Obama at the UN: an Embarrassment to Himself, and to the US

The NYT's report on Mr. Obama's speech to the UN today pulls no punches: Obama's lofty, silky rhetoric were not enough to mask the abject failure of his policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

For Mr. Obama, the challenge in crafting the much-anticipated General Assembly speech on Wednesday was how to address the incongruities of the administration’s position: the president who committed himself to making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians a priority from Day One, who still has not been able to even get peace negotiations going after two and a half years; the president who opened the door to Palestinian state membership at the United Nations last year ending up threatening to veto that very membership; the president who was determined to get on the right side of Arab history ending up, in the views of many on the Arab street, on the wrong side of it on the Palestinian issue.

The Arab Spring quandary, in particular, has been enormously troublesome for Mr. Obama. White House officials say that he has long been keenly aware that he, like no other American president, stood as a potential beacon to the Arab street as the ultimate symbol of the hopes and rewards of democracy. But since he is the president of the United States, he has had to put American interests first.

So Mr. Obama’s entire 47-minute address appeared, at times, an effort to thread the needle meant to balance his efforts in support of democratic movements against his efforts to stand behind Israel, America’s foremost ally.

Obama wants to have it every which way he can: as warrior for peace and human dignity, as fan of Palestinian statehood and Arab democracies, but also as ultimate guarantor of Israel's security and Israel's status as the US's foremost ally in the Middle East.

But in two and a half years as president, he has succeeded only in bowing before the dictates of Israeli domestic politics, as well as those of US congressmen held in (often willing) thrall by the powerful pro-Israel lobby and its Christian Zionist/evangelical/Islamophobic tag-team partners.  He continues to insist that only the US can act as a fair and honest broker between the two sides, and that those sides can hope to achieve a settlement of their differences only by returning to the negotating table.  Meanwhile, Israel's backers rail at the Palestinian leadership for refusing to accept Mr. Netanyahu's always-open invitation to sit down, even when they and any other reasonably sentient observer know that, in Netanyahu's world, such talks are nothing more than an opportuniy for Israel to insist on the same conditions it has been insisting on for years, call it "negotiation," and all the while, keep on expanding settlements in the West Bank, colonizing East Jerusalem, blockading the unfortunate Palestinians of Gaza, and in general make a two-state solution to the conflict impossible.

The only thing worse than Obama's feckless "leadership" on this issue is the solution that Texas governor Rick Perry - a prime contender for the Republican presidential nomination - is advancing: that the US adopt as its own the "Greater Israel" policy of the Netanyahu/Lieberman government: complete the colonization of the West Bank, eliminate any further consideration of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, and cement that new US position by moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  In his view - as he stated yesterday at a press conference - in a Perry administration, if you want to work for the US State Department, you'd better plan to be working in Jerusalem.

Secret Deals to Expand US's Permanent Wars

As the WaPo reports (from documents published by Wikileaks), the US has made some secret deals with Ethiopia and the Republic of Seychelles to host small fleets of drones for use in counterterror operations in Somali and Yemen.

Day by day, the ability of the American people to monitor and comprehend the miltary actions launched on their behalf disappears farther over the horizon.

Sad times for American democracy.  And a disappointing policy decision from a president whose inauguration was thought to be a harbinger of transparency and honesty in the government's dealings with the American people.

Did 9-11 Change Everything?

As we examine the 9-11 attacks 10 years after, one of the persisting questions seems to be: Did 9-11 change everything?

My take?  It didn't have to, but as a nation, we let ourselves be too easily manipulated to believe that everything indeed had to change if we weren't to be swept away in some surging Islamist tide.  The danger of that was never as great as Bush and his spin-meisters tried to convince us it was.  But they did their job well, and thoroughly.

And as Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes make clear in their latest essay (via the LA Times), we're going to be paying for it for a long, long time:

We chose to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with a small, all-volunteer force, and we supplemented the military presence with a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. These decisions not only placed enormous strain on the troops but dramatically pushed up costs. Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.

To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon spending spree that accompanied it and a battery of new homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11.

How have we paid for this? Entirely through borrowing. Spending on the wars and on added security at home has accounted for more than one-quarter of the total increase in U.S. government debt since 2001. And not only did we fail to pay as we went for the wars, the George W. Bush administration also successfully pushed to cut taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, which added further to the debt. This toxic combination of lower revenues and higher spending has brought the country to its current political stalemate.

