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Posted by Jacob Laksin on Mar 24th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Obama’s Dangerous Diplomacy

Posted By Jacob Laksin On March 24, 2010 @ 12:05 am In FrontPage | No Comments

[Editor’s note: As a presidential aspirant, Hillary Clinton condemned ^[1] “cowboy diplomacy” that alienated America’s allies; as secretary of state in the Obama administration, she has practiced it, leading the recent onslaught against Israel for its decision to construct housing in a city that it considers its rightful capital. For some perspective on the administration’s disproportionate response, Front Page is joined by Joel Pollak ^[2], a human rights lawyer and author from Skokie, Illinois. Pollak is currently the Republican nominee ^[3] challenging Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky in Illinois’ 9th congressional district. Pollak discussed the radical shift in the administration’s policy toward Israel, why human rights law does not support the administration’s terrorist detention policies, and standing up to Rep. Barney Frank.]

FPM: The Obama administration’s recent row over Israel’s announcement of new settlements in Jerusalem seems much ado about nothing. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier announced a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction as a good-faith gesture, he specifically excluded Jerusalem, a position that has been held by all Israeli prime ministers in recent decades and which, initially at least, was not protested by the Obama administration. Moreover, as you’ve pointed out ^[4] in these pages, Ramat Shlomo, the neighborhood where the 1,600 homes are to be built, is not some remote outpost; it is in a part of East Jerusalem that is almost certain to remain part of Israel in any future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. How then do you account for the severity of the Obama administration’s response – everyone from Vice President Biden to Secretary Clinton to presidential advisor David Axelrod has publically condemned Israel in the past few weeks – and the hard line it has taken against Israel?

Pollak: There are two reasons for the severity of the response. One is a radical shift in policy. This administration is abandoning the commitments of its predecessors to allow Israel defensible borders that would include some territory across the 1949 armistice line (the 1967 line, or Green Line). Instead, it is adopting the Arab (Saudi) peace initiative, which seeks complete withdrawal to the armistice line. The difference might not amount to much, in terms of total land area, but it is a radical and dangerous shift in the way we approach the conflict, and it has severe implications for the future of Jerusalem.

The second reason for the severity of the response is that this administration–even more than its predecessor–cannot admit its mistakes. It refuses, for example, to acknowledge that its first year of Mideast diplomacy, based entirely on Israeli and American concessions, has been a failure. So it has doubled down on Israeli concessions, much the way it has doubled down on unpopular domestic policies in the belief that people will eventually submit to exhortation by the president.

I also think there was a degree of blunder in the whole crisis–not just on the Israeli side. Vice-President Biden responded in a (sadly) characteristic way to a perceived slight. He insulted the U.S. more than Israel ever did by making a show of being humiliated. Great nations do not fly into hysterics over housing decisions by friendly foreign governments. Biden’s antics–and the administration’s follow-up–also made the U.S look weak by showing that we were not prepared to support our strongest ally. Even if we had truly been damaged by Israel’s housing announcement, the administration wasted whatever leverage it might have had by backing Israeli PM Netanyahu into a corner. For an administration that purports to believe in diplomacy, this was a poor example of it.

FPM: The Obama administration’s position seems to be that Israel’s settlement activity in East Jerusalem is sabotaging the “peace process” with the Palestinians and preventing negotiations from taking place. David Axelrod has put it ^[5] in nearly those exact terms. What do you make of this argument?

Pollak: Settlements are not the problem. The Gaza disengagement in 2005, which uprooted all settlements and soldiers from the territory, was met with an escalation of terror. The fact that the Obama administration does not seem to remember that is very troubling.

FPM: It has been suggested that the U.S.-Israel relationship is the most strained that it has been in nearly four decades. How would you describe the current state of that relationship and what can both sides do to mend it?

Pollak: The relationship between the American people and the Israeli people is stronger than ever. The relationship between the two administrations is functional. But the relationship between the Israeli people and the American administration will not be repaired easily. What Israel can do to repair the relationship is to remain committed to its own defense. Self-reliance and strength breed respect. That is the basis on which the close relationship was built after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War. What the U.S. can do to repair the relationship is to get serious about Iran. Announce that we will support a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iran if the need arises. Indicate that we will target Iranian political institutions as well as military institutions if the nuclear program is not stopped. Offer real and active support to the Iranian democracy movement. I believe that would go a long way to restoring the trust of the Israeli public in the Obama administration. Also, recognizing Jewish claims in at least the Jewish parts of East Jerusalem would have some effect in moving both administrations past the most recent debacle.

