Yesterday, US Ambassador to the UN Zal Khalilzad was humiliatingly forced by the powers-that-be in Washington to withdraw the text of a draft resolution he had presented to the Security Council less than 24 hours previously, that would have expressed the SC’s support for the Nov. 27th Annapolis peace meeting.
Colum Lynch’s reporting in the WaPo linked to there makes very clear:
- (1) that Khalilzad had had the approval of Secretary Rice before he presented the draft Thursday evening (contrary to some of the other reports on the incident); and
(2) that Khalilzad told Lynch that Israeli PM Olmert and other Israeli leaders had become “very upset” when they saw the text of Thursday’s draft.
Israeli governments have for many years strongly– though by no means always successfully– resisted all attempts to have the UN play any role at all in brokering or monitoring peace agreements between it and its neighbors. (That, despite the fact that Israel’s birth certificate as a state in the modern world came from the UN’s Partition Plan of 1947.) The draft that Khalilzad presented Thursday merely “endorsed” the Israeli-Palestinian statement concluded at Annapolis– which allocated a clear leadership role in the follow-opn diplomacy to the US, and not the UN. But even having the UNSC say anything at all about Annapolis was apparently too much for Olmert and Co. to bear.
Khalilzad was forced to fly to Washington DC on Friday, presumably to get a dressing-down from people higher up in the administration for his “presumption” in having presented the pro-Annapolis draft to the SC. My reading of this matter is that only someone politically weightier than Rice could have forced her and Khalilzad to back down on this matter. To me, that means Cheney.
What a humiliating fiasco for Khalilzad, Rice, and US diplomacy in general.
Especially since in Tunis, yesterday– and this was presumably before Khalilzad’s about-face– PA Pres. Mahmoud Abbas had told a press conference, “I must say that we felt the seriousness of the U.S. administration… Among the signals about the U.S. seriousness, there is a draft submitted by the U.S. to the U.N Security Council to endorse the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.”
And China Daily reported from New York that,
- Ambassador Nassir Al-Nasser of Qatar, the only Arab member on the Security Council, said Thursday “we are happy with the language as it is” in the US draft resolution. “I am happy that the council is dealing with this issue,” he said. “For me, this is the main thing.”
So, as I wrote in the headline, the immediate score in this affair looks like:
- Israel/Cheney – 1; World – 0
However, if the Bush administration’s handling of the post-Annapolis diplomacy continues in this inept and extremely one-sided vein, the longer-term score on this important aspect of global diplomacy will probably turn out to be more like:
- US – 0; World – 188
(Or however many countries there are in the whole of the non-US world.)
As I discussed in this Nov. 27 JWN post, the shifting balance among the world’s great powers– that is, the US’s decline from the Uberpower-hood it enjoyed in the 1990s– is an important backdrop to the post-Annapolis peace diplomacy. And the post-Annapolis diplomacy will meanwhile itself be contributing to the shifts in the global power power balance. Especially if the Bush administration keeps shooting itself in the diplomatic foot in this most recent, jejune, and damaging-to-everyone way.
(I have an op-ed on the broad Annapolis-in-global-politics theme that will be in The Christian Science Monitor on Monday. Too bad I finalized the text before this latest Khalilzad fiasco got reported.)
What I have specifically been looking at, in general, is the balance in the post-Annapolis diplomacy between the role of the US and that of the rest of the “Quartet”: Russia, the EU, and the UN. Worryingly, from my perspective, the text of the “Joint Understanding” that Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas agreed to at Annapolis gives the US a specified, special role monitoring both sides’ implementation of the 2002 “Road Map” dealing with interim issues, and spells out that satisfactory– from the US standpoint– implementation of the Road Map is a precondition of implementation of the final peace agreement that the two sides are supposed to conclude before the end of 2008.
(So actually, maybe not having the whole of the UNSC sign off on Annapolis in a formal way may not be such a bad thing?)
I see, too, that lapdoggish as ever, the Quartet’s so-called “special envoy to the PA” Tony Blair has been telling HaAretz and others that he “no longer believes that ‘land for peace,’ in and of itself, is sufficient”, and that,
- “There won’t be a Palestinian state unless it is coherently governed and run, and anyone who tells you different is misleading you.”
What on earth kind of neo-imperial arrogance is this?
Of course we all want the Palestinian state to be as well-run, as democratic, and accountable as possible. But to make this a pre-condition for national independence? This is Shcharansky-ism run wild!
Also, Blair is really not a good person to speak about these things, since in the run-up to the January 2006 Palestinian elections he was the one who covertly despatched a small team of Labour Party campaign advisers to Ramallah to try to salvage Fateh’s already-failing election campaign. That was a quite unwarranted (and therefore kept-hidden) intervention into Palestinian politics, and therefore a violation of democratic norms in Palestine.