There is only one other time in U.S. history that a war was financed entirely through borrowing, without raising taxes: when the Colonies borrowed from France during the Revolutionary War.

Even if we were to leave Afghanistan and Iraq tomorrow, our war debt would continue to rise for decades. Future bills will include such things as caring for military veterans, replacing military equipment, rebuilding the armed forces and paying interest on all the money we have borrowed. And these costs won't be insignificant.

History has shown that the cost of caring for military veterans peaks decades after a conflict. Already, half of the returning troops have been treated in Veterans Administration medical centers, and more than 600,000 have qualified to receive disability compensation. At this point, the bill for future medical and disability benefits is estimated at $600 billion to $900 billion, but the number will almost surely grow as hundreds of thousands of troops still deployed abroad return home.

And it isn't just in some theoretical future that the wars will affect the nation's economy: They already have. The conditions that precipitated the financial crisis in 2008 were shaped in part by the war on terror. The invasion of Iraq and the resulting instability in the Persian Gulf were among the factors that pushed oil prices up from about $30 a barrel in 2003 to historic highs five years later, peaking at $140 a barrel in current dollars in 2008. Higher oil prices threatened to depress U.S. economic activity, prompting the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and loosen regulations. These policies were major contributors to the housing bubble and the financial collapse that followed.

Now, the war's huge deficits are shaping the economic debate, and they could keep Congress from enacting another round of needed stimulus spending to help the country climb out of its economic malaise. Many of these war debts are likely to continue to compromise America's investments in its future for decades.

For years, the public failed to adequately question how it was possible that we could spend and borrow so freely, with so few consequences. But now the painful legacy of these decisions has become clear. Throughout the past decade, Congress routinely approved huge "emergency" appropriations to pay for the wars. This process preempted the usual scrutiny and debate that accompanies large spending bills. In part, this is because the U.S. lacks the basic accounting tools necessary for informed debate. Our future debts from the war are not listed anywhere in the federal government's budget. We don't even know for certain where the money has been spent. The Pentagon hasn't produced a clean financial audit in the 20 years since government auditing began, nor has it developed an accounting framework that would allow an assessment of the future costs of current decisions. This has almost certainly increased the overall cost of the war.

Our response to Sept. 11 has weakened both the current economy and our future economic prospects. And that legacy of economic weakness — combined with the erosion of the credibility of our military power and of our "soft power" — has undermined, rather than strengthened, our national security.

Nearly 10 years into the Afghanistan war, the violence in that country shows little sign of abating. August was the deadliest month of the war yet for U.S. troops, and there were also multiple attacks on Afghan security forces, government officials and civilians. The surge in violence comes as NATO is drawing down and handing over security control to national forces. But tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through the end of 2014.

The costs of fighting the war on terror have already been far higher than they needed to be. The U.S. should not take on even greater war debt without understanding the true costs of continuing down that path.

On America's Imperfect Democracy

Rami Khouri, in The Daily Star, reporting on his attending a Philadelphia city council meeting where the council members - acting well outside the mandate of a city council, and certainly well outside their competence - voted to support the US House of Representatives resolution opposing Palestinian efforts to gain UN recognition as a state:

My conclusion at the end of the day was that the struggle for justice, fairness and equal rights in Israel and Palestine will not be won or even seriously nudged forward in the United States, where the structural biases for Zionist zealotry are too deeply entrenched.

This has also been a useful refresher course for me – 40 years after living and attending university in the United States – on why American democracy is not a useful model for the Arab world. I understand better now why Palestinians are taking their battle for statehood to the U.N. and defying the U.S. and its threats and blackmail; and why so many newly democratizing Arab societies are asking Americans offering money, advice and assistance on democratic state-building to stay home for now.

It’s amazing how much you can learn in America about democracy’s strengths and weaknesses in a day, traveling between the wellsprings of America’s imperfect democracy in Boston and Philadelphia.

 

 

The Long-Term Human Cost of the Iraq War

The AP (via WaPo) reports on a tragedy that has remained way too under the radar here (as has, for that matter, anything at all about Iraq, except for the push to keep thousands of troops there, to protect "American interests"):

A study released Sunday by a global humanitarian aid organization concluded that three out of every five widows in Iraq lost their husbands in the years of violence that followed the 2003 invasion.

