Category: Obama presidency

Hints of Obama’s peace plan–but a notable J. Diehl mistake

Jackson Diehl broke some important news in today’s WaPo:

    As the U.N. General Assembly meets in late September, Obama aims to announce the opening of a new negotiating process between Israelis and Palestinians, along with “confidence-building” steps by Israel, the Palestinian Authority and a number of Arab governments. Though Obama will not offer a specific American “blueprint” for a peace settlement — as a number of Arab governments have urged him to do — he will probably lay out at least a partial vision of the two-state settlement that all sides now say they support, and the course that negotiations should take. More significantly, he intends to set an ambitious timetable for completing the peace deal — something that will please Arabs but may irritate Israel.

This is not new. At Annapolis in November 2007, Pres. Bush also “announce[d] the opening of a new negotiating process between Israelis and Palestinians, along with ‘confidence-building’ steps by Israel, the Palestinian Authority and a number of Arab governments.”
And there, too, Bush, “set an ambitious timetable for completing the peace deal.” It was by the end of his presidency.
Now, here we are, seven months after the expiration of that deadline, and not even one concrete step has been taken along the path back to securing the final peace agreement.
Also, in the nearly two years since Annapolis, Israeli settlement construction has continued apace– quite in defiance of what Bush requested of the Israelis there.
So forgive me if I’m not yet impressed by what Diehl is reporting.
David Ignatius– whose political savvy I trust a bit more than I trust Diehl’s– confirms that there are big peace-diplomacy moves being planned. But he described them a bit differently:

    The Arab-Israeli breakthrough that Obama has been seeking since his first day in office will near the make-or-break point this week as his Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, meets with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. If they can agree on terms for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction, that would open the way for talks on creating a Palestinian state.
    But along the way, there’s politically draining haggling…
    The White House is debating whether Obama should launch his initiative with a declaration of U.S. “parameters” for a final settlement. The Arabs favor such a statement, as do many U.S. experts such as Brzezinski. But Mitchell is said to favor a more gradual approach, in which Israelis and Palestinians would begin negotiations and the United States would intervene later with “bridging” proposals.

So according to Ignatius, the settlement freeze is still in active play as a gateway to be traversed before Obama gets the parties back to the final-status talks. That’s a bad strategy, in my view.
Ignatius is also telling us that the administration is divided on whether to present a US peace plan now, or not.
Diehl ends his piece with some serious– and I would say quite possibly deliberate and ill-intentioned– mistakes of both facts and analysis.
He writes:

    Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who turned down a far-reaching peace proposal by Israel’s previous government less than a year ago, is still insisting he won’t begin talks without a complete settlement freeze. And Hamas, which governs 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, remains implacable in its refusal to recognize Israel.
    The recalcitrance that Obama has already encountered is a reminder of the famous maxim of former secretary of state James A. Baker III, considered a master of Middle East diplomacy. The United States, he said in 1991, “can’t want peace more than the parties.” In taking on the issue now, Obama is, in essence, trying to prove that wisdom wrong. If he succeeds he will probably deserve to be called a president who can do everything.

Here are the mistakes of analysis:

    1. Diehl says that the peace proposal Olmert made to Abbas was “far-reaching”. The implication is that it was also “generous”, and that Abbas was foolish or recalcitrant to turn it down– and therefore can’t be expected to be flexible today. From everything we know about the peace proposal Olmert made to Abbas (e.g. from the end of this article) it didn’t look at all “generous”– and by most standards it was not at all “far-reaching.” But Diehl’s echoing of the old “Palestinian leader turns down a generous Israeli offer” trope is intended once again– as after the whole Camp David 2 debacle in 2000, to paint even the most “moderate” Palestinians as intractable.
    2. Diehl writes that Hamas remains implacable in its refusal to recognize Israel True. But no-one in Israel or the west is recognizing them, either– or, recognizing and being prepared to respect the victory they won in the 2006 elections. In a successful peace negotiation, exchange of recognitions usually comes as part of the end of the peace agreement. It should not be required upfront– and certainly not only in a unilateral way…. And meanwhile, Diehl says nothing at all about the serious moves that Hamas has made to communicate its very real interest in supporting negotiations for a two-state outcome. Once again, Diehl’s lazy shorthand here lays an inappropriate amount of blame on Palestinians.

