, thus protecting Israel from its own dangerous policies of occupation, is a dysfunctional anachronism. It does no favor to Israel, whose future as a Jewish, democratic state is at risk. It contradicts the Obama administration’s own opposition to settlements, and it forfeits a useful lever in persuading Israel to change its policy. Rather than bowing to domestic political pressures, and clinging to the view that the U.N. and international law have no role to play, the U.S. should rejoin the virtual international consensus on these issues, stand up for its own declared interests, and vote for the proposed Security Council resolution.
