PM Netanyahu’s inability to devise a compromise strategy for coming to grips with the changes. Enjoy!

Ty

NYT, September 17, 2011

Tumult of Arab Spring Prompts Worries in Washington

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — While the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring created new opportunities for American diplomacy, the tumult has also presented the United States with challenges — and worst-case scenarios — that would have once been almost unimaginable.

What if the Palestinians’ quest for recognition of a state at the United Nations, despite American pleas otherwise, lands Israel in the International Criminal Court, fuels deeper resentment of the United States, or touches off a new convulsion of violence in the West Bank and Gaza?

Or if Egypt, emerging from decades of autocratic rule under President Hosni Mubarak, responds to anti-Israeli sentiments on the street and abrogates the Camp David peace treaty, a bulwark of Arab-Israeli stability for three decades?

“We’re facing an Arab awakening that nobody could have imagined and few predicted just a few years ago,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a recent interview with reporters and editors of The New York Times. “And it’s sweeping aside a lot of the old preconceptions.”

It may also sweep aside, or at least diminish, American influence in the region. The bold vow on Friday by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to seek full membership at the United Nations amounted to a public rebuff of weeks of feverish American diplomacy. His vow came on top of a rapid and worrisome deterioration of relations between Egypt and Israel and between Israel and Turkey, the three countries that have been the strongest American allies in the region.

Diplomacy has never been easy in the Middle East, but the recent events have so roiled the region that the United States fears being forced to take sides in diplomatic or, worse, military disputes among its friends. Hypothetical outcomes seem chillingly present. What would happen if Turkey, a NATO ally that the United States is bound by treaty to defend, sent warships to escort ships to Gaza in defiance of Israel’s blockade, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to do?

Crises like the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador in Turkey, the storming of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo and protests outside the one in Amman, Jordan, have compounded a sense of urgency and forced the Obama administration to reassess some of this country’s fundamental assumptions, and to do so on the fly.

“The region has come unglued,” said Robert Malley, a senior analyst in Washington for the International Crisis Group. “And all the tools the United States has marshaled in the past are no longer as effective.”

The United States, as a global power and permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, still has significant ability to shape events in the region. This was underscored by the flurry of telephone calls that President Obama, Mrs. Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta made to their Egyptian and Israeli counterparts to diffuse tensions after the siege of Israeli Embassy in Cairo this month.

At the same time, the toppling of leaders who preserved a stable, if strained, status quo for decades — Mr. Mubarak, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia — has unleashed powerful and still unpredictable forces that the United States has only begun to grapple with and is likely to be doing so for years.

In the process, diplomats worry, the actions of the United States could even nudge the Arab Spring toward radicalism by angering newly enfranchised citizens of democratic nations.

In the case of Egypt, the administration has promised millions of dollars in aid to support a democratic transition, only to see the military council ruling the country object to how and where it is spent, according to two administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic matters. The objection echoed similar ones that came from Mr. Mubarak’s government. The government and the political parties vying for support before new elections there have also intensified anti-American talk. The officials privately warned of the emergence of an outwardly hostile government, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and remnants of Mr. Mubarak’s party.

The upheaval in Egypt has even raised the prospect that it might break its Camp David peace treaty with Israel, with Egypt’s prime minister, Essam Sharaf, telling a Turkish television channel last week that the deal was “not a sacred thing and is always open to discussion.”

The administration, especially Mrs. Clinton, also spent months trying to mediate between Turkey and Israel over the response to the Israeli military operation last year that killed nine passengers aboard a ship trying to deliver aid to Gaza despite an Israeli embargo — only to see both sides harden their views after a United Nations report on the episode became public.

Unflinching support for Israel has, of course, been a constant of American foreign policy for years, often at the cost of political and diplomatic support elsewhere in the region, but the Obama administration has also sought to improve ties with Turkey after the chill that followed the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Turkey, which aspires to broaden its own influence in the region, has been a crucial if imperfect partner, from the administration’s point of view, in the international response to the fighting in Libya and the diplomatic efforts to isolate Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

The administration deferred to Turkey’s request last month to delay new sanctions on Mr. Assad’s government to give diplomacy another chance.

This month, only days before expelling Israel’s ambassador, Turkey agreed to install an American radar system that is part of a new NATO missile defense system, underscoring its importance to a policy goal of the last two administrations.

Mrs. Clinton, in the interview, expressed hope that the United States would be able to support the democratic aspirations of the Arab uprisings. She also acknowledged the constraints that the administration faced at home, given the country’s budget crisis and Republican calls in Congress to cut foreign aid, especially to the Palestinians and others seen as hostile to Israel.

“It’s a great opportunity for the United States, but we are constrained by budget and to some extent constrained by political obstacles,” she said. “I’m determined that we’re going to do as much as we can within those constraints to deal with the opportunities that I see from Tunisia to Libya and Egypt and beyond.”

The administration has faced criticism from all quarters — that it has not done enough to support Israel or has done too much, that it has supported some Arab uprisings, while remaining silent on the repression in Bahrain. That in itself illustrates how tumultuous the region has become and how the United States has had to scramble to keep up with events that are still unfolding.

“Things are so fluid,” said Robert Danin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They’re not driving the train. They’re reacting to the train, and no one knows where the train is going.”

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Israel: Adrift at Sea Alone

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I’VE never been more worried about Israel’s future. The crumbling of key pillars of Israel’s security — the peace with Egypt, the stability of Syria and the friendship of Turkey and Jordan — coupled with the most diplomatically inept and strategically incompetent government in Israel’s history have put Israel in a very dangerous situation.

This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.

Israel is not responsible for the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt or for the uprising in Syria or for Turkey’s decision to seek regional leadership by cynically trashing Israel or for the fracturing of the Palestinian national movement between the West Bank and Gaza. What Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, is responsible for is failing to put forth a strategy to respond to all of these in a way that protects Israel’s long-term interests.

O.K., Mr. Netanyahu has a strategy: Do nothing vis-à-vis the Palestinians or Turkey that will require him to go against his base, compromise his ideology or antagonize his key coalition partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an extreme right-winger. Then, call on the U.S. to stop Iran’s nuclear program and help Israel out of every pickle, but make sure that President Obama can’t ask for anything in return — like halting Israeli settlements — by mobilizing Republicans in Congress to box in Obama and by encouraging Jewish leaders to suggest that Obama is hostile to Israel and is losing the Jewish vote. And meanwhile, get the Israel lobby to hammer anyone in the administration or Congress who says aloud that maybe Bibi has made some mistakes, not just Barack. There, who says Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t have a strategy?

“The years-long diplomatic effort to integrate Israel as an accepted neighbor in the Middle East collapsed this week, with the expulsion of the Israeli ambassadors from Ankara and Cairo, and the rushed evacuation of the embassy staff from Amman,” wrote Haaretz newspaper’s Aluf Benn. “The region is spewing out the Jewish state, which is increasingly shutting itself off behind fortified walls, under a leadership that refuses any change, movement or reform … Netanyahu demonstrated utter passivity in the face of the dramatic changes in the region, and allowed his rivals to seize the initiative and set the agenda.”

What could Israel have done? The Palestinian Authority, which has made concrete strides in the past five years at building the institutions and security forces of a state in the West Bank — making life there quieter than ever for Israel — finally said to itself: “Our state-building has not prompted Israel to halt settlements or engage in steps to separate, so all we’re doing is sustaining Israel’s occupation. Let’s go to the U.N., get recognized as a state within the 1967 borders and fight Israel that way.” Once this was clear, Israel should have either put out its own peace plan or tried to shape the U.N. diplomacy with its own resolution that reaffirmed the right of both the Palestinian and the Jewish people to a state in historic Palestine and reignited negotiations.

Mr. Netanyahu did neither. Now the U.S. is scrambling to defuse the crisis, so the U.S. does not have to cast a U.N. veto on a Palestinian state, which could be disastrous in an Arab world increasingly moving toward more popular self-rule.

On Turkey, the Obama team and Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyers worked tirelessly these last two months to resolve the crisis stemming from the killing by Israeli commandos of Turkish civilians in the May 2010 Turkish aid flotilla that recklessly tried to land in Gaza. Turkey was demanding an apology. According to an exhaustive article about the talks by the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea of the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, the two sides agreed that Israel would apologize only for “operational mistakes” and the Turks would agree to not raise legal claims. Bibi then undercut his own lawyers and rejected the deal, out of national pride and fear that Mr. Lieberman would use it against him. So Turkey threw out the Israeli ambassador.

As for Egypt, stability has left the building there and any new Egyptian government is going to be subjected to more populist pressures on Israel. Some of this is unavoidable, but why not have a strategy to minimize it by Israel putting a real peace map on the table?

I have great sympathy for Israel’s strategic dilemma and no illusions about its enemies. But Israel today is giving its friends — and President Obama’s one of them — nothing to defend it with. Israel can fight with everyone or it can choose not to surrender but to blunt these trends with a peace overture that fair-minded people would recognize as serious, and thereby reduce its isolation.

Unfortunately, Israel today does not have a leader or a cabinet for such subtle diplomacy. One can only hope that the Israeli people will recognize this before this government plunges Israel into deeper global isolation and drags America along with it.

That suggestion–on the 1967 borders–is not exactly new and has been in the mix for some time. However, deciding to insert that premise in this speech was controversial, as well as bold, and badly split the Administration. The leading foreign policy figures, such as Secretary Clinton and Special Envoy Mitchell, as well as many WH/NSC staffers, were strongly in favor of using this language. The opposition was led by veteran Mideast negotiator and current WH senior NSC official, Dennis Ross. Indeed, George Mitchell’s resignation was tied directly to the sense that the U.S. has too long favored Israel and has been too reticent in advocating policies more favorable to the Palestinians/Arabs.

Media reaction has been varied–some applauding the President’s words, some expressing the feeling that it is about time we stopped letting the Israelis lead us around by the nose, and others claiming that Israel “has been thrown under the bus” by this President.

Here are three articles–a comprehensive report and two op-eds forwarding widely differing viewpoints– on the tensions, the border issue, Israeli security and Palestinian statehood (all abridged and highlighted) for your review.. Ty

May 21, 2011, NYT

Obama’s Peace Tack Contrasts With Key Aide, Friend of Israel

By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Five days ago, during a closed-door meeting with a group of Middle East experts, administration officials, and journalists, King Abdullah II of Jordan gave his assessment of how Arabs view the debate within the Obama administration over how far to push Israel on concessions for peace with the Palestinians.

From the State Department, “we get good responses,” the Jordanian king said, according to several people who were in the room. And from the Pentagon, too. “But not from the White House, and we know the reason why is because of Dennis Ross” — President Obama’s chief Middle East adviser.

Mr. Ross, King Abdullah concluded, “is giving wrong advice to the White House.”

By almost all accounts, Dennis B. Ross — Middle East envoy to three presidents, well-known architect of incremental and painstaking diplomacy in the Middle East that eschews game-changing plays — is Israel’s friend in the Obama White House and one of the most influential behind-the-scenes figures in town.

His strategy sometimes contrasts sharply with that of a president who has bold instincts and a willingness to elevate the plight of the Palestinians to a status equal to that of the Israelis.

But now, as the president is embarking on a course that, once again, puts him at odds with Israel’s conservative prime minister, the question is how much of a split the president is willing to make not only with the Israeli leader, but with his own hand-picked Middle East adviser.

The White House would not say where Mr. Ross, 62, stood on the president’s announcement on Thursday that Israel’s pre-1967 borders — adjusted to account for Israeli security needs and Jewish settlements in the West Bank — should form the basis for a negotiated settlement. Mr. Ross did not respond to requests for comment for this article. His friends and associates say he has long believed that peace negotiations will succeed only if the United States closely coordinates its efforts with the Israelis.

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel reacted sharply to the president’s proposal, the reality is that the course Mr. Obama outlined Thursday was much more modest than what some of his advisers initially advocated.

George J. Mitchell, who was Mr. Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, backed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, argued in favor of a comprehensive American proposal that would include borders, security and the fate of Jerusalem and refugees. But Mr. Ross balked, administration officials said, arguing that it was unwise for the United States to look as if it were publicly breaking with Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu and Israel’s backers in the United States view Mr. Ross as a key to holding at bay what they see as pro-Palestinian sympathies expressed by Mr. Mitchell; Mr. Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; and even the president himself.

Mr. Ross is the most senior member of a coterie of American diplomats who have advised presidents stretching back to Ronald Reagan. Unlike many of his colleagues, Mr. Ross has thrived in Republican and Democratic administrations.

Mr. Ross initially began his tenure in the Obama administration as a senior Iran policy maker at the State Department. But in the summer of 2009, just a few months into his job at State, Mr. Ross moved to the White House, where he kept his Iran portfolio and eventually assumed a broader role that has allowed him to take part in developing Mr. Obama’s response to the upheavals in the Arab world.

His move came as the White House and Mr. Netanyahu were in a standoff over settlement construction. Over time, administration officials say, Mr. Ross took more of a role over Arab-Israeli policy. In September 2009, Mr. Obama abandoned his insistence on a settlement freeze in the face of Israeli recalcitrance.

“If Dennis Ross was in the inner circle in the early days, this administration would not have made that colossal settlements error,” an Israeli sympathizer said. “He would have said, ‘Don’t go there.’ ”

Once at the White House, Mr. Ross became invaluable, administration officials said, because of his close relationship not only with Mr. Netanyahu, but with the Israeli prime minister’s top peace negotiator, Yitzhak Molcho.

Mr. Ross demonstrated his growing influence last October, when the administration was pressing Mr. Netanyahu to agree to a three-month extension of his moratorium on settlement construction. Mr. Netanyahu balked.

So Mr. Ross devised a generous package of incentives for Israel that included 20 American fighter jets, other security guarantees, and an American pledge to oppose United Nations resolutions on Palestinian statehood. Many Middle East analysts expressed surprise that the administration would offer so much to Israel in return for a one-time, 90-day extension of a freeze.

In the end, Mr. Obama abandoned the effort, concluding that even if Mr. Netanyahu persuaded his cabinet to go along with the extension, it was unlikely to produce the kind of progress in talks that the United States hoped for. Direct talks between Mr. Netanyahu and the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, soon petered out, and Mr. Abbas made plans to go to the United Nations in September for a vote on Palestinian statehood.

In April, Mr. Mitchell, who, one Arab official said, often held up the specter of Mr. Ross to the Palestinians as an example of whom they would end up with if he left, sent Mr. Obama a letter of resignation. By some accounts, one reason was his inability to see eye to eye with Mr. Ross.

But, Mr. Obama must now take into account the emerging realities in the Arab world, including a new populism brought by the democratic movement that may make even governments that were not hostile to Israel, like Egypt and Jordan, more insistent on pushing the case of the Palestinians.

“Experience can be helpful, but it can also be an impediment to viewing things in a new way,” one observer said.

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May 20, 2011, NYT

Obama Draws the Line

By ROGER COHEN

LONDON — On the eve of an election year, with Jewish donors and fund-raisers already restive over his approach to Israel, President Obama made a brave speech telling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “the dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation” and urging him to accept Israeli borders at or close to the 1967 lines.

The president got 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008. Perhaps those words will cost him some of those votes — although sentiment toward Israel among American Jews is slowly shifting. But true friends are critical friends. And the American and Israeli national interest do not lie in the poisonous Israeli-Palestinian status quo.

Netanyahu, who will address the U.S. Congress next week, will certainly attempt in response to go over the president’s head to those restive donors and fund-raisers. He’s Israel’s leader, but knows that a core constituency lies in the United States. He will try to outlast Obama, noting that Republican hopefuls like Mitt Romney are already talking of the president throwing “Israel under the bus.” He will try to kick the can down the road. Process without end favors Israel.

Therein lurks the political fight of the next several months. The best Obama and Netanyahu will ever be able to do is position a fig-leaf of decorum over their differences. The worst poison is distrust. These two men have it aplenty for each other.

Obama, in a first for an American president, has now said the border between Israel and Palestine should be “based on the 1967 lines.” Yes, it should. Netanyahu still talks of “Judea and Samaria,” a lexicon that, true to his Likud party’s platform, does not acknowledge those lines but sees one land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Each leader believes Israel’s long-term security depends on his view prevailing.

A Republican-dominated Congress awaits Netanyahu with open arms. So does the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Aipac. Netanyahu is no less susceptible to adulation than the average man. These are not backdrops that encourage tough choices. But he must make them or watch Israel’s isolation and instability grow.

Does Netanyahu, with democratic change and movement coursing through the region, have it in him to move beyond short-term tactics to a strategy for his nation that ushers it from its siege mentality? I doubt it. I do know he will be judged a failure if he refuses, now, to make a good-faith effort to see if Israel’s security can be squared with Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. That involves revealing Israel’s hand on borders with the same frankness the president has just shown.

As Obama noted, occupation is “humiliation.” It was humiliation as experienced by a young Tunisian fruit vendor that sparked the unfurling of the Arab Spring. There is no reason to believe this quest for dignity and self-governance will stop at Palestine’s door or that Israel’s quest for security can be sustained by walls alone.

Arabs by the tens of millions have been overcoming the paralysis of fear. It is past time for Israel to do the same. A specter — Iran, Hamas, delegitimization campaigns — can always be summoned to dismiss peace. These threats exist. But I believe the most corrosive is Israeli dominion over another people. That’s the low road.

Obama got it right. The essential trade-off is Israeli security for Palestinian sovereignty. Each side must convince the other that peace will provide it.

Israeli security begins with a reconciled Fatah and Hamas committing irrevocably to nonviolence, with Palestinian acquiescence to a nonmilitarized state, and with Palestinian acceptance that a two-state peace ends all territorial claims. Palestinian sovereignty begins with what Obama called “the full and phased withdrawal of Israeli security forces” — including from the Jordan River border area — and with the removal of all settlements not on land covered by “mutually agreed swaps.”

This is difficult but doable. The 1967 lines are not “indefensible,” as Netanyahu declared in his immediate response to Obama’s speech. What is “indefensible” over time for Israel is colonizing another people. That process has continued with settlements expanding in defiance of Obama’s urging. The president was therefore right to pull back from President George W. Bush’s acceptance of “already existing major Israeli population centers” beyond the 1967 lines.

Palestinians have been making ominous wrong moves. The unilateralist temptation embodied in the quest for recognition of statehood at the United Nations in September must be resisted: It represents a return to useless symbolism and the narrative of victimhood. Such recognition — and of course the United States would not give it — would not change a single fact on the ground or improve the lot of Palestinians.

What has improved their lot is the patient institution-building of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on the West Bank, his embrace of nonviolence, and his refusal to allow the grievances of the past to halt the building of a future. To all of this Netanyahu has offered only the old refrain: Israel has no partner with which to build peace.

It does — if it would only see and reinforce that partner. Beyond siege lies someone.

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen .

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Obama Throws Israel to the Dogs

Posted By Robert Spencer On May 20, 2011 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 147 Comments

America is on the verge of abandoning its most reliable ally in the Middle East, thanks to Barack Hussein Obama.

He began his betrayal with lip service to Israel’s concerns about defending itself from the relentless jihad that has been waged against it throughout the sixty-three years of its lifetime as a sovereign state: “For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state. Palestinian leaders will not achieve peace or prosperity if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection. And Palestinians will never realize their independence by denying the right of Israel to exist.”

Yet after saying that “Palestinians will never realize their independence by denying the right of Israel to exist,” Obama called for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Yet neither Hamas nor Fatah have acknowledged Israel’s right to exist, and Obama did not make that acknowledgment a condition of the establishment of a Palestinian state. He was merely making an observation, akin to something like: “You’ll never get a good job by sleeping in the sun all day” – more on the order of a polite request, a mild nag, rather than a firm condition.

Obama also called for “two states,” explaining that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

It was widely reported Thursday evening that Obama was calling for a return to the 1967 borders, but this is not the case. He actually called for the creation of a “sovereign and contiguous state” for the Palestinian Arabs, and said that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines.” Thus he wasn’t calling for a return to the 1967 lines, but new borders “based on the 1967 lines.”

There were, however, no 1967 lines in which Palestinian Arab territory was contiguous. For the territory of Palestine to be contiguous, that of Israel will have to be substantially reduced. Israel’s 1967 borders were indefensible, and Obama is calling for Israel to be reduced even further so that a contiguous Palestinian state can be established.

What’s more, Obama specified that the new Palestinian state should have “borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt,” while Israel should have “borders with Palestine.” The implication was that Israel, in Obama’s vision, will border on neither Jordan nor Egypt — only on “Palestine.” Yet currently Israel has substantial borders with both Jordan and Egypt. Obama was implying that his contiguous Palestine would comprise not just Gaza and Judea and Samaria, but large expanses of Israeli territory bordering on those two states.

