"Obama Admin Will Follow Bush Stance on Hamas Boycott"

Democracy Now! on business as usual at the State Department:

At the State Department Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeated the Obama administration commitment to follow the Bush administration policy of boycotting Hamas.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “I would only add that our conditions respecting Hamas are very clear. We will not, in any way, negotiate with or recognize Hamas until they renounce violence, recognize Israel and agree to abide by, as the Foreign Minister said, the prior agreements entered into by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority."

The US position has been criticized in part because it refuses to impose the same conditions on Israel. Israel refuses to renounce violence, recognize a Palestinian state and abide by agreements, including a pledge to freeze settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.

The Mitchell Mission

Is the Mitchell Mission Doomed from Inception? Obama has his hands full with domestic woes. It is unlikely that he will expend any political capital on seeking justice in Palestine, nor will he be willing to offend any key constituencies by straying from the traditional American playbook on the issue (Rabbani and Toensing's first paragraph says it all) .

Until the US is willing to negotiate with the elected representatives of the Palestinian people it is wasting time. The PA is politically and morally bankrupt - it has no capacity to deliver a peace deal, it has no credibility among Palestinians.

Mouin Rabbani and Chris Toensing (Middle East Report) on "The Continuity of Obama's Change"

US media outlets were quick to pronounce Obama’s “big phone calls to the Middle East” “another marker of change” that the new president is, rather unfairly, expected to bring to every domain of American life. Yet the American political system is not one given to sudden and significant shifts in foreign policy, least of all on account of directives emanating from the Oval Office. Rather, foreign policy, and perhaps nowhere more so than toward the Middle East, is characterized by evolution, typically at a slow pace. Produced by a variety of competing interests encompassing the bureaucracy, business elites, the military, Congress and various lobbies, policy tends to change only when consensus is achieved on a new direction, with the role of the president generally limited to formalizing rather than catalyzing the process. Bush’s notorious aphorism, “I’m the decider,” represented ambition, not reality.
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Even at the rhetorical level, a bromide like, “we are confronted by extraordinary, complex and interconnected global challenges: the war on terror, sectarian division and the spread of deadly technology. We did not ask for the burden that history has asked us to bear, but Americans will bear it,” could just as easily have emanated from Obama’s predecessor. The same is true of the president’s statement: “Just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians.” The source of Israeli fears is named, but the perpetuator of Palestinian despair is not.
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The Mitchell report shared the structural flaw of all US interventions on the Israeli-Palestinian front subsequent to the collapse of talks at Camp David in July 2000. Whether through a stoppage of Palestinian resistance, constitutional and security reform, or institution building, it placed the onus for progress toward peace and Palestinian statehood upon the occupied people, and deferred the duties of the occupying power until later. And it spoke not at all of the foremost of those obligations, the duty to end the occupation.
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How Mitchell intends to produce a durable ceasefire, with the limited toolbox in his possession, remains something of a mystery. Insisting he will neither visit Gaza nor engage with Hamas -- at a time when Israel is all but ignoring Abbas and focusing on Egyptian-mediated talks with the Islamists -- he has once again produced a situation where US diplomacy is hamstrung by being more pro-Israel than Israel itself.
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On the available evidence, it is almost certainly too late to implement a viable two-state settlement. Israeli settlement expansion appears to have proceeded too far, for far too long, to be able to be reversed by an Israeli government that can remain legitimate, even if genuine US pressure is bought to bear. The real test for Washington will therefore be not how often Mitchell shuttles to and around the region, but how rapidly it acts to freeze Israeli settlement expansion in all its forms and reverse Israeli impunity in the Occupied Territories.
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The problem is that the death notice will not be accompanied by a birth announcement for a binational state. With the vast majority of Israelis committed to retaining a Jewish state, and the vast majority of Palestinians in response demanding that their ethnicity be privileged in their own entity, a South African-type transformation on the Mediterranean is at best many years away. The more likely scenario, for the coming years, is a descent into increasingly existential, and regionalized, conflict.

Here are couple different views of Mitchell:

AFP on Mitchell

Zunes on Mitchell

Tone Deaf in Gaza: Obama on al-Arabiya

Much is being made of Obama's interview with Al-Arabiya. Though it should be noted that if Obama really wanted to "reach out" to those of the Muslim worlds with something other than "Predator Ariel Drones" (how exactly did we end up in this episode of Star Wars?), he would have went on Al-Jazeera. However, Obama would not go on Al-Jazeera because, Al-Jazeera would have asked him tough questions, such as how Israel's occupation of and settlements in the the West Bank affect prospects for peace. Al-Jazeera would have most certainly asked Obama about his position on the Israeli assault on Gaza. It is rather amazing that in that entire interview, Hisham Melhem did not ask one question about the Gaza massacre. How they can go on pretending that massacre didn't take place is beyond me. As is how an American president can expect to have any credibility in the Arab world after have stood by Israel as it added one more atrocity to its fast growing list.