The study by Los Angeles-based Relief International found that about 10 percent of the estimated 15 million women who live in Iraq are widows. Among them, 59 percent have lost their husbands during the U.S.-led war.

The study warned that criminal gangs and terrorist groups might try to recruit desperate widows, and that ignoring their suffering could lead them to prostitution, drugs and terrorism.

“The Iraqi state has neglected the widows with their enormous problems, and the solutions lie in the establishing of bodies to take care of and solve the problems of these women,” the report said.

The report was released at a conference in Baghdad where parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi pledged to help widows through job opportunities, salaries and loans to help them start small businesses.

“The misery of those widows has an impact on the whole society,” al-Nujaifi said. “This catastrophe is growing, and its danger will threaten our values.”

In a small room in eastern Baghdad where she lives with her four children, widow Wafiya Hussein said she depends on relatives’ donations to keep her family alive. Her husband was killed in a Baghdad explosion in 2009 as he was heading to work.

“I receive no assistance from the government, and I cannot work due to my illnesses,” said Hussein. 41, who suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure.

“Our situation is difficult,” she said, pleading for government support to help raise her children, including a crippled son.

Also underreported - and forgotten - in the US: the impact of Mr. Bush's Iraq adventure on Iraq's children - killed, maimed, disfigured, emotionally traumatized, forced into exile, their educations interrupted or terminated, their lives ruined.  Even, of course, as the McCain-Lieberman-Grahams boast of how we've "liberated" them

Speaking of which . . . more liberation on the docket?  In Salon, Trita Parsi describes the GOP push for US action against Iran.

In spite of the Republicans' recent gains, the candidate that stands the greatest chance of defeating Obama 2012 is Obama '08. Instead of running away from his record and betraying the foreign policy values he promised to bring to the White House in 2008, Obama should restate the case for diplomacy and point out its benefits and virtues, including the superiority of diplomacy in addressing Iran's flagrant human rights violations. And point to Iraq to remind the American public of the unacceptability of failure when it comes to diplomacy.

As Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told me recently in a sharp reminder of what the end game of the hawks is: "If diplomacy fails and the economic sanctions fail, [then] everybody understands that all options are on the table."

McCain and Pals are at it Again: More US Troops in Iraq

From the usual suspects: The song that never ends.  McCain, Lieberman, and Lindsey, in the WaPo: setting up Obama to be the guy who "lost" Iraq.

The Iraqi leaders really, really want us to stay; Iraq will fall apart if we don't; we need to maintain as many as 25,000 troops there, or else al-Qaeda and the nefarious Persians will take over.  And the US budget? Not a problem, say they.

They seem to have missed those stories about how Muqtada al-Sadr has threatened to call out his militias to go after US forces if they stay.  Is he bluffing? Who knows.  If he's not, and Sadr City and much of southern Iraq rise up against US forces, could US forces light 'em up?  Maybe.  

You'd call that a "win" for the US?  Do you really believe that the already riled up "Arab street" will simply sit still as US forces chew up hundreds more Arab lives?  Do you really believe that Israel won't be made to pay a price that might drive it into retaliations, which could perhaps touch off a regional war?

Gentlemen, is your American exceptionalism so overweening that you'd roll the dice with the fate of an entire region - not to mention the lives of American men and women who have probably seen as much of Iraq  as they'll ever want to, and who probably know much better than do you, that a continued US military presence - be it 3000, be it 25,000 troops, staying one more year, staying 5 more years - will never be enough to "fix" what's wrong in Iraq?

In all likelihood, keeping US troops there will

• be a magnet for more attacks by "al-Qaeda" and Shii militias - with Shii militias supported from Iran, and Sunni al-Qaeda groups funded from Saudi Arabia
• provide more opportunity for provocations that will lead to armed conflict with Iran (something that Lieberman and Graham would likely love to see happen)
• provide cover for Mr. al-Maliki to solidify his regime, make his security forces ever stronger, and destroy whatever threat he may feel from the disempowered Sunni Arabs of Iraq - in effect, a new Saddam-type regime.

The American people elected Barrack Obama in 2008 on the promise that he would get the US out of Iraq.  Let him keep that promise.