That would leave a truncated, reduced Israeli rump state, reminiscent of the reduced and defenseless Czechoslovakia that remained after Neville Chamberlain fed the Nazi beast at Munich. And if Obama did not mean that the diminished Israel he envisioned would have no territory bordering on Jordan or Egypt, the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state including Gaza and the West Bank would cut Israel in two: Palestine’s contiguous territory would come at the expense of Israel’s.

In that vein, I think Tom Friedman today in the NYT captures the standoff well and says, in effect, a pox on both your houses.  

 Ty  

NYT, December 11, 2010

Reality Check

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The failed attempt by the U.S. to bribe Israel with a $3 billion security assistance package, diplomatic cover and advanced F-35 fighter aircraft — if Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu would simply agree to a 90-day settlements freeze to resume talks with the Palestinians — has been enormously clarifying. It demonstrates just how disconnected from reality both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships have become.

Oil is to Saudi Arabia what unconditional American aid and affection are to Israel — and what unconditional Arab and European aid and affection are to the Palestinians: a hallucinogenic drug that enables them each to think they can defy the laws of history, geography and demography. It is long past time that we stop being their crack dealers. At a time of nearly 10 percent unemployment in America, we have the Israelis and the Palestinians sitting over there with their arms folded, waiting for more U.S. assurances or money to persuade them to do what is manifestly in their own interest: negotiate a two-state deal. Shame on them, and shame us. You can’t want peace more than the parties themselves, and that is exactly where America is today. The people running Israel and Palestine have other priorities. It is time we left them alone to pursue them — and to live with the consequences.

They just don’t get it: we’re not their grandfather’s America anymore. We have bigger problems. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators should take a minute and put the following five words into Google: “budget cuts and fire departments.” Here’s what they’ll find: American city after city — Phoenix, Cincinnati, Austin, Washington, Jacksonville, Sacramento, Philadelphia — all having to cut their fire departments. Then put in these four words: “schools and budget cuts.” One of the top stories listed is from The Christian Science Monitor: “As state and local governments slash spending and federal stimulus dries up, school budget cuts for the next academic year could be the worst in a generation.”

I guarantee you, if someone came to these cities and said, “We have $3 billion we’d like to give to your schools and fire departments if you’ll just do what is manifestly in your own interest,” their only answer would be: “Where do we sign?” And so it should have been with Israel.

Israel, when America, a country that has lavished billions on you over the last 50 years and taken up your defense in countless international forums, asks you to halt settlements for three months to get peace talks going, there is only one right answer, and it is not “How much?” It is: “Yes, whatever you want, because you’re our only true friend in the world.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, what are you thinking? Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, offered you a great two-state deal, including East Jerusalem — and you let it fritter away. Now, instead of chasing after Obama and telling him you’ll show up for negotiations anywhere under any conditions that the president asks, you’re also setting your own terms. Here’s some free advice: When America goes weak, if you think the Chinese will deliver Israel for you, you’re wrong. I know China well. It will sell you out for a boatload of Israeli software, drones and microchips so fast that your head will spin.

I understand the problem: Israeli and Palestinian leaders cannot end the conflict between each other without having a civil war within their respective communities. Netanyahu would have to take on the settlers and Abbas would have to take on Hamas and the Fatah radicals. Both men have silent majorities that would back them if they did, but neither man feels so uncomfortable with his present situation to risk that civil war inside to make peace outside. There are no Abe Lincolns out there.

What this means, argues the Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal, is that the window for a two-state solution is rapidly closing. Israel will end up permanently occupying the West Bank with its 2.5 million Palestinians. We will have a one-state solution. Israel will have inside its belly 2.5 million Palestinians without the rights of citizenship, along with 1.5 million Israeli Arabs. “Then the only question will be what will be the nature of this one state — it will either be apartheid or Lebanon,” said Halbertal. “We will be confronted by two horrors.”

The most valuable thing that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could do now is just get out of the picture — so both leaders and both peoples have an unimpeded view of their horrible future together in one state, if they can’t separate. We must not give them any more excuses, like: “Here comes the secretary of state again. Be patient. Something is happening. We’re working on a deal. We’re close. If only the Americans weren’t so naïve, we were just about to compromise. … Be patient.”

It’s all a fraud. America must get out of the way so Israelis and Palestinians can see clearly, without any obstructions, what reckless choices their leaders are making. Make no mistake, I am for the most active U.S. mediation effort possible to promote peace, but the initiative has to come from them. The Middle East only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them.

Dick

Having read your book World War IV and Beyond (noting in particular the exhaustive research supporting the content), I believe it safe to say your credentials on the subject of Iran-Israel relations are beyond dispute.  And thus after reading the alarming article (theme:  an Israeli attack on Iran is inevitable) you shared with us this morning, I’d like to submit to you (AND TO YOU ONLY) a few questions.  I hope you’ll share your answers with the Forum readership but that’s your call to make.  Just for fun I’ll put them in a TRUE/FALSE format to help pin you down:-)

1.  The Obama Administration is resigned to the prospect of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon capability, quite likely while Obama is still in his first term.  TRUE/FALSE

Assume that is true because there really is very little they can do about it.  The sad truth is that there is really very little that any country can do about it.  The technology is widely known and available and any country that is willing to spend the time and money can build nuclear weapons.  They can be delayed by various means (threats, sanctions, espionage, attacks), but if they are willing to persist, they will.