FPM: Some have argued ^[6] that the administration’s disproportionate condemnation of Israel will only embolden anti-Israel extremism in the Middle East – whether from Palestinians or from Iran. Do you agree and how big of a concern is that?

Pollak: I agree. It has already emboldened anti-Israel extremism elsewhere, including in the U.S. It is a huge concern because it makes diplomacy–the very diplomacy to which this administration is committed–far more difficult. It resets Palestinian and Iranian expectations at impossible levels, and encourages a culture of incitement against Israel. For example, Hamas used the Obama administration’s criticism of settlements to attack the re-construction of a centuries-old synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, which Jordan had destroyed after it occupied the area in 1948. They turned a housing issue into an international religious conflagration. It was a foreseeable outcome.

FPM: When Obama advisor David Axelrod ^[7] recently went on cable news shows to condemn Israel, it highlighted the fact that some Americans Jews, particularly on the Left, have a vision of what it means to be supportive of Israel that is radically different from how most Jews would understand the concept. Another example might be J-Street ^[8], the self-styled “pro-Israel, pro-peace” activist group that, despite its claim of supporting Israel, nevertheless opposed Israel’s military campaign against Hamas. How do you explain the disconnect between the putatively pro-Israel aims of such people and groups and the actual implications of the positions they take?

Pollak: I think many well-meaning people on that side of the issue fail to understand the disconnect between sentiment on one hand and logic on the other. I met someone involved in J Street the other day, who told me he was opposed to a military option on Iran, partly because the Iraq war had gone badly. Fine–that is a defensible position, even if I don’t agree with it. He then went on to say he opposed sanctions against Iran as well. Now, if you oppose military action, and you oppose sanctions, what are you left with? Defeat and destruction. I think after a certain point, when idealism stands in bold defiance of reality, it ceases to be excusable. As Orwell argued during WWII, at some point the subjective impulse of pacifism crosses over into effective support for fascism. I think many of those folks don’t realize what they’re arguing, though some should by now.

FPM: You are a human rights lawyer and a graduate of Harvard Law School, so I am interested in how you see the Obama administration’s decision to close Guantanamo Bay and to hold civilian trials for terrorist detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. For instance, the administration has indicated that it may seek to transfer ^[9] some of the detainees to Thompson prison in your home state of Illinois. Are such policies what human rights law prescribes, as the administration has repeatedly suggested?

Pollak: Human rights law, in my view, prescribes exactly the opposite–namely, that we maintain a separation between the military and civilian worlds. Granting war criminals access to the generous protections of the civilian court system may also encourage terrorists to attack civilian rather than military targets, especially since the administration still intends to try the bombers of the U.S.S. Cole in the military system. I believe there are better alternatives to holding all of our detainees at Guantanamo Bay–we could use several different military prisons overseas, for example–but until we find those alternatives, we should not rush to implement decisions made for political rather than security reasons. In my state, the majority of people do not want terror detainees captured on foreign battlefields to be brought to U.S. soil–neither to Illinois nor to any other state.

FPM: You first gained fame (or infamy, in some quarters) in 2008 when you asked ^[10] Rep. Barney Frank during his appearance at Harvard how much responsibility he bore for the financial crisis. At the time, you didn’t get much of an answer ^[11]. So, let me ask you: How much responsibility do politicians from both parties have for the financial crisis and how would you rate the government’s handling of that economic crisis to date?

Pollak: I believe they bear a great deal of responsibility. They weakened the principles of risk and reward that provide the foundation of our economy and our financial system. I think the government has not handled the crisis well at all. Both the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration seem to have made the problems worse, if they can be said to have addressed them at all. The massive spending and bailouts have placed this country’s future growth–its future solvency–in danger. To the extent that our economy has begun to show some positive signs, I believe credit is due to the persistence and faith of the American people, not to the self-interested interventions of politicians.

FPM: This past weekend, the Democrats finally passed the health care bill that they have been pushing for the past year, though they did so using procedural tactics that were controversial, to say the least. What do you make of the substance of the bill and did the Democrats’ ends in this instance justify the means?

Pollak: The bill prepares the way for the nationalization of health care in America. It does nothing to address the problem of cost, while placing the quality of care at risk. The goal–as Democrats stated openly on many occasions–was to show that radical change could be accomplished, in order to prepare the way for further radical changes and a massive redistribution of wealth. In the process, they undermined public faith in democracy by casting aside the ordinary rules of political deliberation. We need to start over–not just on health care, but on restoring the faith of the American people in our constitution and in our institutions of representative government. It took only one year to destroy what took many years to build: trust. It may take many more years to restore that trust. As difficult as that will be, and as long as it will take us, we have to begin today.

