WarSclerotic

Middle East in turmoil 10 years after Iraq invasion that officials said would bring peace | McClatchy.

Unrest continues in Egypt | Keith Lane/MCT

By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers

CAIRO — President George W. Bush kept it simple in his short television address the evening of March 19, 2003: U.S. forces had begun their campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein, he said. The goals, he outlined in his first sentence, were straightforward: “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Some 522 words later he promised the result: “We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail.”

As he spoke, members of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were already crossing from Kuwait, where they’d been preparing for weeks, into southern Iraq. In those sands, it was Thursday, March 20, the dawn of a new day.

Ten years later, the era that dawn ushered in looks anything but simple. After tens of thousands of deaths, not just of Americans, but also of Iraqis – many, if not most, at the hands of other Iraqis – that country is still in turmoil. American troops are gone and a democratically elected government rules. But bombings and massacres continue, and the country remains mired in sectarian feuding between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Elsewhere, conflict rules – in some cases, coincidentally, with anniversaries that fall also around this weekend:

– In Libya, French planes under NATO command opened the campaign to topple Moammar Gadhafi on March 19 two years ago. Today, a democratic government is in place, though it controls little in the face of Islamist militias whose unchecked presence frequently forces the national assembly to cancel sessions. Libyan weapons, taken from Gadhafi’s unguarded stores, were crucial to the advance of Islamist fighters in Mali.

– In Syria, the civil war marks its second year on Friday, with most observers calling the conflict a stalemate and the death toll likely to have passed 70,000 – and rising every day. The Obama administration has called for the defeat of President Bashar Assad even as it denounces as a terrorist group the most effective anti-Assad rebel military faction, the Nusra Front – a branch of al Qaida in Iraq, the same radical Islamist group that the U.S. fought in that country and that the current Iraqi government also is battling.

– Even the relatively peaceful January revolutions that ushered in what came to be known as the Arab spring two years ago are unsettled. In Egypt, the world’s most populous Arab country, a religiously affiliated political party fights to establish its pre-eminence against a group of revolutionaries who demand a share of political power but seem incapable of organizing for upcoming parliamentary elections. Anti-government demonstrations have become so frequent that they hardly deserve news coverage, and the economy is in free fall.

Never has the region seen so much change in the nine decades since the end of World War I, when Western powers carved up the territories of the defeated Ottomans by drawing lines across a map.

The role in that turmoil of U.S. intervention – direct, in the cases of Iraq and Libya, and through rhetoric, in Syria and Egypt – remains an open question.

In Iraq, the people think their security situation is better since American troops left the country at the end of 2011. A Gallup poll released earlier this month found that 42 percent think that, despite the occasional car bomb, the security situation has improved since U.S. troops withdrew. But they have doubts about their government. Only 11 percent said there was less corruption and only 9 percent said there was less unemployment.

Sunnis, who’d enjoyed privileges under Saddam, were particularly negative about Iraq. For 69 percent of them, corruption has gotten worse, compared with 39 percent of Shiites, whom Saddam’s regime had repressed, though they’re a majority in the country. In a clear reference to Iran, a Shiite-ruled theocracy, 39 percent of Sunnis said there’d been worse foreign intervention since U.S. troops had left. Only 27 percent of Shiites felt that way.

Iraq’s leaders openly express alarm at what’s going on in nearby Syria. That worry was particularly strong earlier this month, after gunmen deep inside Iraq killed at least 50 Syrian civilians and soldiers who’d fled their country during a rebel offensive and were being escorted by Iraqi troops to another border crossing for repatriation. Days later, the Islamic State of Iraq, the al Qaida in Iraq umbrella group, claimed the attack, which also had killed Iraqi troops, and Iraqi officials conceded that after a dozen years of training alongside American troops and billions of dollars worth of U.S. equipment, they’d been unable to defend themselves. The attack was the most sophisticated they’d seen in years, Iraqi officials said.

“We need equipment. We need electronic surveillance. We need an air force,” Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told McClatchy earlier this month. “We need a border control system. Definitely. We don’t have it. We have only the concrete blocks that the Americans left for us, lined up along the borders.”

No one knows how long the conflict in Syria will go on. President Barack Obama first called for Assad to step down 19 months ago. U.S. officials no longer say Assad’s days are numbered, and the United Nations published a report this past week that says neither side may claim the military upper hand, though rebel advances seem to outnumber those of the Syrian military.

The United States agreed earlier this month to provide the anti-Assad opposition coalition with $60 million to help it get organized, and the European Union agreed to ease its arms embargo to allow some direct aid to the rebels, including armored personnel carriers.

