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What’s Comes after Death of Mideast Peace? » Publications » Family Security Matters.

April 23, 2010

What’s Comes after Death of Mideast Peace?

Youssef M. Ibrahim

It is not easy to belittle Aaron David Miller’s renunciation of what he described as ‘’False Religion of the Mideast Peace’’ in his essay published in Foreign Policy.

Framed in impeccable logic with unchallenged knowledge from a man who more than any other senior U.S. official has led our Middle East peace camp ever since 1978, that’s a big deal. Miller served as special envoy and senior advisor on the Middle East for 30 years across Republican and Democratic administrations reporting directly to several presidents.

Miller’s despair is more poignant coming from a Jewish senior American policy-maker, one of many who deeply sympathized with Arabs and Palestinians, so much he once accused a fellow Jewish peace-maker, Dennis Ross who is now a special advisor to the president, of being ‘’Israel’s lawyer!”

When such a man now turns around to say the peace process is dead; that the Obama administration is wrong pressuring Israel; and the U.S. has become tone-deaf to more important strategic threats including the Iranian nuclear issue, his thesis and his warnings demand attention. They will get plenty as the questioning is just beginning within the professional Mideast peace making-establishment and its lobbies.

So what happened? What went wrong in that tortured peace process?

Typically, the coolest answers come from military men.

In the same issue of FP no less a figure than General Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command in 2001 and 2002 who worked closely with Mr. Miller said just about everything did. And what’s worse he said we are repeating it all over again.

‘‘We should realize what doesn’t work: summits, agreements in principle, special envoys, U.S.-proposed plans, and just about every other part of our approach has failed. So why do we keep repeating it?’’ Gen. Zinni asks.

Undaunted, the Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are forging ahead with a new Broadway production of the same failed show dotted with ‘’indirect talks’’ because Palestinians do not want to face Israelis, more edicts to stop construction of settlements which Israel will roundly ignore, along with a panoply of international conferences and more special envoys.

The folks who have been there and back, people like Gen. Zinni and Miller and historian Michael Oren, currently Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., as well as a sizeable number of Egyptian and Jordanian experts who for obvious reasons do not voice their skepticism openly in their politicized Arab world, are in fact saying that the paradigm of peace has shifted. We are working off an obsolete database.

Forty years is a long time, especially in the Mideast where many countries are 50 to 70 years old. In other words the picture of 1979 – when Egypt and Israel signed a peace accord under the gaze of a U.S. president and the mid 1980s when Jordan and Israel signed – is not the same in 2010.

Antagonists out there today are not nation states alone. They now include armed militias such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. To use the famed expression of the late Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir, making peace now involves dealing with ‘’tribes with flags,’, a practically impossible task. That is part of the new paradigms.

Another is lack of leadership. Until Mideast leaders of the caliber of late Egyptian president Anwar El Sadat, Yitzhaq Rabin and Menachem Begin of Israel and the late King Hussein of Jordan who are now all dead – two of them at the hands of assassins – emerge, there is not much leadership out there strong enough to strike deals and make them stick.

Paradigms-wise, furthermore, the Soviet Union is gone, robbing that Mideast challenge of its Cold War exigency.

The new enemy rising to challenge America is not an unresolved dispute between Israelis and Palestinians but Islamic fundamentalism that rejects all western concepts of modernization and equal rights for women and citizens. Its tentacles run out of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, ironically all three categorized as friends of the U.S.

Finally, as paradigms go, strategically and tactically speaking, the US has no closer ally in the world than Israel. We could not operate in the Middle East without Israeli assistance and our population, the grand majority of Americans and their representatives in Congress, would never allow Israel to stand alone under attack. This is a basic fact of political life in America that the Obama White House understands too well.

Speaking as an Arab-American, I welcome the protection that Israel’s existence as a minority Jewish state in the Muslim Middle East projects for other minorities including some 25 million Christian Arabs under extreme pressure, 30 million Kurds and other tribal or religious populations who must live free of persecution. Israel stands as a symbol that it is possible to have a multi-cultural tolerant Middle East.

