Friday, June 05, 2009

Greg Djerejian on Obama's Cairo Speech

Belgravia Dispatch emerges from an extended hiatus for a don't-miss commentary. Djerejian is a very smart man with diplomacy in his DNA. If he says something is okay I feel better already. And Obama has not even arrived at the putative excuse for a trip abroad, an appearance in France to commemorate D-Day. This Administration's ability to orchestrate diplomacy is poetic to a Shakespearean degree.

Take a few minutes from your busy day to read this post slowly and entirely.

...all told, and given the overall political realities this President faces, I found it a reasonably adroit balancing act, with one main message: that he was very serious about patiently and deliberately pursuing a peace process (and so, for example, final status issues can be broached well later after much seed-work), in sharp contrast to the deep bungling of this portfolio by the previous Administration. And if some might feel rumblings of discomfort that discussion of ‘shooting rockets at sleeping children’ was too crudely aimed as a moral criticism of only one side (regarding Obama’s point about the surrender of moral authority), overall again, and given the growing tension of late between Tel Aviv and Washington, the middle-ground Obama forged was ultimately more an umpire-like demand, delivered in reasonably soothing, pragmatic, almost professorial tones, that both sides better adhere to the Road Map. We might have done well worse than that, at least as a start.

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