2.  The U.S. has no credible military option to engage Iran–given its current military commitments elsewhere–thus will strive to the extreme to avoid a confrontation in any situation short of a direct Iranian attack on U.S. interests in the Gulf region. TRUE/FALSE

True.  We can bomb them (Victory through Airpower!!), but, first that is aggression (a violation of international law) and second, unless we can totally remove the regime, it would only delay any program and have the disadvantage of uniting the country (and perhaps the entire Muslim world) behind their “sovereign right” to have nukes.  There are enough crazy war hawks who would support a “surgical” strike on Iran, but it is very doubtful any US government would want to take on the opprobrium of destroying much of the infrastructure of Iran with the enormous civilian casualties it would entail.  We do not have the ground troops to do anything useful in Iran.

3.  The use of conventional weapons (by either the U.S. or Israel) in an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is not a credible option as the damage done would not effectively halt the program for more than the short-term, maybe a couple of years.  TRUE/FALSE

True.  Also true for nuclear weapons unless we destroy the country (see 2).  The Iranians learned from the Israeli attack on Osirak and they have their facilities widely separated (hundreds of miles) and deep underground.  Facilities might be destroyed or damaged, but most of the scientists and technicians would probably survive.

4.  Any attack on Iran by the U.S. and/or Israel would be followed shortly by a full-scale Hezbollah assault on Israel.  TRUE/FALSE

Quite likely true, but that would only be one of many possible responses by Iran.  HezbAllah is present in other places as well, such as Iraq and South America.  There are many American targets – both individuals and installations – worldwide they could hit.  The most critical target is the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran might try to close which would immediately affect the world economy.  US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf would be vulnerable because the Iranians have developed their “swarming tactics” by which their small fast craft can attack our ships.  They have Silkworm missiles secreted in many locations along the Gulf.  US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan would be vulnerable to attacks.  They have told the Arab leaders on the Gulf that if they are attacked, they will strike their oil installations. However, the oil weapon is a two-edged sword for them because they also need to sell their oil.  Rather than attack Arabs, they could call on the entire Muslim world to join them in a Grand Jihad against Israel and the Great Satan.

5.  Israel has the political will for a pre-emptive attack on Iran, even without active U.S. support.  TRUE/FALSE

True, but I would call it the political stupidity rather than political will.  They know that if they attack, the US will be forced to come to their aid.  The US Congress and the media will scream for the US to aid our “ally.

6.  Ahmadinejad’s widely reported threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ was in fact misinterpreted by the media, i.e., what he actually said was that time alone would remove Israel in its current form from the map. [Something akin to Reagan's famous remark that the communism would be consigned 'to the dustbin of history].  TRUE/FALSE

True.

7.  Even in the event of war with Iran, no U.S. president would/could re-establish the military draft.  TRUE/FALSE

Not sure about this one.  If Iran is attacked, I think we will be in a world war and the nation will have to return to a draft.

8.  UN sanctions to date are significantly altering the behavior of Iran’s ruling mullahs.  TRUE/FALSE

False.  Sanctions are a politician’s way of trying to show the public he is doing something about a problem he has no idea of how to resolve.  There are too many diverse players in this game.  The interests of Russia and China do not coincide with ours.  China needs oil and is not making enemies.  Russia is the major oil country and benefits from anything that disrupts the oil flow and raises the price of oil.

9.  The State of Israel in its current political form would likely survive world condemnation for the economic havoc wrought by a pre-emptive Israeli strike on Iran.  TRUE/FALSE

Probably true.  But if the attack resulted in a very serious weakening of the US, the future of Israel would be dim.  Israel’s future is not good.  If they do not make some serious decisions on Palestine soon, the likelihood of the continuation of the Jewish state will erode quickly.  Demographics will overcome them and force them to choose between being Jewish or being democratic.

10.  A pre-emptive Israeli attack on Iran would send the U.S. economy into a Depression.  TRUE/FALSE

Probably true.  Any attack on Iran will almost absolutely cause a leap in oil prices, which would place severe strain on an already reeling world economy.  The US is not yet out of the current mess and a new blow would likely turn this recession into a depression.

*****

There are some other points to consider.  Iran does not really need nuclear weapons.  They are strictly the trappings of a major power which Iran is and wants to be so recognized by the rest of the world.  They are mainly good for deterrence (against Israel) but of little value for actual war.  They have thoroughly developed their proxy war capability by their years of experience in Lebanon and Iraq and with the Kurds.  They do not envision normal style conventional war; Lebanon taught them that you can defeat a conventional army (Israel) by sophisticated guerrilla warfare.  They developed effective and accurate long and short range missiles, secure communications (fiber optics – no radios that can be monitored), cracked the Israeli codes, evasion by moving in small groups and hiding in the populace (negating reconnaissance by aircraft, drones and satellites), use of car and truck bombs, developed IEDS and later EFPs (explosively formed penetrators that took out Abrams tanks), etc.

Sunni leadership and the Pan Arab movement have failed and Iran sees the opportunity to seize the leadership of the Muslim world.  They have been pragmatic in dealing with Sunnis such as the Kurds in the PKK against Turkey.  Iran is now less theocratic and ideological and more calculating and pragmatic pursuing its foreign policy interests.  This is probably the most important point in that Iran should now be dealt with as another power and should be seen as a player in power politics.

