Bernd Debusmann

When U.S. President Barack Obama and the leaders of  Germany, France, Britain, Canada and the European Union first issued public calls for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, the death toll in Syria stood at 2,000. That was in August 18 last year.

When Obama repeated the call on May 19, as host of a summit meeting of the Group of Eight, the body count had reached 10,000, according to United Nations estimates. The two figures highlight the lack of success of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure on a ruthless leader who learned lessons in unrestrained brutality from his father, Hafez al-Assad, whom he succeeded in office.

A peaceful solution to Syria’s protracted crisis now looks remote enough to wonder whether Bashar al-Assad might outlast Obama in power. The U.S. president is not assured of winning another term in office next November. But the odds of the Assad regime surviving into 2013 look better with every passing day, even though one of the U.S. government’s top experts on Syria has labeled the Syrian president a “dead man walking.”

There are several reasons for skepticism about a resolution to the Syrian crisis in the near future. One is the government’s military superiority over fractured and lightly-equipped opposition forces. More importantly, there is no international consensus on how to deal with what began 14 months ago as peaceful demonstrations against a 40-year family dictatorship and now includes huge suicide bombings of government targets that have raised suspicions of al-Qaeda involvement.

At the summit of the G8 – the United States, Germany, France,  Italy, Japan, Russia, Canada and Japan – an  aide to Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev made clear, again, that Moscow, unlike the West, does not see Assad’s departure as a necessary step towards ending the bloodshed.  “Some may like or dislike the Syrian government…but one cannot avoid a question – if Assad goes, who will replace him?” said Mikhail Margelov.

That’s a question to which there is no  answer in Washington or the European and Arab capitals whose leaders say that Assad must go. Doubts over what would happen “the day after” explain why the U.S. and its allies have been reluctant to consider arming the opposition and why they rule out military intervention on the model of Libya.

Where Russia is concerned, some critics see motives that go beyond opposition to regime change, the prospect of losing a major client for arms exports, and fears of  losing the Soviet-era naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus, Russia’s only outpost in the Mediterranean. Said Gary Kasparov, a vocal Putin critic, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal:

“The Kremlin is desperate to keep Bashar al-Assad in place…since any conflict in the region sustains the high oil prices  Mr. Putin and his cronies need to maintain power.”

ASSAD’S FRIENDS

Whatever the motive, it’s difficult to see Assad leaving as long as he enjoys arms supplies and backing from Russia, diplomatic support from China, military and intelligence advice from Iran, and shipments of diesel fuel from Venezuela. After a flurry of wrong predictions of Assad’s imminent exit late last year, political crustal-gazers have been wary of forecasts.

But punters on an online exchange that allows bets on political events, rate Assad’s chance of being in office by the end of the year at 68 percent, up from 42 in February, when China and Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that provided for Assad to hand over power to a deputy.

The two countries voted in favor, two months later, of a Security Council resolution that backed a six-point peace plan drawn up by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Its provisions included an end to all violence by the government and the rebels, talks aimed at a “political transition” and the dispatch of an unarmed U.N. force to monitor a truce that both sides are ignoring. .

There’s a Catch-22 in the Annan initiative. It specifies a “Syrian-led, inclusive political transition “which perversely makes al-Assad part of the negotiations (if ever they begin). There is no good reason to think he would be inclined to make concessions on the negotiating table after making none in months of bloody crackdowns on the opposition.

Administration officials have made clear that U.S. patience with Assad, and with the slow progress of the Annan plan, is running out. Some of the bluntest language from Obama aides has come from his ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. She has pointed out that the mandate of the truce supervision mission runs out at the end of July.

“No one should assume that the United States will renew this mission,” she has said. “If there is not a sustained cessation of violence, full freedom of movement of UN personnel and rapid meaningful progress on all other aspects of the six-point plan, then we must all conclude that the mission has run its course.”

And then what? Obama wading deeper into yet another Middle East conflict four months before the elections?

PHOTO: REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri (SYRIA)

America’s electorate is sliced, diced and analyzed in minute detail, but there’s one comparative poll yet to be conducted: What is worse in the eyes of voters, having eaten dog meat or having put the family dog in a crate on the roof of a car for 12 hours?