FBI: Muhammad a "Cult Leader"

The NY Times reports that in its training materials, the FBI refers to the prophet Muhammad as a "cult leader."

In a training segment called “Militancy Considerations,” posted on Wired’s Web site, a chart correlated a steady level of violence with “adherence by pious and devout” to the Koran. In contrast, the chart showed violence decreasing with “adherence by pious and devout” to the Bible or to the Torah.

A PowerPoint presentation titled “Strategic Themes and Drivers in Islamic Law” described Muhammad as a “businessman,” a “cult leader for a small inner circle” and a “religious leader with political ambitions.” The Prophet, the presentation said, “ordered the assassinations and executions of critics” and “employed torture to extract information.”

In a statement posted on its Web site on Friday, the F.B.I. said the training material “does not reflect the views of the F.B.I. and is not consistent with the overall instruction provided to F.B.I. personnel.”

The material was presented only once, in April, to an audience of 37 agents at the Northern Virginia Resident Agency, according to the F.B.I., “and was quickly discontinued because it was inconsistent with F.B.I. standards on this topic.”

In the statement, the agency said that “as of August 2011, the individual who delivered the presentation no longer provides training on behalf of the F.B.I.”

“These corrective measures were made before recent media attention was given to this topic,” the agency said.

Earlier this year, the F.B.I. came under fire for the use of a counterterrorism manual that described Islam as transforming a country’s culture “into seventh-century Arabian ways.” The agency was also criticized last year for inviting Robert Spencer, a blogger and author whose work is widely perceived as hostile to Islam, to speak to a joint terrorism task force.

“This isn’t a revelation to us,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group in Washington. “We’ve been dealing with this issue for quite some time now.”

He added, “There’s a problem with the use of anti-Islamic trainers and Islamophobic materials.”

More Money - and Trouble - for Iraq?

AFP reports that the Iraqi government has recovered more than $100 million in funds from overseas bank accounts held by former Saddam Huseein-era officials.  It would be interesting to track that money from this point, to see if it goes down Iraq's huge corruption hole, or if it is applied to creating jobs and restoring services - something for which thousands of Iraqis marched a few days ago, having been called into the streets by Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr.

Another potential source of jobs in Iraq - again, for the predominantly Shia south - is the new Faw port that the Baghdad government is pushing.  The rub?  The Kuwaiti government is pushing its own new Persian Gulf port - the Mubarak port - and threatens to complete it ahead of Iraq's planned port, which will draw lots of expected commerce from Iraq.  Iraqi pols are furious, and have been railing against the Kuwaitis for months.  As the WaPo notes:

The rival ports have caused a major feud between the neighbors. Baghdad has tried to play down concerns that the Kuwaiti facility will disrupt Iraqi shipping.

But on Saturday, Mansour al-Timimi, a Shiite from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s political bloc, said Kuwait’s Mubarak port will have a “destructive” impact on Iraq’s economy and waterways.

Al-Timimi is urging Baghdad to finish up the construction of its own Faw port, which stalled after it started two years ago. He also says Iraq should boycott companies involved in building the Kuwait port.

This is, of course, not simply about jobs and revenues - as important as they surely are, especially for an Iraq that struggles to regain its economic footing.  The prime beneficiaries of the Faw port would be the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, as well as the local Shia-dominated provincial governments and people of Iraq's south.  Ranged against them - and leading the charge to complete the Mubarak port - is a Sunni Kuwaiti government, which can count on the support of the staunchly Sunni Saudi monarchy - which, of course, sees the al-Maliki government in Baghdad as stooges for the Shia-Islamist regime in Tehran.

Why We Stay in Afghanistan

Thanks to Salon's Glenn Greenwald for reminding us (commenting on a report in the WaPo):

our invasion and occupation is what enables the Taliban to recruit massive numbers of Afghan teenagers into their cause.  And now, we have to stay until we either kill all the people who hate us and want us gone from their country or propagandize deradicalize them into meekly accepting our presence.  Once there are no more Afghans left who want us gone, then we can leave.  For those of you who have been cynically claiming that this war has no discernible purpose other than the generalized benefits of Endless War for political officials and the Security State industry, now you know.

