R&R

I’ve had a wonderful time, these past few days, hanging out at home with Bill the spouse, doing a bunch of work on my (soon to be disclosed) Next Big Project, getting my blogging voice back here on JWN, etc. But it hasn’t been all work…
We’ve hung out with several good friends. I did a couple of sewing projects that really needed doing–altering two pairs of rather tricky tailored trousers that I bought a couple of years ago and that never fit me well until yesterday. I finished crocheting a dress for the Best Grandbaby in the World, and now I’m knitting a pair of socks according to a slightly complex pattern my daughter Leila urged on me… I’ve done a few cooking projects, and some yardwork. Bill and I have been playing our favorite One-Minute Perquackey (word-game) in person, rather than by videophone. I’ve been wrestling with some demonic Ken-Kens. And today I spent a lot of time Quakering. Our monthly Meeting for Worship with a concern for Business was today: It feels good to once again be fully present in and with the Meeting.
All of which makes me aware of how incredibly blessed I am. I love doing just about everything that I do these days! I get real pleasure out of all of it. Well-fitting trousers? Yay!!!! And I made them that way, after doing a bunch of intricate hand-sewing down the center-back of both the main fabric and the lining… Yardwork? Yay!!! I revel in my body’s strength at doing it, and am delighted at the daffodils that can now grow straight and true after I cleared the weight of old, packed ice and snow off them… Working on my new work project?? Yay!!!
… All this also makes me really grateful for the excellent education I received. My parents sent me to two private, all-girls’ schools back in England. We really did receive a good, well-rounded education… including in art, needlework, carpentry (an elective I rushed to take), cookery, music, dance, and sport– as well as in Latin, Greek, French, complex mathematics, the sciences, and all the other usual subjects. So okay, a long time ago I left the art, music, sport, and classical languages behind. But I got basic skills in all those areas, and had the experience of doing some substantial work in them; so now I get to choose which of any of those areas I can go back to, at any point.
I’m afraid the formal curricula in the schools my kids went to here in the US weren’t anywhere near as rich as mine. Even though two of my kids went to the famed “Sidwell Friends School” in Washington DC… But Sidwell, I concluded along the way, was much more of an academic forcing-house than it was a truly Quaker (Friends) educational environment…. My son actually got a far better-rounded curriculum when he went to a non-Quaker boarding school up in Maine, than he ever did at Sidwell. And my daughter Lorna, who went to public (government) schools all along, in DC and here in Charlottesville, had a generally fine school experience.
None of them ever had needlework classes in school, though. What a pity!
… Now, my daughter Leila is a fourth-grade teacher in a New York City public school in Manhattan. From what she says, it seems like a good school. They have “clubs” after the formal school-day ends each day, and each teacher gets to lead the clubs of her or his choice in six-week sessions. So far this year Leila’s led a couple of clubs in knitting, and one in felting. With the knitting ones, she had the kids start out by making their own needles from dowels, and doing a little carding and spinning of sheep’s wool, so they could understand the whole process (which is what Waldorf schools do, I believe.)
So anyway, I really am very blessed. I have three amazing children, a fabulous, supportive spouse, work that I love, a whole range of different right-brainy things I can do when I need to unwind… and the immense privilege and pleasure of being able to make real choices about how I spend my time. (But then, being a Quaker means that when you have a privilege you also have this nagging feeling that you have a big responsibility to use it wisely…. Ah well, that’s okay… Did I tell you I love being a Quaker, too?)
Have a great week, everyone!

Avraham Burg, a prophetic voice for Jerusalem

Go read the stirring op-ed that Avraham Burg, former Knesset speaker and former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, published in Haaretz today.
The title is Once justice dwelled in Jerusalem, now settlers do.
Burg, who is an orthodox Jew (and the son of a key leader of the National religious Party), writes:

