Category: Obama presidency

Long knives, Washington, Afghanistan, part 2

I’ve been thinking more about the timing of the WaPo’s publication of Woodward’s bombshell and the accompanying materials this morning.
It seems clear to me Woodward must have had the text of the McChrystal Assessment for a number of days. His colleagues had the time to do some good follow-up reporting with Gen. Jim Jones and other senior officials. Also, the WaPo and the Pentagon had time to negotiate the amounts of the assessment that the WaPo could put onto its public web-site. So obviously, the folks inside the administration knew that Woodward had it and the WaPo was going to publish it.
Yesterday, Obama was doing his big t.v. blitz– going onto five major t.v. news-discussion programs to discuss primarily health-care but also aware he’d be getting questions about Afghanistan and other issues.
Here’s what he said on Afghanistan on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos:

    When we came in, basically, there had been drift in our Afghan strategy. Everybody acknowledges that. And I ordered a top to bottom review. The most important thing I wanted was us to refocus on why we’re there. We’re there because al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans and we cannot allow extremists who want to do violence to the United States to be able to operate with impunity.
    Now, I think we’ve lost — we lost that focus for a while and you started seeing a– a classic case of mission creep where we’re just there and we start taking on a whole bunch of different missions.
    I wanted to narrow it. I did order 21,000 additional troops there to make sure that we could secure the election, because I thought that was important. That was before the review was completed. I also said after the election I want to do another review. We’ve just gotten those 21,000 in. General McChrystal, who’s only been there a few months, has done his own assessment.
    I am now going to take all this information and we’re going to test whatever resources we have against our strategy, which is if by sending young men and women into harm’s way, we are defeating al Qaeda and — and that can be shown to a skeptical audience, namely me — somebody who is always asking hard questions about deploying troops, then we will do what’s required to keep the American people safe.

Well, strictly speaking, back on March 27, when he made the decision based on that first “top to bottom review”, he decided to expand both the troop numbers and the troop mission in Afghanistan. Only at some later point did he decide he wanted to “narrow” it.
In their piece in the WaPo today, Rajiv Chadrasekaran and Karen DeYoung write that the chaos surrounding the holding of last month’s Afghan election was a turning point for the administration.
Also, note the apparent put-down of McChrystal in what Obama said.
So, a couple of quick points here. Did the WaPo delay the publication of today’s news reports to allow Obama to get his version out to the public first– or was there some other reasoning behind the timing of publishing these stories?
Also, McChrystal may well not last long in his job.
But whether he does or not, the bigger issue here is that Obama and his national-security team are going to have to do some very broad thinking (as I noted earlier– see # 2 here) if they want to find a way to ramp down the currently huge risks the US/NATO troops face in Afghanistan.

Long knives out in Washington over Afghanistan

You can criticize Bob Woodward– and I have– for the insidery, back-scratching nature of most of his recent journalism. But he still manages to pull out a significant number of real news items.
Wow! In today’s WaPo, he has a piece describing a document (PDF) that was most likely leaked to him by someone on the staff of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US general in Afghanistan, in which McC warned that

    he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict ‘will likely result in failure.’

The leaked document was sent by McChrystal to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on August 30, under the title “COMISAF’S INITIAL ASSESSMENT”. (COMISAF is the acronym for “Commander of the [US-led] International Security Assistance Force”.)
I have not had time to pore over the PDF version yet. But Woodward and various other writers at the WaPo evidently have done so. The PDF version posted on the WaPo website is one for which they received a security clearance after certain portions were removed.
An accompanying article by Rajiv Chadrasekaran and Karen DeYoung gives an account of some– but certainly far from all– of the political context within the Obama administration, within which someone took the decision to leak this very sensitive document to Woodward.
Chandra and DeYoung write,

    From his headquarters in Kabul, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal sees one clear path to achieve President Obama’s core goal of preventing al-Qaeda from reestablishing havens in Afghanistan: “Success,” he writes in his assessment, “demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign.”
    Inside the White House, the way forward in Afghanistan is no longer so clear.
    Although Obama endorsed a strategy document in March that called for “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy,” there have been significant changes in Afghanistan and Washington since then. A disputed presidential election, an erosion in support for the war effort among Democrats in Congress and the American public, and a sharp increase in U.S. casualties have prompted the president and his top advisers to reexamine their assumptions about the U.S. role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.
    Instead of debating whether to give McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, more troops, the discussion in the White House is now focused on whether, after eight years of war, the United States should vastly expand counterinsurgency efforts along the lines he has proposed — which involve an intensive program to improve security and governance in key population centers — or whether it should begin shifting its approach away from such initiatives and simply target leaders of terrorist groups who try to return to Afghanistan.

And then, they have this devastating put-down of McChrystal:

    McChrystal’s assessment, in the view of two senior administration officials, is just “one input” in the White House’s decision-making process.

They add:

    Obama, appearing on several Sunday-morning television news shows, left little doubt that key assumptions in the earlier White House strategy are now on the table. “The first question is: Are we doing the right thing?” the president said on CNN. “Are we pursuing the right strategy?”
    “Until I’m satisfied that we’ve got the right strategy, I’m not going to be sending some young man or woman over there — beyond what we already have,” Obama said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” If an expanded counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan contributes to the goal of defeating al-Qaeda, “then we’ll move forward,” he said. “But, if it doesn’t, then I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or . . . sending a message that America is here for the duration.”

I have a few quick reactions to this important news:

    1. I am really glad that Obama is looking at a range of options other than trying to continue the effort to mount a countrywide “counter-insurgency” campaign in Afghanistan that would also involve trying to build a functioning state system in the whole of that very complicated country.
    2. In the range of other options he’s looking at, he should certainly be looking at options that involve bringing other significant international partners into the operation rather than just, as at present, members of the NATO alliance. NATO is so much the wrong implement through which to be acting in Afghanistan, for the reasons I’ve blogged about a lot here over recent months. Other powers, located much closer to Afghanistan, have both (a) a much stronger direct interest in seeing some form sustainable stabilization take root there than members of distant NATO do, and (b) much greater capability– in terms of being both geographically and culturally closer to Afghanistan– to act effectively there. These nations include China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan (which has its own problems, of course), and most of the other Central Asian nations. The UN would seem to be so much the most appropriate body to convene and lead this new form of help for Afghanistan.
    3. Of course this would signal– and be a part of– a much broader shift in the balance of power in world politics between “the west and the rest.” But this shift is happening, anyway.
    4. Very evidently there is a huge, deep, and significant debate within the Obama administration over whether to continue with a “COIN”-only approach, or not. Chandra and DeYoung indicate that this seems to pit some military commanders (McChrystal and Chairman of the JCS Adm. Mike Mullen) against the civilian leadership in the White House.
    5. Unmentioned thus far have been the views of Gen. Petraeus, the highly political general who as head of CENTCOM is McChrystal’s immediate superior and thus stands between him and Mullen in the chain of command. Unknown also is the position in this tussle of Secdef Gates.
    6. All of the above people serve, of course, at the pleasure of our elected president. But a pointed resignation of any one of them, if he should disagree with the decision that Obama eventually makes, would be a major political blow to Obama. That gives all of them clout– but probably Gates and Petraeus the most clout of all.
    7. The leaking of McChrystal’s assessment seems very like a move to cover the rear-end of the military leaders in the– increasingly much more likely– event that the US/NATO “mission” in Afghanistan ends up in some degree of defeat, ignominy, chaos, or worse. Woodward tells us that McChrystal’s assessment concluded by saying, “While the situation is serious, success is still achievable.” But if McChrystal or anyone in his office had anything to do with the leaking of the document, then that act would indicate that the leaker really did not not judge “success” to be very likely at all.
    8. Woodward’s acquisition and leaking of this document are a reminder of the big journalistic coup of his early career in the 1970s, when he and Carl Bernstein leaked details of the dirty tricks President Nixon used against the Democrats during the Watergate affair. But they have more in common, substance-wise, with the 1971 leaking to the NYT of the “Pentagon Papers”, an internal Pentagon assessment that pointed to the unwinnability of the US-Vietnam War.

Anyway, the leak of the McChrystal assessment is a huge story. Chapeau to Woodward.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, “benchmarks”

Excellent analysis, as usual, from Reidar Visser on Biden’s latest trip to Iraq.
Noting that this is Biden’s second visit to Iraq as Vice-President, Visser writes,

    If anything, what these visits have demonstrated twice is that US leverage is quickly disappearing from Iraq. Biden today informed the press that no further “benchmark legislation” would be passed this side of Iraq’s parliamentary elections scheduled for 16 January 2010 (hopefully that statement was offered as a prognosis, since this issue supposedly is for the majority of the Iraqi parliament to decide!), whereas Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki used the opportunity of his joint press conference with Biden to coolly steer clear of any reference to national reconciliation issues…
    Biden’s frank assertion that he expects no major national reconciliation initiatives prior to the elections is useful in two ways. Firstly, it is good news in itself. It is often not realised that to leave these issues in suspense during the elections could actually have a positive impact on Iraqi politics in that voters may get the opportunity to discuss basic constitutional issues in Iraq in a less sectarian and confused atmosphere than that which prevailed during the two 2005 elections and ahead of the constitutional referendum that year…
    Biden’s comments are also useful in that they highlight the limited window that remains for the Obama administration to exercise diplomatic influences in Iraq’s internal political process. If Biden is correct, not much more will be attempted this side of the 16 January 2010 elections. On that day, it is possible that the Iraqi people will reject the SOFA in the referendum that will coincide with the parliamentary elections, in which case the Maliki government will notify Washington that they have one year to leave the country and the logistics of getting out will likely become the preoccupation of the Obama administration. But even if the SOFA is accepted by the Iraqi people, the time that remains for the US between January and the end of 2011 is in practice highly restricted. Combat forces must be out by August 2010, and Washington has already factored in a couple of months in the post-election period to secure a stable transition – meaning that by the time a new government has been formed and serious discussion of national-reconciliation issues can recommence, probably no earlier than April 2010 if past experience is anything to go by, the mechanisms of withdrawal will probably occupy most of the Obama administration’s attention. On top of this, the first batch of constitutional revisions will be passed by a straightforward majority decision in the Iraqi parliament; any crisis over Kurdish objections will erupt only after a subsequent referendum, probably in late 2010 at the earliest…

I always thought Washington’s earlier attempt to impose political “benchmarks” on a– supposedly already sovereign– Iraqi government was patronizing, colonialist, ham-handed, and unrealistic. Now, it is being rapidly buried (and no-one in Washington is paying much heed, at all.)
It is intensely depressing, though, to see the Obama administration now ginning up an effort to define political benchmarks for both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Have they learned nothing from the fate of the “benchmarks” defined for Iraq?
It is also as though people who live in the Washington policy bubble have zero awareness of how their actions are viewed by that 95% of humanity who happen not be American. Including, of course, Afghans and Pakistanis.
Erm, guys, I would like to introduce you to this thing called “the printing press.” Also, the “wireless telegraph.” And I’ve heard tell, too, of a device called “The Inter-Tubes.” Of course, if you’re still living in the days of the quill pen and the pony express, you could perhaps imagine that people living outside the US might not learn of your plans for colonialist-style arrogance.

Goldstone Commission reports on Gaza-war war-crimes

The Goldstone Commission, appointed in April by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that were committed during last winter’s Gaza war, has now presented its findings to the Council.
Regarding actions undertaken by the armed forces of the State of Israel, the report states,

    The Mission found that, in the lead up to the Israeli military assault on Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade amounting to collective punishment and carried out a systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation of the Gaza Strip. During the Israeli military operation, code-named “Operation Cast Lead,” houses, factories, wells, schools, hospitals, police stations and other public buildings were destroyed. Families are still
    living amid the rubble of their former homes long after the attacks ended, as reconstruction has been impossible due to the continuing blockade. More than 1,400 people were killed during the military operation.
    Significant trauma, both immediate and long-term, has been suffered by the population of Gaza. The Report notes signs of profound depression, insomnia and effects such as bed-wetting among children. The effects on children who witnessed killings and violence, who had thought they were facing death, and who lost family members would be long lasting, the Mission found, noting in its Report that some 30 per cent of children screened at UNRWA schools suffered mental health problems.
    The report concludes that the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole, in furtherance of an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population, and in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population. The destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a deliberate and systematic policy which has made the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population.
    The Report states that Israeli acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their rights to access a court of law and an effective remedy, could lead a competent court to find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, has been committed.
    The report underlines that in most of the incidents investigated by it, and described in the report, loss of life and destruction caused by Israeli forces during the military operation was a result of disrespect for the fundamental principle of “distinction” in international humanitarian law that requires military forces to distinguish between military targets and civilians and civilian objects at all times. The report states that “Taking into account the ability to plan, the means to execute plans with the most developed technology available, and statements by the Israeli military that almost no errors occurred, the Mission finds that the incidents and patterns of events considered in the report are the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions.”

Regarding actions undertaken by Palestinian armed groups, the Commission found,

    [T]he repeated acts of firing rockets and mortars into Southern Israel by Palestinian armed groups “constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity,” by failing to distinguish between military targets and the civilian population. “The launching of rockets and mortars which cannot be aimed with sufficient precisions at military targets breaches the fundamental principle of distinction,” the report says. “Where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into civilian areas, they constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population.”
    The Mission concludes that the rocket and mortars attacks “have caused terror in the affected communities of southern Israel,” as well as “loss of life and physical and mental injury to civilians and damage to private houses, religious buildings and property, thereby eroding the economic and cultural life of the affected communities and severely affecting the economic and social rights of the population.”

Three Israeli noncombatants and ten Israeli soldiers were killed during the war. Of the Palestinians killed, more than 1,000 were noncombatants, including more than 300 children.
Here are the Commission’s conclusion and recommendations (reformatted by me for clarity):

    The prolonged situation of impunity has created a justice crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territory that warrants action, the Report says. The Mission found the Government of Israel had not carried out any credible investigations into alleged violations.
    * It recommended that the UN Security Council require Israel to report to it, within six months, on investigations and prosecutions it should carry out with regard to the violations identified in its Report.
    * The Mission further recommends that the Security Council set up a body of independent experts to report to it on the progress of the Israeli investigations and prosecutions.
    * If the experts’ reports do not indicate within six months that good faith, independent proceedings are taking place, the Security Council should refer the situation in Gaza to the ICC Prosecutor.
    * The Mission recommends that the same independent expert body also report to the Security Council on proceedings undertaken by the relevant Gaza authorities with regard to crimes committed by the Palestinian side.
    * As in the case of Israel, if within six months there are no good faith independent proceedings conforming to international standards in place, the Council should refer the situation to the ICC Prosecutor.

What a fascinating road-map towards accountability.
Longtime JWN readers will know that I have long reflected and written about how the demands of peacemaking and the demands of seeking full accountability for past acts can best be reconciled. This is a very important case-study in this field.
Meantime, of course, if Pres. Obama is serious about his support for the human-rights agenda and for building a new, more constructive relationship with the UN, then he needs t get behind this process of holding both parties acountable.
Including, he should immediately signal to both Israel and Hamas that he will condition all future US aid to both of them on their compliance with these recommendations.

Another blunt No from Netanyahu

Netanyahu just loves to poke his finger in America’s eye… again, and again, and again…
Today, with Pres. Obama’s peace envoy George Mitchell still in Israel, Netanyahu bluntly told a key Knesset committee that “there will not be a complete freeze on settlement building and that building in Jerusalem will proceed as usual.”
The exact words, as reported by Haaretz’s Jonathan Lis, were,

    “The Palestinians expect a complete halt to building; it is now clear that this will not happen… Jerusalem is not a settlement and the building [there] will continue as normal.”

He even seemed to want to underline and mock the notable non-reaction of the Americans to all his earlier acts of defiance of their months-long campaign for a complete settlement freeze.
His taunting and his non-compliance are both outrageous. The best response from Obama is to move directly and speedily to securing the agreed delineation of final borders between Israel and the independent Palestinian state. In the West Bank, that border-line will, of course, also include one that runs through Jerusalem.
Deal with it, Netanyahu. Jerusalem does not belong only to Israel.

I-P: Borders first– and fast?

The usually well-informed Akiva Eldar has an important piece in today’s Haaretz, reporting this:

    Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will resume next month on the basis of an understanding that the establishment of a Palestinian state will be officially announced in two years.
    Palestinian and European Union sources told Haaretz that talks will initially focus on determining the permanent border between Israel and the West Bank.
    … It is understood that this will be accompanied by a public American and European declaration that the permanent border will be based on the border of June 4, 1967. Both sides may agree to alter the border based on territorial exchanges.
    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to discuss Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees in the initial negotiation stages will not be allowed to delay the announcement of an independent Palestinian state.
    Likewise, Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and that the Arab world embark on normalizing ties with Israel, will not constitute preconditions to an “early recognition” of Palestine.

Eldar is also reporting that Netanyahu has expressed confidence that he’ll reach an “agreement” on some limited curbs on settlement construction with the Americans, very soon.
If Eldar’s report is accurate, which I assume to be the case, then I think this says some moderately good things about where Obama’s policy is heading.
I understand that Obama’s failure to win– or even, really to fight for– a complete settlement freeze has been very frustrating for the Palestinians But as I noted in this recent IPS piece,

    some seasoned analysts of Israeli-Arab negotiations argue that the main focus for Obama and all others who seek a fair and durable peace in the region should now be not the settlement-building issue, but to start – and win speedy completion of – the negotiation for a final peace agreement (FPA).
    From that perspective, any further prolongation of the fruitless tussle over the settlements can be seen both as a huge time-waster and as a growing drain on Obama’s political capital domestically and internationally.
    These analysts point out that any FPA will necessarily include a demarcation of the final borders between Israel and the future Palestinian state.
    Once those lines are demarcated, the issue of whether and where Israel can build new housing for its people is instantly transformed. After border demarcation Israel can presumably build freely within its own final borders, consistent with international law.
    But outside those borders not only will it be unable to continue its building programmes, but Israeli citizens already living there will rapidly come under Palestinian law.
    And as the FPA goes into effect there will be no more Israeli military occupation of either or the West Bank, and thus no remaining problem, under international law, regarding Israeli settlers in those areas.
    Demarcating a final border for Israel in the West Bank is something that Netanyahu and many of his allies in Israeli’s rightwing government have long been opposed to. Netanyahu’s Likud party traditionally considered the whole terrain between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – and even a stretch of land east of the Jordan – to be part of the Biblical “Land of Israel”.

If Eldar’s account is accurate, here are the good aspects of what Obama seems to be planning:

    1. Going for an agreement on those final-status borders first, and hopefully also fast.
    2. Not getting sidetracked by either endless nickel-and-diming over an interim settlement freeze, or the terrible dead-end of a “Palestinian state with a provisional border,” or Israel’s demands that it needs to receive the Palestinians’ prior agreement to “recognize Israel as a Jewish state”, or whatever.
    3. With regard to the interim settlement freeze idea– which seems as though it’ll go onto operation in only a very limited way– making no mention of any kind of mandatory Arab-state quid pro quos for that. (I see that Saudi Arabia’s very influential Prince Turki al-Faisal today reiterated in the NYT that the Kingdom is not prepared to engage in any normalization or or other peacebuilding measures until “after [the Israelis] have released their grip on Arab lands.” Absolutely no surprise there.)
    4. Having the US and EU declare that the final border will be “based on the line of June 4, 1967”, though with mutually agreeable exchanges.

So, there seem to be much that is laudable and realistic in the plan as reported. Here, though, are one big thing and a number of slightly smaller things that we need to have spelled out before we express any enthusiasm for it:

    One big thing:
    The “borders first” approach will not work unless the border-line and any other necessary arrangements regarding all of Jerusalem are also spelled out in the broader border delineation exercise. This is the case, for two reasons: Firstly because “Metropolitan Jerusalem” now constitutes such a large and such a pivotally placed portion of the West Bank that you literally cannot know what Palestinian-administered area you’re talking about in the West Bank unless you know where the line is and what the supplementary arrangement are for Jerusalem. Secondly, Jerusalem is of crucial political importance to all Palestinians as well as to 1.3 billion Muslims and 13 million Jews around the world.
    My view on what might work in Jerusalem, fwiw, is that the Israelis would get the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and some but not all of the settlement blocs in occupied East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians would get the rest of the Old City and much but not all of the rest of occupied East Jerusalem, with the Palestinian concessions there being compensated with good chunks of land from elsewhere in 1948 Israel… Plus perhaps some kind of special international regime for some Holy Places.
    Anyway, there needs to be a line through Jerusalem. We’re talking about two separate states with separate economies and different trading partners, etc. Over time, perhaps, the two states will want to cooperate, and Jerusalem will be a great locus for that. But for now, a clean divorce is so much better– in Jerusalem, as in the land of Israel/Palestine as a whole– than continuing in any form with the highly coercive and extremely damaging regime that has existed, including at the economic level, since 1967, and also, of course, since Oslo.

And here are the main other things that need to happen to make this path look good:

    1. Obama still needs to spell out, repeatedly, that it is in the United States’ interest to see a sustainable peace agreement secured in a very speedy way… Enough with always trying to justify his diplomatic involvement on the basis that “it’s in Israel’s interest”, or “it’ll help make Israel more secure”, or whatever. Yes, those things will happen. But they will be by-products of him pursuing this final peace agreement for the two even more important reasons that (a) it’s the right and moral thing to do, and (b) it’s in the deeper interests of the US citizenry as a whole… And therefore, that even if the PM of Israel should disagree (shock! horror!) with what Obama plans to do, nonetheless he will proceed, undeterred by that opposition.
    2. He needs to spell out that this whole approach is based on international law and international resolutions… And by the way, he needs to bring other countries/groupings into the “leadership process”, in addition to the US and the EU. This is not, and should not be seen as, a western/NATO project! It should derive its strength, clarity, and legitimacy from the United Nations, including from the resolutions of the UN Security Council.
    3. Based on the preceding two points, he needs to make sure that the “model” of the negotiations is not just one in which “the Israelis and Palestinians get left in a room together to work things out between them.” That can never work. One side is, on the ground, a fearsome military and economic power that is occupying the land of the other. The other is a weak and oppressed (though numerous) group of people who’ve been living under the Israeli fist for many years. That is why both the US’s interest and the principles of international law need to be added into the equation to even things up. So that, for example, the negotiations “land swaps”, the refugee issue, or whatever don’t end up being completely– and over the medium haul, quite unsistainaby– resolved in Israel’s interest.
    4. He needs, obviously, to find a way to include in the diplomacy in some way those parties that were not only excluded but also actively combated and opposed by GWB administration. That includes both Hamas and the five-million-plus Palestinian refugees. On Hamas, there is some modestly good news, in that the Speaker of the PLO’s ‘parliament’, Selim Zaanoun, is supposed to be in Gaza right about now, discussing formulas for bringing Hamas into the PLO… And of course, it is the PLO, not the Determinedly Interim Palestinian Authority, that under the Oslo formula is responsible for negotiating the final peace with Israel. (Even if Saeb Erakat does like to double- or triple-hat himself on occasion); and
    5. Finally, this peace diplomacy on the Palestinian-Israeli track will be a lot more successful if it is seen as part of an intentionally synergizing push for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, that is, one that involves progress on the Syrian-Israeli track in tandem with– rather than, as in the past, in a considerably degree of competition with– the Palestinian-Israeli track.

Well, there’s my input into this. Let’s hope more than a few of the relevant power-that-be here in Washington listen to me, eh?

Malley on refugees, settlers, etc

I realize I promised to put something on the blog about the presentation that Rob Malley made during Thursday’s discussion of Hussein Ibish’s latest anti-one-state screed. Let me convey just the main points here.
Rob started off by noting that all the attempts to get a two-state outcome that have been undertaken since the conclusion of the Oslo Accord in 1993 have failed. (He later referred to “serial failures.”)
He was, of course, part of the diplomatic team, based in the Clinton White House, that was responsible for many of those failures. (But only a junior member.)
He asserted that, “The one-state solution doesn’t meet even the basic needs of Israeli Jews.”
If I’d had more time, I’d have loved to ask Rob to be a lot more specific. Which basic needs, precisely, of Israeli Jews does he see it as not meeting?
He said, “I haven’t given up on the two-state solution. Rather, I’ve soured on the methods used until now to attain it.”
He (like, I think, both the other people leading the discussion– Hussein Ibish and Aaron Miller) made one or more references to the need to attain a conflict-ending two-state solution.
But he said the US needs to do two main things different in the methodology it pursues, than what it did in the past. (And he, like the others, was still talking very definitely about a diplomacy that would continue to be led by the US.)
The main ideas in what he said were familiar, actually, from the NYRB article he co-authored with Hussein Agha back in June.
His first suggestion for a change in methodology was to ask, “Have we left out some vital actors: on the Palestinian side, the refugees and the Islamists, and on the Israeli side the religious and the settlers?”
He argued that in all the rounds of diplomacy carried out since 1993, members of all those groups were excluded and “treated like lepers.”
“We need to stop doing that,” he said, “Because we will need as much endorsement as we can get from all those groups for any eventual peace deal, because they are so present and so well-mobilized.”
His second methodological suggestion was that the people running the diplomacy should realize that, to be conflict-ending, the final peace agreement “has to deal with the issues of 1948, as well as 1967.”
He defined “the issues of 1948” as consisting, on the Israeli side, of a continuing demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and on the Palestinian side, a “demand that they get acknowledgment and some form of reparation for what happened in 1948.”
These two “methodological changes” are, of course, linked to each other– particularly in their recognition that, to be sustainable, any peace deal has to address the concerns and at least some of the claims of the Palestinian refugees.
It does strike me that the first of his two suggestions– focusing on being more “inclusive” towards the religio-nationalists on both sides and also towards both the Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlers– is a little “unbalanced” in the diagnosis on which it is based: All the peace efforts carried out between 1993 and now have been very attentive indeed to the concerns of Israel’s settlers and religio-nationalists… To the point that all US presidents have endorsed final border lines that would annex huge chunks of settler-populated occupied Palestinian territory to Israel, while the Israeli governments they have negotiated with have always included representatives of Israel’s religio-nationalists; and indeed, Israel’s religio-nationalists, like its settlers, are all fully enfranchised within the Israeli political system…
Whereas on the Palestinian side– ?
The Clinton White House, just like the GWB White House, tried to completely downplay and minimize the concerns and claims of the Palestinian refugees. They worked hard to keep the Palestinians living in their Diaspora– all of whom, of course, are refugees– disenfranchized within the Palestinian system, by pursuing the idea that the Interim PA in Ramallah somehow represented “all” the Palestinian people. And they either encouraged (Clinton) or actively instigated (GWB) extremely brutal crackdowns on the leaders and members of the Palestinians’ principal religio-nationalist movement.
Also, it is a little misleading to claim that the interests of the settlers should in any way correlate with, or should be “balanced off” against, those of the refugees.
The settlers, who now number around 500,000, are people who for varying numbers of years now have been– usually quite wittingly– the beneficiaries of Israel’s highly illegal project to implant, and provide generous subsidies to, settlements that use land and other natural resources stolen from its rightful Palestinian owners.
So it hard to see why the claims of these people “deserve”, in any moral sense, much attention from anyone. Of course, as a matter of common humanity they should be addressed as human equals who need a place to live, preferably inside their own country. And as a matter of political expedience, it is probably wise to do a few things to try to reach out to them.
However, they have been illegally living off the fat of someone else’s land for varying numbers of years now. So let’s not go overboard in efforts to accommodate them, maybe?
The Palestinian refugees, meanwhile, consist of around 6.8 million people— 1.8 million registered refugees currently residing in the West Bank or Gaza, and around five million Palestinian people living in the Diaspora, only about 2.9 million of whom are “registered” with UNRWA.
These are fellow-humans who have been living– the vast majority of them for all their lives at this point– while stripped of the most basic right of residing in their family’s homes.
Many of them– especially, today, those in Gaza, those in Lebanon, and those in Iraq– live in extremely tough situations, in great poverty and subject to continuing threats to their physical wellbeing.
So are all human persons equal? Do we consider that the legitimate claims and concerns of one Palestinian refugee should have the same priority as the legitimate claims and concerns one Israeli settler?
How should we weigh the legitimate claims and concerns of 6.8 million refugees against those of 500,000 settlers?
Why would we ever think it is acceptable to fail to address the legitimate claims and concerns of Palestinian refugees? Why would we think it acceptable to allow any further delay in addressing their concerns, thereby continuing to consign them to the situation of insecurity and impoverishment that so many of them have lived in for 62 years now?
… In the Q&A period of Thursday’s discussion, both my friend George Hishmeh (a longtime refugee from Palestine) and I asked questions about the need to include the refugees in the peacemaking, rather than continuing to exclude them from it. In Malley’s response to me, he referred to the the formula Hamas has proposed, whereby it would allow some non-Hamas negotiator to proceed with negotiating the peace, but any peace agreement conclided should thereafter be submitted to a referendum of all Palestinian people– and Hamas would abide by the results of that referendum..
Malley agreed with my assessment that the Diaspora Palestinians would need to be included in that referendum.
That was good.
However, at some point in the Q&A he also rephrased the point he’d made earlier about Israel “needing” to get some recognition of its status as “a Jewish state”, by talking about “Israel’s need to get recognition as the homeland of the Jewish people.”
That sounded like a serious change. The “homeland of the Jewish people”? All of them? When a Jewish American like Rob Malley is talking like that, is he implying he sees Israel as his homeland, too? I found that reference mystifying, and disturbing.
At the end of his main presentation, he summarized his current expectations thus: “I am not optimistic. Maybe we have to lower our sights for the next few years.” Later, he talked about the possibility of “a longterm interim.”
Very depressing– as if we didn’t have reason enough to be depressed before he spoke…

