Obama presidency – Page 6 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Big days ahead for the Middle East…

Tomorrow, Pres. Obama will give his much-awaited address “to the Muslim world” in Cairo. On Sunday, Lebanon holds parliamentary elections– and Iran holds its elections June 12.
I’m in Damascus this week. Officials and non-officials here are very eager for improved relations with the US, and express some concern that despite all his rhetoric of “change”, Obama has so far done precious little to implement that promise.
The WaPo’s Glenn Kessler reported this morning that Sec. of State Clinton spoke with her Syrian counterpart by phone Sunday, and made plans for both Israeli-Arab peace envoy George Mitchell and a US military team to visit Syria later this month.
The military delegation will be discussing coordination in combatting insurgent forces in Iraq. That is something the Syrian government has an interest in. But it has an even stronger interest in not having this be the only level at which relations improve. Having a political delegation visit is seen as even more important here…
However, Obama still has not returned to Damascus the ambassador who was peevishly withdrawn by Bush some years ago. (A high-ranking official in the Bush White House recently told me that the US was in a state of “quasi-war” with Syria in those years. What the heck does that term mean? A state of war is a clear category in international relations, that imposes certain responsibilities on both sides. And often, indeed, even in a state of war, the sides still have ambassadorial-level representation in each other’s capitals… But ‘quasi-war’???)
Obama has also done, or failed to do, a number of other things that could have started to improve relations with Syria.
One of my concerns is that unless he and his people (including Mitchell) pay serious and sustained attention to any issue– including Syria, but including other key issues in the region, too– then the bureaucrats in the State Department will just continue on the same kind of auto-pilot course they became habituated to adopting throughout eight years of GWB– and prior to that, eight years of the also strongly pro-Israel Pres. Clinton.
Remember that throughout those 16 years, any State Department employees who– like Ann Wright and a few brave others– strongly disagreed on grounds of principle with the course US policy was taking in the region resigned their posts. And those not courageous enough to resign who still dared to raise different views within the department rapidly found their careers sidelined.
Turning that great ship of the State Department’s bureaucracy around until it is seamlessly and effectively following the lead of the country’s recently elected new “Captain” will take some sustained attention and energy.
(Another question: Is Hillary Clinton the right person to actually do this inside the department that she heads?)
Anyway, what I’ve been hearing for many weeks now, in Washington DC and elsewhere, is that Washington has been waiting to adopt some kind of a new, more inclusive policy toward Syria after the Lebanese elections.
Okay, that’s next week.
George Mitchell will be in the region next week– he already has plans to visit Israel and Ramallah then.
It would make excellent sense if he also visits Damascus then, for the first time in his role as peace envoy.
He needs to hear the views and concerns of the government here, which has a lot to contribute to the peacemaking venture– especially if, as I strongly hope, Obama and Mitchell are aiming at securing a serious, sustainable, and comprehensive agreement that will end all outstanding portions of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
My judgment is that there is now very little likelihood at all that a viable peace agreement can be concluded only on the Palestinian track– which is all that Obama and Co. have talked about, as of yet.
We need to hear him say out loud that a “comprehensive” Arab-Israeli peace is in the US national interest– not just a “Palestinian-Israeli” peace.
… Anyway, I don’t have time to write much here. But regarding the prospects around the Lebanese elections, the best commentary so far is still this piece by the astute Lebanese blogger Qifa Nabki.

On settlements

I’ve just been catching up with Helene Cooper’s piece in the NYT yesterday on Obama and the Israeli settlement freeze.
She concludes:

When asked on Thursday what he would do if Mr. Netanyahu continued to balk at a settlement freeze, Mr. Obama said he was not yet ready to offer an “or else.”

My view, for what it’s worth, is that the president should keep up the strongly worded requests that Israel cease its ongoing settlement-building activity but should focus primarily on winning the final Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement, under the terms of which the final status of all settlements will be determined.
The (hopefully successful!) demand for a settlement freeze should be seen as a helpful entry-point into these negotiations rather than an end in itself.
If, as some unconfirmed reports have said, Obama wants to achieve the final peace agreement within two years, that’s what he needs to focus on.

