Iran: Chronicle of a War Foretold?

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Tony


In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece Chronicle of Death Foretold, a murder is committed in defense of family honor because nobody does anything to stop two brothers carrying it out, even though they actually want to be stopped. And the careless and infantile scripts being penned by politicians in the U.S., Iran and Israel may yet have a similar outcome. Indeed, what is most remarkable about the actions of many of the key players is the extent to which they’re driven by local, self-serving agendas.

As I noted on TIME.com, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad owes a massive debt to those who made such a gevalt over his visit to New York: Ahmadinejad doesn’t give a toss what audiences in New York think of him, but by turning what might have otherwise been an obscure talk in a small Ivy League auditorium into a national media dog-and-pony show, the protestors allowed Ahmadinejad to grandstand for the folks back home, eliciting sympathy from even some who oppose him for the way he conducted himself in the “lion’s den.” Ahmadinejad, as we’ve proclaimed ad nauseum, does not control Iran’s foreign policy any more than Nancy Pelosi control’s Washington’s. He’s facing an increasingly difficult reelection battle in 2009, and his provocations of the West on issues such as the Holocaust are designed precisely to put him in the spotlight, and sabotage prospects for the rapprochement with Washington sought by his more pragmatic rivals. And by turning him into an “evil” rock star, the Columbia protestors ensured he got an hour-long address on national TV in the U.S. and a major boost at home.

You could argue, I supposed, that Lee Bollinger, the Columbia president who scolded Ahmadinejad at length in his introduction was also playing a form of “local” politics — after all, colleges in the U.S. are privately funded, and Bollinger needed to make very sure that donors were not turned off by the Ahmadinejad invitation.

But the more serious local politics may be neither those of Ahmadinejad or Bollinger. Almost a yaer ago, I wrote about
the danger of war with Iran being based more on Israeli domestic political calculations and the law of unintended consequences than on a clear strategic intent. Israeli politicians across the spectrum continue to whip up hysteria — and a frenzy of expectation — by telling their people that they face imminent annihilation by Iranian nuclear weapons. More rational Israeli voices, such as former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami who argues that Israel can and should seek a grand bargain with Iran, are drowned out in the clamor for action. Instead, Israeli leaders are telling their people that 2007 is the last year for diplomatic solutions; if they can’t force an Iranian surrender by 2008 then the time has come for action. Of course, this timetable has nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear progress; it’s based entirely on the remainder of the Bush Administration’s tenure.

Of course there is no imminent danger of Iran actually possessing nuclear weapons, and there’s no sound reason to believe that even if it had these, it would brandish them at Israel — which, after all, has far more nuclear weapons at its disposal and wouldn’t hesitate to nuke Tehran if it felt threatened with extinction — the Iranians are not stupid; they know this. Don’t expect to hear too much from such sensible voices as General John Abizaid, until recently the U.S. commander in the Gulf, who bluntly dismisses the hysteria, arguing that the U.S. could, in fact, find a modus vivendi with a nuclear-armed Iran.

As Ben Ami noted, “Revolutionary Iran has given frequent proof of its pragmatism” and, in fact, “it was the United States, not Iran, that conducted rigid ideological diplomacy” in the Washington-Tehran equation.

Ben Ami writes:

Iran backed the U.S. during the first Gulf war, but was left out of the Madrid peace conference. Iran also supported America in its war to depose the Taliban in Afghanistan. And, when American forces overran Saddam Hussein’s army in the spring of 2003, the encircled Iranians proposed a grand bargain that would put all contentious issues on the table, from the nuclear issue to Israel, from Hizbullah to Hamas. The Iranians also pledged to stop obstructing the Israeli-Arab peace process.

But American neoconservative haughtiness – “We don’t speak to evil” – ruled out a pragmatic response to Iran’s demarche.

Iran’s mood changed by the time America’s entire Middle East strategy had gone adrift, but the grand bargain remains the only viable way out of the impasse. This would not be achieved, however, through an inevitably imperfect sanctions regime, or by America’s resort to Cold War logic aimed at breaking Iran by drawing it into a ruinous arms race. Iran’s growing regional influence does not stem from its military expenditures, which are far lower than those of its enemies, but from its challenge to America and Israel through an astute use of soft power.

But the Israeli domestic political equation is worrying: Olmert has seen his own approval ratings climb out of the toilet as a result of having bombed something in Syria a couple of weeks ago. Nobody knows what he bombed, but his numbers have climbed from about 3% a few months ago to over 35% today. That’s why the scoundrels to the left and right of him, Ehud Barak and Bibi Netanyahu, have been scrambling to claim some paternity over the mysterious Syria raid.

The Israeli electorate likes the flexing of military muscle, particularly after last summer’s humiliation in Lebanon, and even more so in the face of a steady stream of hysterical nonsense about a new Hitler on the march in the east.

The danger of Israel’s leaders’ own rhetoric painting themselves into a corner where military action becomes inevitable is reinforced by reports that Dick Cheney’s neocon jihadists have actually been planning to goad Israel into doing something this stupid, precisely in order to set off an Iranian response that would force the U.S. into a war with Iran. (Talk about a scorched-earth presidency!)

I tend to agree, though, with the assessment of Steve Clemons that the Cheney/berserk position won’t necessarily prevail — but that the posturing and rhetoric from Washington could force the U.S. into an “accidental” war (a prospect that the berserkers have actually been trying to engineer). Its domestic and internal political shape — besides the neocons around Cheney, there’s also the AIPAC warning Capitol Hill that any legislators seeking to restrain the White House from military action against Iran will henceforth be treated as anti-Semites — certainly appears to be dissuading the Administration from sending any signals to Tehran making clear that Washington has no aggressive intent. Indeed, based on what they’re hearing from Washington, the Iranians might well assume that confrontation is inevitable.

The key to avoiding a confrontation may be the U.S. military, whose opposition to such a catastrophic blunder remains steadfast. The problem, though, is that the Bush Administration has painted itself into a corner by defining a “diplomatic solution” as simply an Iranian surrender to U.S. terms on the issue of uranium enrichment. But there’s little chance of that — which may help explain the rather cynical French hysteria — nor of any new sanctions any time soon, since Iran is cooperating with the IAEA to address outstanding concerns. That’s going to leave the Cheney berserkers, and the Israeli politicians scrambling to outdo each other in satisfying the public’s expectation of action, entering 2008 with no sign that diplomacy is going to produce the only outcome short of war that they’re prepared to countenance.

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 45 Comments

Only Iran Can End U.S. Iraq Nightmare

Posted on September 17, 2007 by Tony


Absent a grand bargain with Iran, talks between U.S. and Iranian ambassadors in Baghdad are just going through the motion

As I wrote on TIME.com last week, Bush is in no position to bring the Iraq war to a satisfactory conclusion; the U.S. is treading water in Iraq lacking both any reason to believe the current balance of forces there will allow the attainment of U.S. goals, and any leverage capable of altering that balance of power. The Democrats, for their part, are posturing, demanding an immediate withdrawal as only a party of opposition on the campaign trail could do:

By invading Iraq, the U.S. irreversibly altered the balance of power throughout the Middle East; now, Iraq cannot be treated as a policy decision in isolation from the full spectrum of U.S. interests throughout the region — all of which will be calamitously weakened if the U.S. were to precipitously retreat. While the congressional discussion focused on the failure to achieve consensus among Iraq politicians, it may be that the absence of a consensus on Iraq between the U.S. and Iraq’s neighbors is even more dangerous. Given the weakness of the central government in Iraq, stability there is unlikely without an agreement among Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and Iran over managing the political contest there. The most powerful stakeholder among them is Iran, which has close ties to the dominant political parties returned by the Iraqi electorate. And as long as Iran believes the U.S. is pursuing a policy of regime-change in Tehran, it has little incentive to help out Washington.

The latter point, really is the key to understanding the current quagmire. The idea of reaching out to Iran has become conventional wisdom in Washington diplomatic circles since the Iraq Study Group report, but it has only been grasped in a facile bound-to-fail sense. So Ambassador Crocker testified that he had talked to Iran on a number of occasions about ending their subversive activities, but to no avail. And this is largely accepted by the liberal hawk camp, while the neocons say told you so.

But if the U.S. is serious about resolving differences with Iran, the agenda of talks would have to be infinitely wider than “subversion” in Iran. Only talks that address and find a mechanism for settling or managing the fundamental strategic conflicts between Washington and Tehran — from U.S. regime-change policies to Iran’s nuclear program and regional activities — can change the course of the relationship. Iran has previously sought such talks with the Bush Administration, but has been rebuffed. As former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami argues, Iran’s regime has proven itself to be pragmatic, and “the grand bargain remains the only way out of the impasse.”

Ben Ami also notes that “Iran’s growing regional influence does not stem from its military expenditures, which are far lwoer than most of its enemies, but from its challenge to Israel and America and its astute use of soft power.” He urges the U.S. and Israel to consider a diplomatic approach based on mutual recognition with Tehran.

The Iranians believe the good faith they showed in Afghanistan has been met with an escalating of hostility from the U.S. side. The idea that they’ll help out the U.S. in Iraq with no quid-pro-quo is hopelessly naive, or worse, cynical (i.e. going through the motions to placate the Iraqi government).

