Author: Helena

Article in The Nation on Hamas and Hizbullah

I see that The Nation has put up on its website a teaser for a piece I wrote for them about a month ago, which is on the need for Hamas and Hizbullah to be included in Arab-Israeli peacemaking if those two respective tracks of it are to be successful.
The piece starts with a little vignette designed to show the degree to which the vast majority of members of the US “political class”– i.e., legislators and media bigwigs– have for many years now considered themselves bound to follow Israel’s lead, rather than their own reading of the US people’s interests, in matters of Israeli-Arab diplomacy.
Of course, this is also a big part of what Walt and Mearsheimer have been writing about.

    Update Sunday a.m.: Thanks to alert co-poster Scott for having figured out you can read the whole text here.

Sometime I might blog the slightly amusing story of how this piece got edited and then de-edited…

Restorative justice in a DC church

Yesterday’s WaPo had a fascinating account of an innovative program the DC police is running, to offer people who are “fugitives” from the law a safe-seeming and humane way to come forward and resolve their situations. Significantly, it is based in one of the city’s big churches, the Bible Way church.
Thursday, in the first of three days the program will run, some 150 fugitives turned themselves in. Most of them were reportedly wanted in connection with nonviolent crimes. One man who came forward in connection with an assault and battery charge was arrested and taken away in handcuffs. The authorities reportedly offered “favorable consideration” to those who came forward.
WaPo journo Robert Pierre added these details:

    The effort is part of a national program that has resulted in more than 5,000 people with outstanding warrants coming forward in five other cities. Most have shown up with family members, and the vast majority said they might have kept running if not for the non-courthouse setting.
    “They talk about the safety and sanctity of the church,” said Kent State University professor Daniel Flannery, who has surveyed participants in all six cities.
    Participants yesterday expressed similar feelings as they arrived at Bible Way Church. They were greeted at the front door by volunteers, many of them members of the church, who guided them toward metal detectors set up inside.
    Dozens and dozens of law enforcement officers were present, although most of them were in the background, many out of sight of participants. Church ladies and pastors chatted with the arrivals, offering them something to eat or drink.
    Soon, however, participants were ushered into the basement, where the wheels of justice were in full motion. People were outfitted with wristbands, introduced to defense attorneys and moved to makeshift courtrooms, where judges heard their cases.
    In one of them, Rufus G. King III, chief judge of D.C. Superior Court, presided. Activity swirled all around: People hustled in and out, reporters requested interviews. Noise from adjacent “courts” crept over walls that didn’t reach the ceiling. The commotion became so overwhelming at one point that King signaled to an aide, who promptly gestured for quiet in the nearby hallway.
    Order restored for the moment, King whipped through cases, dismissing some, setting new court dates for others. As he dismissed one marijuana possession case, King told the man: “We all know that marijuana isn’t going to grow hair on your palms, but it will get you locked up. You got off of this case, but don’t get another one.”
    The man nodded and left, smiling…

I should note that the US is one of the world’s greatest incarcerators, now having more than two million people in jail. It is a vindictive, ill-organized, and largely dysfunctional system that leaves almost no room for the education and social rehabilitation of inmates. Instead, once behind bars, many of them become even further socialized into tough-guy, violent behaviors. And of course, their family ties are nearly completely disrupted and cut off; and yet another generation of kids is forced to grow up without fathers or– as is increasingly the case these days– mothers.
(And this system of so-called criminal “justice” is one that many well-meaning Americans want to export to all corners of the world??)
I am delighted that these churches are working with the court system to offer this alternative. What I see in this report has many aspects of the far more humane, life-affirming, and effective “restorative justice” approach to dealing with wrongdoers. Including that the offenders are welcomed into this program with family members accompanying them, rather than being forced to stand in a criminal dock alone; and they are treated with hospitality and respect by the “church ladies.”
My Quaker meeting in Charlottesville has been quite involved with offender-restoration projects in the city and region there; and more recently it has been working with the juvenile justice system to put in place some truly restorative justice procedures as an option, whenever possible. But as far as I know, the Bible Way church here in DC is far larger than most Quaker meetings. It is great that they’re doing this.

