Obama presidency – Page 5 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Joe Biden’s loose lips

When Barack Obama first named Joe Biden as his running-mate, Washington insiders noted that what Biden is best known for running is his gab-too-much motor-mouth. Too often it seems there is no brain-filter operating to control what comes out of it.
Yesterday, Biden (three-peatedly) told George Stephanopoulos that if the Israeli government chooses to launch a military strike– that is, an act of war– against Iran, then that is quite up to them.
Here’s the first part of the exchange, as transcribed by Politico:

Actually, no, Joe. “Any nation” is certainly not entitled to undertake an unprovoked act of war against another nation…
Biden should have remembered, too, that our country has its own direct interests and responsibilities in this matter, for at least three excellent reasons:

It is not clear to me why Biden has suddenly become so irresponsibly mouthy about Iran. Back in early April, soon after Benjamin Netanyahu’s inauguration as Israeli PM, Biden was the administration’s point-man in issuing a clear warning that Netanyahu would be “ill-advised” to carry out a military strike against Iran. (Also reported here.)
And today, even as George Stephanopoulos’s show was airing in the US, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was openly warning about the very “destabilizing” effects of any Israeli attack on Iran.
Here’s his exchange with ‘Face the Nation’ host John Dickerson:

all of us will have to deal with that.

Mullen’s position is considerably more in line with the one that has been sustained since Obama’s inauguration by his own immediate boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Gates’s boss, the president, than the one that Biden blurted out yesterday.
Bottom line: If it is still true that– as the old WWII adage had it– “loose lips sink ships”, then the ships that are likely to be sunk if Netanyahu takes Biden’s latest motor-mouthing as giving him a green light to go ahead and bomb Iran are much more likely to be American ships, than Israeli.
Bidens apparent gaffe is all the more notable because since the early days of the recent political crisis in Iran, the many US naval vessels in the Gulf have been under strict orders to hang back and take extra precautions against getting into any confrontation with the Iranian navy and military, since the hardliners in Tehran could then use any such confrontation to rally more Iranians behind their cause.
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.

How effective is Obama’s Palestine policy?

I have been among the many criticizing Obama for moving WAYS too slowly on Arab-Israeli and specifically Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking. However, evidence is now emerging that his “slow and steady” approach is bearing some significant fruit:
Item #1: Marc Lynch, just back from a quick trip to Israel and the West Bank, blogged this last night:

only

Item #2: On Tuesday, JTA reported this:

some 49 percent of American voters call themselves supporters of Israel, down from 69 percent last September, and only about 44 percent of voters believe the United States should support Israel — down from 71 percent a year ago

Item #3: Rep. William Delahunt’s “Sense of the House” bill that spells out support for a two-state solution and for George Mitchell’s peace mission, now has 105 co-sponsors, reflecting the success of the campaign that the White House and several pro-peace organizations have undertaken to slowly and steadily build congressional support for thse positions.
These are all key pieces of evidence that Obama’s strategy is working… Though it has until now been, as I said, a painstakingly slow one.
I completely recognize that the removal of, actually, just a handful of the roadblocks with which the Israeli occupation stifles normal life, including normal economic life, in the West Bank is a thin ‘achievement’ indeed. (The PDF of the UN-OCHA’s latest weekly update on the situation is here.) Also, steps like that or, for example, an increase in the number or types of goods Israel allows into Gaza each week, are incredibly easy to reverse.
We can recall, too, what the cocky Likudnik strategic thinker Efraim Inbar told me about what he expected from Obama when I spoke with him back in March:

“The Americans may push us some, so we’ll remove one or two outposts or one or two roadblocks. We’ll play with the Americans.”

