US foreign policy – Page 11 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

How to Prevent War at the Strait of Hormuz

R.K. Ramazani weighs in with an essay on how to prevent military incidents at the Strait of Hormuz from catalyzing war between Iran and the United States. Ramazani, known widely as “the Dean of Iran Foreign Policy Studies,” quite literally “wrote the book” on this subject, The Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. What he wrote on the eve of the Iranian revolution remains a compelling read.
In his current essay, Ramazani, an Emeritus University of Virginia Professor of Government & Foreign Affairs, sets out the stakes and his key argument.:

“The recent naval encounter between the US and Iran extended their cold war for the first time to the strategic Strait of Hormuz. Such incidents could escalate into armed conflict, with catastrophic consequences for the world economy, especially the price of oil. To prevent such escalation, Washington and Tehran should establish a “hot line” and an Incident-at-Sea agreement as Washington and Moscow did during the Cold War.”

The need for such a de-conflict mechanism (a regular theme here at jwn) was amply demonstrated by Bush Administration rhetoric:

“… instead of calming down the situation and seeking a creative way of preventing such encounters from escalating into confrontation in the future, the Bush administration increased tensions by exaggerating the episode as if it were a real crisis.
President Bush depicted the maneuver of the Iranian speed boats as “a provocative act,” linked it to America’s dispute with Iran over the nuclear issue, and declared that Iran was, is and continues to be a threat if it is “allowed to learn how to enrich uranium.” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates categorically dismissed the view that the Iranian sailors had behaved in a fully proper manner, and the State Department formally protested the actions of the Iranian patrol boats. “

The Republican Presidential candidates, Ron Paul notably excepted, were besides themselves with fevered war talk. While evidence is emerging that the Administration consciously “embellished,” if not blatantly fabricated key aspects of the incident, Ramazani focuses on the strategic context and the need for caution:

“Such hyperbolic charges reveal a dismal lack of understanding of Iran’s unmatched geo-strategic position at the Strait, and of the conception held by the Iranian leaders about the Strait’s security in times of peace and war. Recognizing Iran’s vital interest in the Strait is a crucial first step to establishing a hot line between Washington and Tehran.
Geo-strategically, the narrow and shallow Strait of Hormuz constitutes, as I coined it in 1979, the world’s “global chokepoint.” Oil tankers carrying Gulf oil exports must pass through the Strait before traversing the Bab al-Mandab and Suez Canal waterways to the Eastern Mediterranean or the sea lanes of the Strait of Malacca in the Pacific Ocean.
As the dominant Persian Gulf power at this “chokepoint,” Iran stands as the “global gatekeeper” for world oil markets. Iran’s territorial water abuts the entire eastern shore of the Strait, and numerous Iranian islands dot the sea lanes of the Strait. “

Some financial analysts last summer lamely tried to downplay the significance of the Strait of Hormuz today, claiming that the US could withstand oil shocks were a hot war in the Gulf break out. One remembers the argument that invading Iraq would be a “self-funding” war.
Such “optimism” avoids a sober look at just how much oil transits the Strait of Hormuz. Consider figures from the US Government’s Energy Information Agency. According to the EIA, “oil flows through the Straits of Hormuz account for roughly two-fifths of all global crude oil and petroleum product tanker shipments.”
That is, 40% of the world’s oil traffic by sea must first pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Various alternate pipelines across Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula, even if they could accommodate extra traffic and be kept open in time of conflict, cannot possibly take up the 17 million barrels per day presently exiting via the Hormuz Strait. Never mind the analysts, the oil traders know better: the very talk of military clashes in Hormuz sent oil futures spirally up another 10%.
Yet in this regard, Iran and the world community have a shared set of interests. The world needs the oil; Iran needs to export it. Any Iranian leader, of any political stripe, would agree — with one caveat:

“Iran considers the safe passage of all ships through the international waters of the Strait as inseparable from its vital interest in the security of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s oil, the backbone of its economy, needs to be exported through the Strait. Ideologically Iranian policy makers view the Strait as a “divine blessing” and strategically they see it as Iran’s “key asset” in any “defensive war.”
Tehran is committed to the right of transit passage for all ships through the Strait. Yet any prolonged obstruction of Iran’s oil exports by perceived enemies such as the United States could prompt Iran to retaliate by blocking the Strait. This guiding principle was set by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the Iraq-Iran war. He warned that if Iran’s oil exports through the Strait were interrupted by hostile acts, Iran would prevent “the passage of a single drop of petroleum from there” to world markets.
Hojatolislam Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Iranian parliament during the Iraq-Iran war, considered “such an eventuality unlikely.” But he warned those Americans who doubted Iran’s capability that Iran could effectively close the Strait by creating “a wall of fire” over it, firing its guns from Qeshm and Lark islands near the Strait, and launching air-to-sea missiles from planes, and from underground depots.”