Obama in person (and Periello)

I was one of about 5-6,000 people who crammed into Charlottesville’s tented “pavillion” this evening to hear Barack Obama speak this evening. He was considerably better than I had expected. He spoke forthrightly about his anti- Iraq war position and said one of the first things he’d do as president is to call in the Joint Chiefs of Staff and make a plan to withdraw all the troops from Iraq.
(Note to Obama: Actually, you’d need to call the Secretaries of State and Defense in first, to get the diplomacy and the grand strategy right, before you call the Chiefs in.)
His two main topics were foreign policy (mainly, the war), and health care. He noted that the funds being poured into the war would be far, far better diverted into programs to rebuild American society as a community of hope rather than division and fear.
He also once, quite notably for me, said his aim would be to “Re-engage!” the US with the rest of the world.
He spoke a few times about the very bad effects Pres. Bush has had for the country and the world. He also talked quite a bit about the problems of “politics as usual”, and “bowing to the special interests”, etc etc. Those were clearly jabs at Hillary Clinton but he did not name her openly. A wise move.
He got a fabulous, enthusiastic turnout here in town, and was introduced by our Democratic Governor, Tim Kaine, who is co-chair of Obama’s national committee (I think.) Actually, Kaine was also very impressive as a speaker, when he was out there winding up the crowd for Obama.
The pundits are saying– and Kaine and Obama repeated this, this evening– that Virginia will be “in play” in the 2008 presidential election in a way it hasn’t been since the 1960s. That is, there will actually be a chance that the Dems might take the state (and therefore all of its electoral college votes), though it’s been solidly Republican for nigh these many years past.
Recently, the WaPo even said there’s a chance that our Democratic junior Senator, Jim Webb, elected last year, might be a vice-presidential running mate next year.
And more locally yet, my son this evening sent me this fascinating item from the TPM Cafe blogging area, written by a guy called Tom Periello who was explaining his decision to stand against our district’s deeply misguided Republican Congressperson, Virgil Goode.
Periello says:

    I’m running for Congress because I believe my campaign can be part of an important change in American politics. The 2006 elections demonstrated the viability of conviction politics. The great midterm candidates spoke from a deep sense of right and wrong, not a desire to position themselves on an artificial spectrum of right, left, and center…

Personally, I think he’s not being fair to Al Weed, an antiwar Democrat who ran a strong and principled campaign against Goode in 2006, but who lost. And it’s not clear to me what relationship Periello actually has with Virginia, apart from currently having some kind of temporary Guest Lecturer gig at U. Va. Law School. As I understand it, having strong local connections is (not unreasonably) important to many of the voters in our district here, whereas a lot of Periello’s life-experience so far has been as a kind of globe-trotting jurisprudentiocrat… So let’s see what happens with his candidacy as it develops further.
But Obama’s event this evening was unreservedly good news. He had a great manner, a strong organization, and spoke a lot of solid good sense. Tomorrow I’ll look for a transcript of his remarks and post them here.

    Updates Tues. a.m.:
    (1) A commenter has pointed out that Periello grew up near C ‘ville, and indeed Periello’s website notes that he graduated from the private academy that’s a stone’s throw from my house. I believe Periello needs to do a lot better job organizing in the district than he has done so far…
    (2) David Swanson was hard at work live-blogging the Obama event last night. Sean Tubbs was recording it for a podcast. I’m not seeing anything about it yet on Obama’s website.
    (3) This story by Bob Gibson in the local paper reported that, “Barack Obama drew more than 4,250 people to an outdoor rally and fundraiser Monday night at the Charlottesville Pavilion, surpassing a fundraiser that Hillary Clinton staged Sept. 23… by more than 3,000 paid attendees.” Also this: “Organizer James B. Murray Jr. said the gathering was the largest paid crowd that Obama has drawn anywhere as a presidential candidate and noted that the fundraiser out-raised Clinton’s previous Charlottesville total of $200,000 by more than $100,000.” This parallel report is also worth reading.
    The DP once again showed its incredibly skewed news judgment by putting those reports down near the fold on p.1. Topping them was a story titled (yawn!) “Ambulance plan remains divisive.”

