A new war would explode the myth that Obama’s outreach to the Arabs and pressure on Israel have set the Middle East on a new path. Israeli-Arab wars, this narrative holds, were the kind of things that happened during the Bush years, when the president ignored the peace process and alienated Muslims, and neocons imperiled world peace before breakfast. To have a war unfold in the enlightened, post-Cairo speech era, after dozens of visits by George Mitchell to the region — that would be quite an embarrassment.

How many days — much less weeks — would pass before Obama began criticizing the Israeli operation and refusing diplomatic protection at the UN? ~Noah Pollak

Via Scoblete

There are so many faulty assumptions in this quote. When did Obama ever cite the 2006 war in Lebanon as an example of Bush-era policy failures? As far as I can recall, he never said anything of the kind. What does the possibility of a new war between Israel and Hizbullah have to do with George Mitchell or the Cairo speech? Obviously, Mitchell’s time as special envoy has had no influence on the region one way or the other. The policy he was working to advance never really had the backing of the White House. This is why Walt recently argued that he should resign and go home. As I said soon after the Cairo speech, all mention of Lebanon one way or the other in the speech was conspicuously absent:

While I still think the Cairo speech failed, it failed because significant numbers of persuadable Muslims are not going to be won over by an appeal that urges a sort of satyagraha for the Palestinians at the same time that the bombardment of Lebanon and strikes in Gaza go unmentioned. Obama could have made similar acknowledgments of the costs of these campaigns, and thereby deflected attention from the foursquare backing the U.S. gave to both. Even better, he could have recognized that these campaigns were damaging to American and Israeli interests and benefited no one except for Hizbullah and Hamas, but there was no way Obama was going to say that.

What Pollak does not remember and may be unable to comprehend is that Obama fully supported Israeli military actions in Lebanon and Gaza. He uttered no criticisms of either one. If another war occurred, there is no reason to expect that Washington would pressure Israel to halt its military operations. In 2006 Israel expanded the war to the rest of Lebanon anyway when there was no good reason to do so, and it seemed to make no difference to Obama then. If there were more of a military justification for expanding a war to all of Lebanon, which the placement of Hizbullah’s rockets might provide, Obama would probably be even less inclined to call for a halt to the campaign. If we look at the substance of administration policy in the region, rather than fixate on superficial theatrics and stylistic differences, another war in Lebanon would not be at all surprising. Obama’s reliable support for such a war would be even less remarkable.

Except for a few Obama enthusiasts, who actually believed that the Cairo speech and the administration’s half-hearted efforts on Israel-Palestine had much positive influence on Arab attitudes towards the U.S.? Pollak says that another Israel-Hizbullah war would explode this myth of a “new path,” but no one believes the myth. Indeed, the only people who seem to talk about this idea of a “new path” these days are intellectually lazy hawks who want to have a foil for their poor arguments.