In fact, the unprecedented public surge that brought Mr. Obama to the White House was largely mobilized because of the obvious sincerity and next-door-buddy-neighbor personal attraction of the then senator from Illinois, who was trusted by millions to keep his word and remain true to his principles.
The Armenian Genocide is long past the milestone of being a "debatable" historical "event" and becoming a monumental case of mass murder, emerging from the extermination of a whole people because of who they were, an extermination prepared and implemented on the basis of a plan worked out by the Young Turks with a little help from their German military advisers.
The organization element, and the obvious targeting of the Armenians for being Armenians, not to mention the scale of the slaughter -- an estimated 1.5 million men, women, and children perished -- qualifies what the Turkish prime minister Erdogan refers to as "the 1915 incidents" as genocide according to every criterion in the human rights book.
The vehement attempts by American administrations to stop the formal recognition of the Armenian Genocide are of course due to "national security interests" and the usual "geostrategic reasons" that make Turkey so important to American global strategy.
Turkey is not only adjacent to the current cauldron consuming American power with fanatic Muslim abandon, Iraq, but also of key significance regarding a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, not to mention being home to the Incirlik air base that the US military keenly values as a key staging facility to support US operations in the region.
Who cares then about the "moral question" when all these supremely valuable factors are involved, correct?
One of the many underlying problems that have gradually chipped away at American global power in recent decades has been the misapplication of Wilsonian principles and the accelerated slide toward militarizing US foreign policy, inaugurated during Vietnam and disastrously continued through "humanitarian" missions in Africa and the Balkans and the "spreading of democracy" in the Middle East; both these trends have worked hand in hand to bring American power to its present heart-wrenching impasse.
This monumental foolishness (to put it elegantly), practiced to an extreme during the Bush administrations, which many historians already consider the most disastrous period of American government since WW2, brushed aside almost everything -- save raw, simplistic elements of the type "if you are not with us, you are against us" and aimed to transform all US relationships with other nations into strictly utilitarian circumstances without a shred of concern for complex histories, regional traditions and power balances; the inevitable "fog" of disputes predating the formation of the United States by dozens of centuries; and other cultural, religious, and social-economic problems that are simply impervious to fast-track methods of "cultural immersion" so popular with American "in-country" civilian and military commanders.
While it would be unfair to accuse American policy makers of total disregard of the complexities affecting other nations -- and thus, directly and indirectly, harming American aims in various parts of the world -- one cannot but marvel at how the US approach attempts to shoehorn things through in near assembly line fashion, a habit that has assumed commanding proportions since 9/11 and deeply affects current American behavior worldwide.
But, once you claim global status and assert global reach, there are inevitable appendages that you need to heed. And one of them is observing the "moral question" -- occasionally.
Rising Islamic fundamentalism inside Turkey, with the help of the all-so-injured by the genocide resolution, Muslim-rooted Erdogan government, guarantees serious trouble for all those in the West who continue to mindlessly invest in a "secular Turkey, staunch Western ally."
The discovery of the Ergenekon conspiracy by ultra secularist military officers and ranking civil servants, coupled with revelations about Sledgehammer, another military conspiracy aimed at undermining the Islamists, brought to public light the Turkish military-civilian complex's regional destabilizing role; Sledgehammer conspirators, the Turkish press said, were planning to instigate a war with Greece as a way of paving the road to a military coup that would have overthrown the Erdogan government.
Turkey, so valuable to the United States, is the country where Hitler's Main Kampf registers brisk sales long after the One Thousand Year Reich was consumed by the fires of war it single-handedly raised. This is the valuable US ally whose public mobbed a few years ago movie theaters playing The Valley of the Wolves, a Turkish hate film which depicts American troops as bloodthirsty monsters massacring innocent Iraqi civilians, not to mention the Jewish doctor who removes organs from prisoners obviously to feed his personal penchant for trading in human innards.
"Western ally" Turkey misses no opportunity to publicly accuse Israel of "genocide" against the Palestinians and deluge the headlines with vitriolic remarks about the essential "badness" of the West and those "racist" Europeans, who would not agree to 70 million Turkish Muslims becoming European Union citizens in the greatest experiment of social and cultural destabilization in European history.
This is the "ally" so staunchly defended by the current US administration. This is the "ally" whose domestic fanatics wouldn't bat an eye before going after Americans and Westerners in general, with very long knives drawn, if Turkey's domestic situation begins to unravel in the direction of an Islamic revolution. And this is the "ally" that misses no opportunity to subvert US and Western policies in general in practicing its own nationalist foreign and security policy that proceeds from the assumption that Turkey's greatness is so vast that nobody has the right to even think of putting the brakes on the Islamists' neo-Ottoman schemes.
Symbolically recognizing the Armenian Genocide will no doubt ruffle the feathers of Ankara's neo-imperialists. But their feathers do need some ruffling. Those American politicians, who line up behind Armenian Genocide resolution opponents, should keep that in mind plus the fact that the US, or any other country, cannot "democratize" and "westernize" Turkey on demand.
The same American politicians should also remember that dead men do tell tales.... so that the world may have a larger chance in the future of stopping "incidents" like the carefully orchestrated extinction of 1.5 million people whose only mistake was that they were born Armenian Christians.