Back to the book-factory for me. But great to see that the concept of the US “re-engaging” with the rest of the world on new and healthier terms is now entering the political lexicon…

Book-writing progress report

In my experience, birthing a book is similar to publishing a family in the sense that, once you’ve done it, you look at the product– beautifully produced books that can stand as valued resources for years to come; or wonderful young(-ish) adults who are totally their own people with self-confidence, great projects and relationships, and an enduring sense of humor and family values– and you kind of forget all the nail-biting angst, sleepless nights, and just plain hard work that went into the production process.
If we didn’t have this capacity of selective forgetting, no woman would ever have a second child or publish a second book.
So regarding book-writing, JWN regulars are doubtless aware that between July and late September I was hard at work writing my next book.
By the way, we now have a firm title. It will be called Re-engage!: America and the World After Bush.
I worked really hard writing it; got a tight complete manuscript off to the publisher on about September 26th; caught up with a few other tasks; did a couple of things in New York; then went for a fabulous mainly-vacation in Spain with my daughter.
Ah, Spain. I still have so much I want to blog about the trip…
So I get back home, and discover that Jennifer Knerr, the VP at Paradigm Publishers with whom I’m principally working on this project, (1) has given the whole ms. a good, close read, (2) says she really likes it, and (3) has made some really helpful comments and suggestions about it.
I love working with an intelligent editor, and Jennifer is definitely one. (Another thing I like is having a blog where I can hand out public plaudits to good editors.)
But… All this now means another round of close, serious work on the manuscript for me. Plus, I need to pull together both the Resource Section I promised her for the end of the book and the framing Preface for the beginning. This is the part of book-writing that I’d kind of forgotten when I first proposed this project to Jennifer back in June.
So anyway, that’s why I haven’t been blogging much recently. By paying sustained close attention to the task I have now revised three of the book’s seven chapters, and just about sketched out two of the five parts of the Resource Section. (These track the “substantive” middle five chapters of the book, so I’m doing them more or less in parallel.)
My present goal is to get all the chapter-revising and the Resource Section done by the end of this week, and the Preface done shortly after that. Next spring I’ll get the pay-off: the volume in hand, the fully-formed new contribution to the public discourse. Ta-dum!
But now I’m still in angst and hard work. So maybe it’ll be adios here for a few more days.
But hey, who knows? At least I know that– like all the members of my great family– JWN is always here for me. (Plus, I know that people here can carry on an interesting conversation even without me.)

Cheney on Iran: Just how alarming?

I come back to the US and to analyst/blogger mode after my great break in Spain, and find many signs of escalating tensions on the world scene. It’s hard to know where to start…

    * The horrible recent bombing in Pakistan, presaging the strong probability of continued political deterioration there?
    * News of continued security deterioration in Afghanistan?
    * The sharp rise in tensions between Turkey and northern Iraq?

… And it is at this point that Vice-President Cheney chooses to up the rhetorical ante against Iran??
His recklessness is almost unbelievable.
In remarks delivered yesterday at the annual conference of the AIPAC-sired “Washington Institute for Near East Policy” (WINEP), Cheney promised “serious consequences” if Iran doesn’t abandon its present nuclear policy (which the Iranians have said is aimed only at enriching uranium to power-generation olevels, not the much higher levels required for nuclear weapons.) He also warned that:

    “The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences…The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Many people have already noted that this language is almost exactly the same as the tension-raising rhetoric that Cheney and Bush both used in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Just days before Cheney’s speech, Bush himself had warned in a press appearance that Teheran’s achievement of even the knowledge of how to make a nuclear bomb could lead to World War 3. (This seemed like a silly threat, since the knowledge as such is widely available on the internet.) Bush later tried to deny he had been raising the tensions there… But then Cheney chimed in with his Sunday statement.
For many months now, people have been speculating about the chances of the Bush administration launching an attack (or permitting Israel to launch an attack) on Iran.
Until recently, I have remained fairly sanguine on this score, considering the probability to be considerably less than 50%– say, about 30% (max.)
On Sunday, I think the probability went up. So today, I have produced a little graph to illustrate what I think has happened:
JWN's Probability of Attack on Iran Counter
The reason that, despite Cheney’s alarmist rhetoric, I still haven’t raised the number above 50% is because this time, unlike in late 2002, we no longer have Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. I have a lot more confidence in the good (realist) sense of Bob Gates than I ever did in Rumsfeld.
I have the strong impression that Cheney is once again now, as in 2002, trying to “corner” the President into seeing “no alternative” but to launch the military attack that, apparently, Cheney seems to strongly favor. (On Iran this time, as on Iraq five years ago.) He may well be doing this at this point by claiming to the president that the rhetorical escalation is an essential part of the “coercive diplomacy” required to force the Iranians to back down on the nuclear issue. My judgment is, however, that this will not force the Iranians to back down, for a number of reasons– and also, that Cheney most likely shares this assessment. So then, Cheney could hope that two things may happen: (1) The Iranians in their turn would also up the rhetorical ante, or even the policy ante, by one or more further notches in response to the braggadocio from Washington, thus (in Cheney’s view) even further “proving” their irrationality and the danger this poses, both to Bush and to the US public, and (2) Bush would also find it harder to bring his administration down the tree of escalation that Cheney has been assiduously pushing it up into…
And thus would Cheney “corner” his man.
Back in late 2002, we can certainly nowadays discern a very similar cornering effect at the level of escalating the accusations and the hate-rhetoric against Saddam. But there was also another form of cornering going on: that from the military preparations that Rumsfeld was assiduously masterminding from over in the Pentagon. By February of 2003, Rumsfeld had in place (or, well on the way to the battleground) just about all the forces he thought he needed for the assault on Iraq. Keeping armies of such a size in the field is an expensive undertaking. In the recent El Pais account of the conversation between Bush and Aznar on the eve of the war, you certainly heard Bush talking about the “need” to use the invasion force soon.
(But oh! From today’s perspective we can see how very, very much cheaper and better it would have been for everyone all round if he had never launched them into battle that March, but merely kept them hanging around while the diplomacy continued its course… )
This time, though, I feel fairly sure that Gates is not playing the same game as Cheney. At this point, I think of Condi and Hadley both as being empty ciphers on this issue. Maybe I’m wrong.
So the months ahead will be really momentous ones.
Unfortunately, the dynamics of a US election year can too often be dynamics that favor belligerency and the braggadocio that leads to it. And I feel no confidence at all that, on the issue of Iran, the Democrats will be any cooler and saner than the administration.
I wish the “international community” had a few effective adults in it– leaders who could step in and persuasively explain to Pres. Bush just how crazy it would be to attack Iran. (They could also explain how crazy and destabilizing the present rhetorical escalations already are.) I don’t, however, see any such adults from outside the US playing any effective role in this direction.
I guess we, the US citizenry, are just going to have to be our own adults, and exert whatever pressures we can to rein in this escalation and take our country back to a saner path.
Anyway, from now on, I’m going to try to keep my little “Probability of Attack on Iran Counter” updated, at least once a month. I have the cut-off date for it, as of now, at Inauguration Day 2009. There may well be some periods of particular sensitivity along the way between now and then– determined by the political calendar…. I’m also trying to imagine which way the political pressures may push Bush in that strange twilight period after the election… In the past, in those uber-lame-duck nine weeks, presidents have done a number of surprising, and not always belligerent, things.
(Also, of course, January 20, 2009 will not necessarily see the sudden arrival of realism and sanity in the White House… )

Riverbend’s back…

She has a new post today, here.
(I’ll be back soon, too, with a new post. Still basking in having had a real vacation.)
Riv and her family are in Damascus; and she writes quite a lot about how it is to be an Iraqi refugee there:

    We live in an apartment building where two other Iraqis are renting. The people in the floor above us are a Christian family from northern Iraq who got chased out of their village by Peshmerga and the family on our floor is a Kurdish family who lost their home in Baghdad to militias and were waiting for immigration to Sweden or Switzerland or some such European refugee haven.
    The first evening we arrived, exhausted, dragging suitcases behind us, morale a little bit bruised, the Kurdish family sent over their representative – a 9 year old boy missing two front teeth, holding a lopsided cake, “We’re Abu Mohammed’s house- across from you- mama says if you need anything, just ask- this is our number. Abu Dalia’s family live upstairs, this is their number. We’re all Iraqi too… Welcome to the building.”
    I cried that night because for the first time in a long time, so far away from home, I felt the unity that had been stolen from us in 2003.

Rice claims Egypt´s support as big achievement!

You have to believe how weak the US is in the Middle East when the administration claims that winning support from longterm US-aid-recipient Egypt for its latest Palestinian-related initiative is actually some kind of an achievement.
In that NYT account, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit is quoted as saying of Condi Rice:

    ”She says that she is determined, and the president of the United States is determined to have a breakthrough during the remaining year of this administration… We have to believe them. I cannot doubt them.”