    Yes, the capital of the Jewish people – the people that always swore not to do to others what it would not have done to it – has become a harlot. Morally wanton, emotionally sealed-off. It is manipulated by its shepherds for their benefit and is full of law – everyone is suing everyone else, hiding behind the laws of injustice. And the judges – as though forced – issue rulings in accordance with discriminatory laws, unique to the “chosen people.” Once justice dwelled here. Now the settlers do, murderers of the nation’s soul.
    And no one utters a word, but for a few patriots. People of truth and morals who refuse to stand idly by while the state of Jewish refugees repeatedly throws Palestinian families into the street and hands their miserable homes over to bearded, blaspheming thugs.
    These people of integrity are the leftists of Jerusalem… They know only too well the city’s ugly truth, its terrible teens, and will no longer look the other way. They are committed to stopping with their body the torch-bearing brutes who seek to set it on fire.
    No one leads the city now, nor will salvation for it come from the country’s elected leader. Sheikh Jarrah is beyond the cognizance of Mayor Nir Barkat and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as though the commotion has nothing to do with them, as though it is happening in Sudan or Tehran. And in the absence of leadership of the state, and the peace bloc, our children have taken on the responsibility, shaken off indifference and despair and brought us here. The circle is expanding and it is full of life, rage and hope. Israeli humanism has been reborn in East Jerusalem. We are there in the summer heat and the winter rains, shouting and calling on others to gather round, seeking both Shabbat and peace. We will not recoil from violent police officers or hotheaded harassers. We stand and pledge: We shall not be silent when Ahmad and Aysha are sleeping in the street outside their home, which has become the settlers’ domain. Is that justice? Not ours! Is that law? No, it is iniquity.
    … How long, Mr. Prime Minister and Mr. Mayor? And why do you, judges of Israel, cooperate with the evil that threatens to destroy us? Come with us, return to the Judaism of “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not murder.” Leave Sheikh Jarrah now!

Wow. An amazingly powerful piece.

New life for Israel’s anti-occupation left?

Didi Remez has a great post today about the gradually snowballing effect of the weekly anti-occupation demonstration’s in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah district.
He writes,

    Thousands of demonstrators, Jewish and Palestinian, from a wide range of backgrounds and with diverse political views came out in a show of force to protest injustice. Writing about “Sheikh Jarrah and the birth of a coalition,” Jerry Haber at Magnes Zionist captures the unique stripes of this emerging movement…

Remez’s post and Haber’s are both really worth reading. They seem to indicate that a new, more focused of anti-occupation activists is growing up in Israel– which is highly welcome, given the demoralization, decimation, and general political failure of the older generation of “peace” activists.
Note that difference, between Israelis who struggled for an amorphous form of “peace” with their Palestinians and the new generation that is more focused on ending the injustice of Israel’s nearly 43-year-old military occupation of Palestinian (and Syrian) land.
This reminds me of something I heard the older-generation French-Israeli activist Sylvain Cypel say in Washington a couple of years ago. He recalled that back when he was a social activist in France in the 1950s,

    we were all very concerned about the situation in Algeria, and called for many years for ‘peace between France and Algeria’. But our movement never got any real traction until we switched from calling for ‘peace’ with Algeria to calling clearly for an end to France’s illegal and repressive rule over Algeria. That was when we started to have an effect on the political system inside France.

That advice certainly resonated with me, from my years growing up in an end-of-empire Britain. “Peace” with India, or Kenya, or Botswana, or whatever??? Heck no! What Britain needed to do in those colonial situations was quite evidently Just Get Out.
Same with Israel in the OPTs today. There, a whole industry has grown up around the loosey-goosey theories that thousands of outsiders have about “peacemaking”, “confidence building”, etc etc etc. That can come! I’m not against it for a moment. But what people need to focus on, surely, is the structural issue of military occupation, and how to end it, pronto.
Otherwise this “peace-processing” business can just go on and on and on– as we have seen already!– for decades! (While the colonists continue to enjoy and consolidate their illegal gains.)
… I see from that Wikipedia page that Cypel is supposed to be working for Le Monde in New York these days. I wonder if I could contact him there. Any ideas?

Obama’s Gitmo policy: Franz Kafka, meet the Star Chamber

This really eery piece of news was in yesterday’s WaPo:

    An interagency review of all cases at Guantanamo Bay concluded that about 50 prisoners will have to be held in some form of prolonged detention without trial, because the evidence against them was obtained through the use of harsh interrogation methods or because its revelation in court would compromise intelligence gathering. The government says the detainees are too dangerous to release.

Let’s deconstruct this so everyone can see what’s been happening here:

    1. The U.S. authorities use “harsh interrogation methods” against someone held in their custody.
    2. They claim they have “reason to believe” that this person is “too dangerous to release”– but refuse to make their evidence for this public.
    3. Here’s the kicker: Precisely because this individual was tortured, and may reveal details of his torture if brought into any open courtoom, no public court hearing can ever be held for this person.
    (4. If the person had not been tortured, he might well have been brought into a courtroom.)