Indeed, last week’s testimony by Petraeus and Crocker on Iraq coincided with a “rollout” of a Cheney-neocon campaign to stampede Americans to war with Iran. The idea that Iran would cooperate with the U.S. — as it did in Afghanistan — while knowing full well that the Administration is considering attacking Iran, is absurd. The Iranians certainly have a long-term interest in a stable, democratic Iraq, even one in which their Shiite allies do more to accomodate Sunni interests. But as long as they’re facing the threat of being bombed, or even a general U.S. policy of seeking the overthrow of their regime, they have no incentive to cooperate, and plenty of incentive to do whatever they can to keep the U.S. off balance and vulnerable in Iraq.

Moreover, the Iranians see the recent U.S. shift away from the Iraqi government and towards Sunni insurgent groups in Anbar as evidence of a U.S. agenda which now explicitly cites “containing Iran” as the strategic purpose of staying in Iraq. Still, if the U.S. is planning an attack, the Iranians need the U.S. to remain in Iraq.

After all, when Iran retaliates for whatever Bush throws at them, the Iranians are likely to target U.S. forces in Iraq, cutting off their supply lines in Baghdad and targeting them via guerrilla forces in Iraq and medium range rocket attacks. Iran, for purposes of its asymmetrical response to any attack by the U.S. needs plenty of Americans within reach of its capabilities.

And its own survival is a far greater concern for the Iranian regime than the future of Iraq.

There lies the rub: The U.S. cannot stabilize Iraq without cooperation from Iran; the price of such cooperation is normalizing relations with the Tehran regime; the Bush Administration has no intention of doing that, clinging instead to fantasies of regime-change; Iraq remains a nightmare.

Actually, it gets a lot worse. If the U.S. is stupid enough to imagine that a military attack will diminish the threat from Iran, the situation in Iraq will likely get a whole lot worse than it is right now. President Bush made no bones about the fact that Iraq is a mess he plans to hand off to his successor. But if he opts to go out in a blaze of, uh, “glory” by bombing Iran, the mess he leaves in the lap of the next president will have metastasized considerably.

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 19 Comments

Mearsheimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick

Posted on August 31, 2007 by Tony


First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new government. But at the time, Israel was pummeling Beirut in response to Hizballah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, so U.S. legislators naively tried — and failed — to get Maliki to condemn Hizballah. And, revealing the extent to which Washington is encased in a bubble when it comes to matters involving Israel in the Middle East, Senators Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin wrote Maliki a letter saying the following: “Your failure to condemn Hezbollah’s aggression and recognize Israel’s right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East.”

To cut bluntly to the chase, there is scarcely a single politician in the Arab world willing to endorse Washington’s definitions of the problems or the solutions when it comes to Israel’s impact on the region — and that even among the autocrats with whom the U.S. prefers to work, much less that rare breed that Maliki represents, i.e. a democratically elected leader. It is the U.S. leadership that is in denial about what is needed to create security in the region.

Indeed, the grownups in Washington know this better than anyone. In response to the same crisis in Lebanon, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote:

Hezbollah is not the source of the problem; it is a derivative of the cause, which is the tragic conflict over Palestine that began in 1948.

The eastern shore of the Mediterranean is in turmoil from end to end, a repetition of continuing conflicts in one part or another since the abortive attempts of the United Nations to create separate Israeli and Palestinian states in 1948.

But nobody in power listens to Brent Scowcroft any more. Washington’s Israel bubble so detaches it from an objective view of the Middle East that Howard Dean’s 2003 call for the U.S. to adopt an “even-handed” position between Israel and the Palestinians has longsince entered the U.S. political playbook as an example of foot-in-mouth campaigning. (See my earlier entry on how well Barack Obama has learned this lesson.)

Like the tech-bubble and real estate-bubble, Washington’s “Israel bubble” is unhealthy and dangerous — in fact, it not only jeopardizes U.S. interests throughout the region and beyond (by serving as Exhibit A for any anti-American element anywhere in the Islamic world to win the political contest with America’s friends), but it is also exceedingly bad for Israel: Particularly over the past decade, the U.S. has essentially enabled Israeli behavior so self-destructive that it may have already precluded any chance of it being able to live at peace with its neighbors.

It is the lancing of this Israel bubble — in the best interests of the United States, the Arab world, and Israel’s own prospects for peaceful coexistence with its neighbors — that John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt have dedicated themselves, first in last year’s London Review of Books essay and now in a new book, titled “The Israel Lobby.”

They argue, firstly, that the absolute bias hardwired into U.S. policy towards Israel is neither a rational foreign policy for the U.S. or even particularly helpful to Israel. And they further make the case that this policy has been maintained and extended with increasingly destructive effect by the interventions and activities of a network of groupings they broadly define as the Israel lobby, which actively puts Israel positions (rather than American ones) at the forefront of U.S. policy (on issues ranging from the Palestinians to Iran), and which uses its considerable reach in the political process in Washington to ensure that challenging the U.S. bias towards Israel, as Dean did, is considered political suicide for a politician with presidential ambitions.

Their book is a comprehensive scholarly work, but its purpose is unashamedly political. The book has a number of weaknesses — I find its analytical approach often static and institutional; insufficiently dynamic and, dare I say it, insufficiently dialectical. On the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship in last summer’s disastrous war in Lebanon, for example, I disagree with their denial of responsibility on Washington’s part — the original impulse to take some form of action may have come from the Israeli leadership, but as I made clear at the time, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the scale and objectives of the operation became defined by Washington, and they were plainly goals for which Israel had not prepared its forces.

Also, the process of skewing U.S. bias towards Israel may reveal the machinations of a lobby, but they have also become deeply-entrenched tropes in U.S. political and civil society — tropes which now function quite independently of the lobby’s interventions.

But regardless of a number of specific instances that I might analyse somewhat differently, I have no quarrel with its central argument that U.S. policy on Israel and its neighbors is grotesquely biased in favor not only of Israel, but of Israel’s most self-destructive impulses. As such, it is a policy dangerous to U.S. interests and ultimately to those of Israel itself. This biased is maintained and policed in substantial part by an aggressive lobbying effort by an elaborate pro-Israel political infrastructure. Despite its analytical weaknesses, it is a refreshingly candid and courageous (given the all too common fate of those who tackle this taboo — just take a look at the important logging of this stuff at Muzzlewatch) embrace of what has long been the “third rail” of American foreign policy, insisting that a debate be conducted where none has been tolerated until now.

And, its significance may be measured in part by the response it has elicted. Not so much the predictable fulminations of Abe Foxman in his prebuttal of Mearsheimer and Walt, The Deadliest Lies, or the manic chatter of Haaretz’s resident arbiter of all things Hebrew Nationalist in America, Shmuel Rosner — all of that may be par for the course. But M&W share with Jimmy Carter that ability to call forth a rather unfortunate habit among sections of America’s liberal punditocracy, in which sharp and fundamental criticisms of Israel must be discredited and squashed, even at the cost of the cool reason for which the pundits in question are usually known. To put it unkindly, when Israel is under the spotlight, many liberal commentators feel compelled to embarrass themselves in its defense.

I noticed this phenomenon last year when Jimmy Carter made the entirely valid comparison between Israel’s West Bank regime and the apartheid system that prevailed in South Africa until 1994. That prompted Michael Kinsley — a well-known and generally smart liberal pundit — to denounce Carter’s comparison in an op-ed that only served to show how little he knew about either the Middle East or apartheid South Africa. Clearly, though, the idea that Israel was committing crimes equivalent to apartheid clearly made Kinsley so uncomfortable that he felt compelled to blurt out something — anything, really, to negate Carter, and make the discomfort he caused go away. (I critiqued his lame response to Carter in an earlier post.)

This phenomenon is reflective of a trend that has been confirmed to me anecdotally dozens of times, both in the U.S. and at home in South Africa, where some Jewish liberals of faultlessly progressive politics on every other issue turn into raving tribal belligerents of the Ariel Sharon hue when the conversation turns to Israel. We’ve all seen it, dozens of times, I’m sure — although I’m pleased to say I know a lot more whose politics are consistent, and are not prone to being possessed by Zionist Mr. Hydes.

David Remnick is not among them, unfortunately. In response to Mearsheimer and Walt, New Yorker editor Remnick offers a fresh specimen of the denial pathology.

What is most strking about his piece, however, is that it is more of a kvetch, designed to discredit M&W in the eyes of New Yorker readers, than a serious engagement with their argument. For example, Remnick notes that M&W are realists, i.e. they make their case for a foreign policy based on national interests. Remnick writes:

“There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence,” [M&W] write, but they deny that Israel is of critical strategic value to the United States. The disappearance of Israel, in their view, would jeopardize neither America’s geopolitical interests nor its core values. Such is their “realism.”

The latter line seems to be dropped in with a note of bitter irony, as if it somehow damns the authors, who repeatedly make clear their belief that the U.S. should support Israel where it’s right to exist is threatened, but note that its existence is not actually under threat, right now — instead, the U.S. is being called upon to underwrite its brutal occupation policies. But the argument that Israel’s disappearance would not substantially harm U.S. national interests is a perfectly legitimate one in the realist framework, bereft of emotion: Israel safeguards no vital national interests of the United States, and is more of a liability than an asset in the broad U.S. strategic approach to the Middle East. Those who argue that Israel has value as a U.S. ally can point only to tactical advantages, e.g. Israel’s intelligence services can better infiltrate radical groups than can their American allies. No doubt. But on the strategic plane, such advantages are negated by the fact that by unconditionally backing Israel and its regime of occupation over the Palestinians, it becomes virtually impossible for any Arab leader to openly associate with U.S. goals.