In other words, if Iran can’t export its oil, it would retaliate by attempting to prevent all exports from passing through its front yard. In short, as Iran sees it, oil exports through the Strait should be safe for all, or safe for none.

Continue reading “How to Prevent War at the Strait of Hormuz”

More on ‘Filipino Monkey’, need for hotline

The reporters Andrew Scutro and David Brown– writing for the Navy Times, no less– delved into some of the questions I raised here about who in the Navy decided to super-impose a separate audio onto the video of the Iranian patrol boats that was released last Tuesday, and why.
Well, the “why” of it anyway. They quote Chief of Naval Operations (i.e. the US’s highest-ranking naval officer) Adm. Gary Roughead as saying:

“The reason there is audio superimposed over the video is it gives you a better idea of what is happening.”

However, he gave that answer in response to this question:

When asked if U.S. officials considered whether the threats came from someone besides the Iranians when releasing the video and audio, Roughead said…

And that question never really did get answered…
But anyway, Roughead, like Bob Gates last week, was clearly supporting the decision to juxtapose the two separate tracks in the presentation released Tuesday.
Scutro & Brown’s article contains lots of quotes from U.S. Navy officers who have served in the Gulf that illustrate just how wide-open and insecure the existing radio channels of communication are. They therefore also illustrate how urgent it is to establish a secure, dedicated hot-line between the militaries of, in particular, the US and Iran.
They officers quoted make many references to a frequent radio-channel user who openly calls himself “Filipino Monkey”– which is, some of them say, a phrase used worldwide to denote someone who uses radio channels for unnecessary chatter. Scutro & Brown quote the spokeswoman for the 5th fleet in Bahrain as saying of the (threatening-sounding) audio transmissions used in the video compilation as released,

“We don’t know for sure where they came from… It could have been a shore station.”

Anyway, good work, so far from the Navy Times, which is owned by Gannett, which is owned by McClatchy.
What would be even better would be if they– and other key opninion-shapers in the US– would start to agitate forcefully and openly for the establishment of hotlines and other robust deconfliction mechanisms in the Gulf. That need is still great, as evidence by the statement Israeli PM Olmert made yesterday, warning that even after his recent talks with Pres. Bush, “all options remain open” with regard to Iran’s nuclear program.
That is quite clear diplomatese for saying Israel may well still go ahead and bomb Iran’s nuclear installations or launch some other form of military attack against Iran.
Israel might do that itself, directly. Though Israeli planes would still need, at the very least, to have coordination with US military air-controllers if they want to reach Iran in one piece– and even more so, to reach home safely again afterwards. And anyway, if Israel did inflict a significant military strike on Iran, no-one in Iran including the highest leaders would believe that Israel had done this without US connivance. More especially so after GWB himself said he personally doesn’t really believe the December NIE.
Or, Israel might hope to have Iran attacked more effectively and more economically– from their standpoint– by sparking some form of provocation in the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf that, in the absence of secure communications between the US and Iranian navies, could rapidly jack-knife the whole region into the hell of an outright US-Iranian war.
Something that the professional militaries of neither country want. And neither do the great majority of the US (or Iranian) peoples.
Does George Bush understand the danger of these scenarios? Perhaps that is the scariest question of all to contemplate.

Rhetorical high points of Bush’s ME trip

The speech
that George W. Bush gave in Abu Dhabi January 13 was important
because it was the most authoritative articulation to date of the
content of what the president and his officials have described as their
“freedom agenda” in the Middle East. It goes quite a lot
further than any previous presentation given by the President himself.
in spelling out what the Bushites mean by their term “freedom
agenda”, which is currently the main narrative through
which they interpret developments in the Middle East, and which they
are also trying to promulgate among (or impose on) the peoles of the
region themselves.