This is not a trifling question in a country with close to 80 million pet dogs, whose owners treat them as family members and might be disinclined to give their votes to a candidate perceived as a dog eater, in the case of President Barack Obama, or a dog abuser, in the case of his presumptive Republican rival for the presidency, Mitt Romney.

The crated dog on the roof, an Irish setter named Seamus, has dogged Romney on and off ever since the story came to light in 2007. Obama’s dog-eating is a recent addition to the ever-growing catalog of anecdotes collected by Republican and Democratic activists and campaign operatives to paint the other side’s candidate in the darkest possible colors.

The dog stories have legs, so to say, and are likely to stay part of the election campaign until it finally ends on November 6. To refresh the memories of those who might have followed the campaign for weightier topics – high unemployment, say, or the war in Afghanistan – here is a recapitulation of what happened so far.

While Seamus rode atop the Romney family station wagon on the way to a vacation in Canada, the dog was struck by a bout of diarrhea that resulted in fecal matter running down the windows. Romney pulled up at a gasoline station, hosed down the car, the crate and the dog, and continued on his way. That was in 1983, but the story was revived in the Republican primary campaign when one of Romney’s rivals said it pointed to character flaws.

President Obama’s involvement in the canine aspects of the campaign stems from a passage in his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father (Chapter 2, page 37) that recounted how he was “introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher) and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)” by his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetero. Obama lived in Djakarta between the ages of six and 10.

Jim Treacher, a conservative blogger for the website The Daily Caller, came across that passage and published it on April 17 as an antidote to the potentially damaging effect of Romney’s dog-on-the-roof episode. “Say what you want about Romney,” Treacher wrote, “but at least he only put a dog on the roof of his car, not the roof of his mouth. And whenever you (liberals) bring up the one, we’re going to bring up the other.”

The dog wars were on.

PIT BULL WITH SOY SAUCE

Aides to Obama and Romney traded jocular tweets about their bosses’ attitudes toward dogs for days until the president himself took up the issue at the April 28 White House Correspondents’ dinner, an occasion presidents traditionally use to mock themselves (and others). Riffing off a famous sound bite from Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for vice president in 2008, Obama asked: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious.” Particularly with soy sauce.

Obama also showed a mock Republican attack contrasting the rivals’ competing vision of an American dog’s life after the November elections. Under Obama: “dogs forced into government-controlled automobiles.” Under Romney: a dog’s “freedom to feel the wind in his fur.” The ad’s final shot shows Romney standing in front of Air Force One, a Boeing 747. Strapped to the aircraft’s roof: a dog kennel.

For some pundits, the whole dog debate shows that the election campaign has sunk to new lows. “One does wonder what the rest of the world must think of us? Is this what happens to old democracies? Are we too silly to be taken seriously anymore?” asked Kathleen Parker, a conservative columnist.

Probably not. It’s a safe bet that parts of the world would welcome a dose of politics interlaced with the kind of levity that, now and then, accompanies the political discourse in the United States.

As to the yet-to-be-conducted missing survey on dog-eating vs dog-on-the-roof: there actually is a poll on the relative dog friendliness of Romney and Obama. But it was conducted before the president’s culinary adventures in Indonesia became a topic of such fascination that a Google search for “Obama and dog-eating” yields 43 million hits. (“Romney and dog” yields just 28 million).

In March, Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling company, asked 900 voters who they thought would be a better president for dogs. Thirty-seven percent opted for Obama and 21 percent for Romney. Thirty-five percent said learning of Seamus’ rooftop trip had made them less likely to vote for Romney.

That result practically guarantees that the dog issue will stay alive. Entertainment for some, silliness for others.

Take note of a new phrase in the seemingly endless debate over whether the days of the United States as the world’s pre-eminent power are numbered: Those who doubt the country’s economic decline are holding an “intellectual ostrich position.”

The expression was coined by Edward Luce, author of a deeply-researched new book entitled Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. It notes that the United States accounted for 31 percent of the global economy in 2000 and 23.5 percent in 2010. By 2020, he estimates that it will shrink to around 16 percent.

Luce’s diagnosis of descent, published in April, was the latest addition to a steadily growing library of books, academic papers and opinion pieces for or against the idea that the United States can maintain its status as the world’s only superpower. If we adopt Luce’s phrase, it’s a discussion between declinists and ostriches. The latter include President Barack Obama and his presumptive Republican rival in next November’s presidential elections.