In 2009, as 2001: US needs Iran, Russia

On September 12, 2001, as US military planners started examining the options they had t counter-attach against Al-Qaeda and its hosts in Afghanistan, they and their colleagues in the State Department rapidly realized that if they wanted to actually topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan they’d need the help of two key nearby powers: Iran and Russia– and to a lesser extent, India.
They got the help they needed from those regional actors, and went ahead with the invasion operation.
Now, eight years later, the US/NATO forces are still in Afghanistan. And those forces are in deep trouble there. (Osama Bin Laden, btw, is still at large.)
The 95,000 US/NATO forces in Afghanistan are already significantly dependent on Russia and Iran, to be able to maintain their presence in that craggy and distant land. If their commanders are to avert the many worse catastrophes that loom there, they will need even more help from both Russia and Iran.
That is part of the essential background to the decision the State Department announced yesterday, that the US will be participating in the meeting that the Tehran government proposed Wednesday, between Iran and the P5+1 group.
Dafna Linzer of ProPublica notes at that link,

    Iran reiterated many of its previous ideas for talks while scaling back specific requests made in previous proposals [2] (PDF). Among other things, Tehran called for an end to hostilities and for talks on issues of specific concern to Iran, such as drug trafficking and security in the Middle East. Unlike previous Iranian proposals, this one does not contain a litany of past grievances with the United States and does not assert an Iranian commitment to advancing its nuclear efforts.

