by A. G. NOORANI
IT is too much to expect any significant change for the better in President Barack Obama`s stance on foreign affairs in an election year. He has followed the set course with oratorical flourishes.
An example is the much-acclaimed speech at Al Azhar in Cairo on June 4, 2009. `I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.` Two years and a half that have rolled by since have seen no tangible signs of `a new beginning`. On the one issue that exercises people not only in the Muslim world but beyond, the future of Palestine, he has failed dismally.
Particularly on Iran, Obama has demonstrated that he means to follow the old path of unilateralism, based on superior might. Two recent events reveal a dangerous shift in policy.On Nov 12 last year, a huge explosion destroyed a major missile-testing site near Tehran. It killed Gen Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the head of Iran`s missile programme.
(It would be perti-nent to mention here that yet another Iranian scientist was killed on Wednesday).
Gen Moghaddam`s death was welcomed by the United States and its partner Israel as `a major setback for Iran`s most advanced long-range programme` It entailed not only damage to property but also loss of expertise. That Gen Moghaddam`s funeral was attended by Iran`s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei showed how central his work was to Iran`s endeavours.
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American officials said that they believed it was probably an accident `perhaps because of Iran`s inexperience with a volatile, dangerous technology`.
The truth emerged in an article by Roger Cohen a columnist in the New York Times. There is a new `Obama Doctrine`, conceived in private, executed in secrecy unlike the doctrines his predecessors publicly propounded in the past.
He wrote: `The Obama administration has a doctrine. It`s called the doc-trine of silence. A radical shift from president Bush`s war on terror, it has never been set out to the American people. There has seldom been so big a change in approach to US strategic policy with so little explanation. I approve of the shift even as it makes me uneasy.
One day, I suspect, there may be payback for this policy and this silence.
President Obama has gone undercover.
Cohen referred to the blast which killed Gen Moghaddam and added: `Nuclear scientists have perished in the streets of Tehran. The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc with the Iranian nuclear facilities. It would take tremendous naiveté to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israeli drive to sabotage Iran`s efforts to develop a military nuclear capacity.
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