“It means that we’re going to have a 2012 election where…both candidates will start on a false premise: that relative economic decline is simply to be ignored or dismissed,” Luce said in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine. “And I’d describe that as a kind of intellectual ostrich position.”

The false premise, in this view, was set out by Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, in a lengthy analysis entitled Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline. One of the points Kagan made to support his argument: the U.S. share of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has held steady over the past four decades. Plain wrong, says Luce.

The Kagan article, now expanded into a book (The World America Made), is reported to have so impressed Obama that it influenced his State of the Union Speech in January, when he said “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

They don’t? Here’s the view of Clyde Prestowitz, a labor economist and veteran declinist, weighing into the debate in April: “You’d have to be blind not to see the deterioration of our infrastructure. We used to have trade surpluses. Now we have chronic deficits. We used to tell ourselves that didn’t matter because we had surpluses in high tech items. But now we have deficits there, too. We used to be the world’s biggest creditor. Now we are its biggest debtor…How can anybody claim we are not suffering decline?”

Washington’s loss of influence has been evident in many regions of the world, most recently at a summit that brought together leaders of North and Latin America in the Colombian city of Cartagena. There, in Uncle Sam’s traditional backyard, Obama’s assertion that U.S. influence had not waned highlighted a particularly wide gap between rhetoric and reality.

BACKYARD NO MORE?

The backyard showed itself so united in opposition to decades-old U.S. policies – the trade embargo on Cuba, the war on drugs – that the summit ended without the usual final communiqué. “There was no consensus,” said the summit’s host, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, an important U.S. ally in the region.

Apart from disagreements over two of Washington’s oldest (50 years of Cuba embargo, 40 years of drug war) and most obviously failed policies, the meeting showed that the United States is no longer seen as the single most dominant force in the region. As an analysis by the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue put it on the eve of the Cartagena meeting:

“U.S.-Latin American relations have grown more distant. The quality and intensity of ties have diminished. Most countries of the region view the United States as less and less relevant for their needs – and with declining capacity to propose and carry out strategies to deal with the issue that most concern them.”

Why less and less relevant? For one, U.S. economic dominance in Latin America is no longer what it used to be. A decade ago, 55 percent of the region’s imports came from the United States. That has shrunk to less than a third. China’s share of trade with Brazil, Latin America’s economic and political powerhouse, has overtaken that of the United States. The same goes for Chile and Peru.

To what extent U.S. influence in the backyard will continue to slide depends largely on how clear-eyed U.S. leaders see their country’s global position. The ostrich view would hasten the decline.

Every day, around 1,600 U.S. citizens of Latin American extraction are turning 18, voting age, and add to the fastest-growing segment of the American electorate. Almost 22 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in November and how many of them turn out may well decide who will be the next U.S. president.

A series of recent polls show that Latinos favor President Barack Obama over any of the Republican presidential hopefuls, with a comfortable 70 percent to 14 percent over Mitt Romney, the man most likely to win the Republican nomination at the end of a primary campaign marked by often shrill anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Obama is so confident that he primary debates have driven Latinos away from the Republican party that  he told the Spanish-language television network Univision last November there was no need for his campaign to run negative ads on the Republican presidential hopefuls. Instead, “we may just run clips of the Republican debates verbatim. We won’t even comment on them…and people can make up their own minds.”

Among debate highlights that stick in the collective memory was the electrified Mexican-U.S. border fence suggested by Herman Cain, who soon after dropped out of the race, and Mitt Romney’s idea that illegal immigrants would chose “self-deportation…because they can’t find work here, because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.” Newt Gingrich, who is still in the primary contest but whose star is fading, described self-deportation as a fantasy.

The president’s confidence of winning Latino support again – he took 67 percent of their vote in 2008 — is partly based on history: Republicans have lost the Latino vote in every presidential election since 1972. But it would be a mistake for Obama to take that support for granted, not least because he broke an election campaign promise to produce a bill on immigration reform in his first year in office.

This prompted Jorge Ramos, the influential Univision anchor to whom he made the promise in 2008, to write in an essay in Time magazine last month that Latinos faced the difficult choice on November 6 “of voting for either a president who broke a major promise or a Republican candidate who doesn’t respect us.”