On Friday, Russian PM Vladimir Putin expressed his country’s clear opposition to any further escalation of outside pressure (whether sanctions or military force) against Iran.
There is now confirmation from Tel Aviv that Israeli PM Netanyahu made a secret visit to Moscow shortly before Putin announced this decision. If, as we can assume, he discussed the Iran file while there, then evidently he failed to prevent Putin from making that clear decision against escalation.
The Israeli government and its many powerful and well-organized supporters inside the US have been vigorously campaigning for all non-Iranian powers– especially the western governments– to ratchet up the level of pressure they place on Iran.
Today in Israel, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, who is also Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, gave an interview to Reuters in which he seemed somewhat seriously behind the curve, still arguing that Russia and China might get on board the anti-Israel campaign.
I doubt it. Maybe it’s time for Israel and its supporters in western countries to grow up and take a realistic look at the fact that within the world community that needs to make the decision on this matter they are in a very small minority.
And quite evidently, very few people– even in the strongly pro-Israeli United States– will be in a mood to forgive Israel if its actions towards Iran put at risk the lives of 60,000 US service members in Afghanistan.

500 new settlement homes in Jerusalem…

When will this end???
BBC:

    Israel says it is pushing ahead with delayed plans to build almost 500 more homes for Jewish settlers in Jerusalem.
    The project is for the Pisgat Zeev settlement in annexed East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 war.
    The announcement comes two days after Israel said it would build 450 new homes for settlers in [other parts of] the West Bank…

In GWB’s 2002 ‘Road Map’, Phase 1 was supposed to include both an Israeli settlement freeze and energetic and effective efforts by the Palestinian side to stop anti-Israel violence.
Anti-Israel violence has been just about dormant since January 18. Both the Ramallah-based PA and the Gaza-based PA have taken many energetic and effective steps to stop it.
But Israel has simply carried on with these settlement-expansion plans, saying it “might” agree to some very partial slowdown on new construction, sometime in the future.
What if the Palestinians– from either Ramallah or Gaza– said and did something similar?
What if they said, “Oh, we might agree to put some curbs on anti-Israeli violence, at some point in the future. But for now, we’re going to undertake 50 additional suicide bombings and 45 additional rocket attacks, and meanwhile let’s keep on endlessly negotiating about the freeze on anti-Israeli violence?”
Make no mistake about it, Israel’s longstanding project of implanting its own citizens as settlers into the occupied territories is also an act of great violence. The settlement project steals for the settlers land and other natural resources that rightfully belong to the Palestinians. And the whole machinery of repression that the government of Israel maintains maintain against the OPT’s rightful Palestinian residents, in order to protect the settlers, constitutes a huge edifice of ongoing structural violence, punctuated and maintained by the many acts of direct physical violence that the occupation forces take against the lives and persons of the Palestinians.
500 new settlement homes in Jerusalem? The Netanyahu government is just gleefully poking its finger in Pres. Obama’s eye.
Stephen Walt is right. It’s time to get tough.

“The White House regrets… “

The statement the White House issued yesterday in response to Netanyahu’s announcement that he would unleash the construction of hundreds of additional settler housing units before he considered submitting to any possible freeze on additional construction was weak and pathetic:

    We regret the reports of Israel’s plans to approve additional settlement construction. Continued settlement activity is inconsistent with Israel’s commitment under the Roadmap.
    As the President has said before, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop. We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate…

Right. So what is Washington going to do about this? Why, nothing. This statement itself is the wet noodle that’s being flapped in a desultory way somewhere vageuly in Netanyahu’s direction.
The text immediately goes on to underline its own wet noodleness, by saying this:

    The U.S. commitment to Israel’s security is and will remain unshakeable. We believe it can best be achieved through comprehensive peace in the region, including a two-state solution with a Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel.
    That is the ultimate goal to which the President is deeply and personally committed…

In other words, it’s saying that the reason the US is working for Arab-Israeli peace is because the administration judges that this will serve Israel’s security.
Small wonder, then, if Israelis might demur from that and say, “No, actually we have different ideas for how to preserve our security.”
The only way Obama or any other American leader will ever manage to register any solid gains in peacemaking is if he makes clear from the outset and through the whole process that the United States itself has a strong and direct interest in the speedy securing of this final peace, and that the US intends to pursue its own strong national interest in this matter. (Oh and by the way, we believe this is also in Israel’s interest.)
If the successful securing of a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will entail a big political fight inside the US political establishment– as it surely will– then the only way the president can win this fight is by underscoring to all Ameicans, including Jewish Americans, evangelicals, and everyone, that this peace is in the interests of us all, as a citizenry.
If he tries to sell his efforts primarily by arguing “This peace is in Israel’s interest”– but Israel’s own leader then chimes in and says, “No, it isn’t”– who do you think is going to win that argument?
Better to frame it coolly and straightforwardly from the beginning and throughout as something that’s in the interest of 300 million Americans– and that yes, also, is in the interest of both Israelis and Palestinians.
… I am very worried by this statement, and by the fact that Obama has already lost 7.5 months of his presidency doddering around quite inconclusively on the settlement issue rather than going directly and firmly to the heart of the securing the final peace.