The Abu Dhabi speech is titled Fostering
Freedom And Justice In The Middle East. The version on
the White House, linked to above, includes a couple of explanatory
sentences at the top along with what appears to be the text that he
actually delivered, and it is hard to see where the main text actually
starts. But here is how the first graf ends:

The President spoke
about the great new era that is unfolding, founded on the equality of
all people before God. This new era offers hope for the millions
across the Middle East who seek a future of peace, progress, and
opportunity. Unfortunately, these aspirations for liberty and
justice
are being threatened by extremists who murder the innocent in pursuit
of power.

That, in a nutshell, is Bush’s argument. Interesting to see his use of
the phrase “liberty and justice” there, isn’t it? It is taken
directly from the U.S. Constitution [update: oops! the US “Pledge of Allegiance”, thanks Vadim!]— and was a big theme of our
conference there in Beirut last week. But the phrase was abused
in truly Orwellian fashion in Bush’s speech. (And no, I don’t think he
was using it with any ironic intent. I’m not sure the guy even
knows what irony is.)

He then proceeds through the following topics, presented as subheads in
the posted text:

Extremists Are Fomenting Instability In The Middle East
The Desire For Freedom And Justice Is The Greatest Weapon In The
Fight Against Violent Extremists
America Is Using Its Influence To Foster Peace And Reconciliation
In The Holy Land

Well, I largely agree with the first two of these arguments– though
I disagree strongly with Bush’s identification of who the violent,
instability-fostering extremists are.

Continue reading “Rhetorical high points of Bush’s ME trip”

“Tonkin”-type escalation averted in Persian Gulf? Hearings?

The agility of the Iranian government’s information capabilities has protected the US from what could well be an attempt by some moles deep within the Pentagon to jerk our country into a broad and extremely damaging military conflagration with Iran. Now– as during that the worryingly similar Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964– the US Congress needs to react.
But this time Congress’s reaction should be of a very different kind. It should swiftly launch a thorough-going investigation into who in the Pentagon was responsible for producing and authenticating the very harmful (and quite possible knowingly misleading) video of the recent Persian Gulf incident that the Pentagon disseminated last Tuesday.
And it should ensure that secure communications channels are established between the US and Iranian naval forces operating in the Gulf, to prevent unintended escalations between the two forces as they maneuver in the Gulf’s tight confines.
Back in the 1964, US Pres. Lyndon Johnson claimed that Vietnamese naval ships had attacked US navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. A congressional resolution followed that gave permission for a considerable escalation of US military power against Vietnam. By the time the falsity of the original claims had been discovered, it was far, far too late.
This week, some officials somewhere in the US military chain of command– it is unclear exactly where– reported that on Sun., Jan. 6, Iranian patrol boats, operating off the coast of their own country there in the Persian Gulf, had been streaming towards US naval vessels operating there (thousands of miles away from the US), and that a voice on the commonly used CB-type radio channel through which the commanders of ships operating in the Gulf’s tight confines communicate had warned: “I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes.”
On Tuesday, shortly before he left on his current tour of Mideast countries, Pres. G.W. Bush blamed Tehran for for having acted provocatively, as he prepared to take his warning that “Iran is a threat” in person, to Israel and the US’s Arab allies.
Here’s AFP from Washington, on Tuesday:

But now, reports are proliferating that that the Pentagon video may well have been doctored, or for other reasons may not have been what it seemed.
Mike Nizza has an excellent round-up of the affair, here.
One crucial piece of evidence in all this is a video that Iran’s own PressTV media organization released, and posted on its website, which purported to be original video shot by an officer on one of the patrol boats. I’m not on a fast internet connection here so can’t view it all. Nizza writes:

The clip is a bit over 5 minutes long. The first few minutes are views of coalition warships shot from smaller boats (if you thought the motorboats seemed to be moving fast in the American video, wait until you see the bow waves on the warships). In the latter portion, we see an Iranian on the boat using a microphone handset to hail “coalition warship 73″ by radio, in fairly clear but accented English, and we hear responses in an American voice…

He also refers to an NYT paper-edition article by Nazila Fathi from Tehran, in which Fathi contributes her own significant remark about the Pentagon’s video that

the recording carries no ambient noise

She also writes– though this may have been reported by Thom Shanker from Washington– that,

Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby,

Sadly, those Pentagon officials remain unidentified. The “official” view from the Pentagon, including from Secdef Robert Gates, remains that the video their people had released on Tuesday was the real thing.
This section of that report was interesting:

the video and audio were recorded separately, then combined.

still trying to determine if the transmission came from the speedboats or elsewhere.