But finally, there was Diehl’s most egregious and most telling mistake– a mistake of raw fact. That was when he attributed to Sec. James Baker the terrible little dictum about “the United States can’t want peace more than the parties.”
That was not Baker. That was Clinton and Pres. George W. Bush.
This mistake matters.
Why? Because as Diehl wrote, Baker was indeed a master of Middle East diplomacy. But he won his very real achievements in that field by pursuing a policy based on the very opposite of the quite irresponsible sentiment expressed in that phrase.
Under Clinton and Bush II, by contrast, those leaders’ easy reliance on the “can’t want a peace more.. ” mindset meant that they never vigorously pushed for anything in the diplomacy on the basis that securing a fair and durable peace was in the strong interest of Americans.
That was what led to the reliance of those two presidents on the idea that “the parties” should just be left to negotiate the terms of a peace settlement just between themselves.
In the context of the Palestinians, whose entire country is under Israel’s military occupation, that approach is crazy. The very best it could ever lead to would be something like the deals that Marshall Petain or Vidkun Quisling struck with the occupying Nazis.
Did anyone expect the Emir of Kuwait simply to sit in a room alone with Saddam Hussein in August 1990 and “negotiate” a peace with him, with no other parties or considerations of international law intervening?
Small wonder that first of all Arafat and then even the very pro-peace-minded Mahmoud Abbas turned down the extremely pusillanimous and demeaning deals that were all they were ever offered under those circumstances.
And thus, small wonder than neither Clinton nor Bush II ever presided over the securing of a final peace.
And meanwhile, throughout all those 16 years, Israel’s implantation of additional Jewish settlers into the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) continued apace… And so did the anger of Muslims and others around the world who saw the US as continuing to bankroll and support every action of the Israeli government.
Where was international law in all this? Where were the resolutions of the United Nations? Where was firm and principled US diplomacy?
Out of the window!
So please, Jackson Diehl, let’s have no more of your mendacious re-writing of history.
A fair and durable peace in the Arab-Israeli region is certainly in the interests of Americans and everyone else in the world who upholds fairness and international law, and is offended to see it being flouted on a daily basis by Israel in the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.
And if any particular “party”, such as the Netanyahu government in Israel, does not see such a peace as being in its own interest?
Then the US, whose fate and reputation in the world is necessarily tied very closely to Israel’s behavior, will just have to “want” the peace more than that party; and should proceed with the policy steps that are necessary in order to win it.
Those steps would certainly not include continuing to give Israel generous financial, political, and military help that is quite unlinked to Israel’s behavior in the occupied territories.
And yes, it was James Baker and his president who were the most recent US leaders
to make that point clear, and to establish that conditionality quite firmly within US policy.

Obama, Afghanistan– and St. Augustine

Pres. Obama gave a speech to the veterans of Foreign Wars annual convention on Monday in which he spelled out his view of the US’s now-declining strategic stakes in Iraq and its continuing strategic stake in Afghanistan.
His words were considered and important.
On Iraq, he said,

    In Iraq, after more than six years of war, we took an important step forward in June. We transferred control of all cities and towns to Iraq’s security services. The transition to full Iraqi responsibility for their own security is now underway…
    But as we move forward, the Iraqi people must know that the United States will keep its commitments. And the American people must know that we will move forward with our strategy. We will begin removing our combat brigades from Iraq later this year. We will remove all our combat brigades by the end of next August. And we will remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. And for America, the Iraq war will end.
    By moving forward in Iraq, we’re able to refocus on the war against al Qaeda and its extremist allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan….

From one viewpoint, of course, what the US military has been doing in Iraq has been moving back, not forward, despite all of Obama’s uses of the term “forward”.
It’s forward, I suppose, if you understand that he means that the US has been proceeding with its commitments under the November 2008 Withdrawal Agreement. And his mention of the end-of-2011 deadline buttresses that interpretation.
Also, if he wants to describe– for this presumably very nationalistic US audience– this very necessary move out of Iraq as a move “forward”, let him do so, I say.
And then, remembering what he has just said about Iraq, let’s see what he said about Afghanistan. He described his administration’s “new, comprehensive strategy” in Afghanistan in the following terms:

    This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war—that we also need diplomacy and development and good governance. And our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals—to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies.
    … These new efforts have not been without a price. The fighting has been fierce. More Americans have given their lives. And as always, the thoughts and prayers of every American are with those who make the ultimate sacrifice in our defense.
    As I said when I announced this strategy, there will be more difficult days ahead…
    But we must never forget. This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.

Steve Walt had an excellent critique of Obama’s “war of necessity/ al-Qaeda safe haven” claim on his FP blog yesterday.
I want to take a slightly different tack. I want, first, simply to point out a few important things; and then I want to get more deeply into launching a “Just War theory” critique of the whole US military venture in Afghanistan.
So, the prefatory points I want to make:

Continue reading “Obama, Afghanistan– and St. Augustine”

Iran: Ready or not to talk? Washington: Ready or not?

In an amazing display of very late-night– or very early-morning– blogging, Laura Rozen put a post up this morning showcasing a Reuters report that Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna Ali Asghar Soltanieh had “announced Iran’s readiness to take part in any negotiations with the West based on mutual respect.”
She walked her first report back a bit, after Iran’s Press TV reported that Soltanieh said “”There have been no comments or interviews with TV networks on nuclear talks or conditions.” (Which is not a complete rebuttal of what Rozen first reported.)
Rozen has more about all the “will they, won’t they?” speculation about Iran’s future actions that is rife in the Washington political elite that’s both inside and outside the administration. (Sometimes, outside, but close to it.)
The current focus is whether Tehran will send someone to the proposed talks on the nuclear issue that Washington wants to see held before the UNGA session opens at the end of September.
As usual, one of the smartest remarks comes from Trita Parsi, whom Rozen quotes as saying,

    I don’t think worst case is that they don’t show up… They’ll show up. The worst case scenario is that they show up but they are incapable of making any big decisions because of political infighting in Iran.

This is precisely the fear I’ve had since I first articulated it eight days after the June 12 elections.
The “end of September” deadline is one the Obama administration has been pretty insistent on. It is related primarily to the “understandings” the administration seems to have reached with the (nuclear-armed) government of Israel, to the effect that Washington will try to squeeze significant concessions out of Tehran before the end of the year… and if that doesn’t work, then Washington will push hard for much tighter international sanctions against Iran and possibly other potentially even more hostile acts.
The end of September deadline does not, however, take into account either the now-imminent incidence of Ramadan or the continuing, long-drawn-out deadlock in the internal power struggle inside Iran’s theocratic governance institutions.
Insisting on the deadline, or taking concrete policy steps that further escalate the west’s tensions with Iran, would be most likely to strengthen the hardliners inside Tehran/Qom.
Another inescapable factor in this is, of course, that Washington no longer occupies the uncontested Uber-power position at the pinnacle of the global system that it occupied even three or four years ago. To get any significant strengthening of the international sanctions regime against Tehran requires the concurrence of, at the very least, all the other members of the Security Council’s P-5.
At a time of increasing American dependence on (inter-dependence with) both Russia and China– not to mention the NATO allies– that is far from a foregone conclusion.
Rozen does some good reporting (and some that’s not so good.) But she does seem to operate these days almost totally within the DC policy bubble, and too seldom looks at the broader dimensions of world affairs within which the US’s foreign policy operates.

The definitive word on ‘confidence building measures’

… comes from Ezzedine Choukri in this great piece in Al-Ahram Weekly. (HT: Abdulmoneim Said Aly at MEI on Thursday.)
Choukri’s piece is an excellent illustration of the thinking by most Arabs on the “CBM” issue that I was describing in this recent piece (and this recent JWN post.)
It’ also a lot funnier and more poignant than what I wrote.
Choukri draws a prolonged analogy between the challenges of Israeli-Arab peacemaking and those of a village elder seeking to mediate a marriage contract between two families in his native Egypt:

    to allay the multiple concerns of the groom (who has commitment issues as well as problems with his boisterous family members), the mediators encourage the bride to have sex with her prospective groom before the marriage is concluded. “Sex would entice him to proceed; it will reassure him that the money he will put in the marriage will be well rewarded,” they say.
    Mostly liberal in their thinking and ways of life, the mediators see no problem in the proposition (neither does the prospective groom, for all too different reasons). After all, millions of couples in America and Europe engage in premarital sex as a way of experiencing each other and determining whether it would be a good idea to proceed further. There is no disrespect, foul play or wrongdoing involved. They argue.
    The proposition sounds logical to the bride (and quite convenient for the groom). Yet the bride’s family is really conservative. Even if she finds it tempting, the bride knows well that she cannot face her family with such a proposition. “It will be suicide,” she says. However, not wanting to undermine the prospects of her own marriage, the bride is willing to engage in premarital intimate encounters — but short of intercourse. And in return for these intimacies she requires the groom to make demonstrable progress towards signing the marriage contract.
    Thrilled by this “window of opportunity”, the mediators spend weeks negotiating the nature of these intimacies; how much skin is involved, whether it would be made public or kept secret, how far they will go, how frequently they will meet, etc. At the same time, they negotiate the nature of demonstrable steps that would satisfy the bride in return; the nature of commitments the groom has to make, whether these would be reversible, phased, synchronised with the intimacies, etc. (Verification and arbitration remain contentious and unresolved issues).
    Instead of working on finalising the terms of the marriage contract, the mediators waste everyone’s time on fine-tuning the terms of these confidence-building measures. Naturally, neither the groom nor the bride derives any pleasure from their halfway intimacies, and they are busy quarrelling over each other’s compliance with the terms of the deal. The families get no closer to marriage; nobody has negotiated the terms of that agreement — and its difficult issues didn’t become any easier on their own. In the meantime, the bride’s family gets angrier as they feel they were taken for a ride (again) and eventually lock the bride at home. And those who always opposed the marriage on both sides feel vindicated in their prejudice: “this marriage will never take place,” they say; “if they can’t even agree on these tiny matters, how are they going to face common life with all its challenges?”
    Senator Mitchell and friends: would you please drop the useless confidence-building track that depleted precious political resources of so many mediators before you and focus on the real issue? Get the marriage contract signed, after which you can have all the sex you want.

This last paragraph represents a viewpoint that’s extremely widespread in the Arab world. In light of the experience of the past 16 years of US insistence on “CBMs” and ridiculous, time-wasting “interim measures” it is the only logical position there is.
Secure the final peace agreements now!

Peacemaking with Israel– the Gulf Arab dimension

My latest news analysis for IPS is just out. (Also, here.)
The title the IPS editor gave it was Saudi Arabia May Not Follow Obama’s Plan. Not a bad summary of the main thrust of the text.
I found it interesting and useful, while working on this piece, to catch up with some of the developments in the ‘Gulf Arab states’ dimension of peacemaking.
For example, I went back and gave a closer read to items like the remarks special envoy George Mitchell made when he was in Cairo on July 27 and the op-ed the Bahraini crown prince had in the WaPo on July 16.
In his June 4 speech in Cairo, Obama made some specific– and very preachily worded– requests of the Arab states:

    the Arab states must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities. The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state, to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.

It struck me, when writing today’s piece, that he was making two substantive demands of the Arab states there– “to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state, [and] to recognize Israel’s legitimacy”. The day before, he had been in Saudi Arabia meeting the kingdom’s ageing but still apparently very savvy monarch, King Abdullah. So it is fair to assume he most likely gave Abdullah a heads-up on what these demands would be.
The Saudis and their allies in the other (and all much smaller) GCC countries seem since then to have been prepared to cooperate with the first of these requests but quite resistant on the second.
The Bahraini crown prince, Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, has been the most responsive of any GCC personality to Obama’s requests/demands. Notable, of course, that it was not the small island state’s King who “authored” the op-ed, but rather, the crown prince.
Shaikh Salman wrote this:

    We must stop the small-minded waiting game in which each side refuses to budge until the other side makes the first move… All sides need to take simultaneous, good-faith action if peace is to have a chance. A real, lasting peace requires comprehensive engagement and reconciliation at the human level. This will happen only if we address and settle the core issues dividing the Arab and the Israeli peoples, the first being the question of Palestine and occupied Arab lands. The fact that this has not yet happened helps to explain why the Jordanian and Egyptian peace accords with Israel are cold. They have not been comprehensive.
    We should move toward real peace now by consulting and educating our people and by reaching out to the Israeli public to highlight the benefits of a genuine peace.
    To be effective, we must acknowledge that, like people everywhere, the average Israeli’s primary window on the world is his or her local and national media. Our job, therefore, is to tell our story more directly to the Israeli people by getting the message out to their media, a message reflecting the hopes of the Arab mainstream that confirms peace as a strategic option and advocates the Arab Peace Initiative as a means to this end. Some conciliatory voices in reply from Israel would help speed the process.
    Some Arabs, simplistically equating communication with normalization, may think we are moving too fast toward normalization. But we all know that dialogue must be enhanced for genuine progress. We all, together, need to take the first crucial step to lay the groundwork to effectively achieve peace. So we must all invest more in communication.

I think this redirection away from Obama’s demand that the Arab states “must” move speedily towards giving the Israeli government “recognition of its legitimacy,” to a focus on urging his fellow Arabs to do more to address the Israeli “public” and their “media” directly is significant, and quite helpful. (Though how Salman expected to bring other Arabs around to his point of view by deriding their viewpoint as “simplistic”, I have no idea… The text in general looks as though it was written by a second-rate Washington PR firm.)
Recognition of the State of Israel as such is an act of state that– along with a bunch of other things– the Arab states have all promised to Israel as part of, or in the wake of, Israel’s conclusion of final peace agreements with all their neighbors. Why should anyone expect them to give it away now?
Anyway, a few more observations on this general topic:

    1. The formulation Mitchell gave in Cairo on July 27 on (a) the need for a “comprehensive” peace, (b) how he defines this comprehensive peace; and (c) how and when he considers it’s realistic to get the Arab states to undertake “confidence-building measures” was significant and important. I don’t think it got anything like sufficient attention at the time… And I can’t even find the text of that on either the State Department or the White House website.
    2. Of course, as I’ve written before, it riles the heck out of many Americans, including AIPAC, that the balance of power/interests between the US and Saudi Arabia– as well as between Washington and several other Gulf states– is such that Washington can never simply “tell” these states what to do, in the same imperialistic way it often tries to tell the big aid recipients like Egypt or Jordan what to do. (Oh, Israel is also a big aid recipient. Couldn’t we tell them what to do, also??) Regarding Saudi Arabia, the US is pathetically dependent on the Al-Saud to keep the oil spigots open and to recycle as much of their petrodollars as possible into propping up the chronically troubled US arms industries… In the case of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE, those states are all now vital nodes in the US military’s basing plans in the military campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan– as well as significant oil exporters. Okay, so there is a sort of co-dependence between many of these governments and Washington. But that is still a far cry from the deep dependence that the Mubarak regime or Jordan’s Hashemites have on Washington.
    3. Regarding AIPAC’s recent campaign to gather senatorial signatures on the “Bayh-Risch” letter that urges Obama to “press” the Arab states to consider making “dramatic” confidence-building gestures towards Israel, it strikes me it is really a rather pro-forma effort on AIPAC’s behalf.
    After all, the big confrontation between AIPAC’s buddy-buddy BFFs in the government of Israel and the US president is currently over the issue of Israeli settlements. But we don’t see AIPAC mounting a letter-writing campaign about that one, do we? No, indeed, because for many years now AIPAC has had a strong modus operandi of not even starting campaigns they don’t think they can win handily… And on the settlement-construction issue, their analysts have evidently figured out that that’s an issue on which they wouldn’t get much support in congress.
    Good.
    4. Regarding the Arab Peace Initiative in general, though it’s a great thing for Obama and all other serious peacemakers to have in their hand, I hope they’re all aware that the prospect of “normalization with the Arab world” is no longer one that sets many Israeli hearts a-beating. You can see some of my comments on this in my recent article in Boston Review.

Finally, my biggest question right now is over timing…. Assuming that Obama and Mitchell are really serious in saying they want to nail down the “comprehensive peace agreements” between Israel and all its Arab neighbors– when the heck are they going to start?
Ramadan is coming up on around August 20. Prior to that, Hosni Mubarak is due in Washington August 18. (One week from today.)
Can we expect a big announcement of the US’s broad diplomatic initiative sometime before Ramadan? If not, then it will probably have to be delayed until the end of September or so. But I hate the thought of that much additional delay…

Is this gnome running US Mideast diplomacy?

