In his speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum this morning, President Obama once again said all the right things. Though speaking without the passion that can animate his utterances when he is talking about things he feels the most strongly — such as demonizing his domestic opponents — the president sounded many of the right notes about support for the state of Israel and preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons as well as the need for the United States to act to prevent human rights catastrophes. But the president’s problem when it comes to applying the lessons of the Holocaust to statecraft has never been rhetorical.
Rather, it is the gap between what he says and what he does that is the cause for concern. Even though the president announced the creation of a board comprised of representatives of a cross section of government agencies that would be tasked with the prevention of atrocities, institutionalizing an approach to this issue isn’t the complete answer. In the absence of the will of the president to act, more government infrastructure won’t help. And given that the record of this administration has shown it to consider such issues to be among their lowest priorities, it’s hard to see how this speech will change things.
In his speech, Obama cited the example of Jan Karski, the heroic young Polish officer who smuggled himself into Treblinka in 1942 to find out what was happening and then escaped to the West where he told his tale to the leaders of the West including President Roosevelt. But what Obama failed to include in his account was the fact that FDR responded with silence and indifference to Karski’s shattering testimony when it was presented to him in person. And it is that precedent that illustrates why the mere convening of a meeting of the new atrocities prevention board today is a matter of little import so long as the president is more interested in talking about the subject rather than taking action.
The key test of his integrity on such matters today is the situation in Syria. In his introduction of the president at the museum, Elie Wiesel asked how it was possible for men like Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to still be in power if we have actually learned any of the lessons of the Holocaust. But the president’s speech should have given Wiesel little comfort.
Obama said the United States will continue working to isolate the Syrian regime and make an effort to help document the atrocities going on there so as to facilitate the prosecution of those responsible after the fact. But he said nothing to give Assad the impression that the U.S. would do anything that might actually contribute to his downfall.
If, in the face of the massacres going on in Syria, the best that the president can offer is a promise of more meaningless economic sanctions, then of what possible use is an atrocity prevention panel?
The same question can be asked of Obama’s approach to Iran, whose pursuit of nuclear weapons raises the specter of another mass slaughter of the Jewish people made all the more ironic by the regime’s denial of the Nazis’ attempt at genocide. The president’s rhetoric on Iran has been consistently strong, and today’s pledge was just as good. But so long as he is willing to rely on a diplomatic channel in which the European Union’s Catherine Ashton (a veteran Israel-hater) is determined to make nice with Tehran rather than to press it, it’s hard to see how any of his excellent statements are to be translated into effective policy. Criticizing the State Department of the 1940s for its indifference to the Holocaust may satisfy some of the president’s audience today, but it doesn’t make up for contemporary failures.
While I agree that the idea of an Atrocities Prevention Board is worse-than-useless if it isn't backed up by substantive action, I still see this development as a step in the right direction. The APB will provide the Administration with research, analysis and insight that they have not had in the past regarding trouble spots around the world. This should help when it comes to deciding when and how to act – hopefully that will be proactive. Institutionalization lends some weight to the recommendations and provides the Administration with data on which to base public policy. I look forward to seeing what comes out of this.
This is the silliest thing I've heard. We already KNOW who's doing what to whom. It's not a mystery. Turning the intelligence services into data collection agencies for people who want to hold bake sales for Darfur is ALREADY going on. And where those agencies can't or won't fill in their own gaps, people like George Clooney can do it privately. That's not the problem. There's no Rumsfeldian known unknowns here. The problem is whether anyone will do anything about it. n nObama's BFF in the Muslim world, Turkey's Erdogan is a half psychotic zealot who murders Kurds every day. Syria's Assad murders people every day. Afghanistan's Karzai embraces corruption in Al Capone quantities. Sudan is going back to murdering non Muslims, Nigeria – - ditto. And so on. East Africa is a bloodbath. n nThe question, the only question, is, SO? What DOES the leader of the free world do about it? Maybe the answer is 'not much' or lead from behind or whatever they call it. Maybe there are no more geopolitical interests that lie outside our own borders. Maybe we adopt a Russian strategy and sell the wherewithal to whomever wants to butcher some other group but only to the extent that they're able to continue purchasing and not one atrocity more. In any case, Obama has to have some sort of world view, I wouldn't even call it a policy or a doctrine, but simply some kind of coherent perspective which provides some foundation upon which to do 'something'. And by something I mean some thing beyond that which merely allows us to pat ourselves on the back from the heights of our own moral smugness and arrogance.
Syria and Iran have so far proven oppressive, sometimes murderously so, but they are not genocidal–not close to Rwandan or Cambodian standards, let alone WWII levels. Intervention by us for humanitarian reasons is probably not in our national interest, and might well prove counterproductive. Full-scale civil war in Syria, for example, would likely be far worse than what's going on now, and would probably lead to the exile of whole communities in the end. n nTobin and similar acolytes of permanent [democratic] revolution don't care about such subtleties, of course. They want American boys to die for an abstraction–democracy–that may well be unrealizable in the Middle East.
The underlying problem is that a substantial number of Americans are prepared to vote for someone like Obama with some not-so-gentle prompting from the media and other elite groups. This calls for a lot of activism from conservative groups. These folks need to get on talk-back radio, write to papers and congressmen, organize public meetings on issues, letterbox information to voters and so on.
A "board" to prevent future atrocities? Give me a break!
The article stated that Obama gets juiced when he is, "…demonizing his domestic opponents". I have not observed that he is doing much of that, at all. I have seen it, aplenty, on the GOP side, against Obama. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican.