Rootless Cosmopolitan – By Tony Karon

The Fatah-Hamas deal brokered by the Saudis
signaled the limits on U.S. influence in the region

In my latest on TIME.com , I argue that the Baghdad talks involving the U.S., Iran, Syria and other Iraq neighbors are a further negation of the idea that the Bush Administration is somehow rallying the regimes of the Middle East to isolate Tehran. Extract:

Late last year, following the Hizballah-Israel clash in Lebanon and mounting tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, the Administration appeared to retire the claim that its Middle East policy was about spreading democracy, and instead emphasized a split in the region between moderate, “responsible” regimes such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and “extremists” led by Iran and Syria, along with movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas. The U.S. would overlook the authoritarian nature of the “responsible” regimes to focus on the more immediate goal of rallying their support against Iran.

This narrative hailed the sudden diplomatic exertions of the usually reticent Saudi regime, which was growing alarmed at the increasing Iranian influence in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories (where Hamas had responded to U.S.-led efforts to isolate it by drawing closer to Tehran). But what has become abundantly clear is that the Saudis’ ideas on how to respond to Iran are quite different from those of the Bush Administration. Even as they offer financial support to those standing up to Iran and its allies, the Saudis have also been actively engaging with Tehran, recognizing that its influence is a reality that cannot simply be eliminated.

So, while Washington has called for Iran to be isolated and has refused to talk to Tehran, the Saudis have been holding discussions with Iran for months. The first clear fruit of those talks is visible in Lebanon, where Iran and Saudi Arabia appear to have walked their allies there back from the brink of civil war, and put them on the path towards finding new terms for coexistence. On the Palestinian front, while Washington has demanded that its allies keep Hamas isolated — and pressed Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to resist calls to join the Islamists in a unity government — the Saudis brought the two Palestinian factions together in Mecca and brokered just such a coalition government. due to be formalized this week.

Those examples suggest that the diplomatic process now underway over Iraq is unlikely to further the U.S. goal of isolating Iran.

What they also underscore is just how little influence the U.S. has over the political process in the region. For all the talking up of Arab unity against an “Iranian threat,” the reality is that the only Middle East country supportive of a U.S. attack on Iran is Israel. If Iran is engaged in cooperative security arrangements with the Iraqi government and is engaged with the Saudis on Lebanon and elsewhere — and leaving them to take charge of the Palestinian file, which I suspect the Iranian leadership has no genuine interest in pursuing — it strikes me that the regional political context is currently trending away from a military confrontation.

As Rami Khouri wrote a month ago,

The United States should be awarded a Cosmic Prize for Chutzpah and Chicanery for charging Iran with meddling in Iraq and threatening American lives when the United States invaded Iraq, removed the former state structure, killed tens of thousands of people, unleashed ethnic-religious discord there, and allowed Iran to emerge effortlessly as the dominant regional power. What does the Bush administration take us for, simpletons and idiots? Are all the people of this region supposed only to silently applaud American military aggression, diplomatic adventurism, and Frankenstein-like national experiments with Arab dummies? No wonder that huge majorities of Middle Easterners criticize American policies, and even feel threatened by them.

If we are asked to assault Iran mainly in order to comply with American and Israeli hysteria, the likely response from most quarters in the Arab world, Iran, Turkey and others nearby will be to resist and defy the United States and Israel, and also to fight them when possible, politically or militarily. This is the stage we are at now, as much of public opinion in the region rejects the American-Israeli position, while many Arab governments seek protection under Washington’s wing.

The Israeli dimension remains dangerous, however. I’ve previously argued that the domestic political grandstanding of Israel’s incompetent political frontrunners could spark a confrontation, and the same point is emphasized in the Guardian today by Simon Tisdall, who notes that either Olmert, who is on the ropes politically, or Bibi Netanyahu, who is currently leading the race to succeed him — and who is scaring Israelis to death with his preposterous portrayal of Iran as the equivalent of Nazi Germany in 1938, could be tempted to launch a strike.

Tisdall’s most important observation, supported by Yossi Mekelburg who authored an important report on the prospects for Israeli action against Iran for Britain’s Royal Institute for International Affairs, is that the demagoguery of the likes of Netanyahu has virtually silenced serious debate in Israel over the scale of the threat and the consequences of a military response — and that this silence makes a military confrontation more likely.

Faced by an Israeli aerial bombardment of its nuclear and military sites, Iran could – in theory – fire missiles at Israeli cities, block oil routes through the Straits of Hormuz (40% of global oil supply passes that way), destabilise Iraq and Saudi Arabia, inspire a renewed Hizbullah and/or Palestinian onslaught, or undertake acts of international terrorism, the report says.