Obama-Mitchell peace mission gains a little momentum

Haaretz’s Barak Ravid had more details yesterday of the meeting an official Israeli delegation held in London last Tuesday with Obama’s special Mideast peace envoy Sen. George Mitchell and his team.
He quoted one senior Israeli official as saying after the meeting,

“We’re disappointed… All of the understandings reached during the [George W.] Bush administration are worth nothing.”

He adds these details:

There’s a lot to comment on there!
Firstly, why should Pres. Obama be at all worried by the prospect that too “tough” a US line might “lead to the dissolution of the Netanyahu government”??
Secondly, why should any Israelis imagine that a possible ruling of their own judiciary should be expected by anyone else to over-ride the clear requirements of international diplomacy and international law regarding the– actually quite illegal– project of planting Jewish-Israeli settlers in occupied land?
Then, toward the end of the piece, Ravid writes this,

Defense Minister Ehud Barak will travel to Washington on Sunday [yesterday– or next week? not clear] in an attempt to put further pressure on the Obama administration.

So Arad, Molcho, and Co. were unsuccessful in snowing G. Mitchell with their arguments– and now, Netanyahu sends Ehud Barak to Washington… to speak with whom?
This does look just the teeniest bit like Netanyahu and E. Barak trying to go behind Mitchell’s back and speak with other heavyweights in washington… Perhaps E Barak also hopes to speak with the president himself?
If it is an attempt to go behind Mitchell’s back, I am pretty certain it will backfire.
Sen. Mitchell had experience of that, after all, during his first go-round with dealing with the Palestine Question, back in 2001. Also, let’s just recall that he is by no means a political lightweight in Washington…
(Small authorial note. I’m in Damascus, having traveled here overland from Capadoccia over the past 48 hours. The combination of travel and being in Syria means I haven’t been as well plugged-in or as timely as usual on these stories. However, I’ve been gathering LOTS of great new material which will appear here and elsewhere over the weeks ahead. ~HC)

George Mitchell is doing what??

In this piece on the Israeli settlements issue in the NYT today, Isabel Kershner and Mark Landler report this:

Mr. Mitchell has been negotiating reciprocal measures with Israel’s Arab neighbors, in which they would take steps, like granting visas to Israeli citizens or allowing Israel to open trade offices in their capitals, in return for Israel’s action on settlements. But administration officials say the onus is on Israel to show progress.

Is this really true? They give no source for the claim.
I certainly hope it is not. There has always been a fear that Washington’s response to the Arab Peace Initiative might be to require the Arab states to make a substantial upfront deposit on the “normalization”-type steps they promise to give Israel in the wake of conclusion of the satisfactory Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
For them to be expected to make good on some of these promises simply in return for Israel stopping undertaking the illegal acts it has been carrying out for 42 years now defies belief.
Remember the history of Oslo…. As a direct result of Oslo Israel won normalization with around 32 countries around the world that had previously expressed their solidarity with the Palestinians by withholding full relations with Israel.
Israel won those enormous benefits, which opened significant new markets for its arms industry in many rich countries in East Asia, while the Palestinians won… nothing except incarceration in the ever-shrinking open-air prisons that the West Bank and Gaza soon after became.
Actually, there is some reason to wonder about the accuracy of the NYT writers’ claim about Mitchell’s position. After all, which of “Israel’s Arab neighbors” might they be referring to? Israel has five Arab neighbors. With two of them– Egypt and Jordan– Israel has full peace treaties, and Israeli citizens and business-people can get visas very easily. The other three are Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.
Israel itself prevents its citizens from visiting occupied Palestine (except in the context of doing army service there.)
So is Mitchell negotiating the kind of “reciprocal steps” Kershner and Landler write about with Syria and Lebanon? I highly doubt it.
The way the NYT writers and their editors refer to the settlements is also mealy-mouthed and misleading. They write:

Almost 300,000 Israelis now live in settlements in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, among a Palestinian population of some 2.5 million. Much of the world considers the 120 or so settlements a violation of international law.