It was precisely this recognition of Israel’s limited strategic value to the U.S. in a post-Cold War world that led Yitzhak Rabin, a longtime hawk, to embrace the Oslo deal presented to him by Shimon Peres. Like the leaders of apartheid South Africa in the late 80s, Rabin had come to recognize (particularly in the era of the first Bush administration) that Israel could no longer count on unconditional U.S. backing given Washington’s interests elsewhere in the region. As a result, it was compelled to seek an accomodation with the Palestinian national leadership. Of course, this was an exceedingly good thing. Unfortunately, Rabin needn’t have worried, because the changing domestic political atmosphere in the U.S. — the success of the Israel lobby beyond its wildest dreams, particularly as a result of the backing of perhaps its latterly most important constituent, the Evangelical Christian Zionists, had meant that Israel could count on U.S. backing regardless of its behavior in relation to the Palestinians. M&W are simply pointing out that this does not accord with an accurate reading of U.S. national interests.

Remnick notes that M&W “are right to describe the moral violation in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. (In this, most Israelis and most American Jews agree with them.)” But then he complains that they reveal a nefarious agenda in blaming Israel for all ills in its relationship with the Palestinians, and the Arab more broadly.

The narrative rightly points out the destructiveness of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and America’s reluctance to do much to curtail them, but there is scant mention of Palestinian violence or diplomatic bungling, only a recitation of the claim that, in 2000, Israel offered “a disarmed set of Bantustans under de-facto Israeli control.” (Strange that, at the time, the Saudi Prince Bandar told Yasir Arafat, “If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a tragedy. This is going to be a crime.”)

But while Remnick may satisfy his liberal conscience by conceding the idea that the occupation is bad, what he’s not answering is M&W’s case that it is bizarre to the point of inexplicable that the U.S. no longer bothers to even threaten to take steps to restrain Israel from this “moral violation.” U.S. support for Israel is unconditional, settlements and all. The sad fact, for the likes of Remnick, is that the occupation is not some aberration on Israel’s part; there really is no longer any real distinction, in practice on the ground, between Israel and its occupation of the lands it captured in 1967. As Henry Siegman recently explained in an excellent piece in the London Review of Books, Israel quite simply has no inclination to withdraw from the occupied territories, and its ideas of a “peace process” are essentially limited to the pursuit of Palestinian surrender.

As for evoking the authority of Prince Bandar, oy. Remnick himself had suggested that debate on U.S. Middle East policy was welcome, and that it should include questions such as “whether we should be supplying arms to the Saudis.” Uh, Dave, those deals are typically negotiated by Bandar. And by the way, since when did this Bush-Cheney acolyte become a voice of Arab authority? How many Arab leaders were willing to publicly endorse the deal offered at Camp David? (Bandar himself wouldn’t, you can be sure. And nor would Mahmoud Abbas.)

Remnick is entirely correct that most American Jews would agree with M&W about the occupation, but that simply underlines a point they make throughout the book — that the positions and interventions of the Israel lobby are not representative of mainstream American Jewish opinion; they’re way to the right of it. It’s not a “Jewish lobby,” it’s a lobby of people — many of them Evangelical Christians — supporting the positions of the hardline nationalist right in Israel.

Remnick also attempts the rather silly argument that U.S. support for Israel has little impact on the appeal of Osama bin Laden and other radicals in the Arab world, because Bin Laden’s objective is to overthrow Arab autocracies backed by the U.S. Yes, of course it is, but the point is that Bin Laden hardly needs to break a sweat in “proving” American malfeasance to any Muslim audience — he simply needs to point for Washington’s unswerving support of Israel, and the argument is over. And that precludes U.S. allies in the Arab world from attaining any popular legitimacy.

While denying that M&W are anti-Semites, Remnick nonetheless questions the bona fides of their intervention. His message to his readers is, don’t worry about what these guys are saying, they’re just grinding an axe. Wink. “Taming the influence of lobbies, if that is what Mearsheimer and Walt desire, is a matter of reforming the lobbying and campaign-finance laws,” but he suggests that, intead, the authors are a product of a polarized political moment, reducing all ills to a single cause — the Israel lobby. But Remnick hasn’t honestly engaged with their arguments aside from clucking over the settlements: Does Remnick agree, for example, that the U.S. should leave Israel no choice but to withdraw its West Bank settlements, by threatening to cut off the spigot if it doesn’t stop and reverse its colonization of the West Bank? Should the U.S. not use its considerable power over Israel to march it back to its 1967 borders? That, really, is what’s at issue here.

Remnick’s own Israel bubble has been taking a bit of a battering of late: Just three weeks ago, he found himelf compelled to write a subtle smear of Avrum Burg, largely attributing the former Knesset speaker’s renunciation of Zionism to his supposed personality defects! Plainly, Remnick has little appetite for engaging with Burg’s notion that, as he put it, he had always considered himself a human being, a Jew and a Zionist until he began to recognize that his Zionism negated the other two aspects of his identity.

Burg, like Mearsheimer and Walt, had clearly made Remnick uncomfortable. But he’s substantially correct in challenging the M&W idea that the lobby is singularly responsible for policing America’s public discourse on Israel. After all, nobody asked Remnick to write these pieces. Nor did anyone tell Kinsley to try and shoot down Jimmy Carter’s apartheid argument. Just as important as challenging the Israel lobby is drawing attention to the deep-rooted tropes of knee-jerk defensiveness in sections of the liberal-Jewish intelligentsia that allows them to avert their eyes and cling to fantasy when Israel is an agent of oppression.

Posted in Could Die Laughing, Situation Report, Unholy War | 171 Comments

Maliki’s Fate and America’s

Posted on August 24, 2007 by Tony


Another Bush-Maliki videoconference

There’s no surprise in the rising chorus of demands in Washington that Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki be replaced. After all, the U.S. public discussion of Iraq has been fixated on the notion of a troop surge providing cover for Iraq’s political leaders to meet “benchmarks” of progress towards national reconciliation — and it’s long been obvious that Maliki has no intention of doing what Washington wants him to do (a fact that hardly makes him unique among Iraqi politicians). Every time Maliki is pressed on the matter, he snarls that he answers to those who elected him, not to the U.S. The extent to which Maliki rules at all, of course, is questionable, in the sense that there’s precious little acreage in Iraq that could be accurately deemed to be under his control control — as Stalin retorted when it was suggested that the Pope be invited to the Yalta talks on the shape of postwar Europe, “How many divisions does he command?” And in Maliki’s case, the answer is none.

As Nir Rosen makes clear in an interview with Amy Goodman, the Iraqi state has already essentially collapsed, and prospects for putting it back together are grim.

The problem is not Maliki, of course — things were no different under his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and there’s every reason to believe that any politician chosen to replace Maliki from within Iraq’s democratically-elected legislature will represent more continuity than change. Peter Galbraith recently offered an eloquent explanation for why the Iraqi political leadership is unwilling to compromise to accomodate the Sunnis, which is the cornerstone of the U.S. plan for national reconciliation.

Unlike the politicians in Washington who seem blithely oblivious in their campaign-trail debates, the Iraqis — like everyone else in the Middle East — are well aware of the limits of American power, and the fact that it is on the wane. The signs are everywhere now, nowhere more so than in the fact that even the regimes most dependent on direct U.S. military support — Iraq and Afghanistan — are simply ignoring the Bush Administration’s injunctions against consorting with Iran.

They know the U.S. has shot its wad, and that it can’t sustain the current troop “surge” beyond next spring. They smell the panic in the discussion in Washington over how and when to pull the troops out, as the underpinnings of American power begin to creak ominously, like that bridge in Minneapolis — in an extraordinary intervention in the Financial Times, recently, U.S. comptroller David Walker compared the U.S. to the Roman Empire on the eve of its collapse, warning that current debt, taxation and expenditure levels combined with infrastructural decay, an aging population and ruinous military commitments abroad have created a “burning platform” for U.S. governance.

Even as Washington was calling for his head, Maliki was in Damascus, cutting new security and economic deals with an Assad regime that, according to the fanciful projections of the neocons at the start of the Iraq adventure, ought to be have been but a memory by now.

Curiously enough, it is in the options now facing that Assad regime that best illustrate the extent of the collapse of Pax Americana in the Middle East. Seeking a readout on the Maliki-Assad talks, I emailed Joshua Landis whose Syria Comment blog remains an absolutely indispensable source on all things Syrian. His explanation:

Syria has reached a decisive moment in its regional politics. As it becomes clear that the U.S. must begin withdrawing from Iraq in the coming year and that the surge was only a temporary U.S. excuse to prolong a losing hand in Iraq, Syria must decide what strategy it will pursue toward a post-American Iraq. Will it side with Iran in supporting a Shiite government or will it side with Saudi Arabia in supporting the Sunni resistance?

It is in this context that we must see both the Maliki visit to Damascus and the Syria-Saudi spat. Syria has placed itself in between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It has not only supported the Sunni resistance leaders but also improved relations with the Shiite dominated government through visits, increased security measures at the border, and by establishing diplomatic relations and an embassy in Baghdad. Syria cancelled a meeting of Sunni opposition members that was scheduled to be held in Damascus a little over two weeks ago. In its place it held a security conference at which Iraqi and U.S. members participated. Saudi Arabia refused to send a delegation or even an observer to the conference, sparking the latest round of Syrian-Saudi accusations.

