There is one problem with this analogy; President Obama had to compromise a large portion of his party in order to get the health-care reform bill passed into law. The bill may have been dead in the House if it wasn't for his executive order last night, which continued the obstruction of federal money for clinical abortions. On the positive side, this order gave him the votes of anti-abortion Democrats in the House. On the negative side, he may have alienated members of his party who view abortion rights as a key pillar of the Democratic Party platform.

So perhaps the Obama administration needs to take this realism into account when tackling the many problems still facing the Middle East. The President cannot be naive in his thinking; just as the White House had to give up something (federal $ for abortion) to obtain something else (health care reform), they may have to concede on some of the Iranians demands. The same rationale fits in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even in the Afghan war.

I have no idea what those compromises might be, and I have no idea if the most significant compromise would actually solve some of Obama's struggles in the Middle East. But they are there nonetheless. I guess the health care/Middle East analogy is stronger that previously thought.

-Daniel R. DePetris

http://www.depetris.wordpress.com

Grand strategy = ends + ways + means, and must be broken out into economic, military, diplomatic and social strategies, which all must be articulated and resourced. The health insurance bill vote demonstrated ways, but the ends and means remain a bit fuzzy, from where I sit.

It seems unlikely that Team Obama has been able to do more than dust off and hopefully adapt Clinton era ME policy, in light of Bush era developments. While Obama has used his cool pulpit to set a new tone, his team was confronted by Israel's overt Gaza preemption, which 'cast lead' around our diplomatic rudder. Our ship of super-state was also stiffened on course by politically motivated selection of a SecState and VP that have AIPAC history and made promises in their primary campaigns. Then there's WH gatekeeper Rahm, his family history and wartime service.

The overriding principle is that Obama's office can apply ways and means, seek ends in future foreign policy, only if his team keeps a legislative control of the exchequer. No national party has tried to buck the US Israel lobby since Eisenhower in 1956. Johnson saw 1967 coming like a train wreck, but was powerless to constrain our ally. Even Pres. Carter played into the Eretz occupation agenda by inducing Sadat to deal for an opened Suez, without gaining agreement on the Principle of Israel's return to '67 borders.

Don't be fooled by the size of the 'p.' The principles of geometry trump the Principles of Enlightenment. The enforced law is possession, not UN resolutions.

The amount of steerage afforded any US admin. is a matter of a few degrees on the Israeli proposal of a shrunken, split, tribal reservation, with no meaningful commercial link to the sea, and Israel maintaining veto power over Arab water rights, and development of substantial Gaza-Mediteranean nat gas.

This is an interesting correlation. President Obama is a skilled, convincing and respectful orator. Civil dialogue works and leads the way to peace. Let's hope all parties follow his example and keep that lesson in mind during the peace talks that must continue.
Civility. Respect. Dialogue. @pax101

What President Obama has accomplished by passing the health care reform bill is major progress toward a policy goal beloved of many Democratic voters -- without alienating reconcilable major organized interests, and also without addressing squarely the problem of future health care costs.

What he's facing in the Middle East is the necessity of asserting American national interests against those of a government to which an important element of his own party is deeply committed, in the face of the profound unattractiveness to Americans of that government's principal interlocutors. He's also confronting an Iranian regime riven by faction and much more preoccupied with suppressing its domestic opposition than it was a year ago, and certainly more so than Obama knew it was at that time.

The first situation featured a status quo deeply disliked by millions of Americans, the second a status quo in which most Americans take little interest. Obama, wisely or not, left the actual drafting of health care reform to Congress; in foreign policy that's not an option, and with respect to the Middle East Congress is one of his problems. There is also the all-important fact that Obama both knew what he wanted on health care reform and what he was prepared to give up to get it. It's hardly clear that either condition applies in the foreign policy field.

A fully realistic view of the administration's policy toward the Middle East would have to take into account the wreckage Obama inherited from his predecessor. The Bush administration was reflexively deferential to Israeli priorities even where these served no American interest, and paralyzed itself internally through the President's unwillingness to choose between competing Iran policy prescriptions offered by his Vice President and his State Department, respectively. The United States thus appeared overseas as a full partner in everything that Israel did, while toward Iran it alternated between empty words and threats of war -- neither of them tenable positions, and both of them positions from which Obama and his team have struggled to move away.

To that extent, the administration has known what it has to do. It isn't obvious that Obama has accepted the costs that go along with what it has to do. In the administration's view, its statements against Israeli settlement expansion go farther than those of its predecessors, and it has pursued sanctions against Iran while keeping what it sees as a prudent distance from the Iranian opposition. But its opposition to settlements hasn't gone far enough to alter Israeli policy in a meaningful way, and so far from sparing the Iranian opposition from the taint of American endorsement Obama has sat by in all but silence as the Tehran regime suppresses it.

Pressing the Israelis harder would provoke opposition from Democratic supporters of Israel in the United States, and engaging publicly on behalf of Iranians trying -- for the moment, futilely -- to make of Iran a more normal country might further complicate efforts to secure cooperation from authoritarian governments on the Iranian nuclear issue. They would represent political costs of different kinds for Obama, costs he appears unwilling to pay, but to get the United States clear of getting blamed around the world for everything Israel does and to strengthen America's ability to influence Iran's internal politics in the future he would have to pay those costs.

The main benefit enactment of health care reform brings to the Obama administration's foreign policy is simply that the President will now have more time to devote to subjects other than health care reform. That isn't a guarantee of peace in the Middle East, let alone of freedom in Iran, and it doesn't mean Obama has a strategy for either. But it's not nothing.

I don't believe that, having a health care policy would mean that, President Obama has a Middle East policy, anymore than saying, having a health care policy would make President Obama a train driver.
khairi janbek.paris/france

Obama should publically enact into law 10% right off the top goes to God. The Muslims will realize that America recognizes God first and they themselves will shut down the Muslim Gehad.