All of this would be harmful to Israel’s security and deeply inimical to its national interest and international standing, it warns. But Israelis are not thinking about consequences, only about threats.

“The likelihood of military action by Israel against Iran’s nuclear installations is increasing daily,” said Yossi Mekelberg, the report’s author.

“The lack of internal public debate and critical discussion of military action makes a strike more likely and is a deeply worrying trend within Israeli democracy. Israelis are focused on the potential danger from Iran but are indifferent to the potential fallout from military action.”

And, of course, Israel’s partisans in Washington will also continue to shape the discussion towards a confrontational line. Although AIPAC appeared during its congress this week to emphasize mostly sanctions as a response to Iran, just today, House Democrats, in response to AIPAC lobbying, removed language from their Iraq war bill that restricted President Bush’s ability to order a strike against Iran without Congressional approval.

So, as we argue below, this remains very much in play.

Dr. Khumalo

In case you’re wondering why I’ve gone a little quiet on the big themes, it’s because I’m home, in Cape Town, for a couple of weeks. And the most charming thing I’ve seen in the 24 hours I’ve been here is a TV ad that recalls some of what I’ve been thinking about football’s place in breaking down apartheid: It depicts Soweto in the late 60s, and a bunch of kids are getting a game together, picking teams. And then you realize the captains are the legendary Jomo Sono and Ace Ntsoelengoe. And they’re picking from the greats of that generation, Teenage Dladla, Computer Lamolo etc. And then there’s a little kid, who tells them he’s name is Doctor Khumalo (who, some 10 years younger, later became a great Bafana Bafana playmaker), and they let him play because his dad is a famous pro. And then comes a little blonde white boy, looking a little shy. And of the black kids shouts in Xhosa, “Don’t pick him, he probably plays like a cow.” But Jomo Sono throws the ball to the kid who says his name is Gary. And he says “Okay, Gary, you can be my goalkeeper.” (Gary Bailey, blonde and blue eyed, after a successful career as a Manchester United keeper, came home to play in goal for Kaizer Chiefs…) Teared me up, a little, that one did, because outside of progressive politics, the football field was the first place that black and white South Africans met as equals.

Anyway, I’ll be off for a couple of weeks, but back on the big themes soon enough.
Cheers
Tony

P.S. My breakfast yesterday of smoked snoek with mango, and then with egg, reminded me of the versatility of a Cape Town-unique fish whose appeal has been elegized by Calvin Trillin. It really is an essential part of growing up in this city…

The U.S. media with very few exceptions enabled the catastrophic war in Iraq by its failure to challenge the core assumptions on which the march to war was based — assumptions which were patently false — patently, that is, for anyone daring to break with a nationalist consensus fueled by demagogues in the Administration and among the neocon and “liberal hawk” talking heads (Yes, folks, the Tom Friedmans and Peter Beinarts and George Packers are every bit as responsible for enabling this moral and political disaster as were the Kristols, Krauthammers and O’Reillys — not that having been wrong about Iraq has harmed anyone’s infotainment career…)

Not only did the media allow the contention that Iraq had WMD to go largely unchallenged; it mostly failed to unpack that contention and its consequences (yes, the consensus among intel agencies and the UN inspectors was that some old stocks of battlefield chemical weapons from Iraq’s arsenal were still unaccounted for, but even if they existed, they represented no strategic threat to anyone). And more importantly, the media largely failed to challenge the patently false assumption even if such stocks of mustard gas and VX shells existed, U.S. military intervention would leave Iraq and the region more stable and secure.

The fundamental assumption left unchallenged is that military force is a wise, prudent or legitimate response to the proliferation of nasty weapons among regimes hostile to the U.S. It’s precisely that assumption that has been trashed in Iraq, which even if it had had a couple of hundred (or even thousand) mustard gas and VX shells would still be the catastrophic mess it is today.

Iraq is lost, of course, and the same media pundits and moguls that gave us the war have convinced themselves of more self-serving falsehoods, i.e. that the U.S. failure in Iraq was largely a product of bad management by Donald Rumsfeld and some of his generals. Good war, badly done, you might say (in the spirit of the Trotskyists who’ll defend their own Bolshevism by claiming that the revolution was led astray by Stalin). Or better still, that Iran was somehow responsible for the U.S. failure in Iraq.

My reason for revisiting the morbid saga of media complicity in enabling the Iraq war now is that a new, even more catastrophic war is in the works against Iran — but it’s not a done deal. Cheney, quite probably the most dangerous man in the world given the combination of his extremist views and his proximity to real power, would love to make it happen, and so would the neocons and Likudniks, who are agitating for it with increasing alarm.