Maliki is now visiting Damascus in order to lock Syria into a pro-government stand. Maliki is also being attacked by U.S. congressional leaders as an ineffective leader. Some have called for his replacement. He is fighting for his life and recently stated that if America abandons him, “he can find friends elsewhere.” He is turning to Syria and Iran.

Syria was hoping that as the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, Saudi Arabia would seek better relations with Syria in order to create “Arab solidarity” and a united regional front in the face of Iranian penetration of Iraq.

Syria wants to gain Saudi acquiescence for Syria’s role in Lebanon in exchange for Syrian support of Saudi policy in Iraq. This “deal” has not happened. Saudi Arabia and the U.S. are holding firm in Lebanon and continuing to deny any concessions to the Lebanese opposition – Hizbullah and Aoun – which is allied with Syria. Hence, Syria will be inclined to strengthen its pro-Iranian stance and woo the Maliki government away from the U.S. It is in this context that we must understand Damascus’ moves to warm relations with the Maliki government and restrain the Sunni resistance. It is doing this as much to punish Saudi Arabia and the US as to reward Maliki and Iran.

Syria and Iran will try to take Maliki away from the United States. The next few months will be a crucial turning point in regional power politics as all the regional actors jockey for position to exploit and prepare for America’s eventual withdrawal. Syria could go either way. So far, it looks like Saudi Arabia and the US are refusing to woo Syria. They will force Damascus to stick close to Iran.

Joshua’s comments highlight two things:

1) The U.S. has created an intractable mess in Iraq, because steps taken to firm up the only government capable of maintaining majority support mean siding with Iran against Washington’s Arab allies, while the only alternative is essentially to get back in bed with the Baathists and try to once again install a regime of supprression of the Shiite majority — which can’t work, because the mechanisms are no longer in place, and the Shiite majority is risen.

2) The players in the Middle East are already making their calculations on the basis of U.S. retreat. The only alternative to Maliki that might change the dynamic would be for the U.S. to back some form of coup. Juan Cole reports that rumors are rife in the region that this may be precisely what is in the works, but even if it were to happen, it wouldn’t stabilize the situation. It would simply create a new authoritarian regime that the U.S. would have to support against its own people — you know, like that Vietnam business Bush has suddenly discovered. I hesitate to guess that might be why the U.S. refrains from authorizing a coup. Instead, the U.S. will muddle on with the present order, perhaps drawing down its troop levels and relying more on air power to essentially manage the conflict at more or less current levels. Maintaining the present level of civil war may now be all that’s possible with the leverage available to the U.S. acting alone. And, of course, drawing in others who can make a difference would require adopting the more grownup attitude to Iran recommended by the Iraq Study Group, but which the Administration appears incapable of embracing.

Iraq is hardly the only theater in which U.S. power is clearly on the wane. Whether it be the grandstanding of Russia and Venezuela or the more understated (and much more profound) challenge of China to U.S. geopolitical hegemony, encroaching at will now in the traditional U.S. “sphere of influence” of Latin America, sewing up Africa, and so on. A few years ago, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, comprising Russia, China, the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran (with observer status) would have been dismissed as a kind of geopolitical sour-grapes club. Instead, it represents a growing challenge to U.S. influence throughout the region. As Dilip Hiro noted recently, “No superpower in modern times has maintained its supremacy for more than several generations. And, however exceptional its leaders may have thought themselves, the United States, already clearly past its zenith, has no chance of becoming an exception to this age-old pattern of history.”

Even U.S. comptroller David Walker makes a similar point, warning “The world has changed dramatically in recent years. The U.S. is currently the sole superpower on earth but that exclusive status is likely to be short-lived. While the U.S. is number one in many things, from teh size of its economy to military might, it faces several big sustainability changes.” Forgive him his understatement, he is after all the head of the U.S. government’s non-partisan Government Accountability Office.

Hardly surprising, then, that Maliki — like all Iraqi politicians — is hedging his bets, assuming a U.S. withdrawal is inevitable at some point, and doing his best to strengthen his position for the conflicts that will follow. I wouldn’t bet on his surviving. Then again, Maliki may also be aware of a corollary to the trend of declining U.S. power most graphically illustrated in the plight of the likes of Mahmoud Abbas in the Palestinian Territories and Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan (if she continues on the path of making common cause with Musharraf at Washington’s behest): Right now, in many different parts of the world where the U.S. has vital interests at stake, being allied with Washington is less of a boon than it is a political kiss of death.

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 56 Comments

The Wrong Questions on Iran

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Tony

Imagine, for a moment, that U.S. troops invading Iraq had, as they neared Baghdad, been fired on by an artillery unit using shells filled VX nerve gas — an attack that would have lasted minutes before a U.S. aircrew had taken out the battery, and may have brought a horrible death to a handful of American soldiers. Imagine, further, that the conquering troops had later discovered two warehouses full of VX and mustard gas shells. And later, that inspectors in a science lab had discovered a refrigerator full of Botulinum toxin or even anthrax.

The Administration and its allies in the punditocracy would have “proved” their case for war, and the media would have hailed President Bush as the kind of Churchillian visionary that he imagines himself to be. And goodness knows what new adventures the Pentagon ideologues would have immediately begun planning.

Now, ask yourself, had the above scenario unfolded and the “case for war” (on the terms accepted by the media and the Democrats) been proven, would Iraq look any different today? Would it be any less of a bloodbath; any less of a quagmire for U.S. troops; any less of a geopolitical disaster; any less of a drain on U.S. blood and treasure? Would the U.S. mainland or U.S. interests and allies worldwide be any safer today? In short, would the Iraq invasion seem any less of a catastrophic strategic blunder had the U.S. discovered some caches of unconventional weapons in Iraq?

The answer to all of those questions is obviously no.

And it’s from that point that we must begin our discussion on Iran, and the media’s role in preparing the American public for another disastrous war of choice. The “necessity” in the American public mind to go to war in Iraq was established through the mass media — a failure for which there has been precious little accounting. But that failure runs far deeper than is typically acknowledged even by critics: It was not simply a case of the media failing to properly and critically interrogate the spurious claims by the Administration of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction capability. Sure, even the likes of France and Germany suspected that Saddam may, in fact, have still had a few piles of chemical munitions left over from the Iran-Iraq war. The point, however, is that they did not see these as justifying a war. They recognized from the outset that invading Iraq would cause more problems than it would solve.

The more important failure of the U.S. media, then, is its failure to question the basic proposition that if Iraq had, indeed, had unconventional weapons, then an invasion and occupation of that country was a wise and prudent course of action.

Of course many of the decision-makers in the U.S. media in the wake of 9/11 were scared and confused, and looking for John Wayne-style authority figures for comfort — read back now and you’ll find some astounding toadying up to the self-styled tough guys of the Administration: Bill Keller’s wet-kiss profile of Paul Wolfowitz in the New York Times suggested to me a man playing out Robert Mitchum’s epiphany in The Green Berets, the jaded liberal recognizing the harsh truths of John Wayne’s approach to making the world safe for freedom. And Donald Rumsfeld’s loquacious buffoonery created a comforting sense of certainty among a liberal media intelligentsia suddenly desperate to embrace an imperial mythology, and in the case of the George Packers and Peter Beinarts, to render it profound as a narrative of global liberation. Others simply preferred to avoid anything that might have demagogues branding them “un-American,” for fear of losing ad dollars.

That may help explain the failure, but it does not excuse it.

The fact that carnival barkers like Kristol and Beinart continue to be touted as having opinions worth heeding on these matters is ample evidence that the media has either learned little, or else is more dedicated to a kind of edutainment vaudeville than in empowering the American people to make informed foreign policy choices.

Beinart, in a mawkish attempt to account for himself in the excellent Bill Moyers documentary Buying the War, offers up this little gem: “The argument in the fall of 2002 was not mostly about the facts, it was about a whole series of ideas about what would happen if we invaded.”

Exactly. The fact that Beinart and company were wrong on the facts was only part of the problem. More importantly, it was their ideas about the use of force and its consequences that proved so disastrously flawed. And most of the decision-makers in the mainstream media did not bother to challenge the basic proposition that if Saddam had certain categories of weapons, then an invasion was necessary and beneficial.

The very idea that there are certain categories of weapons that draw down a red mist over rational discussion of geopolitical options is an exceedingly dangerous one — that should be one of the key lessons drawn from Iraq. And that’s exactly what’s being cooked up over Iran, too.

The very same crew of neocons and liberal hawks and the Israeli political establishment and its allies in Washington, are goading America to attack Iran. They insist Iran is going hell for leather to acquire nuclear weapons, and allowing it to do so represents a mortal threat to the West, Arab moderates and Israel. And just when a convenient excuse was needed for the U.S. failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, wouldn’t you know it, it’s those darn Iranians “interfering”. Don’t even think about discussing, what, are you Neville Chamberlain or something? Don’t you know it’s 1938 all over again?

Of course, not all of it is as plain silly as the paragraph above.

