Tag: us

Obama and the peace process

Beyond whether who he will appoint to handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, President Obama has to choose what kind of approach he will pursue. Two Arab diplomats (a Palestinian and an Egyptian) who are peace process veterans wrote this powerful op-ed advocating a hands-on approach that shuns the “capacity-building” gradualist approach and recommends going against the Washington received wisdom (received from Zionist think tanks, that is) that there isn’t much to be done:

“Experienced” advisers will point out that the issues are complex, the leaders are weak and divided, and the costs of failure are formidable. They will urge you to take small steps and let the parties lead. The United States, they will argue, should support bilateral talks from the sidelines, but cannot want peace more than the parties themselves.

As former advisers to two of the governments in the region, and having participated in developing the Road Map peace plan, we assure you that is exactly the wrong approach. It is because the parties are weak that American leadership is indispensable. It is because bilateral negotiations yield only hollow communiqués that you should use your political capital to forge consensus on substance. And it is because the issues are complex that small achievements — fleeting cease-fires, relocated checkpoints — are as politically costly as big ones. The Bush administration wasted six years before learning these lessons. You need not repeat its mistakes.

Aim high. The region will not hesitate to supply your administration with a series of crises that demand urgent attention — breakdowns in talks, escalations in violence, right-wing electoral triumphs, settlement expansion and the like. These crises cannot be ignored. But you must not allow managing the conflict to distract you from the crucial task of resolving it. Each passing day, Israel’s occupation produces despair and facts on the ground that make the conflict ever more difficult to solve.

What is needed is a substantive framework for comprehensive peace, endowed with international support and ready for the parties’ acceptance. Like the Road Map, you should develop this framework in consultation with the parties and international partners. But unlike the Road Map, it should specify a destination, defining the central terms of a settlement with sufficient precision to prevent interminable haggling over interpretation and sufficient formality to make rejection too politically costly for any serious party to contemplate.

Build commitment, then capacity. Among the foundations of President Bush’s failed Arab-Israeli policy was the notion that capacity must precede commitment, that Palestine become Switzerland before peace negotiations commence. You have pointed out the folly of such thinking in Iraq, arguing that an American commitment to early withdrawal would give Iraqis an incentive to put their house in order.

That is no less true for the Mideast peace process. Some portray the rejectionism of Hamas and Israel’s right wing as an insurmountable obstacle to peace. It isn’t. There is no peace for them to reject. However, a U.S.-backed framework for peace would oblige all parties to face the moment of truth in a way that a commitment to continue negotiations simply cannot. It would also do more to advance Palestinian governance and security reform than another decade of technical assistance.

[From U.S. should take lead in Middle East peace process | Viewpoints, Outlook | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle]

The alternate universe of Condi Rice

Condoleeza Rice is on a mission to save her (and her boss’) legacy in the Middle East, with all this last minute peace-processing and the recent relaxation of the “no talking to Hamas or Syria” approaches of the past. She and her colleagues made a right mess over the last eight years with their “transformational diplomacy” and now they’re returning to tried-and-true methods to limit the damage, apparently with greater-than-usual focus on preparing the transition to the next administration (or so one hears). But in this (poor) al-Arabiya interview she really seems desperate to provide a positive spin to her disastrous tenure as NSA and SecState:

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, let’s take a panoramic look at the region, the Middle East. The Bush Administration came with some high wishes, hopes: preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power; spreading democracy in the Middle East; a peaceful Iraq, a democratic Iraq; and after Annapolis, a commitment to have peace between the Israelis and the Arabs. And are you disappointed because some of these objectives were not met – I mean, especially on the peace process?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, first, let’s look at the Middle East when this President became President in 2001 and the Middle East now. In 2001, you had a raging intifada after the collapse of the Camp David talks. You had in power in Israel a prime minister who did not come to power talking about bringing peace, and you had Yasser Arafat in power in the Palestinian Territories. You had Lebanon with Syrian forces occupying Lebanon, which they had done for decades. Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq, threatening his neighbors, as he had done for decades. There really wasn’t very much discussion of democracy in the Middle East.
And you look now and you see that, first and foremost, Saddam Hussein is out of power. And while Iraqis are struggling with their new democracy, they are now a democratic state, a multiconfessional, multiethnic, democratic state. Lebanon has a president. Lebanese forces are throughout the country for the first time in decades; Syrian forces are out. Syria has established proper diplomatic relations with Lebanon.
You have a situation in which throughout the Middle East, people talk about popular rule, women can vote in Kuwait, elections have been held in a number of places, and in the Palestinian-Israeli situation, the two-state solution is now taken for granted that this the only real possibility. And President Bush, who put it on the agenda in 2001, has helped the parties come to a process after Annapolis so that you have the first really robust peace process in a number of years.
And so yes, it’s still a difficult region, but I think a lot has been achieved over the last several years.