Why not count the settlers in East Jerusalem, too?
I am certainly assuming and hoping that when Clinton and other administration officials talk about a settlement freeze they at least are talking about the settlements inside Jerusalem as well as elsewhere in the West Bank.
The whole settler-vs.-Palestinians question is at its most intense and tinderbox-ish inside Jerusalem… And Jerusalem is a city that all Arab and Muslim leaders care about, passionately.

Does Obama understand Israel’s war goal in Iran?

If Israel launches a military attack (= act of war) against Iran, what would the main goal of this attack be?
There is good reason to believe that the goal would be not the direct physical destruction/incapacitation of Iran’s nuclear programs but rather, to trigger an all-out US-Iran war in the course of which, Israel’s planners hope, the US would do the dirty work in Iran that it is unable to do itself.
This is a course of action of greatest consequence for Americans.
The best assessments available indicate that– under even the “best case” scenario, from Israel’s viewpoint– an Israeli strike force could not itself “destroy” Iran’s nuclear technology program anywhere near completely, and the Iranian program would be set back by at most a couple of years.
But meanwhile, Iran, subjected to this act of war, would almost certainly retaliate. The retaliation would, with equal predictability, include actions against Israel’s prime ally in the region, the United States. (And, as I have written here many times before, Iran would have considerable justification under international law for including US targets in its retaliation.)
Of course, US forces would in turn respond.
Thus, an Israeli strike against Iran would almost certainly trigger a direct, and of course massive, war between Iran and the US. The US could be expected to launch considerably heavier strikes against the Iranian nuclear facilities and to try to inflict other substantial– perhaps even fatal?– damage on the Iranian government.
Iran could be expected to counter with attacks against US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, against the vulnerable supply lines that support those forces, and possibly– in the event that the collapse of the Teheran regime seems imminent– with actions designed to paralyze US resupply efforts and world oil markets by blocking chokepoints like the Straits of Hormuz.
Triggering this big US-Iran war, rather than the direct ‘destruction’ of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, would most likely be the actual, though never openly stated, main goal of an Israeli attack against Iran.
I have reason to believe that this analysis of the likely course of events and of Israel’s actual war goal in Iran were clearly understood in the Bush White House.
Bush quite rightly also concluded that an all-out US-Iran war would be disastrous for the US’s positions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the entire region. For that reason, he and his officials went to some lengths to rein Israel in from launching– or even preparing for– the triggering attack against Iran.
But to what extent is this evaluation of the strategic realities shared by the Obama White House?
As Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett made clear in the excellent op-ed they published in Sunday’s NYT, the present administration has done almost nothing to follow up in practice on the president’s campaign-era promises to reach out in a serious way to Iran.
Secretary of State Clinton has done very little to back away from her campaign-era promises to “obliterate” Iran, and has chosen as her principal Iran-affairs adviser Dennis Ross, a clear hawk on Iranian affairs.
The Mann-Leveretts noted that Obama has meanwhile kept in place a well-funded (and Bush-initiated) program that seeks to overthrow the Iranian regime. As they note, keeping that program in place sends a powerful message to Iran’s rulers that “American intentions toward the Islamic Republic remain, ultimately, hostile.”
It also sends a powerful message to the Israeli government that their launching of a “triggering” military attack against Iran might actually be welcomed by all those in Washington– in the administration as well as in Congress– who continue to seek the overthrow of the Islamic republic by some variety of means.
Obama won the election last November; and before that he won the primary against Hillary Clinton. He won both races in good part because the American people supported his approach of making a sincere effort to de-escalate our country’s tensions with Iran, rather than the much more belligerent stances that both Clinton and McCain advocated towards Iran.
He won in good part because the American people are smart enough to see that a policy of belligerency, of hyping alleged threats, and blocking avenues for diplomatic de-escalation served our country very badly in Iraq– and can reliably be expected to be disastrous for our country if it is applied to Iran.
At this point, he needs to take actions through many different means to make sure that all parts of his administration are on the same page, giving clear backing to the stance of sincere diplomatic engagement with Iran that he outlined so eloquently and so correctly during the election campaign.
He needs to axe that destabilize-Iran program immediately.
And he needs to make absolutely clear to the Israeli government and its many remaining supporters in the US Congress, using a whole variety of both public and private means, that he judges that any Israeli military attack against Iran directly threatens our country’s interests, and that therefore he will do whatever it takes to ensure that Israel launches no such attack.
Americans should be quite clear: It is our forces and our interests, not Israel’s, that are on the front-line against Iran. We cannot continue to give Israel the extremely generous support it has had from Washington for the past 40-plus years if Israel takes a single action, at any level, that puts our country’s people at risk.
The Mann-Leveretts argue that “in all likelihood” it is already too late for Obama to correct his administrations policies toward Iran. I am not so pessimistic. But if he is to correct his stance that means taking action not only to correct Washington’s policies but also, equally importantly, to rein in an Israel that on this matter may have interests that are very different indeed than those of Americans.