In other words, these 50 individuals who have been tortured by the U.S. authorities or people acting on their behalf now have to suffer the additional punishment of being detained indefinitely– precisely because they were tortured.
(If the only “problem” about trying them would be because disclosing the evidence against them could compromise collection methods, there would certainly be ways of dealing with that, including through private lawyers’ conferences, etc. Therefore I conclude that the fact of prior torture is an issue in all these cases, with or without the applicability of “intel collection methods” concerns.)
I realize that all this is a legacy from the Bush years of operating outside the law. But Obama promised us all something different.
If these people were tortured, then surely we all– U.S. citizens and others– need to have the full facts about this disclosed in an open courtroom. That way, we Americans can understand fully what was done in our name. And we can take all the steps necessary to ensuring our government never does it again.
And as six billion non-Americans around the world will see us disclosing the truth about these matters in an open, constitutional way, they will think the better of us for it– just as, when the South African authorities disclosed the whole truth about the ghastly deeds done by a predecessor regime there, people thought the better of them for it.

Malley & Harling on M.E. regional dynamics

Further to what I blogged here (and here) yesterday about the ever-shifting dynamics within the Middle East, Rob Malley and Peter Harling have an elegant op-ed in the WaPo today that picks up on many of the same themes.
Malley and Harling are both M.E. analysts for the International Crisis Group– Malley being in charge of their M.E. division and Harling their analyst for Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.
They start off with this:

    Much as he would like to disentangle himself from his Middle East inheritance, President Obama is having a rough time doing so. The obvious legacy is an unwanted war in Iraq and a bankrupt Israeli-Arab peace process. But equally constraining is a popular way of conceiving of the region — divided, schematically, between militants beholden to Iran and moderates sympathetic to the United States. While there is some truth to this construct, it assumes a relatively static landscape and clear fault lines in a region that is highly fluid and home to growing fragmentation. By disregarding subtle shifts that have occurred and awaiting tectonic transformations that won’t, this mind-set risks missing realistic opportunities to help reshape the Middle East.

So far, so– generally– good. But I think they’re too kind to the Obama-ites (and their predecessors) by saying “there is some truth to this construct.”
Where, really, is there any “truth” in it?
The main problem with the way Malley and Harling describe the “bipolar” frame that just about all of official Washington applies to its analysis of the Middle East is that they do not mention the role of Israel and its entire, unquestioning cheering section inside the U.S., who between them are the main ideological enforcers of this frame. “Moderates”, within this frame, is nearly always code for “does not challenge Israel on anything, whether through inclination or by being in thrall to the power of U.S. Congress’s purse”, while “militants” is code for “is sometimes willing to criticize Israeli policies.”
Really, the way these issues are discussed, and largely “understood” (or more accurately, mis-understood) among members of the Washington power elite is that, for Middle Eastern governments or other actors to be thought of as “pro-American” (i.e. “moderate”) they must not openly challenge Israel on anything. Therefore, when an actor, such as, for example, the Turkish or Saudi government, starts to criticize an Israeli policy they are immediately vilifed within the Washington DC Beltway as being irredeemably “anti-Israeli” and very often “anti-Semitic” to boot… But either way, no longer “moderate”.
And that is the extent of what passes for “analysis” in nearly all of Washington.
Malley and Harling are right to note that the strictly bipolar “moderates versus militants” frame is no longer useful. But they fail to spell out:

    1. That actually, though they seem to ascribe it to Pres. G.W. Bush, it goes back a lot longer that– back, at least, through the Clinton presidency (during part of which, Rob Malley worked in the White House.)
    2. That this frame never has been useful, either analytically or as a guide to wise policy. The “fluidity” and political dynamism they describe as being “new” within the M.E. regional system has always been there. Use of the bipolar frame has always been an obstacle to sound understanding and sound policy.
    3. That you can’t truly understand the way the bipolar frame “works”, politically, unless you make clear that, when applied at the regional level (as opposed to, for example, within Iraq), it really is all about Israel; and it has almost nothing to do with whether the actors in question are “pro-American” in the content of their policies, or not. Once again, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are key examples. Turkey, for goodness sake, is a member of NATO and has troops risking their lives alongside the U.S. troops in Afghanistan (unlike many other NATO members; and completely unlike Israel!) So how come Turkey nowadays gets labeled by many in DC as problematic and “possibly anti-American”? Answer: It is all about Israel. Malley and Harling fail to make that clear.

I think I also disagree to some extent with their description of the way they see the “relevant” competition in the region today.
This, they say,

    is not between a pro-Iranian and a pro-American axis but between two homegrown visions. One, backed by Iran, emphasizes resistance to Israel and the West, speaks to the region’s thirst for dignity and prioritizes military cooperation. The other, symbolized by Turkey, highlights diplomacy, stresses engagement with all parties and values economic integration. Both outlooks are championed by non-Arab emerging regional powers and resonate with an Arab street as incensed by Israel as it is weary of its own leaders.

The first thing I note here is that the regional visions promulgated by the governments of Turkey and Iran are not as diametrically opposed as Malley and Harling make them out to be. Turkey certainly “speaks to the region’s thirst for dignity”, just as much as Iran does; and Iran “values economic integration”, and “highlights diplomacy” just as much as Turkey does– though many of its attempts to act on these precepts have, of course, been intentionally stymied by the U.S.
Also, Turkey and Iran have excellent working relations with each other. So if there is some “competition” between the visions promulgated by these two governments– as I believe there is– still, this “competition” is very far from being the kind of manichean, “with us or against us” form of competition that too many Americans lazily think is the only kind of competition there is.
In fact, there seem to me to be to be only two significant respects in which the policies of the two governments differ: (1) the way that each of them tries to push forward its explicitly Islamist agenda in domestic affairs– “softly” in the case of Turkey’s AK Party, and “harshly”, in the case of Tehran; and (2) the way that each of them chooses to deal with Israel– again, “softly” vs. “harshly.”
Now I recognize that, for citizens of a majority-Muslim country in the region like Syria, Jordan, or Iraq, the domestic agendas pursued by Ankara and Tehran provide two very different models of modernization, and that having those two different models is valuable and important. But note that, in international affairs, it is really only regarding Israel that these two governments have deep differences… So there, once again, if there is “competition”, it is all about Israel.
I wish Malley and Harling had spelled that out, too.
Look, I have huge respect for both Rob Malley and Peter Harling, both of whom I am proud to think of as my friends. But I don’t think they do the American public whom, presumably, they were hoping to address in this op-ed much good if they pussy-foot around the big Israeli elephant in the “room” of Middle Eastern regional dynamics, and of U.S. policy within the region, in the way they have in this article.
Yes, they’re quite right to argue that the “moderates vs. militants” frame used in Washington is analytically empty of content, inaccurate, and useless… and diplomatically counter-productive, as well. But if they want to provide a frame that is more useful, both analytically and as a guide to policy, then they need to clearly identify the highly politicized source of the vacuity of the “moderates vs. militants” frame that is currently in use in Washington; and by identifying that source spell out that Israel itself (along with its many acolytes in Washington) is a major player that has a strong effect on the politics of the region.
A more useful “frame”, it seems to me, would therefore be one that places the ruling elite of Israel (of all parties) and their allies in Washington at one pole of the region’s dynamics, and the government of Iran at the other, and then arrays the region’s many other actors in the multi-dimensional space between them– that is, not simply on a unidimensional straight line. This frame should also make explicit the fact that many of the other actors in the region, including Turkey, some European powers, other P-5 member states, and Saudi Arabia, also have varying amounts of power to attract other actors towards them, as well…
Bottom line: the region is not now (and never has been) simply “bipolar”, but is multi-dimensional. And though there are two largely competing “super-poles” of influence within it, these are not “Iran and the United States”, and not “Iran and Turkey”, but rather, “Israel and Iran”. (And note that under both the Malley/Harling schema and mine, the U.S. administration gets reduced to the role of something of a secondary actor.)

More on Turkey: Özel, Rosenberg

Related to what I blogged here earlier about the (re-)emergence of Turkish (mainly soft) power in the Middle East in recent years, I just want to note:

  • this blog post today from the experienced Turkish analyst and secularist democracy advocate Soli Özel, writing about the unraveling of the political power inside Turkey of its once all-powerful military; and
  • this Huffpo piece by M.J. Rosenberg on how the pro-Israel lobby helped get a congressional committee to pass the resolution designating what the Ottoman authorities did to the Armenians in 1915 as a genocide.

Özel writes,

    In the upcoming weeks and months, all observers of the Turkish political scene will have a lot to get used to: Fitful though it may be, the country’s political modernization is running apace and a new political architecture is being formed.
    The recent television images of 49 retired and active duty officers (two force commanders and a deputy chief of staff among them) being removed from their homes by the police and taken into custody were quite a shock. Many of the detainees were arrested and will await trial possibly on charges of conspiring to overthrow the Turkish government in 2003 as part of an alleged plan named “Sledgehammer.”
    The immediate reaction abroad was one of apprehension about the military’s possible retaliation. When all the generals and admirals of the Turkish military met the evening of the arrests, the level of anxiety only escalated. In the end, nothing much happened—a different story from other times, when the military called all the shots.