Not only do we have a steady stream of hysteria pouring out of the Israeli establishment and its American backers making the absurd comparison between Iran and Nazi Germany, routinely exaggerating both Iran’s intentions and its capabilities. There’s also the new trope — equally absurd, but it’s not like there’s a very effective filter in place — of blaming Iran for things going wrong in Iraq.

The idea of Iranian “meddling” in Iraq is now commonly discussed in U.S. news outlets, and little air time is given to Iraq’s leaders saying they have no problem with Iran, and reject their country being used as a platform to attack Iran. Just last week, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told CNN, “We have told the Iranians and the Americans, ‘We know that you have a problem with each other, but we are asking you: Please solve your problems outside Iraq. We don’t want the American forces to take Iraq as a field to attack Iran or Syria.” And it’s not just the Shiite parties that see Iran as a friend. “If you exclude the Sunnis, the majority of Iraqis think of Iran as a friend,” says Kurdish legislator Mahmoud Othman. And Kurdish leaders have been equally harsh in criticizing U.S. attempts to ratchet up a confrontation with Iran on Iraqi soil.

The U.S. had promised a major roll-out last week of “evidence” showing Iran was contributing towards instability in Iraq, but it was canceled, reportedly after State and Defense Department officials pushed back against the flimsiness of the evidence on offer. But as Juan Cole notes, the pertinent question worth investigating, then, is “who was spearheading this presentation inside the Bush administration?” ?
I wish I had more confidence in the Democrats readiness to stand up to the demagoguery on Iran. And also the media’s. Thank heaven, then, for former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski, and his moral clarity on the matter. His recent Senate testimony on Iraq and Iran should be required reading for people covering this story. Extract:

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD’s in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the “decisive ideological struggle” of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America’s involvement in World War II.

This simplistic and demagogic narrative overlooks the fact that Nazism was based on the military power of the industrially most advanced European state; and that Stalinism was able to mobilize not only the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but also had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine. In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism; al Qaeda is an isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration; most Iraqis are engaged in strife because the American occupation of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi state; while Iran — though gaining in regional influence — is itself politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Deplorably, the Administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East region has lately relied almost entirely on such sloganeering. Vague and inflammatory talk about “a new strategic context” which is based on “clarity” and which prompts “the birth pangs of a new Middle East” is breeding intensifying anti-Americanism and is increasing the danger of a long-term collision between the United States and the Islamic world. Those in charge of U.S. diplomacy have also adopted a posture of moralistic self-ostracism toward Iran strongly reminiscent of John Foster Dulles’s attitude of the early 1950’s toward Chinese Communist leaders (resulting among other things in the well-known episode of the refused handshake). It took some two decades and a half before another Republican president was finally able to undo that legacy.
One should note here also that practically no country in the world shares the Manichean delusions that the Administration so passionately articulates. The result is growing political isolation of, and pervasive popular antagonism toward the U.S. global posture…

…It is obvious by now that the American national interest calls for a significant change of direction. There is in fact a dominant consensus in favor of a change: American public opinion now holds that the war was a mistake; that it should not be escalated, that a regional political process should be explored; and that an Israeli-Palestinian accommodation is an essential element of the needed policy alteration and should be actively pursued. It is noteworthy that profound reservations regarding the Administration’s policy have been voiced by a number of leading Republicans. One need only invoke here the expressed views of the much admired President Gerald Ford, former Secretary of State James Baker, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and several leading Republican senators, John Warner, Chuck Hagel, and Gordon Smith among others.

The urgent need today is for a strategy that seeks to create a political framework for a resolution of the problems posed both by the US occupation of Iraq and by the ensuing civil and sectarian conflict. Ending the occupation and shaping a regional security dialogue should be the mutually reinforcing goals of such a strategy, but both goals will take time and require a genuinely serious U.S. commitment.

It’s worth reading the whole thing in full, because it includes a grownup guide to how the U.S. could extract itself from the disaster it has created.

And when you hear the U.S. media echoing half-baked allegations against Iran or flights of fancy about how Washington is building a Sunni Arab united front to push back against the likes of Iran and Hamas, or hawking the same notions that security can be created through the application of military force despite that notion having been so spectacularly discredited in Iraq, remember that it’s often the “expertise” of the same cast of clowns that got the Iraq equation so spectacularly wrong that is now shaping the Iran discussion.

Iraq’s President Talabani, a Kurd, in Tehran with
Iran’s supreme leader

It’s amazing, frankly, that even as the Scooter Libby trial reveals the machinations of an Administration determined to prevent any jabs of reality from puncturing the “Iraq threat” scarecrow it had built to stampede Americans into war, the same crowd are getting a free hand to build an “Iran threat” scarecrow.

