WarSclerotic

Editor’s Notes: Exposed by WikiLeaks.

Photo by: Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT

After the first meeting between newish President Barack Obama and new Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in May of 2009, I wrote in these pages about the “acutely uncomfortable clash of divergent outlooks” so readily evident at their media conference.

I noted that while the Netanyahu camp had “rushed to talk up a purported meeting of minds over Iran,” it was plain that there was a gulf between the two men on the issue. Specially, I wrote, it had been Netanyahu’s hope that he would persuade Obama of the imperative to halt the Iranian nuclear drive “as a precondition for encouraging Arab moderation and thus enabling progress with the Palestinians, and on this he failed.”

Instead, I pointed out, “Obama insistently placed tackling the Palestinian issue – which has defeated even the most generous and flexible Israeli governments – on the road to fixing Iran.”

While Israel had argued internationally that stopping Iran would enable headway with the Palestinians, and other foreign heads of state, senior ministers and diplomats had politely suggested it was best to try to chivvy both processes along simultaneously, Obama, I observed, “has gone all the way over to the other side, and done so in public.”

I was referring to the president’s assertion, publicly contradicting Netanyahu, that, “If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians – between the Palestinians and the Israelis – then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”

In that column and many others since, I have often come back to Obama’s unconvincing assertion that Netanyahu, and much of Israel besides, has the Iran- Palestinian equation wrong. I often noted how illogical it seemed for Obama to argue that there was a good prospect of dramatic progress on the Palestinian front even while Iran, and by extension, Palestinian extremists, were in the ascendant, and how much more room for optimism there would be on the Palestinian front if Iran had been faced down, its nuclear march halted, and relative moderates throughout the region emboldened and empowered.

To my mind, the president’s thinking defied common sense. Now we know, however, that it also defied the concrete information he was receiving from his own diplomats.

THE OBAMA administration, it is now clear for all to see, was not pressing a reluctant Netanyahu to make settlement-freeze and other concessions to the Palestinians in part because it truly believed this would be helpful in generating wider support for tackling Iran.

Not at all. The United States, we now know courtesy of WikiLeaks, was being repeatedly urged by a succession of Arab leaders to smash an Iranian nuclear program they feared would destabilize the entire region and put their regimes at risk. Their priority was, and is, battering Ahmadinejad, not bolstering Abbas.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, in 2008, had not urged the US to chivvy those recalcitrant Israelis toward concessions to the Palestinians as a pre-condition for grudging Saudi support for a firmer US-led position against Iran. Anything but. Never mind the Palestinians, the king simply implored Washington to “cut off the head of the [Iranian] snake.”

Likewise, with minor variations in the course of the following year, the rulers of Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.

We are now starting to hear, courtesy of WikiLeaks, what Jordan and Egypt had to say on the matter too.

Obama, that is, was not the prisoner of a misconception, convinced in absolute good faith that if he could deliver Israeli concessions at the negotiating table he might stand a greater chance of getting the Arabs on board for the battle with the mullahs. No, he had the diplomatic cables to prove that the Israeli- Palestinian conflict was no obstacle to wide Arab backing, indeed wide Arab entreaties, for the toughest possible measures against Iran, emphatically including military action.

Either the president, it can be concluded, was so attached to his misconception that he refused to let the concrete information he had on Arab leaders’ thinking get in the way – sticking to his view of the region in defiance of the facts.

Or, more plausibly, he had internalized full well that he didn’t actually need the cover of a substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace process to generate Arab support for tackling Iran’s nuclear program, but chose to pressure Israel just the same, as a tactic, because he felt Israel was not being sufficiently forthcoming on the Palestinian front.

Neither explanation sits well, to put it mildly.

TELL NETANYAHU – who at the time of their first meeting had yet to endorse the two-state solution, and who is extremely unlikely to repeat the peace offer that Ehud Olmert had spurned by Abbas – that you feel he should be doing more? That’s fair enough.

What’s not fair enough is to indicate to the Israeli prime minister, when it’s patently untrue, that he ought to put aside some of his skepticism and take risks for peace because otherwise Israel might impede the US’s capacity to thwart the genocidal enemy, Iran.

In that May 2009 column, I noted that “If building international, and more specifically regional pressure on Iran is perceived to be contingent on dramatic progress toward resolving our vexed conflict with the Palestinians, the outlook may be bleak indeed. To judge by the fate of Israel’s peace overtures since the early 1990s, the Iranians, one can only fear, would be up to their eyes in enriched uranium before there’s a breakthrough here.”