So many things are going on here!
The video and audio were “recorded separately”? Huh? And then, un-named Pentagon officials speaking on background say they’re not sure if the threats as originally reported had even come from the people on the patrol boats, but may have come from elsewhere?
Nizza’s blog post gives some useful background about how access to the CB channel in question, Ch.16, is extremely random, and what gets transmitted on it includes lots of very trivial, entertainment-style or name-calling noise. I’ll note that I’ve been calling for a long time now for a secure, dedicated military-to-military hot-line between the US and Iranian naval commanders in the Gulf, which could certainly help avert the possibility of any malignant (or even just “jokingly” irresponsible) third party being able to jerk the two navies into the broad military conflagration that– I still think– neither of them wants.
I still believe that the US military high command, up to and including Centcom commander Adm. William Fallon, and probably also the overall military leader, Joint Chiers Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, is strongly opposed to any escalation against Iran, which would almost certainly push the already unsustainably overstretched US military into a quite un-“winnable” war with Iran. So I am really not sure why Secdef Gates, who has also gone on the record urging a risk-averse stance towards Iran, was so definitive in telling a press conference yesterday that, “I have no question whatsoever about the [original] report on this incident from the captains of the ships and also from the video itself.”
We all, certainly, need to know what’s been going on inside the Pentagon itself on this issue. Which office there was it, precisely, that was responsible for releasing the original video? If the audio and video on it were indeed recorded separately, who was responsible for combining them in the way they were combined? I’m thinking that if some “joker” somewhere did voice this threat into Channel 16, then someone combining that with some video footage from the theater would already have a potentially wide variety of video clips to choose from… So why choose this one?
Also, is the audio portion of that feed actually time-stamped to be synchronous with the video portion of it?
Also, if you are running a video camera to record this incident– not unusually, since apparently both sides were already doing it– then why not run the audio associated with that actual video feed?
Also, who in the chain of command signed off on the “authenticity” of the compiled audio/video and authorized its dissemination?
Also, more importantly, it looks as if there are some offices in the Pentagon that may well be complicit in an effort to jerk the US into a conflagration with Iran. Who are they? When will the Pentagon identify them for the US citizenry?
We urgently need congressional hearings into this whole incident, so we can be confident that there are not moles inside our own military who would jerk our country into a disastrous war. The whole incident needs to be investigated rapidly and completely– and certainly not just within the Pentagon itself.
As a final note, I just want to underline the hugely increased role that “information engagement” plays in today’s military encounters or proto-encounters. The fact that the Iranians had recorded, and have been able to disseminate, their own video version of this same encounter changes things completely from the version Bush proclaimed on Tuesday. (And I don’t recall that back on Tuesday or Wednesday anyone was questioning the authenticity or integrity of that original Pentagon video. It was only after the Iranians started challenging it and distributed their own video record of the incident that questions started arising about the US version?)
This equalization of the international “information battlefield” between the stronger powers and the weaker powers in the world is a phenomenon that is deeply transforming the nature of warfare in the present age.
In Lebanon in 2006, Hizbullah was able to (a) safeguard the integrity of its own communications and means of near real-time dissemination of information, while also (b) hacking in some instances into the IDF’s communications. Those capabilities were an important component of Hizbullah’s survival through that long and punishing war, and therefore of their victory in it. (Even though they were weakened in several important respects by it, Israel’s strategic position was weakened even more.)
So this week, we have not had a Gulf of Tonkin incident. Thank God!!! What we should have, though, is another kind of congressional follow-up to this alarming incident: a formal enquiry into the whole story about the provenance and dissemination of the Penatgon’s Tuesday video. And legislation mandating the creation of a secure hot-line between the US and Iran.

Bush in Middle East: Region underwhelmed/ aghast

President Bush’s determination to leave Washington tomorrow for a week-long overseas trip looks strangely evocative of Nixon’s disaster-plagued last year in office. The lucky hosts of Bush on his out-of-DC wanderings will be Israel (twice), Palestine (very briefly), Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
McClatchy’s Warren Strobel notes accurately that

Bush, who once had grand ambitions to transform the Middle East through democratic reform, is to begin his first extended presidential visit to the region Tuesday with his sights lowered and his ability to influence events fading fast.