FPM: Joel Pollak, thanks very much for joining us.

Dispute with Israel underscores limits of U.S. power, a shifting alliance – washingtonpost.com.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) greets Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, right, on Capitol Hill. (Melina Mara/the Washington Post)
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Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 24, 2010

President Obama and his aides have cast the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not just the relationship with Israel, as a core U.S. national security interest. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of the military’s Central Command, put it starkly in recent testimony on Capitol Hill: “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel.” His comments raised eyebrows in official Washington — and overseas — because they suggested that U.S. military officials were embracing the idea that failure to resolve the conflict had begun to imperil American lives.

Visiting Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu received warm applause at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference on Monday night when he bluntly dismissed U.S. demands to end housing construction in the disputed part of Jerusalem. He was greeted as a hero when he visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

But the administration has been strikingly muted in its reception. No reporters, or even photographers, were invited when Netanyahu met with Secretary of State Clinton Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Biden on Monday or when he met with Obama on Tuesday night. There was no grand Rose Garden ceremony. Official spokesmen issued only the blandest of statements.

The cooling in the U.S.-Israel relationship coincides with an apparent deepening of Israel’s diplomatic isolation. Anger has grown in Europe in the wake of Israel’s suspected misuse of European passports to kill a Palestinian militant in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. On Tuesday, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced the expulsion of a senior diplomat over the incident, an unusually drastic step for an ally. Relations with Turkey, a rare Muslim friend of Israel for decades, have hit a new low.

Obama and his aides have strongly pledged support for Israel’s security — including a reiteration by Clinton when she addressed AIPAC on Monday — but they have continued to criticize its settlement policies in tough terms. Clinton notably did not pull her punches on the issue when she addressed the pro-Israel group, warning that whether Israelis like it or not, “the status quo” is not sustainable. The drawing of such lines by the administration has been noticed in the Middle East.

“Israeli policies have transcended personal affront or embarrassment to American officials and are causing the United States real pain beyond the Arab-Israeli arena. This is something new, and therefore the U.S. is reacting with unusually strong, public and repeated criticisms of Israel’s settlement policies and its general peace-negotiating posture,” Rami Khouri, editor at large of Beirut’s Daily Star, wrote this week. “At the same time Washington repeats it ironclad commitment to Israel’s basic security in its 1967 borders, suggesting that the U.S. is finally clarifying that its support for Israel does not include unconditional support for Israel’s colonization policies.”

Problems from the start

The Obama administration has struggled from the start to find its footing with Israel and the Palestinians. Obama took office soon after Israel’s three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip, which had ruptured peace talks nurtured by the George W. Bush administration. Obama appointed a special envoy, former senator George J. Mitchell, on his second day in office. But then the administration tried to pressure Israel to freeze all settlement expansion — and failed. The United States further lost credibility when Clinton embraced Netanyahu’s compromise proposal, which fell short of Palestinian expectations, as “unprecedented.”

U.S. pressure at the time also backfired because it appeared to let the Palestinians off the hook. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas refused to enter into direct talks before a settlement freeze, even though he had done so before. The administration had to settle for indirect talks, with Mitchell shuttling back and forth. The recent disagreement has set back that effort.

Administration officials have been careful to turn down the heat in their latest exchanges with Netanyahu over Jerusalem, even as they continue to express their displeasure. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley spoke in clipped sentences Tuesday when asked to describe the hours of private conversations with Netanyahu this week: “We have outlined some concerns to the Israeli government. They have responded to our concerns. That conversation continues. This is a dynamic process. There’s a lot of give-and-take involved in these conversations.”

Crowley argued that “the only way to ultimately resolve competing claims, on the future of Jerusalem, is to get to direct negotiations.” He said the administration faces a series of “pass-fail” tests: Can it get the two parties to join direct talks? Can it persuade them to address the vexing issues surrounding the final status of Jerusalem? And ultimately, “do we get to an agreement that is in the Israeli interest, in the Palestinian interest, in the interest of the rest of the region and clearly in the interest of the United States?”

Arab leaders have long said that a peace deal would be possible if the United States pressured Israel. But many experts say such hope is often misplaced. In the case of East Jerusalem, Netanyahu believes that a halt to construction represents political suicide for his coalition, so no amount of U.S. pressure will lead him to impose a freeze — at least until he is in the final throes of peace talks.

“U.S. pressure can work, but it needs to be at the right time, on the right issue and in the right political context,” said Robert Malley, a peace negotiator in the Clinton White House. “The latest episode was an apt illustration. The administration is ready for a fight, but it realized the issue, timing and context were wrong. The crisis has been deferred, not resolved.”

