Thursday, May 19, 2011

OBAMA: FREEDOM, GROWTH, ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE BASED ON 1967 BORDERS

In a bold and sweeping televised speech in Washington on Thursday, President Barack Obama of the United States offered a streamlined vision for a new Middle East whose societies would be based on freedom for all people, and whose people would have the opportunities for economic advancement and social progress that were long denied to them by authoritarian regimes.

Speaking in the ornate eighth floor Benjamin Franklin Room at the State Department, Mr. Obama also unveiled to a world audience a multi-billion dollar economic plan to spur and reward democratic change in the Arab world, modeled on the evolution of post-Soviet eastern Europe.


The comprehensive US scheme, initially targeting Egypt and Tunisia, would also serve as an incentive for other states currently rocked by “Arab Spring” turmoil, to embrace people power and turn toward democracy, Mr. Obama said.

“The question before us is what role America will play as this story unfolds. For decades, the United States has pursued a set of core interests in the region: countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce, and safe-guarding the security of the region; standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace,” the president said.

He was tough toward Israel, a traditional ward of the United States, urging the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to base new peace negotiations on the principle of observing the 1967 boundaries that demarcated territories in Palestine. Mr. Obama was clearly saying that—like much of the Arab world—he view the occupation of land seized by the Israelis in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War as illegal.

Mr. Obama said for the first time that the borders of Israel and a future Palestinian state should be based on 1967 lines and be completed with land swaps.

“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states,” Mr. Obama said.

He said that peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians would involve “two states for two peoples.”

“The full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces should be coordinated with the assumption of Palestinian security responsibility in a sovereign, non-militarized state,” he said.

“The duration of this transition period must be agreed, and the effectiveness of security arrangements must be demonstrated,” the president said.

But he warned: “For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state,” he said.

The New York Times reported: Mr. Obama said the events in the region reflected an inexorable desire for democracy that nations — both friend and foe of the United States — could not suppress. He bluntly warned President Bashar al-Assad of Syria that he would face increasing isolation if he did not respond to those demanding a transition to democracy.

“President Assad now has a choice,” Mr. Obama said. “He can lead that transition, or get out of the way.”

He was no less blunt in the case of Bahrain, a close ally that has brutally crackdown on protests there.

“The only was forward is for the government and opposition to engage in a dialogue, and you can’t have real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail,” President Obama said in remarks that seemed to represent the first time he was so critical of Bahrain, a longtime US ally that hosts the US Fifth Fleet.

Mr. Obama, in his remarks, reaffirmed that the Middle East is a complex place, where different countries demand different responses, though. It was a marked contrast to his landmark speech in Cairo in June 2009, when he addressed himself to the Islamic world as a whole, trying to heal a rift with the United States, the Times said.

The Times report said that Mr. Obama “conceded that the United States had not been a central actor in the uprisings, but he sought to cast America’s role in the Middle East in a new context now that the war in Iraq is winding down and Osama bin Laden has been killed, in part, a primary goal of the war that began in Afghanistan nearly a decade ago.”

The Times added: Mr. Obama’s aides and speechwriters labored on his remarks until the last hours before he delivered it. Until the end, for example, his aides debated how Mr. Obama would address the conflict that has fueled Arab anger for decades: the division between Israelis and Palestinians. A senior administration official said that Mr. Obama’s advisers remained deeply divided over whether he should formally endorse Israel’s pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian state. That he did so sent a strong signal that the United States expected Israel — as well as the Palestinians — to make concessions to restart peace talks that have been stalled since September.

Mr. Obama laid out his various initiatives in a long-awaited major speech sketching Washington’s response to the historic wave of change sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, at the State Department at 1540 GMT Thursday.

Senior advisers to President Obama, previewing parts of his speech, said the United States would offer debt relief totaling roughly $1 billion “over a few years” to Egypt through a debt swap mechanism that would invest the money to boost youth employment and support entrepreneurs, according to Reuters.

Washington would also loan or guarantee loans up to a total of $1 billion through the Overseas Private Investment Corp (OPIC) for Egypt to finance infrastructure development and boost jobs, the officials told reporters on a conference call.

Mr. Obama’s economic aid parallels a package of measures being prepared by the European Union. The union plans to mobilize more than 2 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in investment and development money for Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries, drawing on the resources of the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

“We’re trying to pull together a kind of strategic approach,” Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s chief foreign policy official, said in an interview with the Times on Wednesday. “This is our neighborhood.”