It turns out there’s a popular figure in some portions of US popular culture called “the underpants gnome.”
The underpants gnome has a “business plan” that consists of three phases. Phase one is “Collect underpants”. Phase three is “Profit.” But neither the gnome nor anyone else can figure out what the Phase two is that bridges from phase one to phase three.
Joshua Foust at Registan has used the UG as a metaphor for various proposals that have been made to deploy more military-backed “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” into either Afghanistan or Pakistan. He is (imho rightly) very skeptical of the idea that PRTs can be a magic bullet to resolve the deepset problems of governance and security in either country.
But I think we’ve seen the underpants gnome phenomenon at work in Obama’s Arab-Israeli “peace” diplomacy, as well:

    Phase One: Keep on repeating that you want to speedily solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by establishing a Palestinian state; keep on publicly criticizing the Israeli government’s settlement construction; send George Mitchell out to the region like a yo-yo, many times.
    Phase Two: ? ?
    Phase Three: Achieve the Palestinian-Israeli final peace agreement.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen the underpants gnome video clip, do go see it. It’s only 30 seconds.

IPS piece on Obama, Jewish Israelis, and Jewish Americans

… here. Also archived here.
Actually, right now the archived version is the definitive one, because I lost a few words from the version I’d sent to my excellent editor at IPS, before I sent it to her…. Bill the spouse just alerted me to that so I sent the correction to Kitty the editor. And took the opportunity to insert the necessary words into the archived version right now.

Just how inept is Ross as a ‘Mideast expert’??

Short answer: extremely.
In case anyone is in any doubt, they should read the transcript of what Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at the end of his meeting with Hillary Clinton in Washington yesterday.
The core of what he said there:

    I would be remiss if I didn’t express our thanks and appreciation to President Obama and to Secretary Clinton for their early and robust focus on trying to bring peace to the Middle East…
    It is time for all people in the Middle East to be able to lead normal lives. Incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and– we believe– will not achieve peace. Temporary security, confidence-building measures will also not bring peace. What is required is a comprehensive approach that defines the final outcome at the outset and launches into negotiations over final status issues: borders, Jerusalem, water, refugees and security.

This is a resounding slap in the face for the approach of using lengthy “interim” periods and “confidence building measures” (CBMs) that was a hallmark of Israeli-Palestinian conflict management (not conflict termination) diplomacy, as practiced by Dennis Ross for eight years under Pres. Clinton.
CBMs, of course, were a concept first developed in great detail in US-Soviet diplomacy in the ramp-down phase of the Cold War. That, indeed, was the field in which Dennis got his core academic training. He later rebranded himself, never terribly credibly, as a “Middle East expert.” His main credential in this new field ended up being the abysmal record he racked up as a failed “peacemaker” for those eight years in the Clinton administration.
Oh, and then there was the term he served as founding president of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute from 2006 through earlier this year… Did that make him a “Middle East expert”, I wonder?
This whole concept of CBMs has made an eery comeback into Washington’s Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy since the arrival of Dennis Ross in the White House at the end of June.
Laura Rozen blogged last week that she had,

    confirmed that President Barack Obama has sent letters to at least seven Arab and Gulf states seeking confidence-building measures toward Israel, which Washington has been pushing to agree to a freeze of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
    One former senior U.S. official who was aware of the letters said they had been sent “recently” to seven Arab states, including the leaders of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The letters reinforce “the Mitchell message re: the need for CBMs [confidence-building measures] in exchange for [settlement] freeze and to [get] peace talks restarted,” the former senior official said by e-mail.
    “These letters were sent some time ago,” a White House official told Foreign Policy Sunday, when asked about them. “The president has always said that everyone will have to take steps for peace. This is just the latest instance of this sentiment.”
    The official declined to provide a date of the letters, but said, “they’d been reported before a month or two ago.”

Coincidentally– or not– one of the big campaigns that AIPAC is currently running is to get US legislators to sign onto a letter “urging” Obama to push Arab states to give up-front CBMs to Israel…
Arab leaders and their citizens have seen this movie before.
In the 1990s, many Arab states moved to end the “secondary boycott” they had previously maintained against international companies doing business with Israel; and some, like Qatar, even took some other small steps toward “normalization” like opening an Israeli trade office in their capitals. That was entirely predicated on Israel making the real progress that was mandated by the Oslo Accord to concluding a final-status peace agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), before the defined deadline of May 1999.
Never happened. The deadline came and went. The Israeli government just went on waffling, with the ever-eager help of Dennis Ross in the White house. And the Israeli government also kept on shoe-horning additional tens of thousands of new illegal settlers into the occupied territories each year…
In the piece that Roger Cohen has in tomorrow’s NYT magazine on US policy toward Iran, there is a telling vignette that reveals just how deeply Dennis Ross does not qualify as anything even approaching a “Middle East expert”:

    On April 29, in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Ross sat down with King Abdullah. He talked to a skeptical monarch about the Obama administration’s engagement policy with Iran — and talked and talked and talked. When the king finally got to speak, according to one U.S. official fully briefed on the exchange, he began by telling Ross: “I am a man of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” Then he posed several pointed questions about U.S. policy toward Iran: What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran’s nuclear program if there is not a united response? Ross, a little flustered, tried to explain that policy was still being fleshed out.