But this time, even if the U.S. media is reluctant to bluntly challenge the suppositions being sold by the Administration, realities are beginning to intrude. Consider this lede from a New York Times story this week on Lebanon: “In an unusual collaboration that could complicate American policy in the region, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been mediating an agreement to end Lebanon’s violent political crisis.”

This, on the same day that President Bush cites Iran’s actions in Lebanon as further evidence of the “Iran threat” to the region. But we learn three important things from the Times story, which reports that Iran’s national security chief Ali Larijani has been working with top Saudi officials to broker a political deal that will avert a civil war in Lebanon.

Iran’s president welcomes Bush’s favorite Iraqi
Shiite leader Abdulaziz al-Hakim to Tehran

The bad news for the “1938” crowd — the bomb-Iran alarmists led by Benjamin “Newt”-anyahu (who seems to have learned from Gingrich that a discredited crank can still get headlines by yelling “the sky is falling and nobody is doing anything about it”) and the Washington neocons, is that Iran is refusing to play the “clear and present danger.” Indeed, if things carry on this way, it’s going to get a lot harder to make a case for war.

Then again, as we know from Iraq, a war doesn’t really need a case. The Washington Post reports that the U.S. has already launched a dirty war against Iran inside Iraq, giving its troops license to execute Iranian operatives there. And, not surprisingly, two of the Administration officials quoted in the story compare Iran to Nazi Germany. The neocons and the Likud demagogues clearly see this as their most potent rhetorical tool — a connection made in the public’s mind by connecting it with the foolish antics of Iran’s own populist demagogue President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad.

Almost a year ago, I wondered whether the New York Times knew who runs Iran, because they were writing about President Ahmedinajad as if he actually made foreign policy or decided national security matters. Now, it turns out, the Times has figured it out. Last week, they ran a front page story on efforts by more powerful elements in Tehran to shut him out of the nuclear issue altogether. The Times writes:

Iran’s outspoken president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears to be under pressure from the highest authorities in Iran to end his involvement in its nuclear program, a sign that his political capital is declining as his country comes under increasing international pressure…. In the hazy world of Iranian politics, such a public rebuke was seen as a sign that the supreme leader — who has final say on all matters of state — might no longer support the president as the public face of defiance to the West.

Right. So the man who supposedly threatened to wipe Israel off the map and who huddles with the Klu Klux Klan comparing notes on the Holocaust — the man at the centerpiece of the frothy “1938” mythology — is in fact not running Iran.

My friend and colleague Scott MacLeod, who has spent decades in the region, offers excellent insights into Iran and the dynamics of the wider region at his new blog on TIME.com. He suggests it may be more important to keep an eye on Ali Larijani than to follow the posturing of Ahmedinajad. While the president rants about sanctions, Larijani is quietly talking to the Europeans, China, even the Saudis with a view to seeking a pragmatic accomodation, albeit one in which Iran keeps more of its nuclear program than the U.S. would like.

It’s worth remembering that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in fact, far from threatening to annihilate Israel, actually offered in April 2003 to open talks with the U.S. aimed at adressing all of its concerns, from the nuclear program to Hizballah, and reportedly offered to embrace some form of coexistence with Israel along the lines of a cold peace. It is this offer, summarily rejected by the Bush Administration at the behest of the hawks celebrating the toppling of a statue in Baghdad, that the Administration is working so hard to prevent Flynt Leverett from revealing in the national media, and for obvious reasons. It really punctures the bubble of any claim of Iran as a looming menace.

But, as Gary Sick, the doyen of U.S. Iran scholars notes (thanks, Scott, for pointing out the link), the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan massively empowered Iran, both by removing the twin threats of Saddam and the Taliban from its borders and by creating a democratic power structure that put Iranian allies in command in Baghdad, at the same time as events there weakened Washington’s Sunni Arab allies. Sick writes:

Although these were unintended consequences of U.S. policy, the effects dismayed friends and foes alike. From Iran’s perspective, it was a strategic gift of unparalleled proportions, tarnished only by the fact that its two major enemies had been replaced by a pugnacious U.S. military giant looking for new worlds to conquer. That tarnish was gradually removed as the United States found itself increasingly bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, with a public fast growing disillusioned with the ugly realities of empire building in a hostile and unforgiving environment. Erstwhile U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf, Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere privately viewed U.S. actions as a failure at best and a betrayal at worst. They were ripe for a change.

Since last summer’s Lebanon debacle, however, Sick says the organizing principle of U.S. policy in the region has become confronting Iran, and its policies all over the region are now attuned to that goal. It will govern Lebanon policy, and even prompt the U.S. to make gestures at restarting an Israeli-Palestinian peace process in order to make it easier to win Arab support against Iran.