And look towards the bottom at how the journalist fawns over “how hard you worked” on the peace process… since when? Since she realized that not working at all on the issue in her first seven years in office was not a super idea, that’s when.

The future of US aid to Egypt

Here’s an interesting piece on the future of US aid to Egypt by Scott Carpenter, who used to run the democracy-promotion office at the State Department until about a year ago. The piece is important because it highlights the little focused on the 2004 MOU between Egypt and the US, which formalized tying aid to specific benchmarks for economic reforms. Carpenter and others in the Bush administration had found willing allies for this type of reform among the economic team of the Nazif cabinet, who were in favor of (and carried out) radical neo-liberal economic reforms in the financial sector. They also hoped that the MOU could be repeated in the future for specific political reforms, but did not find the backing for that in Egypt, and thus there was no follow-up (and of course the bilateral relationship has soured, at least in Congress, considerably since then.)

Carpenter makes the argument below that in light of Egypt’s continued poor human rights record (and, I would add, the inability or unwillingness of Cairo to deliver major pro-US developments in the region, notably Palestine) Congress is likely to continue its anti-Egypt campaign. I don’t think that one should underestimate the ability of the Egyptians to offer compelling reasons to the incoming American administration to protect it from Congress (if you can convince Dick Cheney you can convince anyone!), but the prospect of rising Congressional hostility should not be dismissed either. Of course, the whopping assumption in this argument is that Hosni Mubarak still leads Egypt: a new Egyptian leader would throw everything off-balance, depending on how he is perceived inside of Egypt and in Washington.

For Egyptians, U.S. aid is mainly symbolic, forever linked to the Camp David peace agreements. But as assistance shrinks and conditionality rises, the attractiveness of the aid has dropped significantly. Some have argued, in fact, that it would be advisable to scrap the economic assistance altogether in the interest of smoother relations. Negotiations on such a “small” pot of money have been endless and contribute to bitter feelings on both sides. Moreover, the assistance provides Congress with numerous opportunities to condition what remains, putting additional stress on the relationship. So why does Egypt fight every year for the assistance? Why does the U.S. Department of State not argue that bilateral relations would be better without it? The answer: both are interested in maintaining a shield for Egypt’s military assistance.

Many in Cairo and the Department of State worry that if the economic assistance shield is lost altogether, Congress, with the Obey-Lantos amendment precedent now set, will push more aggressively for conditionality on military assistance. For this reason, many are fighting to maintain it. This state of affairs, however, is unlikely to last into the next U.S. administration. No matter who wins the presidency, Egypt’s critics in Congress will increase, and with it, Congressional ire, especially as Mubarak’s regime has moved beyond Ibrahim to target the next generation of would-be activists. Blogger Abdel Karim Soliman, for instance, has been jailed for nearly two years for insulting the president and Islam. In July, fourteen young Facebook activists were arrested for “incitement against the regime,” a day after flying Egyptian flags and singing patriotic songs to commemorate the 1952 revolution.

Conclusion

The Mubarak regime’s resolute failure to live up to its human rights obligations will give ammunition to members of the next Congress eager to send a strong message to Cairo. As a result, future U.S. administrations will find it difficult, if not impossible, to justify economic assistance to Egypt, let alone to increase it. The White House, instead, will have to fight off multiple efforts to condition Egypt’s military assistance. Waivers similar to those Rice announced this spring will increase, embarrassing both Egypt and a White House forced, however reluctantly, to stand with its “strategic partner.”

Egypt could change all this. If a new leadership were to present a clear vision for the country’s future — one that Americans could understand and support — Egypt would find willing supporters in both branches of the U.S. government. Unfortunately for Egyptians and bilateral relations, such leadership is not on the horizon. Conditioning military aid may, therefore, be the only avenue open to vent U.S. displeasure.