Dennis Ross, let’s remember, supposedly dealt closely with the Saudis throughout the eight years he was Pres. Clinton’s chief Middle East adviser. He also dealt closely with them, though in a subordinate role, when he worked for Sec. of State James Baker during and after the 1990-91 Gulf crisis and war.
But then, he didn’t even really know to deal with them at all, come 2009? He just talked (and talked and talked…) at the Saudi monarch– and couldn’t even deal with the few, to-the-point questions that the king came back to him with?
I don’t know if he tried to raise the issue of CBMs-for-Israel with King Abdullah during that meeting. But evidently, this issue has been pitched to Riyadh as well as other Arab capitals in recent weeks.
And now, Prince Saud has come to Washington to give a definitive and very public answer on the CBMs question.
Of course, it riles the heck out of many Americans, including especially many members of Congress, that they can’t just wave the wand of economic aid over the big Arab oil-exporting countries like Saudi Arabia to get to do what they (and AIPAC) want them to do….
Also significant: In that same State Department transcript, Sec. Clinton uses a significant– and in my view, significantly flawed– way to describe the US’s role in the current Israeli-Palestinian pre-negotiation.
She said,

    There is no substitute for a comprehensive resolution. That is our ultimate objective. In order to get to the negotiating table, we have to persuade both sides that they can trust the other side enough to reach that comprehensive agreement.

This is completely, still, that same “trust-building” or “confidence-building” approach to mediation/negotiation that was used to such dismally unsuccessful effect during the Bill Clinton administration when– acting on Dennis’s advice– Pres. Clinton saw his role as only that of a facilitator trying to build “trust” between the two parties.
No. The US is not just a “facilitator”. The US is a party with a strong and direct national interest in getting all the strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict speedily and finally resolved in a way that is sufficiently fair to all sides that the outcome is sustainable for many generations to come.
So the role of the US “mediator” is not just to “persuade” and nudge the countries to the point where they can “trust each other” (and to do this prior to the negotiation starting???) But rather, the US role should be to:

    1. Reaffirm its own strong interest in a speedy, fair and sustainable end to all dimensions of the Israeli-Arab conflict;
    2. Reaffirm that the outcome it seeks is one based on international law and the longstanding resolutions 242 and 338 of the UN Security Council;
    3. Affirm (for the first time in many decades) its readiness to use all the instruments of national power at its disposal to win the speedy, fair, and sustainable final peace agreements between Israel and all its Arab neighbors; and
    4. Reaffirm that it stands ready to work with its partners in the Quartet to provide all the guarantees the parties might need regarding monitoring all steps of the (most likely phased) implementation of these peace agreements.

In other words, it is at that stage– the stage of implementing the different phases of a final peace whose full content has already been agreed– that the sides themselves can really start to build the “confidence” or trust of the other side…. And the US and its peace-monitoring partners can certainly help that process along.
But to imply that you need full trust between the two sides to the dispute before you expect them even to sit down at the peace table?? That’s nuts!
The process of so-called “confidence building” that Dennis Ross was so happy to see dragging on for years and years in the 1990s did not end up building up any trust at all. Just the opposite. It built mistrust– on both sides. Not least, because people still locked into the dispute on the ground had no idea where the final process was heading– so every little altercation between them became a huge existential issue that had to be fought over “to the death.”
And meanwhile, Ross’s good friends in the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute were able to implant thousands of additional settlers into occupied Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. How “lucky” for them, eh?
This time, someone should tell Sec. Clinton– and best of all her boss, the president– that you don’t need to build full trust between the sides before the negotiation starts.
What you need to build is a healthy and realistic recognition from each of the parties that:

    * the US has its own strong interest in the success of this peacemaking project,
    * the US is prepared to use its national power to secure fair and sustainable final peace agreements between all the parties, and
    * the US stands ready to use its national power to help guarantee the implementation of these agreements.