But with Russia and China firmly on Assad’s side and blocking a series of anti-Assad U.N. resolutions, there’s no legal basis for broader international intervention – and no consensus that such intervention would end the bloodshed.

Perhaps most surprising is how much the tone of the effort in Syria has changed. Though it once was presented as an attempt to bring democracy to the country, the Islamist militant groups that dominate the rebel fighting oppose the very idea. Unable to win on their own, democracy proponents have aligned with those groups, with the head of the U.S.-supported Syrian Opposition Coalition, Mouaz al Khatib, openly denouncing the State Department’s designation of the Nusra Front as an al Qaida-linked terrorist group.

Earlier this month, as anti-Assad fighters moved through Raqqa province – first capturing a strategic dam, then the provincial capital and then the government building itself – they distributed fliers calling democracy un-Islamic.

“Beware of democracy,” they read.

That’s a lesson that in a different way might resonate in Egypt and Libya, where free elections have yet to mean stability.

Indeed, security worsened in the months after Libyans went to the polls to pick a national assembly last July in voting that was widely proclaimed as free and fair. Americans became sharply aware of that in September, when, on the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Islamist extremists overran U.S. diplomatic outposts in Benghazi, an eastern city that had been the capital of the anti-Gadhafi uprising. Four Americans were killed, including the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens.

U.S. officials acknowledge that the way the anti-Gadhafi campaign unfolded, with no American or European forces on the ground to establish order after the government fell, is in part responsible for the uncertainty in that country now.

“When the Gadhafi regime collapsed, and there was, essentially, for a period of time no governmental control, it was in that environment that extremist organizations and criminal organizations took advantage of that situation to establish themselves and in some cases re-establish themselves,” said Army Gen. Carter Ham, the head of Africa Command, the U.S. military group that’s responsible for that continent.

Those groups remain unchallenged by Libya’s inexperienced police and security forces and have spread across North Africa, Ham said. Collecting intelligence on them is one reason the United States has asked neighboring Niger for permission to open a base for pilotless drone aircraft.

In its latest travel warning, issued Monday, the State Department warned Americans to stay away, describing the country as unpredictable.

Egypt has been spared the kind of widespread insurgent violence that’s plagued its neighbor but it’s still beset by political and social upheaval, despite elections that everyone agrees were the first honest ones in its history.

The Obama administration had endorsed the removal of leader Hosni Mubarak when it became clear that he’d lost the support of his people and the military. Now analysts wonder whether Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, isn’t slowly doing the same.

Unemployment levels grow monthly, the official inflation rate is 9.3 percent and the value of the Egyptian pound is falling. Crime and general mayhem seem out of control. Soccer fans routinely defy police, shut down bridges and set fire to rival clubs’ headquarters, simply because they can. Police able to respond to more routine matters are difficult to find. Rape is common at public demonstrations. Dissatisfaction is palpable in the streets.

In a nation where $200 a month is a bounteous wage, fruit is a luxury for a huge swath of the population. So are tomatoes.

Morsi’s approval rating has plummeted, according to the polling firm Baseera. Immediately after his election last summer, it stood at 75 percent; last month it was 49 percent. Yet Morsi’s political opposition remains divided going into parliamentary elections scheduled for next month.

In May 2011, Obama spelled out lofty goals in a speech that’s considered his defining remarks on the Arab spring.

“There’s no straight line to progress, and hardship always accompanies a season of hope,” he said. “But the United States of America was founded on the belief that people should govern themselves. And now we cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights, knowing that their success will bring about a world that is more peaceful, more stable and more just.”

Those goals aren’t much different from what Bush articulated from the White House 10 years ago this Tuesday. But they may be just as far off.

Email: nyoussef@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @nancyayoussef

Israel Hayom | About those talks with Iran.

Dore Gold

“Iran Could Develop 4-5 Bombs if it Wants”.

Or Heller

14/3/2013 Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi (Photo: IDF Spokesperson)

We Salute the Women of the IDF – YouTube.

Hamas accuses Egyptian media of anti-Palestinian incitement | The Times of Israel.

Press had reported that seven Palestinians detained in Cairo were planning to target local installations

A Palestinian smuggler in a tunnel along the Gaza-Egypt border in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on October 4, 2012 (photo credit: Abed Rahim Khatib /Flash90)

Hamas leaders on Thursday attacked the Egyptian press for attempting “to sow strife between Egypt and Gaza” by reporting that seven Palestinians detained at the Cairo airport were planning to target vital infrastructures in the country.

Egyptian media reported the arrest of the seven, who arrived in Cairo on a flight from Damascus early Wednesday morning, after they were found carrying maps of installations and documents specifying ways of manufacturing explosives.