(For the record:

  • First, there is no evidence that Iran is actually building a nuclear weapon; merely that it is building a civilian nuclear energy program with all elements of the fuel cycle permissible under the NPT that would, in fact, put nuclear weapons easily within reach should they opt to build them.
  • Second, even if Iran did possess nuclear weapons, the idea that it would use them to initiate a conflict in which Tehran would certainly be destroyed is based on tabloid-style alarmism about the nature of the regime in Tehran — in fact, Iran’s Islamic Republic has long proved to be guided more by unsentimental realpolitik than by revolutionary fervor in the pursuit of its national interests and regional influence.
  • Third, Iran is not “interfering” in Afghanistan and Iraq any more than the U.S. is; it has close ties with the dominant Shiite and Kurdish parties that represent three quarters of Iraqis, for whom its involvement in Iraq is welcome. Thus the recent rebuke to Bush by both Karzai and Maliki on the question of Iran’s role in their countries. Even the Administration’s claims that Iran is targeting U.S. troops in Iraq are largely unproven: In a remarkably shallow treatment of complaints about the New York Times coverage of the issue, its public editor concedes simply that the Times should have told readers of its previous coverage to provide “context” — there is no serious questioning of the contention that because Iran has been known to supply the know-how to build “Explosively Formed Projectiles” (EFPs), any time an EFP is used in an attack on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the perpetrators are an Iranian proxy. This is worth dwelling on, because it’s typical of the ignorance on various issues — the extent of President Ahmedinajad’s authority in Iran, for example — propagated by the Times. A simple technical exposition of what an EFP is reveals that the technology is easily copied by anyone with know-how and access to very basic munitions. It’s not an actual weapon; it’s a method of building an improvised explosive device to pierce armor. The idea that the use of EFPs in Iraq is automatically a fingerprint of Iran is ridiculous. Someone ought to tell the Times. And by the way, even if Iranian proxies were attacking U.S. forces in Iraq, that wouldn’t signal intent to undermine the Iraqi government; it would simply be an escalation of the secret war between Washington and Tehran. And that’s a war that this President, his deepest psychological scars laid bare by his failure in Iraq — a wound that the psychotic Dick Cheney will press and press — may be ready to escalate by launching an attack on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Indeed, it is not Iranian “interference” that Iraq and Afghanistan fear; it is being caught in the crossfire between the U.S. and Iran.
  • 1938? Don’t make me laugh. Nazi Germany was the most powerful military nation on earth, and in 1938 it was poised to invade its neighbors. To make the same claim about Iran is just plain ignorant. )The drumbeat for war against Iran is actually more subtle than it was in the case of Iraq: The Administration denies it wants war and insists it seeks a “diplomatic solution” to the standoff over the demand that Iran cease uranium enrichment. But by “diplomatic solution,” the Administration and its allies simply mean an Iranian surrender to U.S. terms as a result of non-military pressures. There’s no room to question, here, the basic assumption: (a) that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons; (b) that, as Senator John McCain put it, “the only thing worse than going to war with Iran is an Iran with nuclear weapons.”

    McCain delivers that one as if it’s a last word, but it shouldn’t be. He’s trying to effect the familiar demagoguery of narrowing options in the way the Iran issue is defined in U.S. public discussion: If threats and sanctions can’t dissuade Iran from enriching uranium, then military action becomes the “last resort.” The idea that Iran enriching uranium is a “red line” is not questioned. An irreversible slide to war in the U.S. is being carefully constructed by those who are out to persuade the American public that if Tehran refuses to run up a white flag, military action — unfortunate as it may be — becomes essential. And the idea would be to have the outgoing U.S. Administration to do the job, its disregard for law (international and domestic) well established, as is its propensity to orchestrate disaster. The mythology last time around was that invading Iraq would transform the Middle East in a healthy way; this time it is that a “surgical strike” taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities or Revolutionary Guard facilities would settle the matter. Hardly. Iran would respond in an asymmetrical fashion, that would cost many thousands of American lives in Iraq and elswhere over the next decade, might disrupt world oil supplies and more. Together with the Iraq misadventure, it would ensure that the Bush Administration leaves a legacy that might be a latterday equivalent of the Hundred Years War between England and France; an open-ended conflict with the population of most of the Muslim world that the U.S. can’t really win.

    So, the basic question on Iran should be exactly the same one the U.S. failed to ask on Iraq: Will military action against Iran leave the U.S. and its interests and allies in the Middle East in a more secure position or in greater peril. That, really, is the only question that matters.

    There’s very little discussion in the U.S. media of why Iran might seek nuclear weapons, what alternatives it might have — and might choose to use should it be attacked — and whether the environment can be altered to persuade it that it doesn’t need nuclear weapons. What are Iran’s strategic needs, and can they be accomodated in a framework acceptable to others that at the same time accomodates its interests? And so on.

    Intead, we’re essentially asked to believe that Iran wants nuclear weapons in order to destroy Israel and satisfy some sort of doomsday fantasy. The evidence for this is usually misquoted statements from President Ahmedinajad, and suggestions that he is personally inclined towards an eschatalogical world view (as if the same were not true for President Bush!). The fact is that Ahmedinajad does not actually rule Iran, and would never be in a position to decide on the use of nuclear weapons even if the portrait painted of him were true. Iran’s nuclear program has been in place for decades; Ahmedinajad is unlikely to survive the next Iranian election. (Yes, Iran actually holds elections, at least for the presidency — that may be one reason the presidency doesn’t run the country!) And the regime’s primary concern is to ensure its survival, a principle that governs even its proxy activities abroad — for example, it is conventional wisdom even on the right that Hizballah would attack Israel and U.S. targets in response to an attack on Iran; i.e. their purpose in the Iranian strategic doctrine is asymmetrical deterrence.

    It would certainly be quite understandable in the strategic environment in which Iran operates to seek a nuclear weapon; some would argue they’d be stupid not to. After all, three of their arch-rivals, the U.S., Israel and Pakistan have such weapons. And they’ve seen such capability may have helped North Korea evade U.S. military action. The recent U.S. nuclear deal with India, moreover, underscores the fact that Washington is unashamedly selective in applying the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and has always ignored the treaty’s premise, i.e. that other countries would refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons in order to allow those that currently have them to disarm. Disarm? The U.S. is the only nation ever to have visited nuclear terror on another nation, a war crime — yes, it is a war crime to deliberately target a civilian population — the discussion of which is quite simply taboo in America. Instead, in the U.S. it is still acceptable to talk of actually using nuclear weapons: Hillary Clinton castigates Barak Obama for ruling out their use against al-Qaeda in Pakistan or Afghanistan!

    States do not pursue weapons systems as ends in themselves; and states are hardwired to ensure their own survival. It is to that end that they acquire weapons systems, to protect, enhance or advance their own strategic position and even up the odds against more powerful rivals. As everything from the Cold War to the current deal with North Korea demonstrate, the only way to avoid nuclear conflict is to address the concerns and fears on both sides that might spark such a conflict. Weapons systems are dangerous, but not as dangerous as the conflicts that might result in them being used. And we should also get used to the idea that the globalization of technology on the current strategic landscape makes nuclear weapons likely to become the norm among states — after all, the existing eight nuclear weapons states have no intention of relinquishing theirs, so why would any states that anticipate being in conflict with any of them refrain from pursuing those weapons when the opportunity presents itself?

    It is the conflicts that fuel the drive for nuclear weapons that are more dangerous than the weapons themselves, and the problem of those weapons can’t be addressed separately from those conflicts. An Iran bombed to destroy its nuclear power plants would likely be far more dangerous to the U.S. and its allies over the next couple of decades than an Iran that had nuclear weapons within reach might be. The only way to diminish the danger of an escalating confrontation with Iran — which is what bombing its nuclear facilities would certainly do — is to address the conflict between it and its rivals directly, and seek a modus vivendi that can manage their conflicting interests. Iran has shown itself to be ready to engage in such dialogue; it is the Bush administration that has demurred.

    At this stage, the U.S. media corps that facilitated the Iraq catastrophe ought to be asking the question, can the Bush Administration do any worse than it has already done in plunging the Middle East into bloody chaos and in destroying countless American and Arab lives — and doing irreversible damage to U.S. interests across the planet. The answer, of course, is yes, but only if the U.S. media once again enables it.

    • Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report, Unholy War | 285 Comments

    The Debka Made ‘Em Do It

    Posted on August 11, 2007 by Tony

    Driving down the West Side Highway heading back to Brooklyn on a sunny Saturday morning, I’m suddenly flagged down by one of dozens of policemen, and pulled over. I know what this is about. Earlier, NPR had broadcast that New York City was reacting to an “unspecified threat” of a dirty-bomb attack on the city, and were looking for a truck laden with radioactive material mentioned on the Internet.

    My Subaru hardly fit the description, but being a law-abiding fellow, I was happy to oblige. The officers examined my license, registration — and insurance! They made me open the trunk, at which point I looked behind me and saw a vehicle also with a lone driver also being checked. Were we being profiled? Well, he was African American. But, we both had beards!

    Still, I didn’t mind being stopped at a checkpoint on the West Side Highway, a little Ramallah moment in the middle of New York. What irked me, though, was the news that the “threat” that had necessitated this security clampdown emanated not from any serious intelligence quarter, but from Debka, an Israeli pseudo “intelligence” site that the Israeli security establishment will be the first to tell you should never be taken seriously. The site had reported that its monitors had picked up “chatter” on Islamist web sites to the effect that attacks would be carried out “by means of trucks loaded with radio-active material against America’s biggest city and financial nerve center.”