Precisely. This very precarious, fin-de-regime government of Egypt apparently judges that it has little alternative but to profess ¨belief¨ in Condi Rice.
However, forty years and four months after the start of Israel´s occupation rule over the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan, Rice still says she doesn´t ¨believe¨ in a timeline for getting a final-status agreement on the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian tracks.
So how many more decades does she want these occupations to run? How many more illegal settlers does she want to give Israel time to implant into the occupied lands?

Notes from Granada

We’re staying in Al-Baicin, the old “Arab” city here, on the steep hillside opposite the Al-Hambra. As we walked to the downtown this morning, we saw two pomegranate trees growing in a garden high above the small, cobbled small street we were on. They were heavy with red fruit, which brought the boughs down over the high retaining wall, and many of the fruits had split open. Some had even fallen to the cobbles. I guess it was for this fruit– the eponym of the hand grenade, and itself bloody red inside– that the city was named. The steep hillside all around show many traces of long-abandoned terracing. Maybe it was once like Lebanon.
But nothing is like the Al-Hambra.
We haven’t visited it yet. Last night, its several parts hung like vast, pregnant pearls in the night sky on the ridge opposite us. We arrived yesterday, and today is a national holiday, the “Fiesta of la Hispanidad”, so we couldn’t get tickets to get into the Al-Hambra.
I’m still trying to figure out what this fiesta is all about. It has apparently been timed to coincide with Columbus’s (imputed?) birthday.
So many countries seem to want to claim the old conquistador as their own! In the US, “Columbus Day” is a national holiday– celebrated last Monday, I believe; and always strongly supported by Italian-Americans. I think the Italians and Catalans also try to claim him as “theirs.”
There seems to be intense significance to the fact that Granada– the last city on this peninsula to be held in Arab hands– fell to Ferdinand and Isabel’s Reconquista in the very same year that Columbus made contact with what he thought was “the Indies.” The inaugural year of the emergence of European powers into world hegemony?
I’ve been looking at “historical memory” issues here as if through a many-layered palimpset. There is the continuing/ returning/ re-emerging question of Muslim-Christian relations and the memories associated with that. There’s the much more recent issue of the Civil War and the whole Francoist era, and the many very live issues around the memorializing of that. And now, Spanish army units are in Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, so there are emerging-memory issues connected with that.
Also, I haven’t seen much indication anywhere– though maybe I’ve missed what there is?– that the Spanish people have been coming to any kind of serious reflection on the harms that their rulers and their corporations did in their names during their extremely brutal period of conquest and rule in, especially, South America.
… Yesterday, the English-language edition of El Pais led with the story that on Wednesday, the Zapatero government reached an agreement “to ensure that all Franco-era plaques, street names and statues that still adorn Spanish cities and towns are removed once the controversial Law of Historical Memory goes into effect.”
Inside the paper, General Jose Enrique de Ayala, who had previously commanded some “coalition” units in Iraq, writes an intriguing analysis of the situation in Afghanistan, in which he urges that the NATO/ISAF forces serving there should shift towards seeking a deal with “moderates” among the Taliban, with the aim of winning a stronger internal peace inside the country that will allow for a faster and less chaos-inducing withdrawal of western forces than would be possible without such a deal.
Interestng.
Then on the facing page, there’s a thoughtful piece of reporting on the fact that many of the Spanish forces who have been killed in action in Lebanon or Afghanistan have been younger in age. Someone called Mariano Casado, associated with the Unified Association of Spanish Soldiers (AUME) is quoted as saying of the soldiers who get killed, “Sometimes they’re almost children. They are 18, 19, 20 years old, and they’re not prepared psychologically or militarily to face real risks and situations in which there is no way out… ”
The reporter there, Natalia Junquera, quotes several paratroopers who have served in Lebanon or Afghanistan who said they had felt well prepared before deployment. But they were also in their 30s.
I found it interesting that two of those she quoted– men serving in Spain’s paratroop forces– were described in passing as being of Mexican and Ecuadorian nationality.
So it is not only the US army that these days is scooping up men from distressed areas of central America and putting them into an army in which not enough of its own citizens are ready to serve?
… Lorna and I did get caught up in a smallish procession this morning, organized presumably in connection with the fiesta of La Hispanidad. There were some very embarrassed-looking young men in extraordinary “medieval” getouts– white tights, silky jerkins, funny hats with large feathers; quite a lot more medieval-looking participants including maybe the City Council?; an army band; an army unit with semi-automatic weapons and white gloves; and a civilian-looking band.
The rightwing party, the PP, had called on citizens to make the fiesta a great festival of patriotism with flags and national colors, etc. In the not-large crowd in downtown Granada we saw two people with flags, and the general response to the procession could best be described as desultory.
It made me think of some of the community-oriented Independence Day parades I’ve witnessed and even on occasion participated in, back in the US. The very best was the Palisades Parade in Washington DC, which back in the early 1990s had some fantastic gay percussionists (the “Different Drummers”), who didn’t just drum but also twirled batons and flags and generally camped it up in high spirits along MacArthur Boulevard there; a group of African-American equestrians in snazzy getouts; all the local pols coming and throwing candy to the kids; squads of kids on decorated bikes; the owner of a local porta-potty business who contributed a flatbed truck with porta-potty tied on top and his son and other kids doing tableaux vivants around it; and various other wonderful and wacky participants… Ending up with free lemonade and hot-dogs down there at Palisades Park.
Or the Lewis Mountain Neighborhood Parade in Charlottesville, with Chip Tucker reading the preamble to the Declaration of Independence before a rag-tag bunch of residents would process down to the dell with kids on bikes and pets well decorated in red-white-and-blue– some years even the neighbor bringng her prize chickens on a little cart… and again, it would all end up there with hot dogs and half-melted ice-cream.
This one didn’t look nearly as much fun. But Viva La Hispanidad anyway, provided content of the idea is no longer Francoist.