Why Israel’s ‘natural growth’ claim is dishonest: Four reasons

In an interview with Al-Jazeera Tuesday, Secretary Clinton unequivocally called on Israel to halt all construction activity connected with its settlement project in the occupied West Bank.
She said,

First, we want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth – any kind of settlement activity. That is what the President has called for. We also are going to be pushing for a two-state solution…

In reporting this earlier today, Haaretz’s Natasha Mozgovaya also noted that when Israeli President Shimon Peres was in Washington earlier this month he discussed the possibility of getting a waiver from the US regarding “construction to accommodate natural growth in the settlements.”
The actual words she reported from Peres on this issue were, “These children are not going to live on the roofs.”
This whole “natural growth” argument is a dishonest canard, whether used by Peres or anyone else,for the following four reasons:

1. No settler children are going to be “living on the roofs.”

2. This excuse has been used– and abused– before.

3. Accommodating Jewish Israelis’ alleged “natural” growth claims is inequitable unless the Palestinians’ much more urgent needs for housing are on their way to being met.

4. Why think about “natural growth” at all if the peace agreement is, as we hope, due to be completed in timely fashion?

For the above four reasons, the Israeli argument about “natural growth” is nonsense.
Congratulations to Sec. Clinton and Pres. Obama for being quite clear on this issue.

Obama and Israel’s nukes

My IPS news analysis piece yesterday was on the Obama administration’s intriguing injection of Israel’s nuclear weapons into the global and regional diplomacy. It’s here (and here.)
The piece attempts to put Rose Gottemoeller’s fascinating statement, made to an NPT review gathering in New York on Tuesday, into the broader context of Obama’s return to stronger support for the NPT– and the ‘non-proliferation’ strategy it embodies. This, after eight (or 16?) years of US support for the much more unilateral approach of ‘counter-proliferation’.
In the article I failed to spell out, as I should have done, that Iran is a member of the NPT.
Gottemoeller said,

“Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea … remains a fundamental objective of the United States.”

I have been interested to note that some people have reacted to the statement by saying it was “no big deal.” This includes Joshua Pollack, writing Wednesday on the normally quite sensible Arms Control Wonk blog.
Pollack was reacting to this excellent piece of reporting in the Washington Times.
He notably made zero mention of this equally excellent piece of opinion writing, in the WT the same day, which was by Avner Cohen, who is the world’s best-informed expert on the facts about, and impact of, Israel’s nuclear arsenal. (Oh, he also happens to be Israeli.)
Cohen argued that the US’s 40-year-old policy of, essentially conniving in Israel’s protection of its nukes through the use of a robustly maintained policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” should be changed.
He writes there,

He also argued that the new policy could help make a negotiated approach to the Iranian nuclear question much more feasible– something he strongly supports.
Cohen’s recent piece in the Forward is also worth reading.
But the reason I found J. Pollack’s “no-big-deal” response to Gottemoeller’s statement so interesting is that this is exactly the tactic that Israeli hawks and their friends frequently use to “bury” news that they find disquieting. (This goes right back to Ze’ev Schiff’s early responses to Mordechai Vanunu’s revelations, back in 1986.)
Pollack’s argumentation is certainly all over the place. He quotes, with glowing approval, some comments that George Perkovich reportedly made (PDF) at a recent conference on nonproliferation.
Perko had said:

I also think it’s not constructive to kind of like call out and talk about Israel as having nuclear weapons and that, you know, people ought to come clean and so on…

He also said,

How would we create a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East? And you invite all of the states in the region, and you have the little placards there for Iran, for Saudi Arabia, so on and so forth – and Israel. And I guarantee you, Israel will show up and other seats will be empty…

This is dangerous and misleading nonsense. Even in present circumstances, if you convened a conference dedicated to the creation of a zone free of all WMDs in the Middle East, you would certainly get Egypt and Jordan prepared to turn up and commit themselves to the goal alongside Israel.
Yes, it’s true that Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t currently have diplomatic relations with Israel; but there are plenty of diplomatic contexts in which their representatives do sit down alongside those of Israel to discuss disarmament-related issues, and it’s perfectly possible to imagine a way the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament or some other UN-linked body could convene a gathering at which all the Muslim Middle East states would agree to sit down with Israel to discuss actions toward this important goal.
I suspect it would be Israel that would not sit down there, if it is made plain in advance that everyone’s nuclear weapons capabilities will certainly be on the agenda.
Why does Perkovich make such a silly and mendacious claim?
… Anyway, while J. Pollack was trying to argue that Gottemoeller’s statement was no big deal, Ha’aretz’s Aluf Benn and Barak Ravid were writing that the content of the statement– and the fact it had not been “coordinated with Israeli officials” in advance– was being understood by people in Israel’s political elite as signaling a big change from the lovey-dovey-ness Israeli governments have enjoyed with the White House under George W. Bush.
Good.

White House (still) guiding Middle East policy

After George Mitchell’s appointment as Israeli-Arab peace envoy was announced January 22, I noted (also here) that the way it had happened indicated he would be reporting to both the president and the secretary of state.
When Mitchell returned from his first “listening visit” to the region, he made his report-back primarily to the prez.
Early this morning, Laura Rozen had a blog post in which she demonstrated the degree to which the Obama White House is continuing to keep its hands firmly on the conduct of Israeli-Arab diplomacy.
She writes this, about the meeting Israeli prez Shimon Peres had at the White House yesterday:

Higher up in her post, Rozen had zeroed in on the fact that, though Clinton was not at the White House meeting, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and political adviser, David Axelrod, were.
She writes this– again, liberally quoting Steve Cohen, largely as a kind of inside-the-shtetl story:

Emanuel and Axelrod are two high-level Jewish members of Obama’s administration; they have been increasingly enlisted in recent weeks to build support within the Jewish-American community for a two-state solution in the face of resistance from the new Netanyahu government…

I don’t see it exactly the same way. Yes, there is clearly an inside-the-shtetl aspect to it. But the importance of these two men– Emanuel and Axelrod– is far greater than just their Jewish credentials. They are the president’s two leading political advisers and operatives. If he is gearing up for a Bush(1)/Baker style of confrontation with a Likud government in Israel, he will need to be planning a strategy that covers all the domestic political bases, not just the Jewish one. (And at this point, probably a larger proportion of evangelical Christians would be prepared to fight hard for this government of Israel than the proportion of Jewish Americans who would be so inclined.)
So from this perspective, it is probably a good thing that these two very savvy (and perhaps only coincidentally Jewish) political operatives were in the room. Especially at the exact same time that AIPAC has been flooding the offices of members of congress with citizen-lobbyists arguing that the US must let Israel completely dictate the pace of any moves towards peace.
Because of the extreme permeability of the US political system– especially at the level of members of the House of Representatives– to the influence of pro-Israelis (whether Jewish or not), any US policy that affects Israel is never simply a matter of “foreign” policy. For the president to succeed, he has to be able to use his own immense powers of persuasion not just on the foreign leaders and publics concerned– but also on his own public and congress.
Over the next couple of weeks, Obama will be receiving Israel’s Netanyahu, Egypt’s Mubarak, and Ramallastan’s Abbas in the White House. Sometime soon after that, he is expected to come out with some more definitive policy initiatives. That is when we need to see Obama using his “bully pulpit” of presidential influence– and using it domestically, as well as internationally.