[From The Future of U.S. Assistance to Egypt]

Rodenbeck to Pollack: you are not very good

If you read a lot of book reviews, as I do, you will have noticed that many reviewers (especially ones who are also writers or work in the same field as the author of the book) are reticent to go on attack mode when reviewing a peer’s work. Add to that the phenomenon of logrolling — trading favorable coverage in the expectation that the kind treatment will be returned — and many reviews only seem to tepidly explore the flaws of the work of the work under review.

Enter this review of Kenneth Pollack (he of Iraq: The Threatening Storm fame), which looks at his new book on US Middle East Strategy and finds it not very good at all:

Pollack commits errors that, despite his years in the corridors of power and some 70 pages of footnotes, betray a lack of genuine intimacy with his subject. It is not true, as he asserts, that education in the Persian Gulf emirates is largely private. Nor is it true, any longer, that virtually the only foreign investment in Arab countries goes toward pumping more oil: real estate, tourism, banking, telecoms and even heavy industry now lure investors, too.

It is an outdated generalization to state that “Arab bureaucracies . . . create interminable delays with customs regulations, inspections and other red tape.” Try telling that to Dubai Ports World, a company that runs 45 container terminals in 29 countries, or to the operators of the giant, state-of-the-art transshipment hubs in Egypt and Morocco that are set to dominate Mediterranean trade. It is even more misleading to assert that “the Arab regimes have implicitly or explicitly backed a range of terrorist groups.” Pray, which Arab governments does he mean, and which groups is he talking about?

Pollack also shows a shaky grasp of history. We know that the Ottoman Empire declined and fell, but to have endured for five centuries, and for half those as the biggest state in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, does not make the Ottomans “unsuccessful.” Elsewhere he tells us sagely that “over time, the stagnation of the Arab economies has created considerable poverty,” as if there were no poor Arabs before, and as if one of the most startling modern examples of mass impoverishment was not the Clinton-era sanctions on Iraq, which destroyed its middle class and set the stage for postwar chaos.

America gets off rather lightly in gen eral, in Pollack’s account, compared with the sad Arabs whom we must help to be like us. We are told, for instance, that the United States only grudgingly became involved in the grisly Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s when it nobly undertook to reflag oil tankers in order to protect the flow of oil. No mention here of Donald Rumsfeld’s back-slapping with Saddam Hussein or the supply of satellite intelligence to him or the exchange of American weapons to Iran for hostages — all of which helped prolong the slaughter.

Pollack seems oddly unaware of history’s motivating forces. To assert that “what triggers revolutions, civil wars and other internal unrest is psychological factors, particularly feelings of extreme despair,” is plain silly. The Boston Tea Party could not have been prevented by Prozac. Similarly, he ascribes feelings to broad categories of Middle Easterners, devoid of any context or explanation. They are “angry populations” who suffer “inchoate frustration” and “a pathological hatred of the status quo.” We repeatedly hear of “Arab rage at Israel” and “Arab venom for Israel.” Nowhere is there a hint that such attitudes might bear some relation to the plight of the Palestinians, the agony of military defeat or the humiliation of life under Israeli occupation.

In fact, the book’s most salient distortions stem from Pollack’s protectiveness toward Israel. He makes some absurdly cockeyed assertions, like, “America’s support for Israel over the years has even been a critical element in winning and securing Arab allies.” He offers misleading false alternatives, declaring, for instance, that there is “absolutely no reason to believe that ending American support for Israel would somehow eliminate” the risk of Islamist zealots taking power and cutting oil exports. How about making aid to Israel, and not just to Arabs, conditional, or aiming at mitigating, rather than eliminating, such risks? Pollack makes a peculiarly acrobatic effort to prove that hostility to Israel is not a prime motivating factor behind militant jihadism, repeating this assertion no fewer than four times in two paragraphs. Has he not bothered to listen to Osama bin Laden’s addresses to the American people, where he said that what converted him from dreamer to murderous activist was Israeli bombs falling on Beirut in 1982?

Although I’ve only looked at this book briefly, from the little I saw it’s a well deserved put-down of the man who, with “Threatening Storm,” contributed significantly to the war-drums on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Well-deserved.