I would say that’s already a under-statement. In fact, I’ve been wondering how the decisionmaking on planning this trip was undertaken. Did the leaders of all these countries transmit warm and hearty invitations to the US President that he couldn’t turn down?
Or, did Washington propose these visits, and the Arab rulers involved found they had no way to squirm out of their duties as US satraps in the region?
Somehow, I doubt if it was the former train of events that occurred… Regarding Palestine, Xinhua has this interesting little round-up of the reactions of the various movements to Bush’s visit. The reporter there quotes high-level Fateh legislator Abdullah Abdullah as being decidedly lukewarm about the visit– while the Hamas and Islamic Jihad spokespeople are, quite predictably, scathing in the extreme.
Only Israel’s Ehud Olmert– who is still eager to distract attention from the imminent publication of the (most likely politically problematic) second part of the Winograd Report– can be expected to be warm toward the idea of hosting this particular guest. For all the other hosting leaders, Bush’s presence will most likely be viewed as something between a political embarrassment and the cause of a decidedly unwelcome additional security threat to themselves. Al-Qaeda has, after all, openly called on its supporters in the Muslim world to meet Bush’s visit with “bombs and booby-trapped vehicles.”
Not quite what the domestically unpopular and already hard-pressed rulers in Egypt and Jordan need at this time…
Regarding the political embarrassment for all these leaders, of having these visits serve to remind their citizens yet again of the these regimes’ close ties with George Bush’s Washington, the best way to gauge this will be to look for the amount and quality of media coverage that the government-influenced media in these countries give to Bush visit. My prediction is that most of them will try to cut such coverage down to a bare minimum. But let’s see…

Lobe on NIE-sparked fissures in Neocon Central

Jim Lobe, who has brought his expert eye to the art of watching official Washington for many years now, has an excellent entry on his blog titled Key Neo-Cons Giving Up on Iran Attack? He notes that last week’s publication of the ground-breaking NIE that concluded that Iran stopped pursuit of its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 has caused two key leaders of the neocon movement to (1) conclude that it is now unlikely that calls for the GWB administration to attack Iran are unlikely to succeed, and (2) recognize, however grudgingly, that talking to Iran may well be the best thing left to do.
The two are Robert (“father of all the Kagans”) Kagan and Bill Kristol.
You should read and bookmark all of Lobe’s post there– especially since he has hyperlinks to all the key texts he refers to.
He writes that, apart from R. Kagan and Kristol, other key members of Neocon Central (i.e., the “Project for a New American Century”) such as N. Podhoretz, R. Perle, F. Gaffney, and the ever-delusional Danielle Pletka have refused to give any similar nod to reality and have been going around virtually accusing the NIE’s authors of “deliberate deception.” (I heard Pletka doing this on a BBC News program just a couple of evenings ago. I can’t imagine why they would think it worthwhile to give her crazy views any air-time?)
Lobe notes that this division of R. Kagan and Kristol vs. the rest is the same as the way these same people divided when Sharon broke with Netanyahu back in 2004 over the unilateral disengagement from Gaza and the creation of Kadima. (Israel’s rightwing politics is a key touchstone for all of them, you should understand.)
Lobe writes that R. Kagan’s position has been echoed in recent days by two other notable neocon acolytes: Mort Kondracke and the British neo-imperial writer Niall Ferguson.
So there are two more great services that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did for humanity when they published last week’s report. Not only did they reduce the probability of a Bush administration military attack on Iran by a considerable degree, but they also (1) added considerable new ballast to the weight of those calling for “grand bargain”-type talks with Iran, and (2) they caused apparent chaos and confusion in the neocons’ ranks.
Thank you, thank you, the professionals of ODNI.