So now here we are 18 months later. The peace process is deadlocked and Iran is indeed a good deal closer to the bomb. And the Obama administration has been pressing Israel for a second settlement freeze, even though Abbas wasted the last one, even though Netanyahu has demonstrably sought to encourage reconciliation by improving the economic climate on the West Bank, and even though Israel’s uncertainty about its Palestinian partner is magnified every time Fatah derides the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state or the PA endorses “research” denying Jewish sovereign history here.

Until WikiLeaks, the US was presumably still reminding Israel of its view that the “linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process… runs the other way.”

That the route to thwarting Teheran runs via Jerusalem. That, whatever Israel’s misgivings, it should consider giving ground on the Palestinian front in part because of the demands of the wider struggle against Iran.

What’s the president going to tell Israel now?

Anatomy of a decline – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

President Obama emerges from the WikiLeaks cables as a weak leader, whose good intentions dissipate in the face of the stubbornness of his Middle Eastern counterparts.

By Aluf Benn

Beyond the gossip, the indiscretions and the petty lies, the cables released by WikiLeaks tell a sad story. They depict the fall of the American empire, the decline of a superpower that ruled the world by dint of its military and economic supremacy. President Barack Obama emerges from the cables as a weak, flimsy leader, whose good intentions and lofty visions dissipate like dust in the wind in the face of the conservatism and stubbornness of his Middle Eastern counterparts.

The days when American ambassadors were received in world capitals as “high commissioners” are long since gone. The diplomats who wrote the WikiLeaks documents are tired bureaucrats: Nobody rises in their honor and clicks their heels when they enter a room. They spend their days listening wearily to their hosts’ talking points, never reminding them who is the superpower and who the client state that needs military or financial aid from America.

The legacy of the storied secretaries of state of days gone by – John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger and James Baker – has long since disappeared into archives and memoirs. The America of Obama and Hillary Clinton doesn’t dare pound on the table and knock heads together when its friends and rivals do as they please. It takes notes, files them and moves on.

There is nothing new in the Middle East. Regional leaders, both Arab and Israeli, are busy with their own affairs and ignore America’s interests and wishes. And Obama’s election changed nothing: It’s hard to find differences between the minutes of diplomatic talks held under George W. Bush and the cables sent by representatives of the current administration.

Obama’s Ankara and Cairo speeches, his moving calls for a new relationship between America and the Arab and Muslim worlds, even his quotations from the Koran, were all greeted with utter indifference. The rulers in Riyadh and Cairo, Abu Dhabi and Amman, Damascus and Jerusalem heard Obama and didn’t change so much as a comma in their well-known positions. The Israelis don’t trust the Arabs, the Arabs are suspicious of the Israelis and both of them are terrified of Iran.

In its editorial on Tuesday, the New York Times praised Obama and his team as outstanding diplomats who stood up to Arab and Israeli pressure on America to attack Iran and “cut off the head of the snake,” in the words of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. What naivete. It’s hard to believe that experienced leaders like King Abdullah, the emir of Bahrain, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Defense Minister Ehud Barak really imagined that Obama would read the cables from the Middle East and hasten to arm his stealth bombers and declare war on Iran. They knew Washington was unenthusiastic about bombing Natanz and Bushehr.

Their pressure on the administration had a completely different goal: thwarting Obama’s efforts at rapprochement with Iranian leaders Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and ensuring that America would maintain a hard line against Tehran and its rulers. And this goal was fully achieved, with some help from the Iranians, who openly thumbed their noses at the U.S. president.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first world leader to leverage the WikiLeaks revelations for his own purposes. At a press conference on Monday, Netanyahu used the leaked cables to trash Obama’s position and advance the agenda of “Iran first.” The cables prove, he said, that there’s no truth in the narrative that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the greatest threat to the region and its future.

The doublespeak of the Arab leaders, who publicly attack Israel while warning against Iran in closed forums, helps the prime minister repulse the American administration’s claim that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict takes precedence. It provides confirmation of Israel’s assertion, which the West has disbelieved for years, that the Palestinians aren’t important.

The Arab leaders didn’t ignore the Palestinians. They raised this issue over and over in their talks with American representatives. But the Egyptians and the Gulf emirates share their Israeli counterparts’ view of the conflict as a nuisance that must be managed, not a problem that can be solved.

None of them fantasized about a Palestinian state, about freedom and independence for Gaza and Nablus. All they wanted was to get this annoying nuisance off their backs, and they didn’t care how. They viewed Obama as a pest and his envoys as bothers, not as spokesmen for the global superpower. Or perhaps that’s no longer what America is.

	U.S. President Barack Obama delivering remarks in Ohio on September 8, 2010.
	Photo by: AP