[From Book Review – ‘A Path Out of the Desert,’ by Kenneth M. Pollack – Review – NYTimes.com]

Jeffrey Goldberg’s ‘American Problem’

There’s been much about Jeffrey Goldberg’s New York Times piece about how the powerful members of Zionist groups in America are being, er, more Catholic than the Pope (more Talmudic than the Rabbi?) in their inflexibility on the issue of West Bank settlements. Yes, it’s good that a prominent Jewish-American journalist and former IDF soldier says that. Even if he slammed Walt and Mearsheimer from bringing attention to the lobby a year ago, resorting to the usual slander of anti-Semitism. Yet, to me, most perplexing in this piece is this:

So why won’t American leaders push Israel publicly? Or, more to the point, why do presidential candidates dance so delicately around this question? The answer is obvious: The leadership of the organized American Jewish community has allowed the partisans of settlement to conflate support for the colonization of the West Bank with support for Israel itself. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, in their polemical work “The Israel Lobby,” have it wrong: They argue, unpersuasively, that American support for Israel hurts America. It doesn’t. But unthinking American support does hurt Israel.

Several things here: Goldberg has a problem with the omerta on this topic in the US presidential election not because a small group is silencing the debate on a major foreign policy issue, but because he thinks the policy is wrong (for Israel). So he’s more concerned about the problems in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the damage to American democracy. And then the same line of thinking is seen again when he expresses concern not for the damage to US interests in support for Israeli extremism (one that would think has become amply evident after eight years of extremist Likudnik policies under Bush), but that this might hurt Israel. So basically he is saying we should have a full debate to consider various points of views of the Israeli political leadership (fair enough), but that this is the limit of the debate and benefits to America are not worth considering. Just look at the last line of the piece:

The people of Aipac and the Conference of Presidents are well meaning, and their work in strengthening the overall relationship between America and Israel has ensured them a place in the world to come. But what’s needed now is a radical rethinking of what it means to be pro-Israel. Barack Obama and John McCain, the likely presidential nominees, are smart, analytical men who understand the manifold threats Israel faces 60 years after its founding. They should be able to talk, in blunt terms, about the full range of dangers faced by Israel, including the danger Israel has brought upon itself.

But this won’t happen until Aipac and the leadership of the American Jewish community allow it to happen.

Quite amazingly, he does not seem to have a concern for the American political process, where discussion of a crucial policy question being banned by small but powerful interests. All his attention is focused on whether it might be good for Israel. Does he ever think that, for the majority of Americans who don’t particularly care about Israel or Palestine, the fact that debate is being silenced is the most dangerous and offensive thing of all? Or that US policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict has hurt American interests?

(And incidentally, let’s not forget that Goldberg is among the most biased journalists who cover this conflict in the US, as Finkelstein has argued.)

Bush on Dream

For the last week Dream TV’s interview with President Bush has been talked up in Egypt, but can you understand any of this? And can Bush get any more condescending (and wrong) when he tells the interviewer she has her job because Egypt is a “society that honors diversity and gives people a chance to realize their talents?” I suspect the standard for Middle East reform that Bush has is having the same foreign policy as the Saudis and being slightly less bigoted than the Saudis — then you pass the test.

Q Yes. My first question is, people in Egypt, sometimes they get confused — on the one hand, they hear the U.S. statements, speeches that stress on the long-lasting relationships with Egypt, the strategic importance of Egypt to the U.S. and to the Middle East, Egypt as the major player in the peace process. On the other hand, they could see indications that contradicts with this — U.S. depending on other parties in the region, your snatching visit to Sharm el Sheikh last January, the partial cutting of the U.S. aid. How would you comment on that?

THE PRESIDENT: I would comment this, that from my perspective, the Egyptian-U.S. relationship is a very important part of our Middle Eastern foreign policy, for these reasons: one, Egypt has got a proud history and a great tradition, and a lot of people look to Egypt for help.

Now, the United States can’t solve a lot of problems on our own; has to have allies be a part of it. And so on the Palestinian issue, for example, Egypt can be very constructive, and has been constructive and helpful. Egypt has got a society that honors diversity and gives people a chance to realize their talents, like you. You’re a very smart, capable, professional woman who has showed the rest of the Middle East what’s possible in the Middle East. And Egypt has been on the forefront of modernization. Egypt is strategically located.

And so our relationship is strong and good. We’ve had our differences, on elections, for example. But nevertheless, to answer your question, I would say the relationship is very solid and very important.

Q Then how would you perceive the state of democracy in Egypt?

THE PRESIDENT: I would say fits and starts; good news and bad news. In other words, there’s been some moments where it looked like Egypt was going to continue to lead the Middle East on the democracy movement, and there’s been some setbacks. But I guess that just reflects the nature of the administration and their — on the one hand, their desire for democracy, on the other hand, their concerns about different movements. My view is, is that democracy is a powerful engine for reform and change, and leads to peace.

