Posted by Tina
President Obama spoke to the Middle East on Al Arabiya on Tuesday. His purpose to re-establish the relationship we had twenty to thirty years ago. As Max Boot reported in Commentary, a little math takes us back to the period between 1979 and 1989:
20 or 30 Years Ago? by Max Boot Commentary Magazine
What was happening in relations between America and the Muslim world back then? Not relying on memory alone, I consulted Bernard Gruns reference book, The Timetables of History. *** It turns out that in 1989 U.S. fighters shot down two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra. The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan, creating a vacuum that would eventually be filled by the Taliban. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Salman Rushdies death for blasphemy. Hundreds died in Lebanons long-running civil war while Hezbollah militants were torturing to death U.S. Marine Colonel William Rich Higgins, who had been kidnapped the previous year while serving as a UN peacekeeper in Lebanon. **
** And 1979? That was an even darker year-in many ways a turning point for the worse in the Middle East. That was, after all, the year that the shah of Iran was overthrown. He was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who launched a war against the West that is still unfolding. One of the first actions of this long struggle was the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran and all of its personnel as hostages. The same year saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to the growth of the mujahideen, some of whom would later morph into Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This was also the year that Islamic militants temporarily seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, an event that drove the Saudi royal family to become ever more fundamentalist. *** In other news in 1979, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was hanged by General Zia al-Hak, inaugurating a long period when Pakistan would be under the effective control of the army in alliance with Islamic militants. That year mobs also attacked U.S. embassies throughout the Muslim world from Kabul and Islamabad to Tripoli. The one bright spot in 1979 was the signing of the Camp David Accord between the US, Egypt, and Israel, which did not, unfortunately, auger a new Middle East as many optimists hoped. *** So this is the sort of partnership between the U.S. and the Middle East that President Obama would like to see? If his predecessor had suggested any such thing he would by now be a subject of ridicule for late-night comedians and daytime talk show hosts, and rightly so. **
What message did this hand extended in friendship really send? If our president is hoping to fool them with smoke and mirrors he has his work cut out. That’s the game they play,,,and they know it well.