He runs through the key developments in the ever-continuing revelation of additional coup plots over recent years, and concludes thus:

    What is happening in Turkey is a transformation of the old order and a radical shift in the balance of power from the military towards the civilians. The military, until recently, provided the backbone for the Turkish political system, and it was the custodian of the existing order as well as the provider of its ideology. Urban middle classes for far too long relied on the military to fight their secularist battles for them and abdicated their responsibilities.
    These days are over and the Turkish political system needs a new institutional arrangement and a new ideological framework. The fierceness of the battle reflects the magnitude of the stakes and the increasing mobilization of the civilian forces. This is no less than a battle for the soul and the identity of a new Turkish republic.
    Turkey passed an important threshold in the great power shift from the military to civilian authorities that started at the beginning of the decade. Whether this deepening civilianization will lead, as expected, to a rule-based democratic consolidation and finally finish the “second transition” from democratic government to democratic regime remains to be seen.

His whole post there is definitely well worth reading. (And it has considerable relevance for the political dynamics throughout the Middle East, given the fact that the Turkish military were the lynchpin of the Israeli-Turkish relationship that got built in the 1990s; Turkey’s civilian political forces– far less so!)
For his part, Rosenberg draws attention to this piece published recently by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which reported that,

    In the past, the pro-Israel community [i.e. the Israel lobby] , has lobbied hard against previous attempts to pass similar resolutions, citing warnings from Turkish officials that it could harm the alliance not only with the United States but with Israel — although Israel has always tried to avoid mentioning the World War I-era genocide.
    In the last year or so, however, officials of American pro-Israel groups have said that while they will not support new resolutions, they will no longer oppose them, citing Turkey’s heightened rhetorical attacks on Israel and a flourishing of outright anti-Semitism the government has done little to stem.
    That has lifted the fetters for lawmakers like Berman (Chairman Howard Berman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee) , who had been loath to abet in the denial of a genocide; Berman and a host of other members of the House’s unofficial Jewish caucus have signed on as co-sponsors.”

Recalling the vehemence of the anti-Turkish actions taken by Netanyahu and various Israeli officials ever since Turkey’s civilian government dared to criticize Israel’s December 2008 assault on Gaza, Rosenberg writes,

    That battle is now being carried to Washington. The Israelis are trying to teach the Turks a lesson. If the Armenian resolution passes both houses and goes into effect, it will not be out of some newfound compassion for the victims of the Armenian genocide and their descendants, but to send a message to Turkey: if you mess with Israel, its lobby will make Turkey pay a price in Washington.
    And, just maybe, the United States will pay it too.

Indeed, he’s right. At a time when NATO is deeply entangled in fighting in Afghanistan, and NATO’s only majority-Muslim member-state Turkey is generously contributing to that effort, the idea that a few Israel-influenced lawmakers in Washington might take actions that are almost certainly designed to rile Ankara is beyond belief.
What benefit do U.S. lawmakers, the people they represent– or come to that, the Armenians in Armenia, California, or anywhere else– actually gain by having the U.S. Congress pass this resolution? None, at all, except perhaps a momentary feeling of self-congratulation.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Armenia and Turkey, the two governments have been working hard together to find a way to address the misdeeds of the ancient past while also building a good working relationship going forward together. That, in line with the strategic approach of the country’s government and its brilliant foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, that Turkey should have “zero problems with the neighbors.” Thus, last October, the two countries signed a historic agreement to open their borders and to establish, too, a joint historical commission to examine the records of what happened in 1915.
Even Hillary Clinton went to the signing ceremony for the agreement, which was held in Zurich. (She jumped in at the last moment and was given a cameo role by the two governments, who wanted to secure her buy-in to it by letting her solve some of the agreement’s last details. Smart thinking there– especially in view of the strong opposition to the agreement that had been voiced inside much of the US’s well-organized Armenian community.)
And finally, some breaking news here, from the Turkish daily Today’s Zaman:

    Turkey warned the Obama administration on Friday of negative diplomatic consequences if it doesn’t impede a US resolution branding the World War I-era incidents as “genocide.”
    Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said Turkey, a key Muslim ally of the US, would assess what measures it would take, adding that the issue was a matter of “honor” for his country.
    A US congressional committee approved the measure Thursday. The 23-22 vote sends the measure to the full House of Representatives, where prospects for passage are uncertain. Minutes after the vote, Turkey withdrew its ambassador to the US.

Watch this space.