If enough Latinos find that choice so difficult that they will sit out the vote, Obama’s confidence may prove mistaken. To hear electoral number crunchers tell it, an Obama victory could hinge on Latin turnout and support in swing states where no candidate can be certain of getting the most votes. These states include Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

POPULAR VOTE  DOESN’T EQUAL VICTORY

Ruy Texeira, an election expert and demographer at the liberal Center For American Progress Action Fund, points out that while the Latino support tracked by opinion polls points to Obama  winning  the popular vote, that doesn’t always translate into electoral victory. The presidential elections of 2000, decided after a bitter controversy over Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes, are a case in point.

While immigration, for decades a hot-button issue in the United States, has dominated the debate,  it does not top the list of Latino concerns. Surveys show that like other Americans, Latinos care most about jobs, the economy, education and health care. Immigration ranks fifth.

Latino voters don’t have direct immigration problems – they are citizens. But, as Jorge Ramos says in his essay,  “the issues concerning undocumented immigrants are very, very personal. If you attack them, you attack all of us. They are our neighbors and co-workers; their kids go to school with our kids: they serve in battle next to our sons: they take the jobs no one else wants; they pay taxes and overwhelmingly make America a better country.”

Those who attack illegal immigrants are not restricted to Republican presidential hopefuls. Since Obama took office, his administration has deported more undocumented immigrants than any other president in history – an average of  around 400,000 a year. The deportations have resulted in the separation of thousands of parents from children who were born in the U.S. and thus are citizens.

In a campaign twist that carries a whiff of desperation, Romney has begun to try and turn Obama’s record on immigration against him. “He campaigned saying he was going to reform immigration laws and simplify and protect the border,” the Republican front-runner said early in April, “and then he had two years with a Democrat House and a Democrat Senate and a super majority in each house, and he did nothing.”

“So let the immigrant community not forget that while he uses this as a political weapon, he does not take responsibility for fixing the problems we have.”

This comes from a candidate whose party stalled attempts at immigration reform both under George W. Bush and Obama. Whether his argument sways enough Latinos to make a difference in November remains to be seen.

The prospect of President Barack Obama winning another four-year term in November is swelling the ranks of anti-Muslim activists and groups on the extremist fringe of American society. Their growth has accelerated every year since Obama took office in 2009.

So says a new report by a civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, that has tracked extremist groups for the past three decades and found that last year alone, the number of anti-Muslim groups tripled, from 10 to 30.

Between 2008 and the end of 2011, according to the center, there was an eight-fold increase in the number of militias and “patriot” groups whose members inhabit a parallel universe where the federal government wants to rob them of their guns and their freedom.

“What groups on the radical right have in common is the belief that Obama wants to destroy America,” Mark Potok, author of the report, said in an interview. “Fears that he will win again are now driving the expansion.”

How many Americans are on the right-wing fringe is not known. The Southern Poverty Law Center gives no estimate and neither does the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also monitors such groups. But it issued a report last September on a sub-set of the far-right scene, “sovereign citizens” who believe that federal, state and local governments operate illegally and therefore have no right to collect taxes. The FBI called them domestic terrorists and “a growing threat.”

Some of the beliefs held by those on the fringe are too outlandish to influence the political discourse – the government is running secret concentration camps, Mexico plans to recapture the American southwest, there are plans for the United Nations to take over America – but others are not.

The notion that Obama is intent on turning the United States into a socialist country is regularly echoed in speeches by Republican presidential hopefuls.

And the myth that Obama is a Muslim lives on. A public opinion poll of Republicans taken a day before the March 13 primary elections in Alabama and Mississippi showed that 45 percent and 51 percent, respectively, thought he was a Muslim. The methodology of the survey, by a polling institute affiliated with the Democratic party, has been questioned. But even if you cut the percentages in half, they are remarkable and show how stubbornly Obama detractors cling to mistaken beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Those who think the president is a Muslim tend to harbor deeper suspicions. In September 2010, at the height of a shrill debate over the so-called Ground Zero mosque in Manhattan, a poll commissioned by Newsweek found that 52 percent of Republicans surveyed thought it was “definitely true” or “probably true” that Obama sympathized with the goal of fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world. Thirty percent thought he favored the interests of Muslim Americans over those of other Americans.