Get The Times of Israel’s Daily Edition by email
and never miss our top stories   Free Sign up!

But Hamas deputy political bureau chief Moussa Abu-Marzouq said the reports were baseless and amounted to nothing but “an attempt to insert the Palestinian issue in internal Egyptian conflicts.”

“The moment the seven Palestinians were sent to questioning, which is a routine procedure, certain media outlets hurriedly fabricated a wave of lies claiming they had previously entered through the tunnels, saying they were found with maps of sensitive locations and buildings in Egypt,” wrote Abu-Marzouq on his Facebook page Wednesday evening.

Relations between the Palestinian Islamic movement and Egyptian media have been strained since an August 2012 terror attack against an Egyptian army outpost on the Egyptian border with Israel and Gaza which claimed the lives of 16 Egyptian soldiers. The terrorists who carried out the attack were believed to have infiltrated from Gaza to Egypt, which promptly began sealing smuggling tunnels on its side of the border.

While criticizing the smear campaign by Egyptian media, Hamas leaders have always been cautious of flatly accusing the Islamist government of President Mohammed Morsi of incitement.

“We implore all media to examine their information and stop publishing harmful reports about our Palestinian people, sowing strife between us and the Egyptian people,” wrote Abu-Marzouq.

Sami Abu-Zuhri, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, on Thursday stated that airport officials at Cairo airport grew suspicious of the Palestinians  for not having Syrian entry and exit stamps in their Palestinian passports.

“For a while now Egyptian media has been waging a smear campaign against Hamas and its military wing in particular, and against the Palestinian people in general,” said Abu-Zuhri in an official statement.

Abu-Marzouq, the Hamas leader, explained that Syria does not recognize Palestinian passports due to its principled objection to the Oslo process which created the Palestinian state, causing Syrian airport authorities to stamp a separate paper, which the seven Palestinians carried with them on the flight to Cairo.

But Egyptian media on Wednesday reported a more convoluted and suspicious story regarding the seven Palestinians. According to independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, the men had traveled to Iran from Syria, using separate travel documents.

“All the plans [found on the men], pertaining to ambushes, night combats, the range of heavy missiles, plans to attack installations, military training and explosives production are all within the framework of their work in one of the Palestinian security agencies, and not directed at any particular state or at Egypt,” an anonymous security official at Cairo airport told the daily.

Al-Masry Al-Youm identified the men as Nader Abu-Shazifah, Mahmoud Abu-Shazifah, Muhmmad Al-Ghor, Ahmad Miqdad, Muhammad Tafish, Musab Abdul Aal and Muhammad Abdul Aziz Muhammad.

In January, Hamas accused a Coptic organization in Egypt of fabricating and propagating media reports that Hamas had sent 7,000 movement members to take part in pro-Morsi demonstrations in Cairo.

State-linked report blames Hamas for killing Egypt soldiers | The Times of Israel.

Terrorist group threatens to sue magazine; ‘Those writers should have prioritized siding with the Palestinian people,’ says spokesman

Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, in October (photo credit: Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

CAIRO — A report by a state-owned Egyptian weekly magazine on Thursday accused the Palestinian militant movement Hamas of carrying out one of the bloodiest attacks against the Egyptian army in years — the killing 16 of soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula in August 2012. Hamas’ military wing angrily accused Egypt’s state media of spreading “flagrant lies.”

It was not possible to verify contents of the report. The magazine Al-Ahram al-Araby is closely connected to security agencies, and Egypt’s military currently has a strained relationship with President Mohammed Morsi, who hails from the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group from which Hamas is an offshoot.

Military officers have been issuing thinly veiled warnings that the armed forces might return to the politics. Morsi’s government has been shaken by a bitter conflict with the opposition and by economic shortages, but security in the Sinai is a particular sensitivity. After the August attack, Morsi sacked a number of top military and intelligence chiefs.

The mountainous peninsula is beset with several interrelated security challenges, including a long-running Islamist insurgency that has intensified since Egypt’s 2011 uprising and Bedouin-run smuggling networks.

The military recently stepped up its crackdown on smuggling into the Gaza Strip, a Hamas-ruled territory under Israeli blockade. A day before the report came out, Egypt arrested seven Hamas members at Cairo International Airport, according to a security official meanwhile Egypt’s military frequently reports demolishing underground tunnels used by Hamas in smuggling weapons, militants and goods.

Al-Ahram Al-Araby’s article, based on an alleged report by an unnamed high ranking official, published the names of three top Hamas commanders whom it said masterminded and executed the attack. It said that Hamas militants received help from Islamic extremists in Sinai.