[From Interview of the President by Mona Shazli, Dream TV, Egypt]

Sick on Clinton’s Arab strategy

Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor and eminent scholar of the Persian Gulf, has written a short essay on Hillary Clinton’s recent threat to “obliterate Iran” should it attack Israel for the excellent Gulf 2000 listserv he maintains. Notwithstanding the chiefly domestic US political reasons that led Clinton to engage in rather vulgar sable-rattling, Sick analyzes Clinton’s announced strategy of building an Arab security structure designed to isolate Iran, seeing in it both a continuation of Bush administration policies (they just call it the “Sunni-Shia divide”) and a revival of the Clinton administration’s “dual containment” policy towards Iran and Iraq in the 1990s, which enrolled the aid of Arab countries.

This isn’t too surprising, since the architect of dual containment was Martin Indyk, who also heads Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy team and is a contender for Secretary of State in the (now hopefully) unlikely event of her election. Sick’s essay, republished below, highlights something that has become increasingly clear to me in recent years: the continuation, despite superficial differences, between certain Clinton policies and those of the Bush White House when it comes to Middle East policy. It’s not only that the Clintons had their own group of people who favored an invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s, but also an attitude of refusing negotiations with Iran (or other designated enemies) and a strategic approach to the region that tends to prioritize not only access and control of oil resources, a perennial feature of US policy, but also puts Israel first in strategic considerations. Considering Indyk’s own AIPAC background this is not surprising, but these policies have been extremely damaging to US interests and, more importantly, the people of the region (notably the Iraqis who suffered tremendously under the Clinton-backed sanctions regime).

This is not to say that Clinton and Bush are the same — over domestic issues and many international ones Hillary Clinton is light years ahead of GW Bush (although arguably not GHW Bush). But in their strategic approach to the Middle East, it’s becoming clearer to me that we are seeing basically the same policies expressed without the bravado of the Bushies. A bad policy, even if implemented with caution, is still a bad policy. Sick, a Clinton supporter, provides an excellent analysis of why one should choose Obama as the better Democratic alternative on foreign policy. Read it all.

Hillary Clinton’s warning that the United States could “obliterate” Iran if that country should “foolishly consider” launching an attack on Israel is, of course, pandering to a broad American constituency that wants to hear tough rhetoric about Iran. It is also intended to appeal to a constituency that needs constant reassurance that America’s relationship with Israel is secure. And, by addressing a strategic hypothetical that would by any measure be many years in the future (“in the next ten years” in her words), it seems intended to convince doubters that a woman is tough enough – perhaps more than tough enough – to be commander in chief.

Continue reading Sick on Clinton’s Arab strategy

Ammar Abdulhamid on Syria: “It’s the economy, stupid”

Syrian Blogger and opposition activist Ammar Abdulhamid has a very different take on prospects for change in Syria, which he says will be driven by economic factors. I would not be so optimistic (I see the same kind of thinking over Egypt’s current economic crisis) because just like you can’t control a country entirely through security measures, you can’t make change happen entirely through economic disgruntlement, for which temporary fixes can always be found. Here’s the text of his address to the US Congress:

Change in Syria is not a matter of “if� anymore, but of when, how and who. Facts and factors influencing and dictating change are already in progress and are, for the most part, the product of internal dynamics rather than external influences. Although this assertion seems to fly in the face of traditional wisdom regarding the stability of the ruling regime in Syria, the facts are clear and plainly visible for all willing to see.

 

The problem has been that most experts and policymakers have always been more concerned with high-end politics to pay any real attention to what is actually taking place on the ground. Issues such as the International Tribunal established to look into the assassination of former PM Rafic al-Hariri, Iran’s growing regional influence, the Assads’ sponsorship of Hamas, Hizbullah and certain elements in the Iraqi insurgency, escalating international pressures against the regime, and the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between the regime and opposition forces continue to dominate the ongoing international debate over Syria’s present and future.

 

The dynamics of daily life, however, shaped more by inflation, unemployment, poverty, imploding infrastructure, and official corruption and mismanagement might actually be rewriting the usual scenarios in this regard. For as that old adage goes: “it’s the economy stupid!�

Continue reading Ammar Abdulhamid on Syria: “It’s the economy, stupid”