The European aid will focus both on the immediate need for cash and other support—a team of monitors recently went to Tunisia to help officials prepare for elections—as well as longer-term economic development.

Several billion dollars in additional financing could come from multilateral development banks as well.

The Obama administration would also seek to foster trade and economic development throughout the region and encourage private sector investment, the officials said.

“We think these initiatives will help Egypt and Tunisia as they undertake the twin challenges of economic transformation and democratization,” one official said.

The officials dodged a question on whether the debt relief package was enough.

“Egypt has, I think, a very good prospect of accessing private capital markets, and that’s important to Egypt’s future economic vibrancy, and that’s something that we know economic leaders in Egypt want to reinforce,” one official said when asked why the country’s full debt was not canceled, as reported by Reuters. (Egypt’s external debt was rescheduled earlier this year and is not put at $32 billion, or 14.5 percent of the GDP.)

In his widely anticipated speech on Thursday, Mr. Obama aims to present a coherent approach for dealing with unprecedented political upheaval that has swept the region and upended decades of US policy.

Part of that approach will include boosting economic fundamentals to spur democratic reform.

“We ... know from our study of the past that successful transitions to democracy depend in part on strong foundations for prosperity, and that reinforcing economic growth is an important way of reinforcing a democratic transition,” one official said.

The United States would form “Egyptian-American and Tunisian-American Enterprise Funds” to promote investment from the private sector, the White House said in a statement laying out some of its proposals.

Washington would also work with allies to reorient the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to support the Middle East and North Africa region just as it helped countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

US officials are concerned about the economic outlook in Egypt and Tunisia after democratic revolutions swept out long-ruling autocratic leaders.

Growth forecasts have been revised downward to 1 percent in Egypt and GDP growth in Tunisia is expected to be close to zero this year, the White House said.

The White House hopes to send a message to other countries in the region that they, too, could benefit from economic backing if they pursue a democratic path.

“Part of the purpose of this economic program ... is to reinforce not only positive change in Egypt and Tunisia, but a positive model that can empower and incentivize democratic change and economic reform in other parts of the region,” one official said.

US officials said they would also seek to support better economic management in transitioning nations, try to improve economic stability by easing deficits and spurring growth and would support economic modernization and reform.

Trade will also be used as a lever, in an attempt to help nations help themselves.

“If you take out oil exports, (in) the countries of this region, 400 million people export about the same amount of goods as Switzerland does, with eight million people,” AFP quoted another senior official as saying.

The rationale of President Obama’s Arab plan appears to be an attempt to tackle the economic deprivation and miserable prospects of vast swathes of Arab population, which, along with repression of basic rights, triggered a wildfire of protests.

President Obama sought Thursday to sketch a plausible policy response to the sudden, complex and often contradictory demands thrown up by revolts that started in Tunisia, and spread to nations including Egypt, Syria, Libya and Yemen.

“We will continue to do these things, with the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to peoples’ hopes; they are essential to them. We believe that no one benefits from a nuclear arms race in the region, or Al Qaeda’s brutal attacks. People everywhere would see their economies crippled by a cut off in energy supplies,” Mr. Obama said in his speech. “As we did in the Gulf War, we will not tolerate aggression across borders, and we will keep our commitments to friends and partners.”

Making the situation even more complicated for the US—which has traditionally been Israel’s ward, and often its only big-power supporter—is the insistence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on continuing illegal settlements in the occupied territories, claiming exclusive sovereignty of Jerusalem, and keeping an Israeli military presence along the Jordan River. None of these points are acceptable to Palestinians.

The breathtaking speed, historical scope and complexity of change sweeping the region caught Washington, like the leaders it challenged, unawares.

For many Americans, the most significant foreign event of the year is the US killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, a fact pointing to a key domestic audience for Thursday’s speech.

Mr. Obama had harsh words for US foes Syria and Iran. Although Mr. Obama signed an executive order on Wednesday imposing sanctions on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and key aides, he has yet to call for Mr. Assad’s resignation. That did not change with Mr. Obama’s speech today, although he suggested that if Mr. Assad weren’t ready to make a transition to democracy then he would have to get out of the way.

(Mustapha Ajbaili, an editor at Al Arabiya

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