JPost.com | BlogCentral | Center Field | Obama’s nation – or abomination?.

A mentor of mine teaches that you always end up making three speeches – the one you plan to deliver, the one you actually deliver and the one you wish you’d delivered. Similarly, there are three presidencies – the one the candidate promises, the one that actually occurs and the one the president, partisans and historians argue about forever after. It will surprise many caught in the Israel bubble, that while Israelis have been obsessing about the Biden brouhaha, President Barack Obama was focused on pushing his health care legislation through Congress. With this historic health care bill, Obama fulfilled yet moved beyond the presidency he promised, defined his administration as liberal and secured his place in history.

Victory was costly. Obama broke the defining vow that launched him into the White House. He failed to become the post-partisan, red-and-blue together healer he hoped to be – and which Americans elected him to be. But he fulfilled his campaign promise to be a “transformational” leader. In 2008, he offended his rival Hillary Clinton by saying bluntly that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, that Bill Clinton did not,” and that Reagan “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”

Barack Obama has bet his political future on the assumption that America is ready for the change he just shoved through Congress. With his administration staffed by former Clintonites, Obama was determined not to replicate the Clinton health care debacle. Rather than dictating from the White House down Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill, Obama let Congressional Democrats write the law. The downside is that Obama’s health care reform attracted no Republican votes in the House of Representatives.

This failure marks a dramatic fall from the bipartisan high of Election Night 2008 and deviates from the American standard for passing historic legislation. Franklin Roosevelt passed Social Security and Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare with bipartisan support. The upside is that Obama has a big win, despite having been counted out weeks ago, when the Republican unknown Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat Democrats assumed was theirs because the late Senator Ted Kennedy occupied it for so long.

Power is like a muscle – the more it is exercised, the more it grows. Obama’s victory will make him stronger, and will make America more Obama’s nation. Republicans fear that Obama’s nation is an abomination. Obama does not have enough time to prove them wrong regarding health care. Even he admits that this health care investment will take years to pay off. But Obama can win the health care debate, at least in the short term, if he applies the same determination he just demonstrated to his administration’s defining challenge – producing jobs for millions of unemployed Americans.

This week Americans learned what Israelis learned last week: Obama spent his years in Chicago wisely, mastering the political wards’ kill-or-be-killed ethos. No one could have risen so far, so fast, without a spine of steel beneath his Harvardian eloquence. And just as he blithely muscled past Republicans and bipartisan sensibilities on his way to Congressional victory, Obama brutally ambushed Bibi Netanyahu. Israel should not have walked right into Obama’s Chicagoland sucker punch, although Obama, shrewdly, had his associates administer the beating.

Unfortunately, the Middle East masses are less malleable and more violent than 535 American legislators. The Obama treatment proved incendiary, stirring Palestinian violence while calcifying Palestinian rejectionism. Obama must learn what another young president, John Kennedy, learned a few weeks into his presidency with the Bay of Pigs. Presidential action and inaction, presidential words and gestures, can kill. Especially in an area as volatile as the Middle East, given the history of Palestinian recalcitrance, and with the world piling on against Israel, exploiting a mistake to “condemn” Israel was counterproductive.

Many commentators are correct in wishing Obama would learn to be as tough on Iran and other American enemies as he is on America’s friends. Not only will George Mitchell now have to work even harder to lower the rhetorical temperature over Jerusalem, from all sides, but Obama risks looking like a substitute teacher punishing the timid A-student who whispered in class while failing to control the true troublemakers vandalizing the classroom.

The stress test Obama imposed on Israel highlighted many faults in Israel’s political culture, too. The foolish claim that Obama is an anti-Semite because he criticized Israel demeaned all Zionists – and undermined those of who fight against the real threat of anti-Semitism. Just as our enemies must be taught not to jump from every disagreement about Israeli policy to negating Israel itself, some Israelis must learn that not every disagreement is a call to destroy Israel, or anti-Semitic. No one should call anyone a bigot so casually, let alone the leader of Israel’s staunchest ally. It is untrue – and counterproductive. Just as we should condemn the hooligans who threatened to disrupt Rahm Emanuel’s son’s bar mitzvah when rumors suggested the Emanuel family was considering an Israeli venue, we should repudiate the verbal bullies who prefer to cast aspersions rather than debate policies.