Among them was Ayman Nofal, a Hamas militant arrested in the Sinai three years ago, when authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak was in power, and accused of planning bombing attacks. He escaped from prison during the chaos of the 2011 anti-Mubarak uprising and sneaked back to Gaza through a smuggling tunnel.

Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas’ military wing Izzedine al Qassam, described the report as “only illusions and dreams in the minds of the editor … which is consistent with the role of the Zionist propaganda efforts to drive wedges between the resistance and the Egyptian people.”

Covering his face with a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, he derided the report as “flagrant lies,” in a presser held in Gaza. Abu Obeida said his group would sue the editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram al-Araby, adding, “Those writers should have prioritized siding with the Palestinian people.”

Other Gaza officials also denied the reports. A top security official told Associated Press in Gaza that Hamas worked closely with Egypt in investigating the August attack and that the Egyptians found no links between Gaza and the attack on the soldiers. Both he and the Egyptian security official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

The publication came a day after Egypt’s Defense Minister Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said during an address to border guards said that the military would confront “anyone who dares to harm Egypt’s security or armed forces.”

“We will never forget those who killed us while we were fasting,” he was quoted by the daily Al-Shorouk as saying. The border guards were killed as they broke the fast for the holy month of Ramadan.

At the time of the attack, Egypt blamed a group of 35 militants from both Sinai and Gaza, home to a wide range of Islamist groups including some that are more radical than Hamas. It said 35 gunmen stormed the post and killed the guards before commandeering an armored vehicle they later used to try to storm across the border into Israel. It said Gaza militants supported the attack by firing mortar round at a nearby post. President Mohammed Morsi said the attackers “will pay dearly.”

The Israeli military said the attack was part of a plot to abduct an Israeli soldier, and two vehicles commandeered by the attackers crashed into Israel, where one blew up.

“Fortress Israel:” A necessary response to the Islamic Winter | Jerusalem Post – Blogs.

Of course Hamas killed the baby – JPost – Magazine – Opinion.

Photo by: Courtesy

The recent disclosure that Omar Misharawi, the baby son of BBC photographer Jihad Misharawi, was actually killed by an errant Hamas rocket rather than by an Israeli missile, should have absolutely no moral implications.  Of course the baby was killed by Hamas.  He would have been killed by Hamas even if the missile that ended his life had been fired by Israel.  Hamas is totally and wholly responsible for this death, as it is responsible for every civilian death in Gaza and in Israel. It is Hamas that always begins the battle by firing rockets at Israeli civilians. Generally Israel does not respond. When it does, its rockets occasionally kill Palestinian civilians.  That’s because Hamas wants Palestinians civilians, especially babies, to be killed by Israelis rockets.  They want Palestinian babies to be killed precisely so that they can display the kind of photographs that were shown around the world: a grieving father holding his dead baby, presumably killed by an Israeli rocket. For years, I have called this Hamas’ “dead baby strategy.”  The recent United Nations finding simply confirms the reality of this cynical strategy.

The errant rocket that killed Omar Misharawi was fired by Hamas terrorists from a densely populated civilian area adjacent to the home of the BBC photographer Jihad Misharawi.  Hamas selects such locations for firing its rockets precisely so that Israel will respond by firing into civilian areas and killing Palestinian civilians. They regard such dead civilians as “shahids”, or martyrs for the cause.  It is better for Hamas’ publicity campaign if the rocket that kills the Palestinian baby was fired by the Israeli Defense Forces, but even if the rocket was fired by Hamas terrorists, Hamas will claim that the lethal rocket was fired by Israel.  Often the evidence is inconclusive, though the forensic evidence in this case points clearly to a Hamas rocket.

The important point is that it doesn’t really matter who actually fired the rocket that killed the baby.  The baby was killed by Hamas as part of a calculated strategy designed to point the emotional finger of moral blame at the IDF for doing what every democracy would do:  namely, defend its civilians from rocket attacks by targeting those who are firing the rockets, even if they are firing them from civilian areas.  As US President Barack Obama said when he visited Sderot shortly before going into office:

Babies like Omar Misharawi will continue to die in Gaza and in Israel so long as the world media continues to serve as facilitators of Hamas’ dead baby strategy.  Every time a picture of a dead Palestinian baby being held by his grieving parents appears on television or on the front pages of newspapers around the world, Hamas wins.  And when Hamas wins, they continue with their deadly strategy.  The media, therefore, is complicit in the death of Omar Misharawi as it is in the deaths of other civilians who are victims of Hamas’ dead baby strategy.  Pictures of dead babies in the arms of their grieving fathers are irresistible to the media.  That won’t change.  What should change is the caption.  Every time a dead Palestinian baby is shown, the caption should explain the strategy that led to his or her death:  namely that Hamas deliberately fires its rockets from areas in which babies live and into which Israel must fire if it is to stop its own babies from being killed.