ZEALOTRY GOES MAINSTREAM

The Southern Poverty Law Center traced the rapid growth of anti-Muslim groups to the dispute over the planned Islamic cultural center and mosque, not far from the site of September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Since that controversy, anti-Islam arguments previously confined to little-known web sites run by anti-Muslim zealots have gone mainstream.

The most prominent proponent of the radicals’ theory of “stealth jihad” is Newt Gingrich, one of the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. He has termed Islamic law (Sharia) “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and the world.” How so? Radical Muslims use political, societal, religious and intellectual tools to sweep away Western civilization and replace it with Sharia law.

The idea that Muslim Americans, who account for less than one percent of the U.S. population, could succeed in replacing federal and state law with Islamic law, strikes many legal scholars as absurd. But that has not prevented conservative legislators in a string of states from introducing bills to ban the use of Islamic law.

Such efforts look like a search for legislative solutions to a non-existent problem and have begun running out of steam, slowed by common sense and the efforts of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In the first half of March, five states withdrew anti-Sharia bills or let them expire.

That doesn’t mean the debate is over, nor is it the end of the right’s portrayal of Obama as a socialist foreign-born Muslim enemy of America as we know it. How persuasive that is to mainstream Americans will be clear on election day, November 6.

Here we go again.

It’s an American election year which means a season to bash France, Europe and China as well as drawing attention to un-American skills by presidential hopefuls. Such as speaking in foreign tongues.

Mastering foreign languages is considered an asset in most parts of the world but clearly not in the United States, a fact highlighted by attack ads in the race for the nomination of a Republican candidate to run against President Barack Obama next November.

One television clip mocked Mitt Romney, the present frontrunner, for speaking French. Another featured Jon Huntsman, who dropped out of the contest this week, and suggested that his fluency in Mandarin meant that he subscribed to Chinese rather than American values.

Attempts to exploit ignorance, prejudice and xenophobia are nothing new in American election campaigns, but even by their standards, the Huntsman ad stood out. Created by supporters of rival candidate Ron Paul, the 72-second ad is entitled The Manchurian Candidate, after a novel (and movie) about the son of a prominent political family who is brainwashed by Communists.

The attack on Romney harked back to the presidential elections of 2004, when Republicans portrayed Democratic contender John Kerry as an out-of-touch elitist who not only spoke French fluently but also looked French. In an oft-repeated description, coined by a Wall Street Journal commentator, Kerry was called “a haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat.”

Romney is a former Massachusetts governor. So far, no-one has accused him of looking French but the ad notes that “just like John Kerry, he speaks French.”

Both in the 2004 campaign and now, Republicans stirred anti-French resentment, though for different reasons. Eight years ago, it was about the French government’s refusal to back the U.S. war on Iraq. Now, both France and Europe have become dirty words in the Republican dictionary because they are portrayed as a socialist threat to the global economy.

Europe-bashing is part of the stump speech of every candidate for the Republican nomination. Romney is the most consistent basher, perhaps to make up for the perceived stain of speaking French and having lived in France as an unsuccessful missionary for the Mormon church. He misses few opportunities for warning that President Obama wants to turn the United States into a “European-style welfare state.” That would, in his words, “poison the very spirit of America.”

Obama, according to Romney, “takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe and has a European social Democratic vision.” Ron Paul takes the idea a step further: he wants to pull out U.S. troops stationed in Germany in order to stop “subsidizing” a “socialist” country. Republican stump speeches combine to a portrait of Europe as a collection of enterprise-stifling losers.

EUROPE SEEN THROUGH A DISTORTED LENS

This is seeing Europe through a severely distorted lens, notwithstanding the European Union’s current sovereign debt crisis and prolonged political problems to solve it.

Europe-bashers fail to mention that Europe is home to more of the world’s largest companies than the United States (179 to 140) and ranks higher on important quality-of-life indexes than the United States, from income inequality and access to health care to life expectancy, infant mortality and poverty levels.

(Last October, the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German think tank, published a study that examined such indicators in 31 of the 34 countries of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It ranked the United States 23rd in providing health care and 20th on access to education.)

Pointing out such data is not fashionable at a time when America’s persistent high unemployment makes it tempting to look for scapegoats, foreign and domestic. But there are exceptions.