One last point is that much can be accomplished via espionage and special agents.  The Israelis basically killed the Egyptian nuclear and missile program by killing German scientists.  They also killed off many who were working on various programs in Iraq.  Iran has killed off its own internal opponents overseas including Paris.  Probably as much or longer delays could be attained in Iran with similar targeted programs against scientists and technicians and some facilities.  There has evidently been some of this already.  The advantage is deniability and the preclusion of reprisals that overt attacks almost surely would invoke.

Sorry for the long answers, but it is a touchy subject because of the power of the Israel lobby and media in this country and the feeling that Israel is our great “ally” and we must stand beside this small rogue country.  That is why I think Ty should have another NSF session on Iran.

Muslim Reform Is Being Reversed By Young Turks In Secular Turkey

Israel must be punished for its “massacre” on Gaza-bound ships, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the Turkish parliament last Tuesday.

By MARK STEYN

INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY, 06/04/2010

Foreign policy “realists,” back in the saddle since the Texan cowboy left town, are extremely fond of the concept of “stability”: America needs a stable Middle East, so we should learn to live with Mubarak and the mullahs and the House of Saud, etc.

You can see the appeal of “stability” to your big-time geopolitical analyst: You don’t have to update your Rolodex too often, never mind rethink your assumptions. “Stability” is a fancy term to upgrade inertia and complacency into strategy. No wonder the fetishization of stability is one of the most stable features of foreign-policy analysis.

Unfortunately, back in what passes for the real world, there is no stability. History is always on the march, and, if it’s not moving in your direction, it’s generally moving in the other fellow’s. Take this “humanitarian” “aid” flotilla.

Much of what went on — the dissembling of the Palestinian propagandists, the hysteria of the U.N. and the Euro-ninnies — was just business as usual. But what was most striking was the behavior of the Turks.

In the wake of the Israeli raid, Ankara promised to provide Turkish naval protection for the next “aid” convoy to Gaza. This would be, in effect, an act of war — more to the point, an act of war by a NATO member against the state of Israel.

Ten years ago, Turkey’s behavior would have been unthinkable. Ankara was Israel’s best friend in a region where every other neighbor wishes, to one degree or another, the Jewish state’s destruction. Even when Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP was elected to power eight years ago, the experts assured us there was no need to worry.

I remember sitting in a plush bar late one night with a former Turkish foreign minister, who told me, in between passing round the cigars and chugging back the Scotch, that, yes, the new crowd weren’t quite so convivial in the wee small hours but, other than that, they knew where their interests lay.

Like many Turkish movers and shakers of his generation, my drinking companion loved the Israelis. “They’re tough hombres,” he said admiringly. “You have to be in this part of the world.” If you had suggested to him that in six years’ time the Turkish prime minister would be telling the Israeli president to his face that “I know well how you kill children on beaches,” he would have dismissed it as a fantasy concoction for some alternative universe.

Yet it happened. Erdogan said those words to Shimon Peres at Davos last year and then flounced off stage. Day by day what was formerly the Zionist Entity’s staunchest pal talks more and more like just another cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan -of-the-month club member.

As the think-tankers like to say: “Who lost Turkey?” In a nutshell: Kemal Ataturk. Since he founded post-Ottoman Turkey in his own image nearly nine decades ago, the population has increased from 14 million to over 70 million. But that fivefold increase is not evenly distributed.

The short version of Turkish demographics in the 20th century is that Rumelian Turkey — i.e., western, European, secular, Kemalist Turkey — has been out-bred by Anatolian Turkey — i.e., eastern, rural, traditionalist, Islamic Turkey.

Ataturk and most of his supporters were from Rumelia, and they imposed the modern Turkish republic on a reluctant Anatolia, where Ataturk’s distinction between the state and Islam was never accepted. Now they don’t have to accept it. The swelling population has spilled out of its rural hinterland and into the once solidly Kemalist cities.

Do you ever use the expression “young Turks”? I heard it applied to the starry-eyed ideologues around Obama the other day. The phrase comes from the original “young Turks,” the youthful activists agitating for reform in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. The very words acknowledge the link between political and demographic energy.

Today, the “young Turks” are old Turks: The heirs to the Kemalist reformers who gave women the vote before Britain did are a population in demographic decline. There will be fewer of them in every election. Today’s young Turks are men who think as Erdogan does.

That doesn’t mean Turkey is Iran or Waziristan or Saudi Arabia, but it does mean that the country’s leadership is in favor of more or less conventional Islamic imperialism. As Erdogan’s most famous sound bite puts it: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”

Some Western “experts” like to see this as merely a confident, economically buoyant Turkey’s “re-Ottomanization.” But the virulent anti-Semitism emanating from Erdogan’s fief is nothing to do with the old-time caliphate (where, unlike rebellious Arabs, the Jews were loyal or at least quiescent subjects), and all but undistinguishable from the globalized hyper-Islam successfully seeded around the world by Wahhabist money and so enthusiastically embraced by third-generation Euro-Muslims.

Since 9/11, many of us have speculated about Muslim reform, in the Arab world and beyond. It’s hard to recall now, but just a few years ago there was talk about whether General Musharraf would be Pakistan’s Ataturk. Instead, what we’re witnessing is the most prominent example of Muslim reform being de-reformed, before our very eyes, in nothing flat.