And, Sick writes, Ahmedinajad’s media image is an important facilitator of the strategy:

The advent of Mr Ahmadinejad in Iran, with his extravagant rhetoric and populist posturing, makes that a much easier sell than it was under President Khatami. More than anyone else, Ahmadinejad is responsible for the appeal of this strategy. He has done immense — and perhaps irreparable — damage to Iran’s image in the world and its genuine foreign policy objectives. The fact that Iranian parliamentarians are banding together in opposition to him and his policies is evidence that this has not gone unobserved in Tehran, but it may be too late.

Will the strategy work? Well, it does NOT necessarily mean an immediate recourse to military conflict, as some are predicting. The underlying fundamentals have not changed: none of the tripartite protagonists stand to gain by an actual war. Especially after the Iraqi experience, it is widely understood in Washington that a war with a country as large and as nationalistic as Iran would be immensely costly and almost certainly futile. Moreover, there is no halfway house. You can’t do a quick air strike and realistically expect it to end there. The situation would inevitably escalate and ultimately require boots on the ground. That is a bridge too far for the United States at this juncture. However, the strategy is deliberately provocative and risks prompting a belligerent Iranian response (or perhaps it is deliberately looking for a belligerent response} that could quickly escalate into an armed exchange. So the threat of military action is not insignificant.

Newt-anyahu certainly continues to sing the tropes that amplify U.S. belligerence: “I want to call on the world that didn’t stop the Holocaust last time to stop any attempt this time and what needs to be done is divest genocide,” he told a recent Israeli security conference. Say whaaat? Here’s more: “When we are talking about rallying public opinion on genocide, who will lead the charge if not us?” he said. “No one will come defend the Jews if they no not defend themselves. This is the lesson of history.” Sorry, what genocide is this? The fantasy may have been cultivated for some time — most gloriously by a certain Amir Taheri, the New York Post’s tame Iranian who seems to fancy himself as a kind of Ahmed Chalabi for the next big blunder, who put out a fictitious story about Iranian Jews being forced to wear yellow cloth — a story furiously denounced by the Jewish representative in Iran’s parliament (who, by the way, is no flunky — he also condemned Ahmedinajad’s Holocaust conference).

Given Sick’s observations about Ahmedinajad’s role, it’s likely that the pressure to rein him in is growing very strong in Tehran, where the leadership remains pragmatic.

Trita Parsi suggests, via informed sources, that Iran may in fact agree to suspend uranium enrichment by the February 21 deadline in the current UN Resolution, but only after substantially ratcheting up its enrichment capability by joining together six cascades of enrichment centrifuges. Trita suggests this combination of accepting the key U.S. demand but only after crossing what the Israelis have called a red line in terms of enrichment capability, would create a major headache for the U.S.

The frontline of the Iran confrontation may not be nuclear diplomacy, however, but the dirty war on the ground in Iraq. The problem that the U.S. faces there, of course, is that the majority of Iraqis don’t share Washington’s hostility to Iran and their political leaders have made clear they are not going to let their country be turned into a battleground between Iran and the U.S. (They won’t necessarily say it outright, but the majority of those political leaders will see the U.S. rather than Iran as being responsible for such a confrontation. Even recent White House guest Abdulaziz al-Hakim has urged the U.S. to normalize its relations with Iran, a position shared by the Shiite and Kurdish leadership.)

The irony is that while the Administration’s most discredited hawks will try, however improbably, to suggest that Iranian “meddling” is the reason for Washington’s failure in Iraq, the reality may be that U.S. efforts to confront Iran on Iraqi soil, against the wishes of the majority of Iraqi leaders, may actually hasten the demise of the U.S. project in Baghdad.

Ever since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon last summer, I’ve been wondering about the changing nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship — it was plain in that conflict that the Bush Administration actually wanted Israel to go a lot further than Israel was ready to go in terms of committing forces to a battle to eliminate Hizballah. We’d all watched over a couple of years how Ariel Sharon had cynically walked back a hopelessly naive Bush and Rice from most traditional U.S. positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — much to the chagrin of Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft. But still, the expectation was that the U.S. ultimately needed to balance Israeli interests with those of those of its Arab allies (even if, under first Clinton and then Bush, that balance was increasingly, untenably tilted in favor of Israel). Israel’s neophyte leadership plunged into Lebanon, no doubt assuming that the U.S. would soon enough call a halt, allowing Israel to make a symbolic “deterrent” point without getting too mired (or bloodied) in a ground war in Lebanon. Instead, it found the U.S. essentially demanding that it finish the job. Where once the U.S. had acted as a restraint, now it had created a vacuum. And for an Israeli leadership weaned on the principle that the U.S. would always set the limits, this was a disaster.