    All I can say is that if our physical security is in the hands of people who’re making tactical decisions based on what they read on Debka, we are in serious, serious shit.

    Posted in New York Moments, Situation Report | 21 Comments

    Permit Sharon a Comatose Smile…

    Posted on August 10, 2007 by Tony

    You don’t hear much about Ariel Sharon, these days, quietly passing his days on a life-support machine with no indication of when or how his coma will end. But were Sharon capable of comprehending and appreciating his legacy, right now he’d be laughing his head off. When everyone else was talking of peace with the Palestinian leadership, Sharon was doing his best to sabotage it, arguing instead that Israel needed to come to mutually beneficial arrangements with Palestinian warlords in discreet fiefdoms. And the source of his delight, today, would be the willingness of Mahmoud Abbas to accept the role of Marshal Petain in a Palestinian Vichy regime. Today, Abbas dines in Jericho with the leader of the occupation, while personally insisting on the maintenance of a blockade on Gaza to starve its people (his people) into rejecting Hamas.

    While everyone outside of the paid spokespeople of the Bush Administration concurs that nothing will come of the Administration’s vaunted efforts to revive a peace process by “bolstering” Abbas against Hamas and holding idle conversations with the Palestinian president about hypothetical statehood, Abbas seems determined to go through the motions. In an excellent commentary in the Financial Times (which will be unavailable by the time you read this), Gideon Rachman makes clear the paucity of the “peace” that is on offer to Abbas:

    Even some members of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority argue that Mr Abbas is likely to be offered a deal that he can only refuse. One prominent Fatah member predicts gloomily: “We will be offered a state within the borders of the Israeli security wall, which will mean losing huge parts even of the West Bank. The Israeli settlements will stay. Our borders will be controlled by Israel. We won’t be allowed an army. There will be no right of return and the Israelis will effectively take over Jerusalem. This will be presented as a temporary arrangement. But the temporary would become permanent.” Mr Abbas’s allies say that it would be political suicide for him and for Fatah to accept a deal like that. Hamas would take over the Palestinian cause by default.

    When I put this scenario to a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem last week, he replied: “The Palestinians are being over-optimistic. They are not going to be offered even that.”

    Rachman explains that the Israeli military, backed by a political consensus, has concluded that for security reasons, it cannot risk handing control of the West Ban back to the Palestinians, or even removing the hundreds of checkpoints that make daily life for Palestinians intolerable.

    He writes:

    The mood in Israel now seems to mix fear and complacency in a way that is probably fatal to the chances of a peace deal. The fear is a legacy of the Palestinian terror campaign that killed almost 1,000 Israelis. Memories of the suicide bombings – added to the rise of Hamas – have hugely undermined public willingness to take risks with security.

    But the suicide bombings have stopped. And just at the moment, life is good. The nightlife of west Jerusalem – which was dead in 2002 – is now vibrant again. Last week, I went to the Jerusalem wine festival, where affluent Israelis sampled the latest Cabernets and Rieslings from the country’s boutique wineries. Palestinian towns such as Ramallah and Bethlehem were just a few miles away. But being behind the wall, they are out of sight and out of mind for the average Israeli. Gaza is sealed off even more effectively. As a result, for all the hand-wringing about Iran and Hamas, Israelis have rarely felt more secure. They feel little need to take risks for peace.

    Which means that Mahmoud Abbas is lying to his people and to himself if he believes anything good will come of the ghastly charade in which he has joined Bush and Olmert. Abbas will either be forced to swallow his pride and rejoin a unity government with Hamas at the behest of Egypt and Saudi Arabia (one he realizes how little Washington will really offer him), or else he’ll simply be sidelined. But the last laugh may yet be on Sharon, and those who have bought into his fantasy of peace-through-strength and iron walls. Even in Gaza, bottle-rocketeers are able to construct devices that can sling explosives as far as Ashkelon. Israel still fantasizes about missile shields, but the likelihood of the collapsing Arab regimes around Israel being able to stop Palestinians acquiring weapons that can reach deeper and deeper into Israel is dim.

    Israel’s social and political elite, entrepreneurs well integrated into the global economy whose lifestyles are more Californian and than Kibbutznik, will look at the reality unfolding in Israel and wonder why they bother to live there. The world is not a hostile place for Jews, these days, and if your economic and cultural life is so integrated with that of the West, then why bother to risk living at the heart of an increasingly messy and violent Middle East? An Israel that fails to reach peace with its neighbors will likely survive, but it will increasingly start to look like a collection of fiefdoms of religious and nationalist extremism presided over by cynical Russian mobsters. Frankly, I’d say the transition is well underway…

    Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 50 Comments

    Why Oblivion Looms for Abbas

    Posted on July 31, 2007 by Tony

    Guest Column: Mark Perry offers 10 reasons why Hamas, rather than Abu Mazen and his U.S. backers will prevail in the struggle for Palestinian hearts and minds. The Islamists today represent the Palestinian mainstream, while Fatah is broken from top to bottom. Even more importantly, Abbas is increasingly isolated within his own organization, most of whose grassroots and mid-level leadership want nothing to do with the U.S. schemes on which Abbas has staked his future. By Halloween, expect Abbas to be either back in a unity government with Hamas, or else having departed the scene

    By Mark Perry

    In the summer of 1997 I found myself seated in the office of Yasser Arafat in Gaza. I had known Arafat for many years, and was a welcome visitor. Being an American and a friend gave me privileges. Others weighed their words, but I was constrained by no such requirement. So as he thumbed through a stack of papers, I pleaded clemency for a friend who had been under house arrest in Gaza for the better part of a year. The man, a prominent security official, had ordered Palestinian security forces to fire on a Hamas demonstration the summer before and Arafat, enraged, had ordered him home. “He made a mistake,” I said. “It’s time to bring him back.” Arafat ignored me.

    There was a long moment of silence as Arafat’s aides eyed each other in discomfort. Arafat motioned to one of them and handed him a paper. This was typical of him. You could spend hours with the man in silence. He continued to pretend he hadn’t heard, so I plunged on. “The man is dedicated,” I said. Arafat stopped, his eyes widening, but he still refused to look at me. I waited many moments and pleaded my case again. “He’s a good man.” Finally, he spoke, but he bit off each word, making his point. “This is not your concern.” And he was silent again. “I think that it is,” I said. “He is a friend of mine.” Arafat was suddenly exasperated and locked me in his gaze, to emphasize his point: “He crossed a line.”

    Those of us who know and understand something of Palestinian society were saddened by June’s Gaza troubles — the flickering YouTube films of Palestinian gunmen being dragged willy-nilly through the streets of the Strip seemed a talisman of lines crossed so many times they no longer existed. Palestinians have fought each other before — most notably in the Palestinian Civil War that raged in northern Lebanon in 1983 — but nothing like this. Palestinians themselves seemed to draw back, even recoil, from the violence. “Both sides made mistakes,” Hamas official Usamah Hamdan told me in Beirut in late June and there was sadness in his voice. “We are sorry for that.”

    In the wake of these troubles, Palestinian President Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) cut ties with Hamas, declared an emergency government, suspended the workings of the Palestinian Legislative Council, arrested dozens of Hamas legislative members, clamped down on anti-government protests, purged critics in his own Fatah movement, and announced he would begin immediate talks with the Olmert government. The U.S reciprocated: it urged Israel to release hundreds of millions of dollars in tax monies, said it would work towards the creation of a Palestinian state, pressured Israel to ease travel restrictions in the West Bank, awarded the Abu Mazen government tens of millions of dollars in economic and security aid, urged Arab nations to support Abu Mazen’s political program, called on the EU to take similar actions, dispatched a team of experts to assess Palestinian needs, called for an international conference to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and conducted high-level talks with Arab nations to make certain their support for these programs was assured. The actions were breathtaking in their scope. They provided, for the first time in nearly a decade, the prospect for a political resolution of the daunting Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

    And they have absolutely no prospect of success.

    Instead, Abu Mazen will fail to solidify his position as President of the Palestinian Authority; the American program to support him will fail; there will be no international conference; and, within the next sixty to ninety days — and almost certainly by the end of the year — Abu Mazen and his colleagues will either be forced into exile or will take steps to reconstitute the national unity government that they have spent the last 60 days destroying.

    And here’s why:

  • 1. Palestinian society is not divided

    • Palestinian society is more united than it has been in years, in spite of what we see on our televisions or read in the American press. The “Gaza coup” was not launched in Gaza, but in Ramallah — and the forces that brought instability to the Strip were funded and armed by the United States. They did not represent Fatah or even a majority in Fatah, but rather a small minority of Fatah radicals. The vast majority of mainline forces in Fatah, and even a significant number in the Fatah Central Committee did not support the arming of the Preventive Security Services. The leader of the PSS, Mohammad Dahlan is now in exile and his opponents are calling for his arrest. The Palestinian people know this. They know their vote was overturned by Abu Mazen and the United States, and they resent it.

  • 2. Hamas remains popular, and it is gaining strength

    • It is true, there have been some dips in the popularity of the movement in some areas, but the losses are not significant. And, remember, there is a tendency in the U.S. to consistently underestimate Hamas’s popularity, which I attribute to:

    — a disbelief that Palestinians could support such an organization

    — a belief in U.S.-funded Palestinian polling numbers

    — the reputed secular nature of Palestinian society

    — a tendency to overlook the traditional strength of Hamas during periods of confrontation, and

    — the impact of the economic embargo.