Syria once again at the regional pivot

Last week, there was considerable fuss in much of the U.S. media because, just a couple of days after the Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Bill Burns, visited Damascus and announced that after a five-year absence Washington would finally be returning an ambassador to Syria, President Bashar al-Asad turned to hosting some other political figures important to him, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the heads of Hamas and Hizbullah.
Various U.S. commentators (many of whom were anyway just primed to pounce on anything the Obama administration does) became apoplectic in their fury, arguing that Asad’s meetings with his other allies just “proved” that Burns, Secretary Clinton, and Pres. Obama had all been taken royally for a ride.
So I’m glad that we can now read the calm voices of Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett on the subject. The Leveretts were actually in Damascus, and had a meeting there with Pres. Asad, shortly before Aasad’s meeting with Ahmadinejad and the rest of the Jabhat al-Mumana’a (though maybe I should find a better name for the Jabha… That one, which means “Blocking Front” is very Bush-era-ish… Anyway, I guess readers will know whom I refer to.)
The Leveretts:

    A week before Ahmadinejad’s arrival in Damascus, we had our own conversation with President Assad—a conversation that came one day after… William Burns met with the Syrian leader. In our session with him, Assad expressed satisfaction over his meeting with Undersecretary Burns. However, Assad also made clear that Syria’s relations with Iran, as well as its ties to Hizballah and HAMAS, are not on the table.

They note that, also shortly before Ahmadinejad’s visit to Damascus, Hillary Clinton had told the Senate Appropriations Foreign Operations subcommittee that,

    “We have laid out for the Syrians the need for greater cooperation with respect to Iraq, the end to interference in Lebanon and the transport or provision of weapons to Hezbollah, a resumption of the Israeli/Syrian track on the peace process which had been proceeding through the offices of the Turks last years, and generally to begin to move away from the relationship with Iran which is so deeply troubling to the region as well as to the United States.”

So, there goes Hillary, in the fine nanny-ish tradition established by Condi Rice before her, of trying to publicly dictate to other sovereign governments what their policies should be.
Asad’s laconic response was to say,

    “We must have understood Clinton wrong because of bad translation or our limited understanding… I find it strange that they [Americans] talks about Middle East stability and peace and the other beautiful principles and call for two countries to move away from each other.”

I do think that Clinton (like everyone else from both party leaderships here in the U.S.) has a pronounced and very worrying tendency to continue to see every actor in the Middle East as being “either with us or against us” on the question that continues to preoccupy most of official Washington, that of Israel vs. Iran.
But matters aren’t as simple as that in the region, any more. At least two very significant actors in the region can no longer be clearly categorized as being in either the “pro-Iranian” or “pro-Israel/western” camp. They are Turkey and Saudi Arabia, both of which have many close ties to the west as such, but a lot of reservations about Israel; and both of which believe that negotiating in good faith with Iran is greatly preferable to continuing to saber-rattle and escalate the tensions against it.
Significantly, both these governments now have good relations with Syria. In the case of Turkey, these relations are of some years’ standing at this point. In the case of Saudi Arabia, they are more recent, dating from the landmark visit that King Abdullah made to Damascus last year. Prior to that, for several years– and most especially since the February 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri, which has been widely but not categorically blamed on Syria– Riyadh’s relations with Damascus were extremely hostile. (Though prior to that, too, the present Saudi King, Abdullah, also had a long history of friendliness to Syria’s rulers; so go figure that.)
All of this provides some background for the judgment the Leveretts make in their blog post about their meeting with Asad, that,

    the perceived value in Damascus of strategic realignment with the United States through a carefully conditioned peace deal with Israel is slowly declining as America’s hegemonic standing and influence erode.

They go on to write,

    Certainly, the Syrian leadership was relieved by President George W. Bush’s departure from office and his replacement by President Obama. But, with a right-leaning coalition headed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in power in Israel, expectations in Damascus for what Syria would see as major improvements in America’s Middle East policy are not high. And, as President Assad noted to us, poor policy choices in the Middle East by the United States over the last decade have created “vacuums” which “others [Iran and Turkey] filled”. (In this context, Assad argued that Iran’s evolving regional role does not represent “new ambitions” on Tehran’s part.) This has expanded Syria’s strategic optionality. In this context, Assad underscored that the rise of Iran and Turkey to new levels of regional influence has not come at Syria’s expense; rather, all three states have been able to improve their own relations and bolster their regional influence.
    This is not to say that Hafiz al-Assad’s preferred strategic option of realignment toward the West through a “principled” peace with Israel does not remain deeply attractive to his son and successor. But, the longer that Damascus must wait for the United States to deliver on its end of the peace process, the more time that Bashar and his advisers have to internalize what they see as the reality of America’s slow decline. And that has a palpable effect on the price they are willing to pay for realizing Hafiz al-Assad’s preferred strategic option.