And meantime, the occupation as a whole grinds on and on and on… and so does Israel’s expropriation of additional amounts of Palestinian land, its construction of additional blocks of settler-only housing, and its continued maintenance of military law over the 2.3 million Palestinians of the West Bank and of a punishingly tight siege against the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza…
It is that big problem of the occupation that Obama has set himself to tackle. And so far he’s taken only baby steps toward doing so.
But here’s the important thing: In taking those baby steps and in presenting the Palestinian-Israeli issue in the way he has to the US public and Congress, Obama has actually succeeded in building up, rather than diminishing, the support his approach in the US public and Congress. That is unprecedented for US Presidents trying to move towards a more even-handed Arab-Israeli peace policy.
One of my friends who works this issue intensely reports that Sen. Mitchell has actually spent just as much time “working” key members of Congress on the issues as he has doing fact-finding in the Middle East.
However, I don’t think anyone in or out of the administration judges that “just” getting a few more West Bank roadblocks removed, or a few settlement outposts theatrically “demolished” (only to be re-erected someplace else the very next day, as has often happened in the past), or “just” getting the Israeli military’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) to add beans into the “diet” of the Gazans this week, or potatoes next week, or whatever, is going to solve this problem.
Everyone understands this is above all a political/diplomatic problem; and if Obama and Mitchell don’t take some significant steps at the level of authoritative diplomatic engagement pretty soon, then the whole, still perilously fragile balance in the Arab-Israeli region could still, oh so easily, explode.
That, at a time when the US military is working overtime to finetune the modalities of a safe exit from Iraq, the situation in Iran remains extremely murky, and NATO’s entire situation in Afghanistan/Pakistan is poised on a logistical knife-edge.
So the actions Obama and Co. have taken until now– expressing a firm stand on Israeli settlement construction (though not, actually, doing anything yet to hold Israel accountable on that score), and expressing a firm stand on opening up the crossings into Gaza (again, without any actions to implement it)– are in a sense an overture to the main, that is diplomatic, act that should, and I believe will, follow.
They have also served to both test and prepare public opinion in both the US and Israel for the main act. (And the results of that ‘testing’ would, I think, encourage them to move ahead even more boldly.)
But when will they make the big diplomatic move? Nobody knows. This team has proven incredibly good at holding its cards close to its chest.
It’s also good at using a little tactical deception when it wants to. For example, until today, nobody has a clue whether Dennis Ross’s latest move– over to the National Security Council, from the State Department, is a move up, sideways or into some form of bureaucratic sidelining. As Politico’s usually very well-informed Ben Smith writes: “As for how much influence he’ll have, we’ll have to wait and see.”
For my part, I believe Ross will now come more effectively than before under the command of General Jim Jones, who runs a tight ship on the NSC. But as Smith says, we’ll have to wait and see.

US, Syria, Iran, Hamas

The Obama administration has decided to return a US ambassador to Syria, the WaPo’s Scott Wilson reports today. This is a long overdue move– see below. However, the timing of the announcement does seem to link it to the ongoing turmoil inside the Iranian regime.
The always very well informed David Ignatius, writing (also in today’s WaPo) about US policy responses to the developments in Iran, says,

As the mullahs’ grip on power weakens, there are new opportunities to peel away some of their allies. The United States is moving quickly to normalize relations with Syria, and there’s talk of working with the Saudis to draw elements of the radical Palestinian group Hamas away from its Iranian patrons, toward a coalition government that would be prepared to negotiate with Israel. Observes a White House official: “Iran’s allies in the region have to be wondering, ‘Why should we hitch our wagon to their starship?’ ”