Bush/Rice peace push floundering?

I know I haven’t written much about the– extremely belated and highly opportunistic!– Israeli-Palestinian peace “initaitive” that Pres. Bush and Secretary of State Rice have been pursuing ever since Hamas pushed the (US-backed) Fateh “Contra” units out of Gaza in June and Fateh’s PA President Mahmoud Abbas formed a rump PA government in Ramallah shortly afterwards.
The main reason I haven’t written anything until now is that I was very busy writing my latest book, which is on global issues, not specifically on Palestinian or even Middle Eastern issues. Then, too, the twists and turns in Palestinian politics are hard to write about clearly and succinctly. (I just finished writing a piece that is largely on this question, that “The Nation” commissioned from me way back when. It proved a more complex writing job than I expected– largely because of the need to whittle down into a limited number of words the huge range of factors that need to be mentioned.)
Anyway, right now I am supposed to be on vacation. Indeed, I’m writing this from the courtyard of beautiful small Pension in Granada, with views looking over toward the Alhambra. Hard to focus on the twists and turns of current Jewish-Arab politics, though I suppose that if there’s a good place to gain perspective on such matters– as well as to reconnect with the idea that there is a universe in which constructive Jewish-Arab cooperation is possible– then this might well be it.
So now, I’ve been reading a few news items on this topic that have piqued my interest; and yes, I do have a few thoughts.
Richard Boudreaux and Paul Richter have this piece in today’s LA Times. They write this from Jerusalem:

    After prodding the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table for the first time in nearly seven years, the Bush administration now confronts a stalemate that threatens to undermine the latest peace initiative and further diminish American influence in the Middle East.
    … The administration’s effort is hobbled by stark differences between two sides with weak leaders who face hawkish opposition at home and cannot even agree on what kind of joint document to strive for as a basis for the conference.
    … On Monday, when the negotiating teams that Olmert and Abbas had appointed last week held their first working session, it was clear that the sides remained far apart. The talks were suspended, and the parties are looking to Rice and her team to bring proposals to bridge their differences.
    But it remains to be seen whether the Americans will be willing to take such an activist role.
    Bush, sympathetic to Israeli arguments that no outsiders should try to dictate the Jewish state’s security needs, has in the past directed Rice to leave it to the two sides to see what they could work out.
    … If the sides are too far apart, he said, the administration might decide to delay the November conference to reduce its downside risk.
    But that would create another risk. Propagandists for Hamas, Syria and other potential spoilers — the militant forces Bush is trying to weaken — would inevitably exploit a delay or any outcome that gave the Palestinians less than what Abbas seeks.
    Abbas and his Fatah movement are preparing for such a letdown. One advisor said the movement was debating whether to continue with open-ended negotiations brokered by Rice or snub Washington by returning to a power-sharing deal with Hamas and even engaging in new armed attacks against Israel.
    “The November meeting is going to be a threshold event for Abbas,” said Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. “If he doesn’t bring home the goods, he faces a crisis of credibility and will have to compensate by seeking agreements with rival Palestinian factions. He would be weaker, and Hamas would be stronger.”