Annals of imperial contraction: Aden, 1967

I’m a few days late, but November 30 was the 40th anniversary of the final withdrawal of British forces and power from Aden, now part of a unified Yemeni Arab Republic. That withdrawal was the key step in the dismantling of Britain’s permanent military (naval) presence “East of Suez”, a development whose inevitability became a lot clearer to Brits and others after the strategic failure of the British-French (-Israeli) “over-reach” assault against Egypt 11 years earlier.
The BBC website has an interesting account by veteran reporter Brian Barron of a repeat visit he recently made to Aden, and his reflections on the 1967 withdrawal which he had covered as a much younger journo.
He tells us a revealing anecdote about standing in Aden’s Crater District in 1967 with the notoriously bloody British “counter-insurgency” specialist Col. Colin (“Mad Mitch”) Mitchell, watching as some of the soldiers under Mitchell’s command were…

stacking, as in a butcher’s shop, the bodies of four Arab militants they had just shot and Mad Mitch said: “It was like shooting grouse, a brace here and a brace there.”

(I wonder: Did Barron report it in that straightforward way at the time, or did he conveniently glide right over that articulation of Mitchell’s brutal mindset?)
Americans, I have found, are a people with not much appreciation for anyone’s history– but especially not for the history of peoples far distant from and perceived as different from themselves. Thus, you have the scenario repeated over and over and over again of eager, fresh-eyed and well-meaning US citizens rushing overseas to work on often well-intentioned projects to bring “modernization”, or “good governance”, or “universal [= western] judicial norms” or whatever to those distant peoples. They seem to imagine that those other societies are a tabula rasa on which American/”western” norms and practices can simply be inscribed. There is little or no appreciation that people in Africa or Asia or the Middle East have seen nearly all of this before. They have seen white westerners come in, protected by the force of heavy arms or other appurtenances of hard power, and proclaiming all kinds of “humanitarian” but often extremely myopic and self-referential projects. They have seen all those phalanxes of young white idealists come in and try to impose their own societies’ norms and projects on indigenous people many years more experienced and wiser than themselves. They have seen the horrendous damage those interventions ended up causing.
Barron’s latest reflection on the British retreat from Aden makes a few unnecessarily chauvinistic points. For example, he refers to “the old Anglican Church [which] is no longer the secret police interrogation centre it became following the British retreat”, but no reference at all to the interrogation centers where Mitchell and his predecessors over the preceding 130 years of British occupation of Aden did all their ghastly work.
Barron concludes with this reflection:

I find this story-line intriguing. In the first two paras there is some realism and self-awareness. In the third there is some anti-Soviet finger-pointing, which also introduces the justifiability of some kind of an “apres nous la deluge” view of the end of empire. And that view is strengthened and underlined with the last para. Now that the British are no longer in Aden, according to Barron it has slipped out of history: “a forgotten place anchored to a forgotten time.”
Well, maybe Aden has been (fairly conveniently) “forgotten” by many Brits. But how on earth can anyone say it has been “forgotten” by the 800,000 people who live there, or the 21.5 million people in the rest of Yemen? Do they not count as people whose forgetting or remembering we should take into account?
Indeed, the history of Aden is an important one in the anti-colonial narratives of the Middle East and far beyond. The peoples of the Middle East have never forgotten those narratives. Very few Americans, however, have any idea that they even exist.

My CSM op-ed on post-Annapolis diplomacy

Today’s Christian Science Monitor carries the op-ed I wrote (last Friday morning) about the post-Annapolis diplomacy. The title is For Mideast peace, think bigger; Regional stability involves more than the Israelis and Palestinians. You can also find it here.
Specifically, I call in the piece for:

Regarding the Syrian-Israeli track– an issue I have worked on a lot over the years, in addition to my work on Palestinian-Israeli issues– I give three reasons why it is important to pay attention to that track, as well as the Palestinian one.
Regarding the international dimension, even as I was writing the piece Friday morning, US Ambassador to the UN Zal Khalilzad was being forced humiliatingly to withdraw the text of a Security Council resolution he had proposed the night before, that would have expressed the SC’s “support” for the Annapolis process. That was a strong indication that the (anti-UN, anti-Syrian) hardliners in Dick Cheney’s office were muscling in on the decisionmaking in Washington and showing their willingness to ride roughshod over the decisions and strategies adopted by Secretary of State Rice and her people, of whom Khalilzad is one.
Not good news, to say the least.
Another very worrying indicator is that ever since Olmert and Abbas had their final photo-op at the White House Wednesday, Bush himself has done little or nothing to sustain the pro-peace momentum created by the Annapolis confab. I was really shocked, for example, to see that his weekly radio address Saturday made zero mention of it. That is unconscionable!
If I were Condi, I would resign. But I shan’t be holding my breath for that. After all, one of her main mentors was that perennial “good soldier” Colin Powell…
In this JWN post that I wrote on the day of Annapolis itself (11/27), I wrote: “with the broad turnout [Bush] succeeded mainly in creating extra pressure on his own administration to perform effectively in the diplomacy started in Annapolis. All those invitees are all now, to one degree or another, invested in the process… ” I also speculated that the time might well soon come when the other members of the “Quartet”, who at Annapolis itself were consigned to the role merely of a praise-singing Greek Chorus, would seek a much more active role for themselves in the diplomacy.
Those other three Quartet members are : Russia, the EU, and the UN.
Russia– where President Putin won a strong victory in yesterday’s referendum– is planning to host the next substantive political follow-up to the Annapolis confab, in Moscow, early next year. That important Nov. 29 news report from Robin Wright and Michael Abramowitz notes that the Syrians and Russians are hoping to revive the Syrian-Israeli track at that meeting. (Note also, this report on the growing Russian role, from Haaretz’s Ben Caspit.)
In Washington, Cheney and the neocon ultras who surround him– and also Elliott Abrams– are known to be particularly hostile to any move that might loosen the isolation in which they want to keep both Syria and Iran trapped. (Remember that in the iconic neocon document on the Middle East, “A Clean Break” (1996), Syria was defined as the central target.)
Regarding the Annapolis and post-Annapolis peace diplomacy in general, I was extremely skeptical during the lead-up that the gathering there would be anything more than a content-free photo op. And indeed, I still entertain the strong concern that that may, indeed, be what George Bush and his vice-president still want Annapolis to be.
However, the breadth of the participation in Annapolis caught my attention and fascinated me. It really did a lot to reframe “Annapolis” as being the very last chance Washington has to make good on 33 unbroken years of promises that Washington, and Washington alone, is the power capable of brokering a sustainable Israeli-Arab peace.
In my CSM piece, I noted that,

All major world powers today have large stakes in the [Arab-Israeli] region. They need the peacemaking to succeed. If Bush’s current peace gamble fails, that will seriously dent America’s power and standing around the whole world.

Of course, Washington’s international standing has already been dented very seriously indeed by its fatal strategic over-reach in Iraq. But a widely watched and understood demonstration of its failure to “deliver” on Israeli-Arab peace would certainly continue that process.
The world’s non-US powers are meanwhile in something of a bind. They need the Middle East not to erupt into any further chaos and bloodshed. They need a successful and sustainable settlement of all strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict. They are not, in any conceivable combination, capable of achieving this on their own, without the cooperation of the US. But the US refuses to cooperate with them and continues, arrogantly, to arrogate to itself the “right” to monopolize the post-Annapolis diplomacy. (As spelled out in the final para of the “Joint Understanding” reached by Israel and the PA at Annapolis.)
In my op-ed, I concluded by writing: “The stakes could not be higher. The world watches, and hopes.” Perhaps I should have added that if those hopes are rebuffed, then the non-US powers will most likely soon start planning their own alternative approach.

Sadat and Saudis tried to prop up failing Nixon?

Yet more from the Nixon tapes, which will prove to be, I think, a huge treasure trove. (The Nixon Archives link to the new releases is here.) The WaPo’s Walter Pincus evidently spent time poring over them yesterday and came up with a cable to Kissinger from then-US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Jim Akins (mis-spelled by Pincus as Adkins) describing a “secret” letter Pres. Sadat wrote to King Faisal in January 1974 saying that Nixon

“could easily be impeached” and that “Arabs must do everything they can to strengthen” Nixon…

Well, the letter was supposed to be “secret”, but Akins reported that a “senior Saudi official” had read it out to him…
That was in the middle of the post-1973 War oil boycott. Pincus continues:

“The one thing they could do which would be most effective,” Sadat wrote Faisal, “would be to assure the president that the [oil] boycott would be lifted as soon as disengagement [with Israel forces] could be accomplished.” Kissinger traveled to the Middle East in February 1974, and the boycott was lifted the following month.

The linking of the termination of the oil boycott with the Israeli-Egyptian disengagement agreement has always been well understood. A motivation on the behalf of at least some of the Arabs to do this to “save” Nixon seems new to me, though perhaps not to others. It is also quite possible that that the oil-exporting states needed to end the boycott for their own reasons, as well. (And that the US needed to get the disengagement for its own reasons, too.)