What Miller and Zinni and more analysts are asking is why therefore is this administration expanding such extraordinary resources to resolve what clearly has recessed to a minor strategic threat when far greater menaces loom?

As Miller pointed out on CNN in an interview with John King: Would Obama become the first US president on whose watch Iran turns into nuclear power? He also wonders, correctly, if Israeli’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would accept to be the first Israeli prime minister to let this happen.

Another primary strategic concern for the U.S. is the ongoing disintegrations of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

What indeed is our strategy in Iraq should civil war break out again as it seems? How do we define winning there? And, will thousands of American forces in Afghanistan do baby-sitting for a decade, or longer?

These appear indeed pressing issues with not a single indication of an American strategy.

On the Israeli side, one can assume the country can take care of itself militarily and otherwise. It has matured to a nation of 7.5 million including 1.5 million Arab Israelis who are not as unhappy as their Palestinian brethren suggest and would, if pressed, more likely opt for an Israeli quality of life. Israel just hit a per capita income level of around $ 35,000, putting it squarely in the higher ranking of the industrialized western living standards, with an economy bigger than all neighboring countries. It has never lost a war and can still win any.

Beyond this, the best strategy for the White House when it comes to those Middle East ‘’tribes with flags’’ may be benign neglect. When you think of it, despite predictions of dire consequences and World War Three out there, the Middle East dispute has survived with various accommodations quite well for 100 years already.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Youssef M. Ibrahim is a journalist whose articles have appeared in the New York Sun and New York Times.

U.S. sees sanctions by May; Iran lobbies against West | Reuters.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said on Thursday he expects new sanctions on Iran by May as Tehran began lobbying the U.N. Security Council to oppose new steps against the Islamic Republic over its atomic plans.

World

Biden issued the latest U.S. warning to Iran, locked in a standoff with the West over a nuclear program Tehran insists is entirely peaceful, in an appearance on ABC television’s “The View” talk show.

“Everyone from the Israeli prime minister straight through to the British prime minister to the president of Russia, everyone agrees the next step we should take is the U.N. sanction route,” Biden said.

“I believe you will see a sanction regime coming out by the end of this month, beginning of next month,” he said. Asked if Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities without consulting Washington, Biden said Israel had agreed to wait and see what the impact of new U.N. sanctions would be.

As closed-door negotiations continue on a draft resolution for the U.N. Security Council, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki heads to Vienna and other capitals to lobby council members to oppose any new U.N. sanctions.

If negotiations on a fourth round of U.N. punitive measures against Tehran run past May, the U.S. House of Representatives has declared Congress should finalize legislation to impose new unilateral U.S. sanctions on Iran by the end of next month — whether or not the Security Council has acted.

The 403-11 vote signaled growing impatience on Capitol Hill with efforts by U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration and its allies to get a fourth round of U.N. sanctions to pressure Iran to curb a nuclear program the West fears is aimed at making a bomb.

Diplomats from the five permanent Security Council members — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — and Germany are meeting nearly every day in New York to revise a U.S.-drafted sanctions proposal that Moscow and Beijing would like to see watered down, Western diplomats say.

The proposed U.S. congressional measures are much tougher than those included in the U.N. draft proposal, agreed upon with Britain, France and Germany over a month ago before Washington passed it on to Russia and China for comment.

U.N. SANCTIONS TALKS COULD DRAG ON

The majority of U.S. lawmakers from both political parties are ready now to block Iran’s vital gasoline imports by imposing sanctions on its gasoline suppliers, a tough measure also favored by Israel. Both the House and the Senate passed legislation months ago to do this.

The U.S. draft for the 15-nation Security Council proposes some new curbs on Iranian banking, a full arms embargo, tougher measures against Iranian shipping, moves against members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and firms they control and a ban on new investments in Iran’s energy sector.

But the U.N. draft does not seek to block imports or exports of oil or gas products to or from Iran — measures that Russia and China have made clear they could not support.