Demography is destiny, for the most part. For example, European Muslim populations are young, fast-growing and profoundly hostile to Jews. European Jewish populations are old, fading and irrelevant to domestic electoral calculations. Think of your stereotypically squishy pol, and then figure the reserves of courage it would require for the European establishment not to be anti-Israeli, and, indeed, ever more anti-Israeli as the years go by.

But demography alone isn’t always destiny. A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history. Bismarck’s famous remark that, if the British Army invaded Germany, he’d send the local police force to arrest them is generally taken as a sneer at the minimal size of Her Britannic Majesty’s armed forces. But, in another sense, it’s a testament to how much the British accomplished with so little.

Erdogan would not be palling up to Ahmadinejad and Boy Assad in Syria and even Sudan’s genocidal President Bashir, the Butcher of Darfur, if he were mindful of Turkey’s relationship with the United States. But he isn’t. He looks at the American hyperpower and sees, to all intents, a late Ottoman sultan — pampered, decadent, lounging on its cushions puffing a hookah but unable to rouse itself to impose its will in the world.

In that sense, Turkey’s contempt for Israel is also an expression of near total contempt for Washington.

Is Erdogan wrong in his calculation? Or is he, in his own fashion, only reaching his own conclusions about what Israel, India, the Czech Republic and others are coming to see as “the post-American world”?

Well, look at it as if you’re sitting in the presidential palace of some other Third World basket-case. Iran is going nuclear in full view of the world, and with huge implications for everything, not least the price of oil. Meanwhile, NATO’s only Muslim member has decided it would rather be friends with Iran, Sudan and Syria.

And all this in the first decade of the 21st century. So much for stability.

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June 2, 2010

Saving Israel From Itself

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When reports first circulated on Twitter of a deadly attack by Israeli commandos on the Gaza flotilla, I didn’t forward them because they seemed implausible. I thought: Israel wouldn’t be so obtuse as to use lethal force on self-described peace activists in international waters with scores of reporters watching.

Ah, but it turned out that Israel could be so obtuse after all. It shot itself in the foot, blasting American toes as well, and undermined all of its longer-term strategic objectives.

Abba Eban, the former Israeli statesman, is famously reported to have said in 1973: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” The quotation resonated because it was largely true.

Palestinians were locked for years into a self-defeating dynamic of violence and self-pity that led to terrorism and intransigence. Feeling misunderstood, they shrugged at global opinion and lashed back wherever they could, undermining their own cause.

Yet now, as a rabbi noted on my Facebook page, it is Israel that never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems locked in a self- defeating dynamic in which it feels misunderstood and gives up on international opinion. It lashes out with force in ways that undermine its own interests. It is on a path that could eventually be catastrophic.

There’s no question that Israel faces existential threats. That should make its leaders focused above all on two things: an Arab-Israeli treaty and pressure on Iran to drop its nuclear program.

These aren’t easy, and a Palestinian-Israeli deal may be impossible for the time being. But Israel could freeze all settlements and take other steps that would make a deal more likely. We already know what the final deal would look like — a two-state solution and terms resembling the “Clinton parameters” that Bill Clinton proposed in 2000.

Israel could also cultivate Turkey, a central player in the effort to press Iran. Instead, Israel’s storming of a Turkish-flagged vessel in international waters was a huge setback to efforts to win new sanctions on Iran. One big winner in this week’s fiasco was the Iranian regime.

Israel is also antagonizing its support base in the United States, which is critical to protect it from those existential threats.

Peter Beinart wrote a powerful article in the most recent New York Review of Books exploring the way young Jews in America feel much less identification with Israel than their elders did. Mr. Beinart noted that even the student Senate at Brandeis University, which has strong Jewish ties, rejected a resolution commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel.

One basic problem, Mr. Beinart said, is that the Zionist movement has become increasingly conservative politically. “For several decades,” he writes, “the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

Israel’s hard-line policies are depleting America’s international political capital as well as its own. Gen. David Petraeus noted two months ago that the perception that the United States favors Israel breeds anti-Americanism and bolsters Al Qaeda. The chief of Mossad, Meir Dagan, was quoted in the Israeli press as making the point more succinctly: “Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden.”

For many Israelis, all this seems profoundly unfair. Israel is a thriving democracy that withdrew from Gaza but is still threatened by missiles from north and south alike. So Israel and its hard-core supporters tend to dismiss outside criticism as inherently unfair and anti-Semitic, and embrace unilateral solutions based on force. As the newspaper Haaretz suggested, Israel is now “lost at sea.”

How do we change this dynamic? One necessary step is a major investigation of what happened. Another is a quick end to the blockade of Gaza, by Egypt as well as Israel. The blockade has failed to topple Hamas, failed to recover the captured soldier Gilad Shalit, and failed to keep rockets out of Gaza.

When you visit Gaza, you see that the siege has accomplished nothing — except to devastate the lives of 1.5 million ordinary Gazans. Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization, has compiled a list of goods that Israel typically blocks from Gaza: notebooks, blank paper, writing utensils, coriander, chocolate, fishing rods, and countless more. That’s not security; that’s a travesty.

President Obama needs to find his voice and push hard for an end to the Gaza blockade. He needs to talk sense to Israel and encourage it to back away from its plans to intercept other flotillas now headed for Gaza — that would be a catastrophe for Israel and America alike.

Above all, he needs to nudge Israel away from its tendency to shoot itself in the foot, and us along with it.