Friday, January 11, 2019

Fiasco in Cairo

There may never be a worse high-level speech than the one that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered yesterday at the American University of Cairo. Pompeo travelled all the way to the Nile, but could not step outside the Potomac/ Hudson/ Fox News international relations book circle, in which the Arab Spring was Barack Obama's fault, the average Arab lives in mortal fear of Iran, and a judo contestant from Israel going to Abu Dhabi is the greatest breakthrough anywhere since Nixon went to China. And then's there a line for which we'd have blamed Steve Bannon if he was still in the administration:

Our eagerness to address only Muslims and not nations ignored the rich diversity of the Middle East and frayed old bonds. It undermined the concept of the nation-state, the building block of international stability. And our desire for peace at any cost led us to strike a deal with Iran, our common enemy.

In the background, whoever wrote that is thinking ... ISIS is just like The Globalists! 

The country that should probably feel most aggrieved is Lebanon: Pompeo ignored its hosting of large numbers of Syrian refugees, mindlessly equated it with Hezbollah and Iran, and presented it as a country only to be thought of in terms of the implications for Israel.

There's not much that can be done, but why is Poland lending any legitimacy to this charade?

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