It’s gotten worse. Now, you have a situation where Israel is actually able to resolve its differences with Syria, but the U.S. is warning it off talking to Damascus. And Washington is trying to engineer Palestinian political outcomes in ways that the Israeli security establishment recognizes as disastrous. Unfortunately for Israel, the game changed when the U.S. invaded Iraq, and became a direct player in a Quixotic bid to remodel the region on its own terms. That effort is doomed to fail, and the refusal of the Bush Administration to recognize the failure of its grand plan is only raising the cost of that failure.

So, while some like to believe that Israel is directing the U.S. Middle East policy, I think something quite different is afoot. Sure, a number of the people driving the agenda in Washington are in many cases neocons with strong roots in Likud, but they’re hardly representative of the Israeli political consensus. On the Israeli spectrum, those driving the policy in Washington are broadly akin to Benjamin “Newt” Netanyahu (and I say “Newt” because like Gingrich, he’s a discredited crank who only gets media attention by tossing out alarmist bon mots that headline writers seem to like — Newt: It’s World War III all over again; Bibi: It’s 1938 all over again…) Bibi can remain on the margins in Israel, because his ideological soul mates are running things in Washington. In other words, the hard-right position in Israel triumphs because it is dominant in Washington. This is not good for America, and nor is it good for Israel.

Hence my new op-ed in Haaretz, “Should Israel be in Bush’s Back Seat?. Extract:

When Ehud Olmert tells the world that President Bush’s invasion of Iraq has made the Middle East safer, at least he can fall back on the excuse that sarcasm is a mainstay of Israeli discourse. But when Olmert says Israel won’t talk to Syria as long as President Bush won’t, Israelis ought to be worried. More worried, still, when Condi Rice comes hawking fantasies about Israel concluding peace with the Palestinians while Hamas is swept away by Mahmoud Abbas (or is it Mohammed Dahlan?) playing a Palestinian Pinochet, while the likes of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt somehow contrive to reverse the train wreck of Iraq and scare Iran back into its shell.

Olmert appears to be outsourcing Israel’s strategic decision-making to a White House that has repeatedly demonstrated a catastrophic failure to grasp the realities of the region. Betting Israel’s security on the ability of the Bush crowd to transform the strategic landscape in the Middle East is rather like leaving a party in the backseat of an SUV whose driver is cradling a bottle of tequila and slurring his words as he rebuffs offers by more sober friends to take the wheel…

…The failure to impose Pax Americana on Iraq or even Afghanistan has therefore had profound consequences throughout the region. The Iraq Study Group recognized that the United States is simply in no position to dictate terms to its rivals and enemies in the region, and instead advocated pursuing a new stability based on recognition of the real balance of power, rather than the fantasy one concocted by the White House. But Bush remains in denial, pressing ahead with short-sighted, aggressive strategies that will only compound and accelerate the demise of U.S. influence in the region. …

To read the whole thing, click here

Hebron settlers attack a Palestinian passerby

Jimmy Carter has been branded as everything from an agent of Saudi Arabia to a cyrpto anti-Semite in a campaign of unprecedented hysteria by a Zionist establishment desperate to squelch any discussion in America of the moral implications of Israel’s apartheid policies in the West Bank and Gaza. So what, one imagines, would the same apparatus of Orwellian obfuscation, denial and diversion make of Tommy Lapid. Never mind apartheid, Lapid last week compared the actions of the Hebron settlers who regularly and viciously abuse the town’s Palestinian majority to the behavior of European anti-Semites in the early Nazi era. It’s entirely appropriate that someone draw attention to the vicious racism of the Hebron settlers, but you’d imagine the Alan Dershowitz-Marty Peretz crowd would turn its talk show artillery on anyone comparing Israelis to Nazis and their ilk. Except that Tommy Lapid was a member of Ariel Sharon’s cabinet, and is currently the chairman of the council of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum.

Like I always said, the U.S. public debate over Israel is so heavily policed by berserk denialists (not of the Holocaust, but of the idea that Israel is capable of oppression) like Dershowitz that it would brand the views of much of the Israeli political spectrum as unacceptable, even “anti-Semitic.” To be sure, if Haaretz was an American paper, the Carter-bashing crowd would have probably tried to shut it down.

Indeed, while most of the mainstream media in the U.S. typically steered clear of any serious discussion of the issues raised by Carter’s title — preferring to cover the events engineered by the Carter bashers such as the resignation of 14 of the 200 members of Carter’s advisory board — there were plenty of Israelis willing to step up to the plate in their own media and confirm, as Yitzhak Rabin’s education minister Shulamit Aloni bluntly stated, that Israel maintains an apartheid regime over the Palestinian territories. And, I think, Aloni nails the reason why the Peretz-Dershowitz crowd, as well as liberal commentators like Michael Kinsley who really ought to know better, went into paroxysms of denial when Carter stated the obvious. She writes:

Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.