    My own (admittedly unscientific), belief is that Hamas’s strength is likely to grow. The movement’s base of support has widened significantly — from about 9 percent in the late 1980s to about 25 to 30 percent now, numbers that match up well to any well-established Western political party. While its parliamentary victory in January of 2006 was due largely to Fatah’s poor reputation, Hamas has not repeated Fatah’s mistakes: despite the clear temptations of power, it has provided as good a government as its resources have allowed — no stain of impropriety has touched its senior leadership. This remains its most significant achievement.

  • 3. Hamas represents mainstream Palestinian society

    • Palestinian society is not secular, liberal, progressive and western. It is Arab, traditional, conservative and Muslim. Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayad, Saeb Erakat and Yasser Abed Rabbo are fine people — and they are friends of mine — but they do not represent mainstream Palestinian society. Hamas does. The election of Hamas and its continued strength is not a setback for Palestinian society, but a reflection of its growth. My own Hamiltonian tendencies are humbled. It is possible to understand America by visiting Boston, but I wouldn’t recommend it — any more than I would recommend that an American believe that Hanan Ashrawi is typically Palestinian. Americans aren’t governed from Nantucket but from Natchez, and Palestinians aren’t governed from Ramallah, but from Jubalya — and wishing it so doesn’t make it so. That Fatah was defeated is not simply a comment on their corruption, but on their inability to speak for the people of Palestine. It is for this that Hamas is likely to grow and prosper.

  • 4. Hamas is is not innately or irrevocably wedded to violence

    • Hamas stood for an election and won. We decided to reverse the verdict of a democratic process, not them. There is certainly debate inside of Hamas on the efficacy of continuing the movement’s involvement in electoral politics. The loss of some popular support, the reversion to violence in Gaza, the inability of the movement to break the international boycott, emerging divisions inside Hamas itself, and the closing off of political options have sparked this internal debate. But I doubt that Hamas will abandon its current strategy in favor of violent confrontation, either with Fatah or with Israel. The view from Gaza may seem dark, perhaps the view is even darker in Damascus. But there is another side to the ledger, and it is as significant: Balancing Hamas’s strengths are Fatah’s continuing weaknesses — and those cannot be reversed with a simple infusion of our money.

  • 5. From top to bottom, Fatah is broken

    • Fatah is weak, aging, corrupt, disorganized, and even more divided than Hamas; it is funded exclusively through outside sources; it lacks a clear political program and political vision; its leadership is out-of-touch, conference-bound, tethered to a past era; it is dependent for its survival on the United States and Israel (a fact of which Palestinian society is well aware, at the expense of Fatah’s credibility) it is at war with its own younger cadre (which are abandoning the movement). Its militant Tanzim grassroots are growing in strength, but are alienated from Fatah’s leadership, disenchanted with its corruption and, perhaps most importantly, is cooperating with Hamas. The Fatah grassroots is pushing hard, just now, for the long-delayed General Conference to reform the organization. Abu Mazen can throw Hamas legislators in jail — it will be much more difficult to throw members of his own party in jail, which is why …

  • The political battle being waged in the West Bank now is being waged inside of Fatah

    • Abu Mazen’s power has been significantly eroded inside of his own organization. The recent meeting of the committee called to make an assessment of the Gaza troubles repudiated Abu Mazen’s appointees: Mohammad Dahlan, Rashid Abu Shabak and Tawfik Tarawi. Abu Mazen is within one vote of losing his Fatah power base. His closest aides (Salam Fayad, Saeb Erakat, Rafiq Husseini, Yasser Abed Rabbo) count for nothing in Fatah, because they have no vote in the organization. Abu Mazen’s plea to the Central Committee last Tuesday, that “my aides have told me my actions are legal,” brought laughter even from his closest supporters. Former Prime Minister Abu Alaa has refused to support him and Hani al-Hassan has denounced him. In response someone shot up Hassan’s house. He laughs: “They made sure I wasn’t here,” he told me. And the former national security advisor, Jabril Rajoub has called for Mohammad Dahlan’s arrest. Abu Mazen’s response has been to say he will hold national elections — but without allowing Hamas to run. And our president has conferred his blessing on this, calling Abu Mazen’s government “legitimate.” Truly, truly, truly, we are a light in the darkness, a city on a hill.

  • 7. Abu Mazen is increasingly isolated

    • The non-payment of governmental salaries to Hamas members in the West Bank is causing deep disenchantment because it cuts across family and tribal lines. So it is that one brother, a Fatah member, is paid while another (a Hamas member) is not. Salam Fayad has thereby proven to be a good bean counter, but not much of a politician. He has set family against family, brother against brother. And doing that is deeply resented in the West Bank. So too, the security services are in a posture of near-revolt over the policy of continuing arrests of anti-Abu Mazen partisans. Posters have begun to appear in the West Bank, styling Abu Mazen a Palestinian Pinochet — or worse, an “Abu Musa” (the man whom Syrian President Hafez Assad sent to kill Arafat in Lebanon). The posters are being designed by Fatah, not Hamas. Do we really believe that the Palestinian police will continue to follow Abbas’s orders: to arrest Hamas activists because they do not meet the conditions of the Quartet? Because Hamas does not “recognize Israel?”

  • 8. The united front of the U.S.-Israel and the Arab regimes is no match for Hamas in the battle for Palestinian support

    • Indeed, the much-vaunted united front being built by the U.S. against Hamas is something of a myth: The Egyptians and Saudis have quietly repudiated the U.S. program to overthrow Hamas, and instead have urged Fatah and Hamas to reconcile. Colin Powell has called for talks with the Hamas leadership, while Israel’s support for Abu Mazen remains predictably indifferent. (They’re no dummies – the Israelis, too, will end up talking to Hamas is my bet.) There are 542 roadblocks in the West Bank — the same number will be there tomorrow and next week and next month. Tell me I’m wrong. Israel has returned tax money collected for the Palestinians to the Palestinians, but not all of it — and it has trickled in. Do we really, really believe that Israel will suddenly rise up as one and say that they intend to endorse UN Resolutions 242 and 338? Or are they now quietly laughing into their tea and shaking their heads: we’re going to support Abu Mazen? We’re going to send him guns? We’re going to conduct talks with him and calculate that he will be able to produce competent and uncorrupt administration — and one that has the support of his people? Or are they will to see what we have failed: that the last time there was an election in Palestine Mr. Abu Mazen’s party lost. The U.S. program in Iraq is in a shambles, calm and stability are returning to Gaza, questions about the American program for Palestine are being raised in Washington. This is not a time for sudden political movement or a shift in strategy, it is a time for political calculation. Hamas knows it. Israel knows it. Egypt knows it. Saudi Arabia knows it. The only person who doesn’t seem to know it is George Bush.

  • 9. Hamas’s reign in Gaza undermines the propaganda of its foes

    • Some U.S. politicians and Abu Mazen’s more alarmist allies like to paint the Hamas administration in Gaza as a kind of pro-Iranian Islamic State, but this hardly stands up to scrutiny. There is no enforcement of the veil or other conservative Islamic social laws, no Sharia council, no compulsion to attend the mosque. Stability has returned to Gaza. People are obeying the law, and feel secure. This is not a lesson lost on either Egypt or the Israelis. Which would they rather have — civil conflict or civil order?

  • 10. Abu Mazen has crossed the line

    • Several years after my mild confrontation with Mr. Arafat in Gaza, I met with him at his headquarters in Ramallah. It was a bright early April morning and quite memorable for its beauty: just one day after the resolution of the Siege of the Church of the Nativity. Those in the church had, the day before, been sent out of the church to Europe — away from their families and into an involuntary exile. Their departure had been emotional: they had walked out of the church as their families, on the rooftops of Bethlehem, cheered and wept.

    The next day I traveled very early to Ramallah to see Arafat to talk to him about the siege. When I arrived I was ushered into his upstairs office. It was just after dawn. I was exhausted, but I found Arafat in a good mood and open to my banter. “I think you crossed a line,” I told him. It was something I would not have dared to say at any other time, but he was smiling at me and so he nodded, as if humoring me. “Oh? he asked. “And what line would that be.” I had him, finally, and so I recited the rule, liturgically: “Palestinians do not send other Palestinians into exile,” I said. He looked at me and nodded and then looked down, suddenly sad. “Yes,” he said. “But I have another line,” and he reflected: “Palestinians do not send other Palestinians to Israeli jails.”

    There are lines. Palestinians do not send other Palestinians into exile; Palestinians do not shoot other Palestinians; Palestinians do not betray other Palestinians, Palestinians do not resolve their political differences by gunfire, Palestinians do not collaborate with their enemies, do not betray their own people, Palestinians are not traitors to their own cause, Palestinians do not send Palestinians to Israeli jails. And at one time or another each of these lines has been crossed. But at no time, ever, has any Palestinian ever renounced the one principle — the one true commandment that has motivated every Palestinian patriot from Arafat to Abu Musa to Abu Nidal: that the Palestinian people are indivisible; that they cannot be divided.

    Until now. By turning his back on the Palestinians in Gaza, but even actively seeking their impoverishment in the United Nations (as he did, shamefully, on Friday, when his diplomats blocked efforts to seek a Security Council statement on the humanitarian situation there), Abu Mazen has set out to divide the Palestinian nation, to set it against itself. And that line, in the end, cannot be crossed. And the fact that Abu Mazen has crossed it will, in the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people, make all the difference. There is only one Palestine and now, Abu Mazen is not a part of it.