It has, of course, long been a dream of some Israelis and allies of Israel that they could “flip” Syria away from its sturdy, 30-year alliance with Iran. “Peeling them away” is a less crude and possibly more nuanced version of the same idea.
Ignatius links the administration’s current overture toward Syria, and its consideration of an overture toward Hamas, centrally to its desire to take maximum advantage of the current political problems in Tehran. I would note, however, that these moves have been under active consideration in the administration since considerably before the hotly disputed June 12 election in Iran.
From that perspective, announcing the moves in the context of linking them to the situation in Iran might be very canny politics within the US. But it is not the whole story.
Indeed, when I was in Damascus earlier this month, there were already many signs of a growing thaw in the long frozen US-Syria political relationship.
It has also been an open secret for some time now that Obama, Mitchell, and Clinton are very eager that the Palestinian movements– especially the ‘Big Two’, Fateh and Hamas– find a way to settle their differences enough to allow a unified Palestinian delegation to take part in negotiations for a final peace with Israel. Mitchell said as much in his first conference call with Jewish-American leaders back in early February. And his determination– along with, presumably, that of the person who appointed him, Pres. Obama– that this happen seems only to have grown since then.
Including that Mitchell gave an attentive hearing to former Pres. Jimmy Carter when Carter went to brief him June 18 about the discussions he had had over the preceding week with Hamas leaders in Damascus, the West Bank, and Gaza.
In my recent blog post on Fateh’s woes, I made one suggestion as to how a Palestinian negotiating team that enjoys the confidence of both the big parties might be constituted. Such a team might or might not include Fateh’s Mahmoud Abbas.
When I interviewed Hamas head Khaled Meshaal in Damascus June 4, he restated Hamas’s longstanding position that it is happy to have Abbas do the negotiating with Israel– but on the condition that any final deal negotiated should be submitted to a Palestinian-wide referendum thereafter. Hamas, he said, would abide by the results of that referendum.
Personally, I think it would be better to find a way to get Hamas more involved in the negotiating– even if only indirectly– from a far earlier stage than that. Hence my suggestion that a person or persons whom they trust be fully included on the negotiating team from the beginning.
Either way, folding Hamas into the diplomatic strategy is something that has to be done, given their real weight in Palestinian society. And it’s something the Mitchell team has been wrestling with from the get-go. Let’s hope the current turmoil in Iran gives Mitchell and Obama a new opportunity to “sell” this idea to the many folks in Congress and the US public who are still very wary of the “the H word.”
We can note, though, that there is significant support in Israel for talking with Hamas directly. The last time Tel Aviv University’s Tami Steinmetz Center recorded the answer to this question, in its February 2009 poll, it found that 45% of Israelis supported this. In other, earlier polls, pollsters found that an even stronger percentage of Israelis supported negotiating with a Palestinian team that included both Fateh and Hamas.
Regarding the new US opening to Syria, we should remember that it was Pres. Bush who decided to withdraw the US ambassador from Syria; and he did so, in February 2005, in response to the specific situation in Lebanon. Former PM Rafiq Hariri had just been assassinated there, and much of the evidence about that seemed to point towards Syria.
A lot has happened– in Lebanon, in Syria, and in the US– since then.
Back in February 2005 Syria still had some 35,000 troops in Lebanon, the remnant of a peacekeeping force that went into the country in 1976 with Washington’s blessing. After the Hariri killing, a broad movement of Lebanese arose that called for the withdrawal of those troops; and that withdrawal was duly completed in April 2005. After subsequent developments inside Lebanon, that included a nasty assault from Israel, elections, further discussions, and a new government, Lebanon and Syria agreed for the first time ever to have normal diplomatic relations with each other and exchange ambassadors.
That step took place earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the “evidence” that the Bushites and others had relied on to pin blame for the Hariri killing on Syria seemed to largely unravel. Earlier this year, four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals who had been imprisoned in Lebanon since 2005 were released by order of the UN’s Special Tribunal for Lebanon. So there really has been little continuing rationale for Washington not to have an ambassador in Damascus. And meanwhile, Syria is a regional player of considerable significance in both the Iraqi and the Arab-Israeli theaters.
In recognition of that, Sec. of State Clinton called Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem May 31, and they agreed on a ‘Road Map’ for improving relations. Ten days later peace envoy Mitchell made his first visit to Damascus.
You can find my June 12 account of the recent history of the US-Syrian relationship here. My thoughts on the need to include Syria in the Arab-Israeli negotiations are here. My compilation of the 18-year record of Syria’s attempts to negotiate its own final peace with Israel is here. And my June 4 interview with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem is here.
It is intriguing, though, to see that we finally have a president who recognizes the importance of diplomacy and has the capacity and agility to start to rebuild a whole host of important relations that had, basically, been shredded by the Bushites.

Plus, he cooks daal and reads Urdu poetry?

Is our president a phenomenal mutli-culturalist or what?? Not only he has Kenyan relatives, grew up in gloriously multi-culti Hawaii, went to school in Indonesia and speaks some Bahasa Indonesia, can do Hawaiian hand gestures and African-American hand jives with equal ease, has studied and taught in the arcane language of the law, writes graceful and revealing English prose, etc etc….
But now we learn he also reads Urdu poetry and can cook some Pakistani dishes? Who knew?
This, from the interview with Anwar Iqbal that ran in Pakistan’s Dawn yesterday (HT: Tom Ricks):

Oh, and there was a bunch of politics there, too.

I can now reveal…

… that it was Sen. Mitchell with whom Pres. Carter met yesterday.
The updated version of the IPS piece has now been posted, at the same URL. It’ll take me a bit of time to update the archived version.

Ross, moving on– to where?