The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to keep an eye on the population’s movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever
the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians’ land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.

If that were not enough, the generals commanding the region frequently issue further orders, regulations, instructions and rules (let us not forget: they are the lords of the land). By now they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing “Jewish only” roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night – all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.

On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order – this is a Jews-only road”, he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing short of amazing. “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign here and
let some antisemitic reporter or journalist take a photo so he that can show the world that Apartheid exists here?”

Israeli affirmation of Carter’s use of the apartheid analogy, as well as affirmation of the same over the years by such icons of the anti-apartheid struggle as Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu are simply inconvenient truths for those looking to trash Carter for his use of the analogy. But, I think the point here is two-fold — first, as Shulamit Aloni emphasizes above, and which I also argued earlier, a lot of liberal Jewish Americans seem to find it emotionally impossible to accept that Israel can do terrible things. Or, at least, if they see Israel doing terrible things, then those things are immediately blamed on the victim. The idea of universal, timeless Jewish victimhood seems to give Israel a moral free pass in some people’s minds — although the irony is that many of the Israeli liberal counterparts of those in the U.S. that hold these emotionally adolescent views are horrified by them, because many Israeli liberals pay more heed to the ethical injunction at the heart of Judaism to avoid doing unto others that which is hateful unto ourselves.

But there’s also a movement ready to swarm on anything deemed threatening to a Zionist narrative that entirely negates any other and the moral claims of the Palestinians. I can always tell what the talking points that have been issued are by the emails that begin arriving in my mailbox from various Israel advocacy groups, whose lines of argument are then echoed in dozens more from their enthusiasts. They tend to hone in what they claim are “factual” errors in his text to discredit the basic point that Carter is trying to make.

This, from the letter of resignation from the Carter Center board by 14 resignees (none of them, as far as I can see, known for their engagement with Middle East issues):

You wrote that UN Security Council Resolution 242 says that “Israel must withdraw from territories” (p. 38), but you know the word “must” in fact is not in the resolution. You said that since Mahmoud Abbas has been in office there have been no peace discussions. That is wrong. You wrote that Yassir Arafat told you in 1990 that, “The PLO has never advocated the annihilation of Israel” (p. 62). Given that their Charter, which explicitly calls for Israel’s destruction, was not revised until the late 1990s, how could you even write such a claim as if it were credible?

Well, actually, Carter is entirely correct on the first two claims, while on the second (and I haven’t read his text) he’d be correct if he argued that the PLO began moving towards a two-state solution, i.e. recognizing that Israel could not be militarily defeated, some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Sure, they only changed their Charter in 1998, but by then they had already formally recognized Israel through the Oslo Accords. To simply cite the Charter of the PLO as the last word on their position, you would have to deduce that Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert can’t possibly have been serious about a two-state solution, either, since the Likud Party platform expressly rejects the creation of a Palestinian state anywhere west of the Jordan River. (And remember, Sharon and Olmert were Likud for most of the period of the “roadmap” etc.)

Carter is absolutely correct that the last serious peace discussions between Israel and the Palestinians were held at Taba in January of 2001, in the last efforts brokered by the outgoing Clinton Administration to bridge the gap after Camp David. The process ended with the election of Ariel Sharon, and the only talks held since were symbolic meet-and-greets held at the behest of the Bush Administration (entirely for purposes of “showing” its Arab and European allies that it was, in fact, still engaged with Middle East peace). Carter is correct to treat these as farcical, as, indeed, does all of the Israeli media, no matter its ideological stripe. Only, it seems, in the fantasy world of the Carter-bashers (and, perhaps, also of Condi Rice and some of her fans) is Israel is engaged in a peace process with Mahmoud Abbas.

Most amusing, though, is the charge that Carter gets 242 wrong by saying it says Israel must withdraw from territories — because it doesn’t say “must”. What’s funny about this is that these people seem to have misunderstood the talking points. Having been a target of the pro-Israel media machine myself on this question, I know that their argument is not over the word “must” but over the word “the”. The Zionists claim the absence of a proper noun in resolution’s call for Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in 1967 means that it does not call for them to withdraw from all of those territories — that it somehow leaves the door open for them to annex parts of the West Bank, or East Jerusalem or whatever. This, too, is specious semantics, because the resolution is premised on its clause upholding “the inadmissability of the acquisition of territory by war,” which would by definition require that Israel accept it has no legitimate claim to keep any of the territories captured in 1967. The Zionists claim that it was a deliberate fudge, but frankly, this is just another red herring: the international consensus on 242 has always been that Israel’s “recognized” borders are those of June 4, 1967, and that was the premise of the Oslo final status talks, too — that’s why the principle of quid-pro-quo land exchanges by negotiation and common agreement was accepted by the Israeli side for any land outside of the 1967 borders that Israel would seek to keep. The semantics are simply designed to confuse the issue. But unfortunately the 14 Carter center “refuseniks” seem to have gotten the wrong end of the stick, saying it didn’t say “must.” The relevant wording in 242, BTW, is that the Security Council “Affirms that the fulfillment of (UN) Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include … withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Does it say “must”? No, it simply says that a lasting peace requires such withdrawal.