(Of course, the goal of ridding Afghanistan of all those who want to fight us will never happen precisely because the American military presence in their country produces an endless supply of American-hating fighters -- just as the Soviet military presence there once did, and just as the general War on Terror [and its various bombings, detentions, occupations, assassinations and the like] ensures that Terrorism never ends by producing an endless supply of American-hating Terrorists -- but that's just a detail.  All wars have challenges.  At least we can now see the very important purpose of the war in Afghanistan: we stay until there's nobody left who hates us and wants us gone, then we triumphantly depart.)

So, Bibi, Who Ya Gonna Call? O-ba-ma!

Daniel Levy, ever incisive and insightful, in a Foreign Policy analysis that makes plain: The US is squandering whatever reputation and good-will it still might have in the Middle East, with its shameless pandering to Israeli interests during the run-up to the Palestinian petition for statehood at the UN (which, the NYT now reports, will be brought first to the UN Security Council, where the US will veto it).

Whatever the outcome, the United States is guaranteed to be the real loser in all of this. For domestic political reasons the Obama administration is committed to oppose any U.N. initiative not authorized by Israel and to cajole and convince other countries to do likewise. The United States will find itself isolated, blamed for its own vote and the "no's" of others, weakening its Palestinian friends while frittering away further diplomatic capital, and all at such a delicate time in the Middle East. Having previously been aligned with Arab autocracies, the U.S. could have opened a new chapter post-Arab awakening. Instead, with Arab public opinion now a driving force, the United States will further alienate itself from popular sentiment by (again) trampling Palestinian rights. Making matters worse for President Obama, the relationship with Netanyahu is wholly unidirectional. According to ex- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Netanyahu is "ungrateful" and U.S. interests (let alone Obama's own needs) do not figure in his calculations.

Those interests, and America's regional alliances, are being stretched to snapping point by the excesses of Israeli belligerence toward the neighborhood and dismissiveness toward the Palestinians under its current coalition. Democratic Turkey and democratizing Egypt are increasingly unable or unwilling to feign indifference. Israeli hegemony faces new and serious challenges. The unraveling of Israel's regional relations could make New York a sideshow, and a tame one at that. If Israel chooses to take punitive counter-measures against the Palestinians -- withholding tax revenues belonging to the PA, annexing settlements, or responding violently to unarmed marches (and if the Uunited States joins suit by cutting its own PA funding) -- then events could spiral in dangerous and unpredictable ways. The PLO move at the United Nations is not an incitement to violence by any reasonable measure -- but the Netanyahu government's response might become just that.

Watching from the sidelines with a mixture of amusement and bemusement will be America's emerging global competitors from the BRIC countries and beyond. After the recent Congressional debt-ceiling debacle, a U.N. display of the United States tying itself in knots and squandering reputational currency due to its inability to manage relations with a country so in its debt, will offer further evidence of Washington's unreliability as a competent world leader.

(For more detailed analysis of the situation, read the International Crisis Committee's recent report .)

It's a truly sad reflection of the dysfunctionality of the American political system that, in a country where (according to most polls) a majority of its citizens want its leaders to take an impartial stance in promoting a settlement between Israel and Palestinians, their representatives in Congress adopt almost unanimously a stance aligned lopsidedly with the interests of only one party - Israel - and designed to inflict maximum humiliation on an evidently well-intentioned president who, owing to spinelessness, or considerations of political expediency and longevity, or some combination of the two, has opted to back away from his earlier promises (Cairo, 2009) to work for a just and equitable settlement.  The result: US policy and actions that represent a complete caving-in to the dictates of the Israeli government, and to a well-organized, well-funded, vocal, but perniciously ignorant and myopic element of the American electorate: Christian Zionists - who just happen to dominate the Tea Party, a throwback to the nativist Know Nothings of a previous - and very sad - era in American politics.

They call themselves patriots, "real Americans" - yet stood by and guffawed when the prime minister of Israel came to Washington and dissed the president of the US (in his own house!) on his hardly innovating proposals regarding a peace settlement, and they then cheered his address to Congress like teenyboppers at a Beatles concert.

Yet, to whom did the prime minister turn when his country's embassy in Cairo was stormed by real patriots - Egyptian citizens intent on signaling that their country would no longer be content to kowtow in the face of Israel's provocations?  Netanyahu couldn't get the leader of Egypt's military government on the phone during the crisis.  So (channeling "Ghostbusters"), Bibi, who ya gonna call?  O-ba-ma.