When a high-level US official dealing with Middle East affairs gets “reassigned”, why I am not surprised that the story gets broken in Israel before any murmur of it emerges in the US media?
Haaretz’s Barak Ravid wrote a couple hours ago (HT: Bill the spouse) that,

Attentive readers of JWN, e.g. here most recently, should not be surprised to learn that I am, by and large, delighted with this development.
My only concern is the fuzziness over where Ross is heading.
Good that he’s off the Iran case. But is it really true that he will “will deal primarily with regional issues related to the peace process”? H’mm. Only firmly under the leadership and control of presidential peace envoy Sen. George Mitchell, I hope.
Ravid and, guess who, Marty Peretz, are both raising the irrelevant and deceptive question of “Is Ross’s ouster because he’s a Jew?”
No, Barak and Marty, the two reasons it’s good and appropriate that Dennis Ross is being removed (I hope) from any position of importance on Middle East issues are

done some contract work on high-level strategic planning issues for a foreign government

Jewish People’s Public Policy Institute

an upcoming book

(Okay, also 3: During 12 years as chief US peace-processor he succeeded only in prolonging the process, not securing the much-needed peace.)
So enough already with this raising the canard of anti-Semitism.
Yes, I know anti-Semitism exists, and can be literally lethal– as, too sadly, it proved to be in Washington DC last week. But that fact does not give everyone of the Jewish faith/nationality a free pass to ward off any criticisms of their actions.
(Last note to Barak Ravid: When you quote “a diplomatic source in Jerusalem” as speculating that “perhaps Ross preferred to work for the National Security Agency, which answers directly to President Barack Obama”, it is very unclear indeed what this source– or you– are referring to. The NSA is a quite technical agency, that under Bush/Cheney listened to my phone calls and everyone else’s that it wanted to. The National Security Council is the body that reports directly to the Prez, though through Gen. Jim Jones. I doubt if he’d want Dennis on his staff, but let’s see.)

Syrian negotiations with Israel: the short version

So presidential envoy George Mitchell has now had his meeting with Pres. Bashar al-Asad in Damascus.
Afterwards he said, “”We are well aware of the many difficulties … yet we share an obligation to create conditions for negotiations to begin promptly and end successfully.”
Intriguingly, that Reuters report also tells us that Mitchell’s meeting with Asad,

Alert readers here may have noted that in the piece I published at IPS Wednesday, that reported and analyzed my June 4 interview with Syrian FM Walid Moualem, I drew attention to the fact that, in talking about his recent phone conversation with Secretary Clinton,