So now, Pres. Obama, let’s get on with it.
I also note, parenthetically, that Saud al-Faisal seemed to be placing more emphasis on getting the final peace negotiations started than on getting Obama’s demand for a complete Israeli settlement freeze implemented. I think that’s the right emphasis.

How occupations end

We here in Washington DC currently have a front-seat view of how a country undertakes the ending of the military occupation by its ground forces of another country’s territory.
Today, Iraq’s elected PM Nuri al-Maliki will be meeting with Pres. Obama in the White House. Top on the agenda of their talks will doubtless be continuing disagreements over the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement (SOFA) that the two governments concluded last November, which mandates a complete withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Yes, there have been some disagreements between the two governments over how the WA will be implemented. But seeing how the US is now in the process of pulling its troops out of Iraq over the next 30 months can inform us a lot about some of the issues involved in ending Israel’s continuing military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.
Over the past 20 years, we’ve actually seen a lot of military occupations being brought to an end. This is not rocket science. Here’s what we now know:
1. An occupation can end as a result of an agreement negotiated between the occupying power and a “sufficiently legitimate” governing authority representing the occupied area’s indigenous residents; or the occupying power can attempt a unilateral, essentially un-negotiated withdrawal. A third alternative: Of course, occupations can also be ended– as the German occupations of European countries, the Japanese occupations of Asian countries, and Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait all were– by the direct application of military force.
2. Examples of the second (unilateral) kind of withdrawal include the US’s withdrawal from the portions of southern Iraq it occupied in the course of the 1991 Gulf War, and Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from just about all of southern Lebanon. The Us withdrawal from Iraq occurred in the context of a ceasefire agreement the two governments hastily concluded; but that agreement did not end the overall state of hostilities between Saddam’s government and the US.
3. Unilateral withdrawals, because they do not end the state of hostilities between the parties, merely rearrange the furniture for the continued pursuit of those hostilities.
4. The “withdrawal” from Gaza that the Israeli government claims it undertook in 2005 did not, actually, end Israel’s formal status under international as the occupying power in Gaza, since Israel retained its control over all Gaza’s contact points with the outside world and over Gaza’s air-space; it also retained the “right” under international law to send its troops back into Gaza whenever it wished.
If Israel had not still been seen, under international law, as the occupying power in Gaza, last December’s massive Israeli assault against the Strip including the large-scale incursion of Israeli troops into it would of course have been seen as an international aggression, triggering the intervention of the UN Security Council under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. That did not happen, because Gaza is still under the same Israeli military occupation that it has been continuously since 1967. What happened in 2005 was not the ending of Gaza’s occupation, but a rearranging of the way Israel organized it.

Continue reading “How occupations end”

Obama reading JWN, responding well?

Back on Sunday (July 5), I blogged about Joe Biden’s “loose lips” statements that seemed to many Middle Easterners to give Israel a green light to attack Iran.
I ended the post saying,

    Obama now needs to go to some lengths, first to clearly restate that any Israeli strike against Iran is perilous for US lives and interests, and second, to try to get Biden to be a lot more disciplined when he speaks about momentous matters in the future.

Yesterday, Pres. Obama went forcefully on the record to (re-)state that,

    “It is the policy of the United States to try to resolve the issue of Iran’s nuclear capabilities in a peaceful way through diplomatic channels.”

From my lips to Obama’s (interestingly sized) ears? Well, maybe, one way or the other.
Of course, a few other Americans also made the same appeal to Obama about Biden’s statement. Including Marc Lynch, who wrote Sunday,

    the administration urgently needs to come forward quickly with a restatement of its policy — and make sure the Israelis and others in the region understand it clearly — or else it risks paying some extraordinarily serious costs.

Marc also did a good job there in pulling together the bad effects the Biden statement was already having by then, within the Arabic and Hebrew-language discourse in the Middle East. Which, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is a very important part of the audience for any US leadership pronouncements on matters in that region. (That is, it actually matters a lot more how Israelis, Arabs, and Iranians themselves interpret such statements than it matters whether Juan Cole or others of us here in the US might manage to massage– or not– Biden’s words into a more ‘reasonable’ interpretation.)