Obama’s aggressiveness also imposed a stress test on American Jewry – and the jury is out regarding the results there. Obama’s team is calculating that if Jews could not bring themselves to vote for George W. Bush even when he stood up for Israel, few Jews will abandon Obama for pushing Israel around. American Jews remain more committed to liberalism than Zionism. No presidential election has ever been determined by a president’s Middle East record.

Yet foreign policy failures have doomed presidencies. As Obama rests on his laurels, as he pushes for more jobs, he should remember that his great threat comes not from Bibi Netanyahu but from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. To be another American president who watched Jewish neighborhoods be built in areas of Jerusalem, the Jewish people’s historic capital, that were previously uninhabited is no great shame. To be the first American president who watched Iran go nuclear – could be disastrous.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Research Fellow  in Jerusalem. He is the author of Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. His latest book The Reagan Revolution:  A Very Short Introduction was recently published by Oxford University Press.

Obama hosts Netanyahu after week of bilateral tensions – Haaretz – Israel News.

By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz Service and News Agencies

President and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testing Netanyahu’s will for peace, U.S. source says.

U.S. President Barack Obama held a one-on-one meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Tuesday as Israel sought to smooth over a diplomatic spat sparked by the announcement of Israeli construction in east Jerusalem. Efforts to restore ties may have hit a roadblock, however, with the approval Tuesday of a further 20 east Jerusalem homes beyond the Green Line at the site of the former Shepherd Hotel. In spite of attempts on both the Israeli and American sides to bring the crisis to an end, there is still lingering tension and lack of trust within the Obama administration toward Netanyahu. An American source close to the administration said that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have decided to “test” Netanyahu and see whether he will carry out his promised gestures of good will toward the Palestinians. According to an Israeli source who has discussed the matter with senior U.S. officials, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president are dissatisfied with a letter given to them by Netanyahu, in which he detailed steps he is willing to take to restore American confidence in his government. The prime minister and his aides said that a meeting with Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden on Monday, which served as a preamble to the meeting with Obama, was conducted in excellent spirits. Israel had angered Biden by announcing plans for 1,600 new Jewish homes in east Jerusalem during his visit to the country two weeks ago. An Israeli source noted that both Biden and Clinton used strong language and made it clear to Netanyahu that he would need to make further concessions to American demands in their meeting if trust is to be restored. The same source said that the Americans are convinced that the answers Netanyahu had given them are insufficient. Washington officials have also been irritated by Netanyahu’s attempts to draw equivalency between building inside Israel’s internationally recognized borders and in east Jerusalem. “I think at one point the prime minister added that he did not see a distinction necessarily between building in Jerusalem and building in Tel Aviv. We disagree with that,” a White House spokesman said ahead of the meeting. In a sign of White House concerns about lingering tensions, press coverage of the Oval Office talks was barred and no public statements were planned. Before seeing Obama, Netanyahu told U.S. lawmakers he feared peace talks may be delayed for another year unless Palestinians drop their demand for a full freeze on Jewish building beyond the Green Line, including in east Jerusalem. “We must not be trapped by an illogical and unreasonable demand,” Netanyahu said during his meeting with House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders, according to his spokesman. “It could put the peace negotiations on hold for another year,” he said of the talks, suspended since December 2008.

US warns citizens against travel to Iran.

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The Obama administration has warned Americans against travelling to Iran.

The Obama administration warned Americans on Tuesday against travelling to Iran, citing the risk of hostility, harassment or arrest.

The State Department warning singled out US-Iranian dual nationals, noting that Iranian authorities have prevented several Iranian-Americans from leaving the country since 2009, sometimes for several months.

“Americans of Iranian origin should consider the risk of being targeted by authorities before planning travel to Iran,” it said, noting Iranian-Americans have been detained in the Islamic republic on such charges as espionage and posing a threat to national security.

“Iranian authorities deny access to the US Interests Section in Tehran to dual nationals because Iranian authorities consider them to be solely Iranian citizens.”

Iran does not recognise dual citizenship.

The document, which updates a travel warning issued on July 1, 2009, said “US citizens who travel to Iran should exercise caution” in light of the tense political climate, including outbreaks of violence, that has prevailed since last June’s contested presidential elections.

US President Barack Obama’s administration is at loggerheads with Tehran, which denies Western and Israeli claims it is developing nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear energy program. The United States is also leading the charge to slap a fourth round of UN sanctions on Iran.

The US government does not have diplomatic or consular relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Israeli leader gets warmer welcome in Congress – News – Politics – bnd.com.

AP Diplomatic Writer Barry Schweid contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.bnd.com/2010/03/22/1185002/clinton-accuses-israel-of-hurting.html#ixzz0j2qm6Ydo