before the Arab-Israeli peace process

In that piece I also characterized what I see as the precise nature of the two countries’ shared concerns regarding Iraq.
If you haven’t read that piece– or the longer collection of excerpts from the interview that I published at ForeignPolicy.com (and also here)– then you should do so.
Also, go read Peter Harling’s excellent recent article “Stable Iraq Key to U.S.-Syria Dialogue.”
I would add at this point that during the six days I was in Syria, several well-connected private citizens there talked about how Syria’s interests in Iraq diverge from those of its longtime ally Iran in some significant ways.
Basically, while Syria and Iran (and the US) all want to strengthen the Maliki government in Baghdad and help him crack down hard on the anti-Baghdad insurgents, Damascus and Tehran differ on the kind of regime they want to see emerging over the long haul in Baghdad. Damascus wants to see one that is determinedly Arab and secular, while Tehran wants to see one that mirrors its own Shi-ite-Islamist character much more closely and might not be particularly closely integrated into the rest of the Arab world.
Yes, this is a difference, and an intriguing one. Several Syrians have also noted how relieved they are to have built good relations over the past few years with their northern neighbor Turkey, a NATO member that has a determinedly secular constitution (even though it is currently ruled by an Islamist party.)
No-one should ever expect, though, that Damascus will simply turn on a dime and– as the childish US parlance has it– “flip” rapidly or completely against Tehran. The Islamic Republic has been an essential regional bulwark for the Asads through many years in which they have faced extremely dangerous threats (especially the early 1980s and the GWB years.)
—
Anyway, the original intention of this post was to note that, though most Americans have paid ittle attention to the Syrian track of the Arab-Israeli negotiations over the past two decades, in fact this has been a fascinating story.
Damascus has negotiated with every Israeli premier from Yitzhak Shamir through Ehud Olmert, with the exception of Ariel Sharon. You can see the book I wrote about the very fruitful first five years of these negotiations, here. Good news, it is now apparently back in print.
Here’s the short version of all the negotiations since 1991:
With Yitzhak Shamir.
Syria decided to participate in the Madrid Peace Conference of October 1991, after Sec. of State Baker pre-negotiated between Shamir and Asad the agreed basis on which the conference would be held. The encounter at Madrid was not itself productive. Syrian FM Farouq Sharaa used his time there to hold up old 1940s-era posters published by the British in which Shamir was (rightly) described as a “Wanted criminal.”
But still, an official Syrian envoy had participated in a public negotiating forum with an Israeli leader for the first time ever; and Pres. Hafez al-Asad assured everyone at home and abroad that securing a negotiated peace was Syria’s “strategic option”, and not just a mere tactic.
Yitzhak Rabin.
Rabin succeeded Shamir in 1992, and engaged in negotiations with both Syria and, as it turned out, the PLO. After the PLO concluded the bilateral Oslo Agreement with Rabin in September 1993, Syrian oficials said that though previously they had been committed to negotiating jointly with all the other Arab parties, now they felt prepared to negotiate the best deal they could for Syria even if the Palestinians were not yet ready to conclude a final peace.
Moualem and other officials reiterated that position to me during my recent stay in Damascus– though they all still said that a “comprehensive peace”, that is, an all-track peace, is their preferred outcome.
Rabin engaged more seriously with Damascus than any other Israeli PM before or since. In summer 1994 he handed the US intermediaries what has since been called the “Rabin deposit”, which was a commitment to– in the context of getting satisfaction from Damascus on a range of other issues in the security, economic, and diplomatic fields– withdraw Israel completely back to the lines of June 4 , 1967.
That deposit was never handed over to the Syrians. But Washington’s assurance to Damascus that the deposit was indeed “in Washington’s pocket” was sufficient to allow negotiations on the associated range of other issues to proceed. Including, the chiefs of staff of the two country’s military’s engaged in discussions of a post-peace security regime.
Opposition to the idea of withdrawing from Golan grew up inside Israel, however. (Most of the 20,000 or so Israeli settlers there were put there by Labour, and are still, basically secular-type people, since Golan has almost none of the hot-button “religious”-type sites that are important to the religious-extremist settlers in the West Bank.) Then in November 1995, Rabin was assassinated.
Shimon Peres.
Peres inherited the Syria policy from Rabin. (He had to be informed of the nature of the Rabin deposit while he was actually at Rabin’s funeral. That, though he had been Rabin’s foreign minister. Go figure what that says about the integrity of the process for strategic decisionmaking at the top of Israel’s leadership structure.)
Peres faced imminent elections. He didn’t want to push on with the always-tough Palestinian negotiations. But he did want some kind of an “achievement” of his own to take into the elections, so he moved rapidly into accelerating the negotiations on the Syrian track. Asad was eager to do that, too. In January 1996 the two sides went to the Wye Plantation in Maryland and held very intense negotiations over all the fine details of a final peace agreement. With help from actively involved US mediators there, they nailed down many of its these details.
In February and March 1996, Hamas and other Palestinian militants angry with the the ever-deteriorating situation inside Paltustan as the settlements continued to grow there, launched a devastating series of suicide bombs against civilian targets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Peres called the elections immediately and ordered his negotiators to return from Wye to Israel. He also launched a nasty little war (as an election-related ploy, as so often in Israel.) That war was against Hizbullah in Lebanon, which as it happened he lost. He also lost the election.
Bibi Netanyahu.
He came in in late spring 1996 on a strong platform of opposing Oslo and not doing anything further on the Palestinian track. But when he came under some (not enormous) pressure from Washington to do “something” peace-wise, he tossed a few grudging and inconsequential crumbs to the Palestinians while engaging in a ploy that Likud people have often resorted to: dealing with Syria as an alternative to dealing seriously with the Palestinians.
That, at least, is my reading of the episode in which Netanyahu went along with a plan proposed by the pro-Likud US-American businessman Ron Lauder that he, Lauder, fly to Damascus and try to conclude a quick deal with Asad. (By the way, if I used cosmetics I would definitely boycott those from Lauder’s Estee Lauder brand.)
On this occasion, though, Lauder still had not finally satisfied Asad that Bibi was committed to the June 4, 1967 line before news of Lauder’s activities was prematurely leaked to the media– by, according to Moualem, Sharon, acting in cahoots with Daniel Pipes. Bibi abruptly ended the intiative.
(One casualty of the Lauder affair was, for a few years thereafter, present FM Walid Moualem, who as Asad’s ambassador in Washington in the 1990s had been a full participant in the Rabin and Peres-era talks and had helped facilitate the Lauder mission. After it bombed he was recalled abruptly to Damascus and sent to the woodshed for a few years. We should all be glad he’s back from there.)
Ehud Barak.
Barak came to power in 1999 on a platform of achieving a final Palestinian-Israeli peace “within six to nine months”. But when that proved harder than this intensely arrogant man had understood, he abruptly switched to the Syrian track. He instructed Clinton to convene peace talks with Syrians at Shepherdstown in West Virginia; and then as a follow-up to that, in mid-2000, to organize a summit meeting with Asad in Geneva.
Okay, maybe he didn’t actually, directly, “instruct” Clinton to take these steps… But it was almost like that, given Clinton’s slavering admiration of anyone (Rabin, Barak) who had actually not only served in the military but also had been a renowned leader in the IDF.
Asad was intrigued by the invitation to Geneva and very much hoped that when he met Clinton face to face there Clinton would assure him that Barak had finally reaffirmed his adherence to the terms of the 1994 Rabin deposit. There was some very last-minute sleight of hand involved there– in which Dennis Ross was extremely deeply involved– and when the two presidents met in Geneva Clinton was unable to give Asad the assurance he sought. The meeting broke off very badly. Asad returned to Damascus and a month later died of some combination of long pre-existing conditions and a broken heart.
Dennis, by the way, was the only person taking notes in Geneva. And nine years later the Syrians say he still has not made good on his promise to hand a copy of those notes over to them. Memo to any negotiators: Take your own note-taker with you.
So Pres. Hafez al-Asad died and was succeeded by– what an amazing coincidence!– Pres. Bashar al-Asad. As for Barak, he was still useless at the coalition-guarding task that’s a sine qua non of political survival in Israel. Plus Sharon was stirring things up against him, deciding to go visit the Haram al-Sharif plaza in Jerusalem, and things were going downhill fast in Paltustan… So Barak’s coalition fell apart and he had to call an election in early 2001. He lost to Sharon.
Who as far as I can recall never did anything significant on the Syrian negotiating track. (Maybe I’ve forgotten something. I’m writing this fast.) But anyway, for the new and in some ways accidental Pres. Asad, that meant he had a few years to consolidate his hold on power before he needed to engage in the perils of peace diplomacy with an extremely erratic and ever-changing cast of leadership characters in Israel. He did, however, reiterate at every possible opportunity the commitment that a negotiated peace with Israel was Syria’s “strategic decision.”
Sharon was the PM from 2001 through January 2006, when he was felled by a stroke and was succeeded by his long-time protege…
Ehud Olmert.
In 2007, Turkey’s AKP prime minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan started sending a high-level adviser, the foreign-policy intellectual Ahmet Davutoglu, shuttling between Israel and Syria to explore the possibility of re-opening the peace negotiations on this track with the help of Ankara. These feelers resulted, in May 2008, in Turkey convening a first round of proximity talks between Syrian and Israeli officials in, I think, Istanbul. In the proximity talks, each delegation had rooms in a separate hotel, and Davutoglu and his team carried messages between them.
Olmert continued participating in this initiative until December 2008 even though Bush’s top Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams very strongly disapproved of it. I guess we could call that evidence of a modicum of courage and vision on Olmert’s behalf? H’mmm… Maybe…
(Clarification, morning of June 14: Though Abrams opposed Olmert’s involvement, Olmert reportedly checked in with Bush himself who gave him a go-ahead of some sort. So Olmert’s “courage” is not necessarily proven by this episode.)
Once again, the members of the Syrian team in Turkey sought assurance from this new leadership in Israel of commitment to the 1994 Rabin deposit. They also sought assurance that, when referring to “the June 4, 1967 line”, everyone was actually still talking about the same exact spot on the map. So demarcating that line because an issue.
On around Christmas Day last year, Olmert himself went to Ankara to give his Turkish hosts his version of where the six key GPS points on the demarcation line were. If Davutoglu, Erdogan, and Asad had determined that this concurred with the Syrian view of where the line was, then Moualem was reportedly ready to fly to Istanbul at a moment’s notice to engage in the first direct face-to-face talks any Syrian official had held with Israeli officials since Shepherdstown… But before the Turks could fully examine the six GPS coordinates being offered by Olmert, Olmert got urgently called back home.
One or two days later he launched the assault on Gaza.
In both Damascus and Ankara there was some real anger that in the whole exercise of the promximity talks these two governments had merely been “used” by Olmert and as part of an elaborate strategic deception operation, designed to provide a flim-flam of diplomatic movement to hide the reality of the assault that Olmert– and Barak– had for many months been preparing, against Gaza. There is considerable evidence of other elements of this strategic deception operation, too, as has been widely noted by Israeli analysts and reports. In one part of it, Barak went on a very silly game show and had tomatoes thrown at him, or whatever, to “lull” the watching world into thinking that Israel really couldn’t be preparing any serious military operations if the defense minister had so much free time on his hands…
In Damascus, in addition, I heard some real relief expressed that the regime had dodged a bullet by not having moved to the next level of direct talks with Olmert by the time he launched the assault on Gaza.
—
So now we are back to Bibi Netanyahu in power in Israel.
Moualem told me he thought the best to resume the peace negotiations with Israel would be to resume the approach that was used with Olmert in Turkey; and to resume it with Turkey playing the same role, as before.
Here was what he said, precisely:

Of course, Mitchell and Obama may well have other plans for how to proceed. My own longstanding preference, fwiw, is for a resumed, all-track, international peace conference that is convened with the goal of securing a comprehensive, all-track peace between Israel and all of its neighbors.
I wish that in his Cairo speech, Obama had mentioned the words “comprehensive peace.” He has mentioned them since then; but in the Cairo speech would have been even better.
If that really is his goal– as seems to be the case– and it is also, crucially, the goal of the Arab Peace Initiative, then that needs to be repeatedly spelled out, and concrete actions in pursuit of that goal need to be taken very soon indeed.
Maybe the resumed international peace conference should be convened in Turkey. That would be a fabulous location, and would send many constructive messages to important audiences all around the world. Plus, Edogan and Davutoglu– recently named his foreign minister– have proven their abilities as mediators and negotiators on a broad range of issues relevant to the quest for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.
I can’t quite make up my mind between Ankara and Istanbul. Istanbul maybe carries a bit of left-over Ottoman baggage– but it is a ways more exciting city!
But maybe the Ottoman baggage has nearly all dissipated now, anyway. Gosh, I still have half an essay on my hard drive on the emergence of a helpful, de-escalatory form of neo-Ottomanism in Turkey under the AKP… Ankara’s foreign policy under the AKP has truly been inspired. (Including, of course, that even though Turkey’s a NATO member it dug its heels in, in opposition to Bush’s invasion of Iraq.)
Enough here, for now. The main topic of this post is, after all, the history of Syria’s peace efforts with Israel since 1991.