And, after absorbing all those body shots from Bibi, Obama came through; the Israelis were permitted to fly in a special military plane to get their diplomats out, undoubtedly because of Obama's intercession.

No matter.  As the UN vote approaches, and it becomes ever more obvious that the General assembly will approve - overwhelmingly - the recognition of Palestine, the Tea Party element of the GOP will scream bloody murder about how Obama let Israel be dissed, how he let down the stalwart Bibi.  Indeed, when Tea Party darling rootin-tootin Rick Perry can celebrate rootin-tootin Israelis as being just like rootin-tootin Texans, how long a jump is it to declaring the Israelis are better Americans than is Obama?

Of course, Texans have a long history of white Anglos dominating - and abusing - darker-skinned cohabitants of their state.  Kinda like the long history of Ashkenazi European-descended ("white") Israelis dominating - and abusing - darker-skinned Mizrahi Jews, as well as Arabs.  Kinda like how the white Christian evangelicals who dominate the Tea Party have a long history of abusing their darker-skinned fellow citizens - especially ones with a middle name like Hussein.

 

 

The Looming West Bank Crisis

Along with the looming UN General Assembly vote on recognizing a Palestinian state, and the IDF's arming of West Bank settlements in expectation of Palestinian demonstrations accompanying the vote, comes an even more worrisome and potentially lethal development: settlers in the West Bank are organizing into terrorist groups to exact payback for actions taken against them by the IDF and peace activists.  As reported in The Independent (citing report in Haaretz):

Shin Bet sources told the liberal Ha'aretz newspaper that the Jewish groups were essentially engaged in "terrorist activity" by planning attacks, conducting covert surveillance of Palestinian villages, and gathering data on Israeli activists. The disclosure reveals growing unease among the security forces at their inability to contain increasingly militant settlers, seemingly bent on exacting revenge for every move against them through so-called "price tag" attacks – where Palestinian property is destroyed for every hostile move towards the settlers by the Israeli authorities.

In recent days, settlers are suspected of defacing two Palestinian mosques, uprooting and setting fire to olive trees, torching cars and daubing graffiti on the walls of a Palestinian university in Birzeit. Vandals also broke into an Israeli army base, slashing tyres and spray painting "price tag" on army vehicles, and wrecked the engines of bulldozers used for the demolitions in Migron.

At the home of an Israeli activist who works for Israel's Peace Now, which monitors the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the assailants' slogans included "Migron forever" and "Death to traitors". "They want to silence us, to scare us. It's not going to happen," said the activist, who did not want to be named.

In a statement, Peace Now called for "emergency measures against what is becoming the new Jewish underground".

Ideologically-motivated settlers, who believe they have a divine right to the West Bank, represent some of the most right-wing opinion in Israel. Though a majority of Israelis support a two-state solution, many settlers remain fiercely opposed to either a bi-national state or to Palestinian statehood, doubting that the two peoples could exist peacefully side by side.

"We need to erase the idea of a Palestinian state from people's minds and convince the world that Islam is a danger," Michael Ben-Ari, a right-wing politician and settler, told a workshop this week.

Erdogan Puts Obama to Shame

The NYT on Turkish premier Erdogan's visit to Egypt, where he refers to Israel as "the West's spoiled child" and castigates Mr. Obama for not standing up to Israel when it killed a US citizen during  the IDF raid on one of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla vessels, the Mavi Marmara.

“Israel is the West’s spoiled child,” he said, “to this day it has never executed a decision by the international community.”

Asked about Turkey’s downgrade of diplomatic relations with Israel, he vowed that his nation would not back down until Israel apologized for its forces killing eight Turkish citizens and an American of Turkish decent aboard an aid flotilla seized in international waters on its way to the blockaded Gaza Strip. “Israel cannot play with our dignity,” he said.

He faulted the United States, as well, for failing to demand a similar apology for the killing of its citizen in the commando raid. “One of the victims was an American from Turkish origin, but America did not protect the right of its citizen after that,” he said.

The Independent's Patrick Cockburn covers the same story, with a headline that points out the major development here:

Turkish PM sets out on mission to become leader of Arab world