Today's Roger Cohen Op-Ed deals with the lack of Arab-Americans in the new Obama Middle East team. His first sentence rattles off a list of academics/intellectuals who are conversant in regional culture and language who are on the team: "Shibley Telhami, Vali Nasr, Fawaz Gerges, Fouad Moughrabi and James Zogby." At first, I was astounded to see that Obama created such a group to advise him on Arab and Arab-American affairs. Cohen was kidding. However, that canard allowed him to illustrate the very lack of what the US needs in its diplomacy with the Middle East. Cohen doesn't denigrate BO's diplomats' qualifications, but "on the diversity front they fall short. On the change-you-can-believe-in front, they also leave something to be desired."
Importantly, those hands arrive with certain predispositions and legacies of failures. Although he doesn't bang his reader over the head, he remarks that the US needs fresh minds to tackle the region's dynamic realities. Such as:
"Does regarding the Middle East almost exclusively through the prism of the war on terror make sense? Does turning a blind eye to the Israeli settlements in the West Bank that frustrate a two-state solution, and the Israeli blockade of Gaza that radicalizes its population, not undermine U.S. interest in bolstering moderate Palestinian sentiment?"
or
'"Do we understand the increasingly sophisticated Middle East of Al Jazeera where, as Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland, put it to me, 'People are not dumb and our credibility is at a historic near-zero?'"
All in all, a well-written op-ed.
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