Mitchell mission getting very serious

Most people in the western MSM have for some days now seemed strongly fixated on the elections in Iran. (And my thanks to Scott Harrop for getting his excellent post on that up here this morning.)
However, something else really important is happening in the Middle East in these days. That is the latest trip around the region being made by special peace envoy George Mitchell.
Today, Mitchell has already visited Lebanon, and is probably just about now arriving in Syria.
My sense is that after he returns to Washington, after everyone has heard what Israeli PM Netanyahu will say in his much-touted speech on Sunday, and after the important people on Washington’s Arab-Israeli policy have been able to do some joint brainstorming there… we might see some significant “next steps” emerging from the White House.
I hope so. I certainly hope there is some decisive move to expand the administration’s actions from words to deeds, and to expand its purview from “merely” the issue of a settlement freeze (which is only an interim-stage issue, anyway, however important it is), to the all-important goal of securing a fair and sustainable final-status peace between Israel and ALL of its neighbors.
Syria is, of course, an important part of this, so Mitchell’s visit there is extremely timely (or, in fact, long overdue.). This is his first visit either there or to Lebanon in his present round as envoy, since he skipped both countries during his earlier three trips around the region.
On this trip, Mitchell has already been in Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon…. All this, in the wake of Obama’s June 4 speech at Cairo U.
It is worth reflecting a little on the meaning, for Syrians and for their relations with the US, of Mitchell’s visit to the country. So long as G. W. Bush was president, as I noted in this recent piece, high officials in the neocon-swayed US administration considered themselves to be “in a state of quasi-war” with Syria. This manifested itself in Bush-era acts like the following:

Continue reading “Mitchell mission getting very serious”