I see that the well-informed Syrian analyst Sami Moubayed also focuses a little on King Abullah’s role in this recent article on Syria’s diplomacy.
I’m not quite sure how Moubayed manages the feat of “reading” King Abdullah’s mind… But what he writes here is nonetheless very interesting:

    King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia shares this view [that Syrian-Iranian relations are in the best interest of the international community, and should be seen as a blessing in disguise for the United States], believing that Syria can indeed walk the tightrope between the so-called moderate and radical camps in the Middle East, helping influence and moderate the behaviour of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Syria has repeatedly used its influence with these players in meetings like the ones that just took place in Damascus (which perhaps were not as high profile) to get Hamas to accept the Arab Peace Initiative, for example, or to get Hezbollah more involved in the political process in Lebanon. In Iran, Syria used its influence to free 17 British sailors captured in 2007, as well as a French prisoner in the summer of 2009. Syria, after all, doesn’t have a history of anti-Americanism, and has proven since 1990 that it is a credible peace partner, with whom the West can do business.
    The Damascus Summit [with Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, and Meshaal] by no means indicates that engagement has come to an end between Syria and the US. Far from it; the meeting is a reminder of how helpful Syria can be in dealing with these non-state players. Nevertheless, it sends another strong message: Think twice before waging another war on Lebanon, because neither Syria nor Iran will allow it. Rather than escalate the conflict, the tripartite meeting in Damascus actually forced Israel to recalculate, thereby minimising the chances of war next summer. The leaders assembled in Damascus are clearly very confident of their abilities, and feel that neither Israel nor the US can deal with them as they have in the past. Much has changed since Obama came to power in 2009, but much remains the same, given that the Syria-Iran-Hezbollah alliance has outlived five US administrations since that of Ronald Reagan, and will likely outlive the Obama administration as well. Persuading the US to pressure Israel into seeking peace is high on Syria’s agenda, and this explains the recent Damascus Summit.

As’ad AbuKhalil, the Mossad, and Israel’s KoolAid

As’ad AbuKhalil has an excellent piece on the Al-Jazeera English website, in which he examines all the hasbara-fueled myth-making around the alleged prowess of Israel’s Mossad.
As I noted in this reflection on the recent Dubai affair, Israel’s spymasters and policymakers made the two fatal mistakes therein of underestimating both the capabilities and the intentions/commitment of the leadership of Dubai’s police authorities. It seems to me that this under-estimation could well have resulted from the Israeli leaders having drunk too much of their own KoolAid about the alleged “invincibility” of the Mossad.
After the debacle he presided over in Amman in 1997, current Israeli PM B. Netanyahu should have been well aware that Mossad can and does make some serious mistakes! But no, since he and his key security advisers hang out only with people, including many Americans and other westerners, who worship the ground the Mossad stands on, he had evidently forgotten that inconvenient fact.
It’s a pity that in his piece, As’ad didn’t include the Amman affair in the list of Mossad debacles he presents. To be quite fair in his use of evidence, I think he should have referred, too, to the killing in Damascus two years ago of longtime Hizbullah strategist Imad Mughniyeh, which was almost certainly organized by the Mossad. But even if you put all Mossad’s claimed “successes” in their practice of the arts of violence, subterfuge, and cruelty into the hopper along with their many evident failures, it is still clear that the Mossad is very, very far from being the “all-knowing, always very smart” spying and secret-ops outfit that its many propagandists paint it as.
At the root of everything, though, is the serious misjudgment, made by so many colonial administrations in the past, that their side and their people are so smart, and all members of the indigenous majority so basically dumb and ineducable, that the use of subterfuge, alleged “smarts”, and prestidigitation will always enable to the “smart, colonial minority” to outwit and prevail over the indigenous majority.
That hasn’t worked anywhere since the 19th century. Back then, the ability of colonial administrations to monopolize the flow of information meant they were almost completely unhampered in their implementation of large-scale extermination projects in locations far from the bastions of their home “civilization”. And they were therefore able–and nearly always oh, so willing– to kill and oppress the indigenes on a massive scale in pursuit of their colonialist projects, and also to twist, divide, and manipulate the indigenes without anyone back home being easily able to “report on”, or really understand those dreadful facts.
But guess what, Israel! We are no longer in the 19th century! Within the region of which you’re a part, you may dominate everyone else on all the steps on the ladder of military escalation, right up to, of course, very advanced nuclear weapons… But military might on its own is of no use in the 21st century. And meanwhile, other actors in the region have considerable amounts of strategic, civilizational, and tactical smarts– and they have access to all modern means of communication.
In fact, these days, the myths you continue to propagate about the alleged superiority of everything Israeli, including the capacities of your Mossad, clearly stand in the way of you being able to make realistic judgments about the capabilities and intentions of your neighbors in the region, and therefore about the true balance of forces there. By continuing to try to rely on force, coercion, and manipulation rather than genuine peacemaking and seeking viable, sustainable ways to become integrated into the region as a Jewish state within it, you are in fact just making the failure of the whole “Jewish state” project even more probable. So carry on drinking the KoolAid of your own alleged “superiority”, if that is what you want to do… But don’t be surprised if increasing numbers of people around the world refuse to drink it with you.