Also, as we know, he has been a strong supporter of the mass-punishment policies sustained against the Palestinian people after they held their elections and he and George W. Bush didn’t like the outcome…
So much for yesterday’s man. Meanwhile, if you’re as interested as I am in the shifting global balance question, go back and look at all three pages of that China Daily report I linked to above in connection with the reporting on Qatar’s reaction. That is some pretty thorough and wide-ranging reporting– and in English, too. Even though the architecture of the article, the way it’s published on the web, is definitely sub-optimal: it’s impossible to bring up the whole text on a single, clean “print” page…
The Chinese are evidently watching what is happening on this issue pretty closely. Plus, they have been investing heavily and quite effectively in upgrading their English-language web presence. US commentators who mock China’s supposed weakness in the realm of soft power often don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.
Interesting times we live in.
Khalilzad has been hung out to dry. He said that he had cleared this with Condi, and she is denying that it happened.
Che brutta figura!
Helena = I just read your CSM column and it was a nice change to read something realistically optimistic about the middle east situation. But, I have to disagree with your basic premise of a war weary region. Yes, I think the average Palestinians are very weary and for the most part have accepted defeat at the hands of Israel. I do believe that most of them would accept almost any deal that could be negotiated that would lift the yoke of the occupation. Israelis, on the other hand, seem to be increasingly content with the status quo. The economy is booming, there are no suicide bombers (although occassional stories of the security measures stopping another plot), life in general is good for the majority. They reluctantly support the unending roadblocks, targeted killings, nighttime raids, and the apartheid system because they provide security and they seem to work. What would improve with an agreement? Indeed the need for security has created a major new export industry for Israel – security expertise and hardware. All they got from the Egyptian deal was a cold peace (conveniently forgetting the removal of their major existential threat). And of course, without the ongoing security threats,Likud, the IDF, and even Olmert’s Kadima would be in big trouble. They have nothing else to offer their people. None of that crowd would be capable of leading a peaceful country. I agree with you about the potential long range benefits of an overall peace, but, unlike you, I see no incentive on the Israeli side.
“They reluctantly support the unending roadblocks, targeted killings, nighttime raids, and the apartheid system”
I am not sure that the majority support the oppression of the Palestinians all that reluctantly. It seems to me that most of them really don’t care about the Palestinians at all as long as their lives are good.
Pleased to see that this matter is thoroughly reported. I prepared a Diary for DailyKos but a group in that community arranged to have me banned.
My woulda-been article on the withdrawal of the UN Resolution was boring in its objectivity: summarized the 9 newspapers that reported it, pointed out which papers filled in which details, (WaPo seemed to have the greatest detail and the keenest perspective.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113002307.html
WaPo also solicited Readers’ Comments: I read comments assiduously, for a sampling of what the great unwashed are thinking.
Of the 20 comments on WaPo on Dec 1, 12 reflected (in varieties of colorful language & metaphors) that “Israel runs US foreign policy.”
The most representative & thoughtful of these 12 comments was the one from MHughes, which looked at the problem not from the perspective of bashing Israel, but of fearing for the U.S.:
MHughes976 wrote:
It’s very hard to think of any other circumstance in which the United States, or indeed any other Security Council member, would change policy so visibly and humiliatingly because another government, friendly or not, intimated that it was upset. Will the forthcoming election be an auction seeking Israeli approval at all costs and threatening Iran ever more forcefully?
12/1/2007 5:31:03 PM
Included in the 12-count is the only input from someone who was apparently strongly supportive of Israel: in two posts, she said: 1. The Arabs want Jerusalem but will never get it; and 2. US foreign policy is run out of Jerusalem, not TelAviv.
The last two commenters exchanged views on a comparison of the isolated position of Germany after WWI to the isolated position of the US and of Israel today.
Me again; mind if I say something else, Helena?
You noted that “the Chinese are watching…pretty closely.”
Yes, I did notice that. I’m trying to twist together Zbigniew Brzezinski’s WaPo editorial on getting China involved in US negotiations with Iran;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/29/AR2007112901876.html
Israel’s increasingly strident acceleration of the demonization campaign against Iran, (ie:
http://www.ujfpittsburgh.org/page.html?ArticleID=147006
mushroom clouds are mushrooming)
and Israel’s project of establishing stronger alliances with China.
The last point is contained in a report under the auspices of the JPPPI – Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, chaired by Dennis Ross, and more specifically, a paper produced by Shalom Wald,
http://www.jpppi.org.il/JPPPI/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=150&FID=341
Hilary Krieger reported on Wald’s encounters with the Chinese in The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 3, 2005.
http://www.freeman.org/m_online/feb05/krieger.php
Krieger quotes Wald:
“‘The Chinese are nauseatingly obsessed with making it, with success,'” says Wald. “For the Chinese, he explains, the Jews are the model of success.”
But not just in money and political clout, continues Wald:
“To the Chinese…the Jews are the …’great doctors and scientists,’…[and] Chinese people especially admire …Einstein and…Marx.”
Wald says, “‘The Chinese believe the Jews are a big people. It makes no sense to tell them we’re not.'”
Interesting about Daily Kos. I have heard that they have a habit of banning people who write diaries that suggest a point of view that is not sufficiently sympathetic to Israel (did I put that diplomatically enough?). I guess progressive in this case only applies to certain subjects.
There are other sites than Daily Kos where you could no doubt post your diary without being banned for it.