WaPo’s Kessler pulls punches on Ross

The WaPo’s Glenn Kessler had an article today in which he deals with the topic of Dennis Ross’s objectivity and the appropriateness of having this person, of all available people, acting as Sec. Clinton’s adviser on Iran and Gulf affairs.
It is good and notable, I guess, that this topic can even be raised by a journo in the MSM. For many years, almost no-one in the MSM would have dared even mention the criticisms that have surfaced against a leading Jewish-American public figure like Ross, for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.
However, Kessler considerably pulls his punches in the article.
He makes no mention of the many questions that have been raised about Ross’s competence to arrive at any judgments about decisionmaking in Iran, a very complex country of whose affairs he has never previously demonstrated any detailed knowledge.
Though Kessler does mention Ross’s role as co-author with another WINEP person of the new book “Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East”, he doesn’t mention the fact that the book argued strongly against a key proposition propounded by his principals in the administration: namely that there is a strong link between Iran policy and Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
Also, in the book, Ross and Makovsky express a hard line toward Iran that can give the Iranian government ample reason to believe that a US leadership guided by Ross’s advice may only be undertaking diplomatic overtures to Tehran as a ruse, preparatory to launching a further escalation of its attacks against the Islamic Republic.
Finally, though Kessler does mention Ross’s role as a co-founder of a very hawkish US group called United Against Nuclear Iran, he mysteriously makes no mention of Ross’s just-relinquished role as founding President of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People’s Public Policy Institute (JPPPI). According to reports in the Israeli press, while Ross was still its president JPPPI was “tasked” by the Israeli government with doing some important strategic planning on its behalf.
Kessler also writes in deadpan vein, “Ross has written that his admiration for Israel has not hurt his effectiveness as a negotiator.” But he has apparently been quite unable to find a single Arab or Muslim person to corroborate that statement!
That part is pretty hilarious.
But I wish Kessler and his editors had been braver and published much more of the material that I am sure they have to hand that strengthens the judgment that this man is a quite unsuitable pick for the Iran-affairs advisory post in Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
Addition, 11:20 a.m.: I just read the article in the paper edition. It is still always easier for me to read texts on paper! What struck me on this read was this framing Kessler made in his fourth para of what “the issue” is around Ross:

Ross is undertaking this assignment amid questions in Washington about whether he has sufficient clout in the nascent Obama administration. And in the Middle East, many officials view him as too pro-Israel, raising concerns about whether he is the right person for the job of coaxing the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I would say that seriously mischaracterizes the concerns here in Washington DC. Some people here doubtless have questions about whether he has enough clout in the administration– but I can tell you that many others– perhaps an even greater number!– question whether he too much clout. Worries on that score are not, as Kessler’s framing would have you believe, limited to the Middle East.

Washington’s new tone on Islamist political parties

Two excellent initiatives by the Obama administration in the lead-up to The Speech tomorrow. They’ve made a point of inviting members of the Egyptian parliament affiliated with the long banned and often forcibly suppressed Muslim Brotherhood to attend The Speech.
And Obama himself put an interesting, and potentially helpful, twist on one of the long-standing Three Preconditions that Hamas will have to meet before the US or other Quartet members will deal with it.
In his interview with NPR on Monday, Obama defined the Preconditions in these terms:

without prejudging what various grievances or claims are appropriate

… And he added that if Hamas met these conditions, then ” I think the discussions with Hamas could potentially proceed.”
The “without prejudging” clause there is new and important. As, too, is the impression he conveys that discussions with Hamas are a worthwhile thing to win.
Also notable, of course, in this context is the fact of the longstanding close relations between Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Marc Lynch has reported that the head of the MB parliamentary bloc has said they will attend– and also that the MB declined to join the anti-Obama protest being organized by the Kefaya movement.
Many aspects of that are interesting. When I was in Cairo in February a couple of well-informed friends there noted how very restrained the MB’s reactions to the Mubarak government’s collaboration with Israel in besieging Gaza had been, and speculated that the MB may well be placing a subtle bet on hoping the ageing Egyptian despot’s son Gamal will succeed him– and that Gamal may give them more space for real political participation than any other possible successor.
Who knows? Anyway, it looks as though Obama is setting a very intelligent new tone.
Another important point in his NPR interview came when he talked about the importance of movements like Hamas making the transition from using violence to renouncing it.
Of course, governments like Israel can be expected to make that transition, too. Just like Britain eventually did, in Northern Ireland.
… I am still in Damascus. I’ll be blogging some reactions from various parties here to The Speech, before I leave Saturday morning. Stay tuned.
Next week, I’ll have a piece in the CSM on the fascinating experience Turkey has had of being governed by a party that is both moderately Islamist and committed to democracy. Turkey’s AKP is such a good role model for other Islamist movements.
By the way, can any reader confirm for me what time– Cairo time– The Speech is scheduled for? Thanks!
And I would be delighted to publish reactions to The Speech, especially from readers who are part of the intended Muslim-world prime audience.