An Obama Fail

7:52 pm EST April 6th, 2009 | News | 10 Comments

He didn’t do the right thing in recognizing the Armenian genocide. There’s no way to wiggle out of that, just a bad call by the Prez.

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10 Responses to “An Obama Fail”

  1. moron says:
    April 6, 2009 at 8:18 pm

    Unfair –

    He went halfway there. That’s a lot more than previous administrations have done.

    If he was willing to take us even halfway there on universal health care, or fixing the banking crisis, or passing EFCA or ending DADT or ending Bush’s wars, I’d be delighted — but it remains to be seen whether he will do even a *fraction* of what needs to be done in these areas, all his hopey-changey happy talk nonwithstanding.

  2. sgwhiteinfla says:
    April 6, 2009 at 8:50 pm

    (ABC News’ Lara Setrakian says in Turkey it is a crime to publicly discuss the Armenian Genocide, a ban mounted in 2000 as an add-on to Article 301, which prohibits by law any insult to Turkey or the Turkish nation. The “g” word has landed a handful of scholars in jail, among them famed journalist Hrant Dink before his 2007 assassination by an extreme nationalist.)

    Well he reaffirmed his views and said they haven’t changed but I mean damn it IS against the law to say it out loud. I am at least encouraged that he didn’t say anything that could be construed as him “thinking it over” or reassesing the situation. Sometimes you have to weigh the merits of doing something versus the reprecussions.

  3. Phil says:
    April 6, 2009 at 9:00 pm

    Armenia and Turkey are right now closer to normalizing relations than at any time in their history, but it is a fragile and delicate process. It’s angry Armenian-Americans who think it’s super important for the US to flaunt some hypocrisy and grandstand about the genocide. How exactly would it have helped the healing process for Obama to show up and scold the country? Don’t you think maybe it would have backfired andgiven ammo to hardline anti-reproachment demagogues(“we shouldn’t be taking orders from the Americans” etc etc)? Obama did exactly the right thing by saying “this is for Armenia and Turkey to work out, the rest of us should butt out.”

    People get all bent out of shape about the Jewish Lobby distorting U.S. policy to conform to their notion of what is good for Israel, but nobody stops and thinks about realities on the ground when some other activist group gets their meme into the national consciousness. Yes, it was a genocide. Yes, Turkey needs to own up to it. No, it is not our place to go in there with fingers wagging.

  4. Oliver Willis says:
    April 6, 2009 at 9:23 pm

    but I mean damn it IS against the law to say it out loud
    All the more reason for the President Of The United States to point it out.

  5. Phil says:
    April 6, 2009 at 9:41 pm

    Clarification: Lest my “people get bent out of shape” locution is read as belittling the notion that lobbying efforts by AIPAC et al push our policies in unwise directions, let me be clear and say that people RIGHTLY get bent out of shape about that. Powerful groups get bees in their bonnet about certain issues, and bluster about “moral clarity” without consideration for outcomes and, as sgwhiteinfla termed it, repercussions.

    It’s the same thing on the Armenian genocide issue. Yes it would be emotionally satisfying, and not without value, to thrust shameful reality it the face of the Turkish parliament. I just think one has to be cognizant of costs, and whether that course of action moves you closer to a desirable outcome. I see no way dropping the G-bomb today would have been productive. Some day (soon IMO) Turkey will have its “Willy Brandt at the Warsaw Ghetto” moment, but the US should have learned from recent history that gerrymandering historical processes in foreign land is very dicey indeed. A little humility people!

  6. Jeff says:
    April 6, 2009 at 10:28 pm

    Turkey is one of the few secular Muslim nations in the world and we need their friendship. Our hands aren’t so clean ourselves (when was the last time you saw a Native American?). Barack faced reality and dealt with it.

  7. sgwhiteinfla says:
    April 6, 2009 at 11:08 pm

    Oliver

    You gotta remember that SOME countries actually believe in the notion of the rule of law. The might have frog marched President Obama up out of there, and what would you be saying then?

    I keed, but only a little.

  8. anotherbozo says:
    April 7, 2009 at 7:56 am

    Oliver, you’re a blogger, not a diplomat. I thought Obama handled that land mine with considerable tact. The Turks are obsessed with the g word and it would have become THE issue of his visit.

    I think sgwhiteinfla’s nuanced conclusion here is the right one.

  9. anotherbozo says:
    April 7, 2009 at 8:26 am

    Afterthought: If I wanted to indulge in the sport of second-guessing Obama: he could have made the point “good countries sometimes do bad, bad things” in re-affirming his acknowledgement of Armenian genocide. With or without explicitly mentioning the recently-released Red Cross report on U.S. torture victims.

  10. ts says:
    April 7, 2009 at 10:30 am

    People get all bent out of shape about the Jewish Lobby distorting U.S. policy…

    What’s the Jewish Lobby?