THE SPEECH – AT 8:01 A.M. ET:  President Obama delivered what was dubbed a "major" speech on the Middle East yesterday.  Notice the difference?

The most worrisome thing about the speech is that it is being praised in Europe. 

The speech was based on a false premise, that President Obama has always stood for democracy in the region.  I mean, who could doubt that The One was always for "the people"?  But as former Republican official Elliott Abrams points out, the president didn't exactly get his own history right:

The first thing he did was take credit for the Arab Spring, saying he had supported it all along. This is simply not true. The by-word early in his administration was “engagement,” with a caustic rejection of the Bush “Freedom Agenda.” Bush’s tougher policies toward Iran and Syria were to be replaced by outreach, discussion, diplomacy — far more civilized. And that engagement was with the rulers, not the ruled; Obama’s was a world of states, and you engaged with the people ruling them.

And...

It is traditional now for Obama to insult the Bush administration, and this time he referred at the start to how he had had to “shift our foreign policy” after a decade of war. In fact, the shift he had to perform today was from indifference to democracy in the Arab world to the Bush policy of supporting it.

That is correct, but the Obamans never concede that Bush got anything right.  To do so would be to violate the holy beliefs of the political left. 

It was just a speech, long on nice talk about democracy, but short on policy – kind of like having the preamble to the Constitution, without the Constitution. 

Most of the attention has not been given to Obama's bromides about democracy.  They are meaningless and are just words.  The president had little to say about Iran's suppression of democracy, nothing to say about Saudi Arabia, one of the most regimented societies on Earth, and he actually suggested that Assad of Syria, currently head of a government that has murdered more than 1,000 of its own citizens recently, can still play a useful role in his country.  We fail to see a coherent, practical policy in this.  And Gadaffi of Libya remains in power, despite Obama's demand, now forgotten, that he leave.  Obama doesn't do democracy very well.

In fact, far more press attention has been given to Obama's demand that peace between Israel and a proposed Palestinian state be based on the "1967 borders," borders that existed before the Six-Day War of 1967.  This has infuriated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who arrives today for a visit with the president.  Obama's proposal, now applauded by the European appeasers, codifies for the Palestinian side that it will get a state within the borders it wishes without negotiating a single point. 

True, the president did blast the recent, sordid "unity" deal between the Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank, and the terror group Hamas, which runs Gaza, asking how Israel can be expected to make peace with a Palestinian government that includes a terror organization that denies Israel's right to exist.  That is a good question.  But it's a question, not a policy.  The policy was in the proposal that peace be based on 1967 borders that Israel considers indefensible.  The fact that this policy was insultingly spelled out on the eve of the visit of the Israeli prime minister shows, once again, Obama's contempt for an American ally, a contempt he has shown before toward Britain, France, and Canada. 

We can't read this speech and feel any confidence about the future of American foreign policy.  I wish we had one.

May 20, 2011