Tragic endgame for the U.S. in Iraq

Most Iraqi voters will go to the polls Sunday. As so often, Reidar Visser has been doing the best, most systematic, and well-informed reporting on the important political developments of these days. The picture he paints (1, 2, 3) is troubling indeed.
He notes that the big issue in the election is still “Debaathification”, that is, continuing to pore over the extremely divisive and painful issues of the past rather than looking to the future…
Not surprising, maybe, since the present and immediate future both look fairly grim. But certainly, given both the worrying political news, as described by Visser– and by Raed Jarrar, see below– and the continuing large-scale security breaches, the situation in pre-election Iraq seems very far from the rosy picture given in this latest big Newsweek article.
Why on earth have the Newsweek people been doing this? This article includes this:

    The elections to be held in Iraq on March 7 feature 6,100 parliamentary candidates from all of the country’s major sects and many different parties. They have wildly conflicting interests and ambitions. Yet in the past couple of years, these politicians have come to see themselves as part of the same club, where hardball political debate has supplanted civil war and legislation is hammered out, however slowly and painfully, through compromises—not dictatorial decrees or, for that matter, the executive fiats of U.S. occupiers. Although protected, encouraged, and sometimes tutored by Washington, Iraq’s political class is now shaping its own system—what Gen. David Petraeus calls “Iraqracy.” With luck, the politics will bolster the institutions through which true democracy thrives.

Some of this is just flat-out wrong. The decrees of the “Debaathification Commission”, which prohibited many of the candidates from participating, were nothing if not “dictatorial”.
But the whole upbeat tone of the report was also highly misleading. The cover of the U.S. edition of Newsweek even featured– apparently without any irony– that famous photo of George W. Bush strutting across the aircraft carrier with the big banner stating “Mission Accomplished” behind him. Why do they feel they need to do this, nearly seven years after Bush’s launching of that infamous, damaging war?
The only possible reason I can think of is that the editors there are eager to get Americans into a more feel-good mood about war in general…. just in time for the next one…
But as analysis, it’s disgraceful.
You’ll find much better analysis from Ra’ed Jarrar, here, at Truthout.
He writes this:

    The Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) is fully controlled by members of the current five ruling parties. Thus, many Iraqis, especially from opposition parties, don’t believe the IHEC is fair and balanced.
    What adds complication to the already tense situation is that only a few hundred international monitors are participating in these elections, and many of them have not been there long enough to monitor the preparations and set-up process. For example, most US organizations that have sent international monitors to Iraq’s past elections are not sending any at this time -some of them due to a lack of funds, others because of the lack of interest and security concerns. Last month, 28 US Congress members, including the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and two chairmen of his subcommittees, sent a letter to President Obama asking him to pay more attention to the Iraqi elections. The letter urged Obama to “allocate emergency funds for US NGOs and encourage them to go to Iraq to observe the election,” but the White House does not seem to have considered that appeal.
    In addition to the absence of international monitors and lack of IHEC credibility, rumors about the impending theft of elections have been creating an atmosphere where the slightest claim of fraud might lead to Iranian-style post-election unrest.
    … Even if this election proves to be inclusive, fair and transparent, there are other threats to a peaceful transition of power to the upcoming democratically elected government. The Iraqi armed forces continue to be infiltrated by militias and controlled by the current ruling parties.
    … There is a high probability that Iraq will face a political meltdown after these elections. There is also the possibility, if al-Iraqiya wins the elections, that ISCI and other ruling parties backed by the Iranian government might stage a military coup. Most Iraqis would agree that the upcoming months will most probably bear a lot of bad news.
    However, for the US, this should not affect withdrawal plans. There are two approaching deadlines for the US withdrawal from Iraq: President Obama’s plan to withdraw all combat forces and end combat operations by August 31 of this year and the US-Iraq bilateral security agreement’s deadline for all troops to withdraw by December 31, 2011.
    … The situation in Iraq is horrible, and it will most likely deteriorate further this year, but that should not be used as an excuse to delay or cancel the US withdrawal from the country. Prolonging the occupation will not fix what the occupation has broken, and extending the US military intervention will not help protect Iraq from other interventions. The only way we can help Iraq and Iraqis is to first withdraw from the country, and then do our best to help them help themselves – without interfering in their domestic issues.