This is why Obama went on Al-Arabiya, which is owned by Saudi King Fahd's brother-in-law, and should be considered an organ of Saudi state propaganda.

Indeed, in the interview, Melham describes the US as "the only western power with no colonial legacy" (about 9:45 into the video, transcript here). As long as erasing America's colonial past and present remains a crucial presuppositions for all discussion of America's place in the world, we'll remained trapped in a world of universal deceit. The minute we start putting the Zionist project in the same context as Manifest Destiny and the ethic cleansing of Natives, we'll begin to start working our way out of this morass.

This portion of the interview stood in my mind as particularly egregious:

Now, Israel is a strong ally of the United States. They will not stop being a strong ally of the United States. And I will continue to believe that Israel's security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side.

This last sentence says it all. "... if the time is right"? What is that supposed to mean?

Another of Obama's greatest hits:

But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power [yeah, just ask the Native Americans...], and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that.

US respect and partnership with the Muslim worlds in 1988 or 1978? What is he talking about?

The Continuing Failure of the Corporate Media

Our media outlets are part of massive project of ideological and psychological conditioning:

Despite two wars involving more than 200,000 U.S. troops and a global economic crisis, foreign-related news coverage by the three major U.S. television networks fell to a record low during 2008, according to the latest annual review of network news coverage by the authoritative Tyndall Report.

This psyop has deadly consequences. As Chris Hedges points out with regard to the (non)reporting of Israel's massacre in Gaza:

It was Israel, not Hamas, which violated the truce established last June. This was never made clear in any of the press reports.
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But by giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to justify wholesale slaughter we empower not only Israel’s willful self-destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup to the Iraq war, was again feckless and gutless. It bent to the will of the powerful. It abandoned its sacred contract with its readers, listeners and viewers to always tell the truth. It chattered about nothing. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for doing “a fair, balanced and complete job.

However, public opinion regarding that lawless frontier outpost on the Eastern Med is changing very fast, much faster than the media and its corporate sponsors are able to adjust to. This is evident in the skyrocketing viewership of Al-Jazeera English during the most recent Israeli atrocity.

Interestingly CBS "60 Minutes" is the first network to respond to the shift in attitudes by filing this incredibly hard hitting report from the Occupied West Bank. Given the realities that Robert Anderson reports in this video, it is obvious that the two-state solution is officially dead, victim of a disingenuous Oslo "peace process" that was all an elaborate cover and stalling tactic so that Israel could consolidate its control over the West Bank.

Obama's Vietnam?

Norman Solomon listens to Obama's inaugural and hears "The "Ghost of LBJ." Juan Cole, makes similar observation in "Obama's Vietnam":

Friday's airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war.

The Power behind the Throne

Is it me, or did Cheney's nod off at Bush's farewell address appear a deliberate affront to the impetuous half-wit that mans the storefront. Cheney's got about as much interest in the spotlight as a shitake mushroom, but you've got to guess that even he gets a little bored with hearing one of Yale's finest wax poetic about the virtues of perpetual peace and the the expansion of liberty, blah, blah, blah...

American Dynasty: Gone but not Forgotten (that is till Jeb gets his turn at the plate...)

Once again its Alexander Cockburn who offers the insightful observations and asks the important questions:

I’ve always been a fan of George Bush, on the simple grounds that the American empire needs taking down several notches and George Jr has been the right man for the job. It was always odd to listen to liberals and leftists howling about Bush’s poor showing, how he’d reduced America’s standing in the family of nations. Did the Goths fret at the manifest weakness of the Emperor Honorius and lament the lack of a robust or intelligent Roman commander?

As a continental transplant Cockburn is well qualified to engage in a little Royalty watching:

Was this doggedly incompetent saboteur of empire an “accident” of history, born of hanging chads in Florida in 2000 and the ruthless competence of James Baker in outmaneuvering Al Gore’s efforts to claim the White House amid the Forida recounts?

Blame first his mother, Barbara Bush, an unpleasant creature who never forgave George Sr for dragging her from behind the lace curtains of respectability in Connecticut to West Texas where she endured the miseries of a frontier wife, helpmeet to a failed wildcatter. She let her hair go white, grieved for the daughter that died and snarled at the lads while her faithless husband gadded about the world. It was Barbara who gave George his petty, mean-spirited vindictiveness and George Sr who passed on the relentless philistinism. Blame Laura who took in hand the lay-about cokehead of the Houston years and nudged him into politics.

How did it all go so terribly wrong?

Bush passed his final White House years in morose seclusion, despised by all, obeyed by none – a welcome rebuke to the concept of “unitary power” and an omnipotent executive.

Now Obama proclaims his mission of renewing America, always a sinister prospect. We’re heading back in to the high country of moral uplift, and dispiriting talk of America’s “mission”. I live in hopes of an acrid manuscript from Laura Bush, blaming everything on Dick Cheney.