Obama’s NewSpeak on the ‘Arab Spring’ – Obama friend of democracy and friendlier still with dictators, tyrants and kings

THE ROVING EYE
What Obama could not possibly say
By Pepe Escobar

Facts on the ground will decide whether the United States really “values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator”.

So let’s start with a fact. For US President Barack Obama, Saudi Arabia is not in the Middle East. Maybe the House of Saud has relocated the deserts and the oil to Oceania without telling anyone. In his major speech on Thursday from where the opening quote comes, and where, according to the Reuters gospel, he would “lay out a new US strategy toward a skeptical Arab world”, the skeptical Arabs, and the whole world for that matter, never heard these fateful two words, “Saudi” and “Arabia”. Even India, Indonesia and Brazil were mentioned.

That goes a long way to explain how the US, once again according to the Reuters gospel, plans to “shape the outcome of popular uprisings”; by not even naming the Middle Eastern power behind the ongoing counter-revolution against the great 2011 Arab revolt.

Obama tried to shape what Clintonites define as “ambitious realism”. It was more like ambitious fiction. By insisting on America’s set of “principles” and not so subtly trying once again to monopolize the moral high ground – issuing dispensations on regime change from Muammar Gaddafi (already gone) to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad (reform or go), Obama tried to rewrite history by inscribing Washington at the heart of the Arab-wide push for democracy. It may fool Americans. It didn’t fool the Arab street.

It took three long months for Obama to finally deal with the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain – without ever mentioning their masters Saudi Arabia. He let the Bahraini rulers off the hook with a State Department-issued velvet glove, at the same time deviating into a Riyadh/Tel Aviv-approved script blaming the evil of all evils Iran; “We recognize that Iran has tried to take advantage of the turmoil there, and that the Bahraini government has a legitimate interest in the rule of law. Nevertheless, we have insisted publicly and privately that mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens, and will not make legitimate calls for reform go away.”

It’s much more Orwellian than mere “brute force”; it’s the University of Bahrain, for instance, forcing students to sign a pledge of allegiance to the government, promising not to defy the monarchy; otherwise they’ll be expelled. …more