In his survey of responses to Carter, Norman Finkelstein includes a useful discussion of politicking over Resolution 242.

In my previous entry on this issue, I warned against a simplistic collapsing of the valid moral equivalence drawn between the condition of the Palestinians and those of black people under apartheid into an erroneous analytical or strategic equivalence — despite the moral equivalence of the colonial style disenfranchisement of black people under apartheid and Palestinians under occupation since 1967, to two situations are quite different. I wrote, last time, that

Israel manages with very little Palestinian labor, and as a result the daily intimacy between black and white South Africans created by their economic interaction even at the height of the apartheid system is largely absent in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. In South Africa, the fact that black people were driven off their land forced them into wage labor in a common economy; in Israel-Palestine Palestinians have been forced off their land in order to drive them out of a common polity and economy. That, I believe, means that the solution to the conflict in Israel-Palestine will be quite different to that in South Africa, at least in the near term.

Veteran Israeli peace campaigner and “premature post-Zionist” Uri Avnery offers a thoughtful critique of the idea that the two can be conflated in the realm of practical political responses. For many, it’s a simple step from the apartheid analogy to the idea that Israel should be internationally isolated and sanctioned in order to end the Occupation. That, he says, is a profound misreading of international public opinion, which will never be persuaded to isolate a state still viewed as representing the survivors of the Holocaust. He writes:

It is a serious error to think that international public opinion will put an end to the occupation. This will come about when the Israeli public itself is convinced of the need to do so.

There is another important difference between the two conflicts, and this may be more dangerous than any other: in South Africa, no White would have dreamt of ethnic cleansing. Even the racists understood that the country could not exist without the Black population. But in Israel, this goal is under serious consideration, both openly and in secret. One of its main advocates, Avigdor Lieberman, is a member of the government and last week Condoleezza Rice met with him officially. Apartheid is not the worst danger hovering over the heads of the Palestinians. They are menaced by something infinitely worse: “Transfer”, which means total expulsion.

Some people in Israel and around the world follow the Apartheid analogy to its logical conclusion: the solution here will be the same as the one in South Africa. There, the Whites surrendered and the Black majority assumed power. The country remained united. Thanks to wise leaders, headed by Nelson Mandela and Frederick Willem de Klerk, this happened without bloodshed.

In Israel, that is a beautiful dream for the end of days. Because of the people involved and their anxieties, it would inevitably turn into a nightmare. In this country there are two peoples with a very strong national consciousness. After 125 years of conflict, there is not the slightest chance that they would live together in one state, share the same government, serve in the same army and pay the same taxes. Economically, technologically and educationally, the gap between the two populations is immense. In such a situation, power relations similar to those in Apartheid South Africa would indeed arise.

In Israel, the demographic demon is lurking. There is an existential angst among the Jews that the demographic balance will change even within the Green Line. Every morning the babies are counted – how many Jewish babies were born during the night, and how many Arab. In a joint state, the discrimination would grow a hundredfold. The drive to dispossess and expel would know no bounds, rampant Jewish settlement activity would flourish, together with the effort to put the Arabs at a disadvantage by all possible means. In short: Hell.

The debate doesn’t end there, of course: Avnery’s dismissal of the realistic prospects for a single-state solution is not shared by Ali Abunimah, whose new book argues persuasively that Israeli policies in the Sharon era have essentially completed the elimination of infrastructural basis for a viable two-state solution, and that the two peoples’ fates are now inextricably intertwined.

Both sides of that ongoing debate share a concern to practically redress the injustices Jimmy Carter has highlighted, and both sides raise valid arguments — over which I’m too old and too jaded, to see any necessity to take a “line.” But Carter’s contribution has been to remind Americans why they ought to be having a discussion on their responsibilities in respect of, as he put it, seeking peace for Israel and peace and justice for the Palestinians.

Perhaps Jimmy had been listening in his i-Pod to the immortal Peter Tosh anthem “Equal Rights,” which actually name-checked the Palestinians, and proclaims the following:

Everyone is crying out for peace
None is crying for justice
But I don’t want no peace
I need equal rights, and justice