Western diplomats familiar with the U.N. talks say the six powers are far from agreement on a draft to present to the full council and expect negotiations to drag on until June.

Diplomats said China proposed cutting some of the measures from the U.S. draft. Both Russia and energy-hungry China have close trade ties with Iran and fought hard to dilute three previous rounds of U.N. sanctions before voting for them.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Reuters in Tehran that Foreign Minister Mottaki would soon “meet and discuss with representatives of (council) member countries” the sanctions issue. Diplomats said Tehran was launching a lobbying campaign to avoid new sanctions.

Mottaki’s first stop will be Austria, which is on the council until the end of this year and also the seat of the U.N. nuclear watchdog. He is expected to meet with senior Austrian officials on Sunday, as well as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano.

Mottaki met with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu earlier this week in Tehran. Davutoglu told reporters his country, which is also on the Security Council and has made clear it would have trouble supporting new sanctions on Iran, was ready to help resolve Tehran’s standoff with the West.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in Harare for talks with Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, a visit Mugabe’s opponents condemned as a meeting of despots.

Zimbabwean state media said Ahmadinejad’s visit was part of a drive to boost ties between nations at odds with the West.

The U.S. unilateral measures under discussion in Congress could make life difficult for countries trading with Iran.

A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 41 foreign firms had commercial activity in Iran’s oil, natural gas and petrochemical sectors from 2005 to 2009.

Separately, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards successfully deployed a new speed boat on Thursday that is capable of destroying enemy ships in war games in a waterway crucial for global oil supplies, Iranian media reported.

JPost.com | BlogCentral | Koch’s Comments | Congress must step up to the plate in challenging the president on Israel.

The silence continues to be deafening, with no Democrat in Congress to my knowledge crying out against President Obama for continuing to try to diminish the US’ closeness to Israel.

The president is apparently attempting to placate the Sunni Muslim countries in order to establish a coalition opposed to the increasing power of the Shi’ite Muslim state of Iran that towers in the region like a colossus. The president fails to realize, however, that sacrificing the US-Israel relationship is both unnecessary and dangerous. The Sunni Arab countries are petrified of Iran’s growing power and are actually aligned with Israel in their opposition to Iran.  Furthermore, as I have stated before, treating Israel as the problem only emboldens the radical elements in the Middle East and makes the prospect of another Arab-Israeli war more likely. Only through steadfast US support of Israel will the Arab countries realize that the Jewish state is here to stay. That, in turn, will lead to peace.

While the president continues to hammer Israel, the Iranian nuclear threat increases by the day. The New York Times reported today “that Mr. Gates [Defense Secretary Robert Gates] had warned in a secret three-page memo that the United States did not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability.”

Our efforts to assemble the needed coalition of nations to impose meaningful sanctions against Iran at the Security Council have failed. Furthermore, today’s Times reports on the efforts of the Obama administration to woo American Muslims with the headline “White House Quietly Courts Muslims In the US”.

What have the Senate and House done to convey to the president their differences with him on these issues and the outrageous treatment accorded our long-time ally, Israel? They issued joint letters. The House letter was signed by 333 members and the Senate letter was signed by 76 Senators. The letters were addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, when I believe they should have been sent to the president directly, since it is he, not she, who is orchestrating the change in the standing of Israel and the elevation of Arab interests. The letters consist of a platitudinous statement of why the US and Israel are allies, but do not criticize the president or convey to him that Congress will oppose his efforts to change the US-Israel relationship. Even more shocking is that some key Senators were unwilling even to sign the toothless letter. One can only speculate why the following Senators declined to sign – John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut), Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), Democratic Party Whip Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee; Harry Reid (D-Nevada), the Senate Majority Leader and others. Was it due to agreement with the president’s plan? Was it fear of the president? I suspect agreement.

There are those, when asked what they are doing to challenge and defeat the president’s actions with regard to these grave matters, who have answered, “I’m working behind the scenes.” Those corridors must be heavily crowded, and those hidden efforts do not appear to have produced results. I repeat, the silence is deafening.