Condi’s conversion, Bush, etc

Two fascinating pieces in today’s NYT.
This one by Elisabeth Bumiller chronicles Condi rice’s conversion from being a big Israeli-Arab negotio-skeptic to now being the cheerleader for Bush’s extremely belated venture into peacemaking there.
After describing how derisive both Bush and Rice were back in 2001 of the whole idea of the US having an active role in israeli-Palestinian mediating, Bumiller wrote,

When Ms. Rice became secretary of state in the second term, she told Mr. Bush in a long conversation at Camp David the weekend after the 2004 election that her priority would have to be progress in the Middle East. It was a turning point in more ways than one; Mr. Arafat died a few days later. Although Ms. Rice said in an interview that she had set no conditions when she took the job, her aides said that she had known that her relationship with the president would give her far greater influence to push an agenda, including peacemaking in the Middle East, than Mr. Powell’s…

Her first two major judgment calls in the Palestinian arena showed mainly her lack of ability to judge it. Those were (1) the active support she gave to Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and (2) the active support she gave to the Palestinian elections of January 2006. In the first case, the fact that the Israeli withdrawal was unilateral meant that (a) it did nothing to establish a negotiating-type relationship between Sharon and Abu Mazen, (b) Israel remained quite free from any negotiated-and-agreed commitments to the Palestinians, so it retained a free hand to continue very oppressive and sometimes lethal policies in both the West bank and Gaza, and (c) it weakened Abu Mazen politically by making him look irrelevant to Palestinians.
How many of those outcomes were foreseen or intended by Rice, I wonder?
Regarding the Palestinian elections, I think she made completely the right decision– but she totally misjudged the outcome, which was a rout for Fateh. (In part, because of factor ‘c’ above.) And then, instead of swallowing hard and dealing with the outcome, she backed Olmert in his pursuit of extremely punitive policies against the Palestinians.
And then, in the summer of 2006, she (or her boss?) made decisions regarding Israel’s lethal assault against Lebanon that were both ethically horrendous and very counter-productive from a policy point of view.
So we cannot at this point say that her track record as Bush’s chief manager on Israeli-Arab affairs has been a good one.
Bumiller also has this description of the motivations for Condi’s current activism in the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace:

I am really surprised and saddened to see that her aides apparently didn’t say a word there about Condi finally realizing that peace is an extremely necessary and valuable thing for both Israelis and Palestinians to work for… They just seem to be presenting her as this machiavellian manipulator.
(Bumiller also has a really hackneyed quote from previous longtime– and failed– “peace processor” Dennis Ross in which he says, “This administration has too often engaged in stagecraft, not statecraft.” Like Dennis was any good at statecraft during all those years he presided over a string of failed negotiations?? Note that I exempt from that criticism the work Dennis did in helping prepare the Madrid conference of 1991– but at that point, he was acting mainly as a gofer for Jim Baker, rather than running the show himself.)
The second interesting NYT piece is also by Bumiller. It is this short-ish exploration of Rice’s relationship with Bush. Turns out she tries to be his nanny, too, not just the nanny to the whole of the rest of the world… and he sort of jokes about the extent to which she “tells” him what to do. It sounds like a bizarre and very unhealthy way to run a country.
And finally, we have this, from the president himself when he was meeting with Abu Mazen earlier today:

The United States cannot impose our vision, but we can help facilitate.

That is such nonsense! There is a tremendous amount the US could do, both by working other nations in the security Council and by re-structuring the pattern of the incentives and disincentives it gives to Israelis and Palestinians (i.e. carrots and sticks), in order to push for the US’s own reading of what is a just, legitimate, and sustainable outcome between Israelis and Palestinians. The US is a great power, for goodness’ sake, and seldom holds back from telling any other country in the world how to run its business.
But in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, all Bush aspires to do is to “help facilitate” the negotiations between these two extremely mismatched parties.
If he sticks with this approach, and if the adults in the international community don’t step in and take the process over from him as he falters, then this Annapolis-launched process will be going, very dangerously, nowhere.
Why can’t he simply say, forthrightly and frankly, that the US has its own strong interests in the speedy attainment of a fair and sustainable final peace agreement– all of which is true– and will be working hard with all concerned parties to achieve that?