I have huge respect for Mouin’s judgment. But I am not as certain as he seems to be that Abbas (Abu Mazen) would necessarily respond to a failure in November by going back into a coalition deal with Hamas– and one in which, this time around, his hand would be even weaker than it was during the last such deal, concluded under Saudi auspices in early February. After all, in the past, when political and diplomatic developments have not gone as he hoped, Abbas has on a couple of occasions merely retreated from public life, in a blue funk. And I think there’s a distinct possibility that he might do that again, if Bush and Rice prove themselves totally incapable of delivering anything worthwhile for him.
If Abu Mazen does respond in this way, that would of course provoke yet another huge internal crisis for Fateh. He might meanwhile be settling back into a semi-retirement in Qatar, where he spent many previous years of funkdom. (And as for being “President” of the PA? Well, let’s face it, the President of the PA doesn’t have any real powers anyway, apart from running some internal workings of the string of ghettoes into which the IDF has penned the Palestinians ever since Oslo. He probably would not miss the job.)
It is a very interesting time, right now, for the fate of the US’s until-now hegemonic role in the Middle East. More and more of the cards are getting stacked up against the US-Israeli alliance. This means, of course, that there’s a chance of some extremely rash action from one or the other, or both of them, as they chafe within the limitations that are increasingly building up around them.
There is, of course, a lot more to be said about this Bush/Rice peace “initiative.” For any number of reasons, I have always found it hard to judge that the initiative was serious, at all. Primarily because of the extremely opportunistic and reactive circumstances in which it was born. But also because this formula of simply having an extremely weak and widely repudiated (by his own people) Palestinian leader sit down with his people’s jailers and expecting the two “sides” to be able to reach anything like a sustainable peace agreement is pure pie in the sky. (“Like putting a kindergarten child into the ring with a sumo wrestler and expecting a fair fight,” in the memorable words that Palestinian human-rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab once used.)
That approach of keeping the negotiations determinedly “bilateral” between the two sides, along with the approach of seeking to negotiate in the first instance only an interim deal or even, heaven forfend, another airy-fairy “Declaration of Principles”, was completely discredited by the failed record of the diplomacy of the 1990s. If that record showed anything it showed that:

    1. Diverting the negotiating energy into interim deals, or even interim-of-an-interim deals, while leaving the final status undetermined– as happened at and after Oslo– is a clear recipe for uncertainty on all sides, tension, violence (on all sides), failure, and disappointment.
    2. The outlines of a politically sustainable final agreement are already fairly well known– though the balance of forces between the two sides has shifted somewhat away from Israel’s favor since the (non-governmental) “Geneva Accord” was concluded at the Track Two level in 2003.
    3. Left alone, the two sides cannot negotiate a sustainable agreement. This is especially the case if, while it claims it is “leaving the field clear for bilateral negotiations”, the US continues to shovel huge amounts of nearly unconditional political, military, and financial aid into Israel.
    4. The principles of international law– including the Geneva Conventions’ provisions against the building of settlements in occupied land and the general principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force– have just as much relevance in the Palestinian arena as anywhere else, and indeed can provide useful signposts to the content of a legitimate and sustainable final peace agreement.

(Meanwhile, if anyone is interested in the views and judgments on the Palestinian issue of an increasingly deranged Tony Blair, you can read them here. Among the inanities he mouthed there were this: “If you cannot reach a deal with the current Palestinian leadership … then the Palestinian with whom you will be able to reach an agreement has not yet been born,” and this: “He said that he took on the role of helping resolve the conflict in June because of ‘my sense of a mission’.” Nonsense on stilts, Tony dear. Go home and apply some cold compresses to your fevered brow.)