Nicholas Kristof, the liberal New York Times columnist, wrote from Paris this week that “the basic notion of Europe as a failure is a dangerous misconception.” And in Washington, Elisabeth Jacobs, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a respected think tank, even held out Germany as an example Americans might do well to study and follow.

The global recession, she wrote in a paper on Maintaining Employment in a Difficult Economy, had much less drastic effects on Germany workers than on American workers. A key reason: labor market policies that encourage business to pursue long-term objectives in contrast to the traditional U.S. focus on short-term gains. That may not be a model that best serves the U.S. economy and American workers in competitive global markets, according to Jacobs.

Can such arguments dent the rigid views of Republican standard bearers? Unlikely. The talking points seem fixed. Romney: “I don’t think Europe is working in Europe. I know it won’t work here.”

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

So much for charges from conservative contenders for the 2012 U.S. presidential elections that Barack Obama is not pro-Israel enough — the president just won seals of approval from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and the U.S. lobby that usually reflects their views.

If the elections, as some predict, will include a contest on who loves Israel most, Obama can use their praise to good effect. How much it will contribute to his legacy is another matter.

The plaudits came in response to Obama’s address to the United Nations on Sept. 21, when he rejected the Palestinians’ bid for U.N. membership in what one Israeli journalist, Chemi Shalev of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, described as “probably the warmest pro-Israel speech ever given at an annual U.N. General Assembly meeting by any U.S. president, bar none.”

Its tone differed sharply from his moving description of the plight of the Palestinians in a speech in Cairo in 2009, five months after taking office. For 60 years, he said, they had endured the pain of dislocation and “the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. Let there be no doubt,” he said, “the situation of the Palestinians is intolerable.”

The Cairo speech raised expectations in the Arab world that here was a president who sympathized with the Palestinians and had the power, global prestige and commitment to succeed where a long line of his predecessors had tried and failed – help create a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel. It didn’t work that way.

Fast forward to Sept. 21, 2011. No word about daily humiliations, dislocation, occupation, intolerable conditions. Instead, the emphasis was on centuries of persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic Arab school books, Israelis killed by Palestinian rockets and suicide bombs. As Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute put it, “He recited a litany of suffering of Israelis with nothing about Palestinian hardships in a conflict whose most recent flare-up in 2008-09 left over 1,300 Palestinian victims and 13 Israelis.”

Netanyahu saw it differently. Obama had won a “badge of honor” with his address. Lieberman, a driving force behind the relentless construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, praised Obama for not mentioning that negotiations on a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be based on the 1967 borders.

The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issued a statement expressing its appreciation for Obama’s rejection of the Palestinian U.N. bid and his insistence on the return to negotiations. Off and on, they have dragged on for two decades, during which Israel has tripled the number of Jewish settlements on land that is supposed to become a Palestinian state.

POLITICS TRUMP POLICY

What explains Obama’s transition from Cairo 2009 to New York 2011? In Washington, politics trump policy and Israel has been more of a domestic than a foreign policy issue even before the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948. When President Harry Truman and his top advisers discussed plans for the partition of Palestine in 1945, the experts warned against it. Truman is said to have responded: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Sixty-six years later, that kind of calculation still plays a role but in the case of Obama, there has been an additional element – a battle of will with the Israeli prime minister in which the leader of the world’s remaining superpower backed down repeatedly, on issues from a demand for a settlement freeze to the territorial lines on which negotiations should be based. The score so far: Netanyahu 3, Obama 0.

Which makes it rather bizarre that the two front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, are portraying Obama as favoring the Palestinians at the expense of Israel. In language that highlighted both ignorance and the toxic nature of American politics, Perry said Obama had pursued a policy of “appeasement” of the Palestinians.

The term dates back to the 1930s when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made concessions to Adolf Hitler to avoid going to war against Nazi Germany. In slightly less over-the-top terms, Romney talked of Obama’s efforts to “throw Israel under the bus.”

Whether Perry, Romney and other prominent Republicans manage to turn support for Israel into a wedge issue in 2012 is open to doubt in a race almost certainly dominated by jobs and the economy. But if it does emerge as a campaign topic, Obama can always wave the “badge of honor” awarded him by Netanyahu, to show that he is no different from a long line of American presidents much closer to Israel than to the Palestinians.