Another Scary Terror Report

The new annual State Department Report on Terrorism is out. It’s primarily the same as last year’s report. You were expecting changes maybe?
Here are the lead paragraphs from last year. . .

AL-QA’IDA AND ASSOCIATED TRENDS: Al-Qa’ida (AQ) and associated networks remained the greatest terrorist threat to the United States and its partners in 2007. It has reconstituted some of its pre-9/11 operational capabilities through the exploitation of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), replacement of captured or killed operational lieutenants, and the restoration of some central control by its top leadership, in particular Ayman al-Zawahiri. Although Usama bin Ladin remained the group’s ideological figurehead, Zawahiri has emerged as AQ’s strategic and operational planner.

. . .and this year.

AL-QA’IDA AND ASSOCIATED TRENDS: Al-Qa’ida (AQ) and associated networks continued to lose ground, both structurally and in the court of world public opinion, but remained the greatest terrorist threat to the United States and its partners in 2008. AQ has reconstituted some of its pre-9/11 operational capabilities through the exploitation of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the replacement of captured or killed operational lieutenants, and the restoration of some central control by its top leadership, in particular Ayman al-Zawahiri. Worldwide efforts to counter terrorist financing have resulted in AQ appealing for money in its last few messages.

Same old stuff.

Continue reading “Another Scary Terror Report”

Obama opens timid discussion with Congress on Hamas

The Obama administration has launched a tiny first discussion with Congress over the issue of dealing with Hamas. Administration officials did this, according to this piece in Monday’s LA Times by Paul Richter,by seeking a change in existing legislation that forbids the US from giving aid to any PA government that contains Hamas members.
Richter writes:

This tracks, by the way, with other information I have received, that the administration is still sticking exactly to the “three conditions” defined by the US and its allies/satraps in the so-called “Quartet”, immediately after Hamas won the PA elections in 2006.
Richter quotes Nathan Brown, a prof at George Washington University, as describing the administration’s request as “gutsy.” I don’t think it’s gutsy. Gutsy would be to come out and say the US respects the results of the 2006 election and intends to explore all possible ways of working with the duly elected Palestinian government– just as it works with the duly elected government in Israel that contains some extremely rightwing figures and is headed by people who are much more opposed to a two-state solution than is Hamas.
I do think the administration’s move is a tiny and realistic move in the right direction.
Realistic, because without making some move like this the US could pretty rapidly find it has dealt itself out of having any real influence at all in the Palestinian political sphere.
As it is, the portion of US aid that goes into the PA’s budget is already, I think, much smaller than the EU’s aid. (And I see that Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi has been in Ramallastan and Israel recently.)
Plus, as I have noted elsewhere, the net effect of all of the US-mobilized aid that’s been poured into Ramallastan in recent years has been to further feed the culture of clientilism and corruption that has become rampant in the Fateh-controlled (Ramallah) wing of the PA, and thus to hasten the internal disintegration of Fateh and its secular allies.
With all that US-mobilized money that has been poured into Ramallah since 2006, Hamas’s popularity in the West Bank has only been rising, and now easily tops that of Fateh!
(Bottom line: It’s not the aid itself that wins influence. Aid when allied to correct policies would have a much better chance of doing so.)
…Anyway, inside Washington, the administration’s move sparked exactly the kind of knee-jerk response you could expect from some heavily AIPAC-influenced members of congress.
Richter reports,

What’s notable to me, though, is the absence of any knee-jerk condemnation, up to this point, coming from anyone with any real clout in congress. (Schiff is the congressman from one of the LA Times’ home constituencies, and was quoted for that reason rather than because he has any huge clout in congress.)
Officials in Israel were described in this Haaretz piece as “surprised” by the Obama administration’s move– and also, of course, opposed to it.
The pro-Hamas PIC website somewhat over-interpreted the move.
Regarding the possibility of progress in the long-drawn-out intra-Palestinian reconciliation process, the PIC website has this fairly detailed report, published under the title “Hamas: The fourth dialog round made slight progress and will resume next month.”
It included this:

Anyway, let’s see what happens between now and May 16.