My recent lectures at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon were covered by a leading source of Middle East news and information on the Internet - the DailyStar.com.
I want to thank my hosts at the Lebanese American University for the opportunity to discuss these important topics, and the students for their spirited interest & contributions. I look forward to continuing the dialogue. Full article re-published below:
‘Obama intends to maintain the status quo’
Fellow democrat says new president’s sole focus is the US economy
By Andrew Wander
Daily Star staff
Thursday, March 05, 2009
BEIRUT: For a man who counts US Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore among his friends, Joe Cari offers a refreshingly frank point of view on President Barack Obama’s commitment to peace in Middle East.
With an extensive knowledge of Democratic politics, Cari is ideally placed to guess the direction that the new administration will take. “The status quo, or no eruption, is what Barack Obama wants,” he says, adding that the new president is intent on focusing all his energies on dealing with what he terms the “economic calamity” in the US.
He has nothing personal against Obama. After all, they are both Democrats who cut their teeth in the pressure cooker of Chicago, a city famed for its brutal political scene. “I like Barack,” he smiles, as he speaks to students at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, where he is giving a series of talks on the new administration.
But he believes that the writing was on the wall for the Middle East from the second Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate. “Joe’s views on Israel are in concrete,” he says. According to Cari, Biden’s appointment was the “first signal” that Obama’s priorities lay away from the region.
He says the subsequent appointments made by the new president carry their own message. He admits the special envoys to the region Obama chose have experience, but he worries it’s the wrong sort. “I would argue that this is a missed opportunity because we brought people in who have preconceived ideas,” he says of the appointment of George Mitchell, Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke.
“The one thing that I like is that they have reached out to Syria,” he says. But even this, he adds, is with an eye on maintaining rather than changing the situation in the Middle East. “The real reason that they started talks with Syria is to keep the status quo,” he says.
For a president who came to power promising change, it is a damning appraisal from the perspective of those who live, and suffer, in the region. But Cari insists that it is accurate. “The US will just try to keep the lid on things for some period of time,” he says, while Obama focuses on “economics, economics, economics.” He also has a theory that the powerful Jewish lobby in the US doesn’t want to see an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The Jewish community in the States wants to perpetuate the conflict because that way they are more powerful,” he says, after pointing out that despite making up only 4 percent of the population, Jews make 60 percent of the donations to US politicians. “They keep the conflict going because they are an institutional power,” he says.
He points to how donations are split between the parties.
“The Jewish community is strategic,” he says. “There is support for both sides to ensure they have a seat at the table.” And he warns that if another conflict in the region did erupt, it would be Obama’s “worst nightmare,” because it would distract him from America’s economic woes. “It would force him to spend time on an issue that he doesn’t have time to spend time on right now.”
Joseph Cari Jnr. is a man with a huge experience of US politics.
His career has spanned philanthropy, law and business, as well as working on every presidential campaign between 1980 and 2000. He has not escaped unscathed from the bitter political battles he has been involved in.
For a time, he was facing a potential prison sentence after pleading guilty to one count of extortion in the Rezko corruption scandal in 2005. But he maintains that he was the target of a politically motivated prosecution initiated by the Bush administration.
“I was in the wrong place, for the wrong time, for the wrong reasons,” he says. “I learned from it and have gone on.”
He’d rather talk about the future than the past. He believes that Obama compromised unnecessarily on the recent $787 billion stimulus package designed to help kickstart the US economy. The version of the stimulus package that got through the House, he says, will have “worldwide repercussions” on a crisis that has reached unprecedented proportions.
“I’m afraid the stimulus package isn’t going to work,” he warns, saying that the economic crisis has changed America’s view of itself.
“We were founded on the belief that the next generation would do better than ours. For the first time in a very long time, that is no longer the case.”
He talks of a triangular relationship between India, China and the US at the head of the future world economy.
“The most important relationship is with China,” he says. “The ties that we have with Western Europe will carry on, but won’t be that important.” But he believes that closer ties with China won’t mean the US will use its leverage to persuade Beijing to improve its human rights record.
“America lost its moral authority to talk to others about human-rights violations with Guantanamo Bay,” he says.
But while his vision of Obama’s America is one chastened in foreign-policy terms by the economic meltdown, he argues that there wouldn’t be an Obama administration at all if the financial crisis had not struck.
“If it had stayed a foreign-policy election, it would be President McCain,” he says. He believes that the neoconservative approach to spreading democracy in the Middle East - which he believes was a mistake of “biblical proportions” - is dead. “Obama will promote democracy in a way that a country can define its democracy,” he says.
But despite his call for a reality check on expectations of what Obama will achieve in the Middle East, Cari says he remains optimistic.
“History has shown that a single good idea, over time, changes the world,” he adds, citing the example of Rosa Parkes, the African American woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in 1955.
“Her single act sparked a civil-rights movement that culminated in an African-American president,” he says. “A single act, a single thought, can change history.”