    Posted in Guest Columns, Situation Report | 32 Comments

    European Hypocrisy: A Palestinian View

    Posted on July 30, 2007 by Tony

    It is with great pleasure that I welcome back Saifedean Ammous, one of my favorite Rootless Cosmopolitan readers and correspondents — he really is a far better political analyst than he is at predicting football results! Saifedean, currently completing a Ph. D. at Columbia, hails from Palestine and is a passionate and eloquent advocate of its national cause, known for skewering the logic of its foes. Read more of his work at his own site, The Saif House.

    European Hypocrisy

    By Saifedean Ammous

    While in Paris a few weeks ago, whenever I would discuss Middle East politics with anyone, I would be overwhelmed with the traditional refrains of classical anti-Americanism: “they have no culture and deal with the world as if it had no culture”, “they have no morality in their foreign policy”, “they go to war for oil and money” and so on with inane over-simplified stereotypes. Soon after would come the cackle of self-righteous pride: “we Europeans are different”, “we want our foreign policy based on a concept of morality”, “we attempt to promote justice in the world and fix up the mess left behind by the Americans”. I would then usually be told something about all the aid that Europeans give to Palestinians as proof of the decency of Europeans as opposed to the rabidly Zionist Americans who give billions to fund Israel’s murderous army.

    Would that this were true.

    Europe’s policy with regard to Palestine/Israel is so racist, short-sighted, counter-productive and hypocritical that it could almost pass for American policy.

    When looking at the current situation in Palestine, an observer will find an illegal Israeli occupation that has been festering for 40 years, combined with illegal ethnically-exclusive colonies built on stolen Palestinian land, and the world’s only ethnically-segregated road network, where many routes can only be accessed by Jews. An internationally-illegal apartheid barrier surrounds Palestinian towns and villages, not only cutting them off from one another, but also cutting off farmers from their lands, children from their schools, patients from their hospitals and workers from their jobs. Israel controls all of the Palestinians’ openings to the outside world, stifling not only Palestinians’ freedom of movement, but also their economy and trade. One of the world’s strongest armies, the IDF, is regularly unleashed on civilian populations in Palestine, murdering thousands and killing innocent children with complete impunity. The Israeli government has as its Deputy Prime Minister an unabashed Fascist who openly and regularly calls for ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Arabs as a solution to the conflict. Israel continues to deny millions of Palestinians their legal right to return to their own homes from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948, restricts land-ownership to Jews only, and has discriminatory racist laws in countless areas from marriage to immigration.

    In the face of this travesty of justice, what is the only thing that the Europeans do? Demand that the oppressed, the Palestinians, only elect political parties that “recognize Israel’s right to exist” as a precondition for sitting on one table and discussing what to do about all these travesties.

    Let us first bear in mind that the idea of Hamas—or any Palestinian political party for that matter—recognizing Israel’s “right to exist” is a patently meaningless idea that makes as much sense as Manchester United Football Club recognizing Tanzania’s “right to exist”. Nowhere is it written that nation states have a “right to exist” themselves. What is meant by “recognition” in an international setting is what happens when countries exchange embassies and establish diplomatic relations. Nowhere but in Palestine has the idea of a non-state entity recognizing a state ever been seriously discussed. Further, the imbeciles who repeat this canard conveniently ignore that Israel is not merely “not recognizing Palestine’s right to exist”, but actively, deliberately and comprehensively destroying any chance of a Palestinian state ever existing. But, for the morally-superior Europeans, Hamas’ “recognition” of Israel is the thing that bothers them the most about Palestine/Israel today, and not all of the crimes listed above. The kicker, of course, is not just that this is a morally and logically absurd position, but that Israel’s actions are the root of the conflict, and not whether Hamas recognizes Israel. This recognition won’t change anything on the ground and won’t affect the lives of anyone in any way, but the walls, settlements, killings, checkpoints and Israel’s racist policies will. Only when these are ended can there be peace, regardless of what Hamas “recognizes” or declines to “recognize.”

    All of the aforementioned crimes by Israel constitute clear violations of the EU Neighborhood Policy terms under which EU neighbors get preferential access to EU markets and a slew of other benefits and perks. The EU regularly uses its economic and diplomatic influence to try and get countries to desist from carrying out racist policies: it makes trade deals dependent on improvements in human, labor and minority rights; it has made Turkey’s accession to the EU dependent on Turkey’s human rights record, and has stopped Austria from bringing Jorg Haider into the government. Far from taking any action to try to pressure Israel to stop some of its crimes in Palestine, the EU has cowardly chosen a policy of rewarding their transgressions with more carrots, and Israel continues to enjoy extremely generous benefits from its relationship with European countries, even being sold arms by many of them.

    The tragic aspect of Europe’s policy with regard to Palestine today is not just that is practically indistinguishable from the policy of the US, but that it comes bundled with great self-righteousness and an unshakable belief that it is not only the correct policy, but is also vastly morally superior to anything anyone else is doing. The financial aid provided by Europe is the major rationale supporting this smugness.

    As the Europeans continue to do nothing to stop Israel from destroying the livelihood of the Palestinian people, they take out their checkbooks and assuage their conscience by providing money to the Palestinians. Before the election of Hamas, this money went to prop-up the increasingly unpopular Palestinian Authority in order to guarantee its survival and a continuation of the painful status quo. After Hamas’s election, they tried to surpass the PA by sending money through increasingly complex, inefficient, and often counter-productive mechanisms.

    Here is a small microcosm of how this madness works: A Palestinian town has a wall built surrounding it from all sides, making it impossible for previously prosperous farmers to access their land, patients to reach their doctors and children to reach their schools. Naturally, the town is devastated. That’s when Europeans send in their conscience-assuaging, smugness-propping aid “experts” to “save” the town, in the process relieving Israel from having to deal with the consequences of its crimes. They provide the farmers with food instead of the food they could have produced themselves, and proceed with projects to teach Palestinians “alternative industries”, “new business models”, “good local governance”, “participatory development”, “creative educational techniques” and countless other meaningless prattle that the Palestinians would gladly give up for having the wall removed, an independent state and some sense of normalcy bestowed on their lives. Naturally, these projects have a short shelf-life; the funding soon dries up, the “experts” leave, but the apartheid wall remains, the livelihood of a whole town is devastated, and the mirage of Palestinian independence is even more distant. And worst of all: the next time an unfortunate Palestinian like myself visits Paris, they will be bombarded with self-righteous recitation of countless such micro projects, and expected to bow in deference of the mighty superiority of European morality.

    This combination of criminal politics combined with generous futile charity is what Ann Le More brilliantly dissected in her appropriately entitled paper: Killing with Kindness: Funding the Demise of a Palestinian State.

    High percentages of European citizens have a good understanding of the conflict and would like to see a better policy and a just solution. Countless Europeans spend a lot of time and money in helping Palestinians, many volunteering to travel there to protect Palestinians and protest and document the occupation. These brave souls are some of my personal heroes. There are many sincere and honest European politicians who have opposed these policies. I do not doubt the sincerity of many of those who genuinely want to improve the lives of Palestinians, and am personally very grateful to them. But a combination of indifference on the part of many and malice on the part of the leaders kow-towing to the US produces this criminal policy, and donates a lot of aid to try to appease those who care. Europeans have to recognize that the only way things will improve is not through charity, but proper, principled and sustained political action.

    True, Europe has shown some principled and humanist action in their foreign policy in many countries. They may give more aid, send more peacekeepers and broker more peace deals than the Americans, and they have certainly improved a lot in the way they deal with the world over the last few decades. But whatever Europe does, its complicity in the abhorrent oppression of Palestinians will remain to blight any claims it has to moral authority. After all, you are only as moral as your least moral action.

    Posted in Featured Analysis, Guest Columns, Situation Report | 43 Comments

    Yes, Bush is Naked, What of It?

    Posted on July 24, 2007 by Tony


    Eloquent Image: There’s nothing on the table

    I posted this piece last week on TomDispatch:

    President Bush’s announcement of a new Middle East summit is being dutifully reported as a move to “revive” the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, designed to culminate in a two-state solution. But the meeting, if it ever comes about, will be nothing of the sort. U.S. officials have already made clear that the gathering’s purpose will be “to review progress toward building Palestinian institutions, look for ways to support further reforms and support the effort going on right now between the parties together.”

    Mushy? Of course it’s mushy. The Bush speech simply restated the key term of the administration’s long dead “roadmap” — before there can be peace talks, the Palestinians will be required to destroy Hamas. In other words, there will be no peace talks, just a lot of wishful thinking. As White House Press Secretary Tony Snow put it, “I think a lot of people are inclined to try to treat this as a big peace conference. It’s not.”

    The Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about the emperor’s new clothes might accurately describe current U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — except for one important detail. In the fairytale, the emperor’s courtiers are careful never to let on that they can see their monarch’s nakedness; in the case of U.S. Middle East policy, there is what playwright Bertolt Brecht might have called an epic gap between some of the actors and their lines. Plainly, very few of them believe the things that the script requires them to say.

    In this absurdist take on the old fairytale, whenever anyone points out that the emperor has no clothes, they are simply told “duh!” before the players get back acting as if it’s fashion week in the palace.

    Read the whole thing here.

    Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 4 Comments