It may sound heartless to claim that Hamas wants its own babies to be killed as part of its strategy of demonizing Israel.  But there is no escaping the reality and truth of this phenomenon.  Indeed it has been admitted by Hamas leaders such as Fathi Hammad:

Of course these Hamas leaders don’t desire their own death.  They build shelters for themselves and for the terrorists who fire the rockets at Israeli civilians.  As soon as these rockets are fired from crowded civilian areas, the terrorist scurry into below-ground shelters, leaving babies, women and other civilians in the path of Israeli rockets that target the rocket launchers.  This isn’t martyrdom by the leaders and terrorists.  It is cowardice.  That too is part of the dead baby strategy: make martyrs of babies, while the leaders and terrorists hide in shelters.  In Israel, it is precisely the opposite; shelters are for civilians; soldiers put themselves in harm’s way.  That’s why illustration above so aptly sums it all up.

US drone escapes attack over Hormuz. Syria threatens to bomb Lebanon. Russian marines dock in Beirut.

DEBKAfile Special Report March 14, 2013, 10:52 PM (GMT+02:00)

Russian warships dock in Beirut

 

Middle East tensions are spiraling sharply six days before US President Barack Obama lands in the Middle East. Thursday night, March 14, an Iranian fighter jet tried to bring down a US Predator drone flying over Oman, i.e. the Straits of Hormuz – only to be warned off by flares from its US fighter escort.

This was not the first time a US drone was threatened by Iranian aircraft over the Persian Gulf, but in reporting the incident, the Pentagon revealed that the drones flying in the neighborhood of Iranian shores are now escorted by US jet fighters.
A couple of hours earlier that evening, debkafile received an exclusive report from its military sources that the Syrian high command had just issued an ultimatum, on the orders of Bashar Assad, demanding that the Lebanese government put an immediate stop to the passage of armed Sunni fighters from Lebanon into Syria, else the Syrian Air Force would strike the Lebanese intruders’ convoys and also their home bases.  Damascus claimed they were coming to fight the government alongside the al Qaeda-linked Jabrat al-Nusra.

Their incursion threatened to engender a major spillover of the Syrian conflict into Lebanon.
The danger of hostilities inching close to the Syrian port of Tartus, where Moscow maintains a naval base, decided the Russian Navy to instruct three warships carrying 700 marines to Tartus to change course and put in at Beirut instead.

Three Reasons Obama is Traveling to Israel – Jeffrey Goldberg – The Atlantic.

President Obama heads next week to Israel, with a side trip to the West Bank and an overnight visit to Jordan. He will not be going to oversee peace negotiations, nor will he be bringing a specific peace plan with him. Instead, he’s going to reintroduce himself to the region. Specifically, he’s going to speak directly to the Israeli people, over the head, if necessary, of the prime minister, with whom he generally sees not eye-to-eye.

(Which is not to say their relationship is all contention: On the matter of Iran, Obama was actually quite appreciative last September when Netanyahu suggested, at the United Nations, that he would cease contemplating a preventive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities until well after the American election. In a phone call shortly after that speech, Obama thanked Netanyahu for giving him “time and space” on the nuclear issue. On the matter of settlements, and the continued occupation of much of the West Bank, Obama has repeatedly expressed his frustration with what he might term — and I would term — Netanyahu’s myopia on the subject).

There are several reasons Obama is going now to Israel:
1) The president is said to have grown tired, during the campaign last year, of hearing the question, “Why haven’t you visited Israel yet?” Of course, many presidents did not visit Israel while president, and some had gone late in their term. Obama is held to a bit of a double-standard on this question — it was a Republican strategy to suggest to Jewish voters, in particular, that he was hostile to the Jewish state — and he has seemed annoyed, at times, when his commitment to Israel is questioned. Late last year, after he won reelection, he suggested, in a White House meeting, that he make Israel an early stop in his 2nd-term foreign travels, in part to quiet this meme.

2) During the first term, Administration thinking held that there was no point in sending the President to meet with Israelis and Palestinians on their home turf unless there was real progress in negotiations. Last year, this thinking shifted: Visiting the region while it was relatively quiet, without carrying a specific political agenda, grew to seem like a smart idea, in particular because many Israelis had grown suspicious of his intentions and would therefore benefit from direct exposure to the man, rather than his caricature. The caricature developed in part  because they were told by the Sheldon Adelsons of the world (and more subtly, by Netanyahu himself) not to trust him. This also happened because the President had created the impression, in his famous Cairo speech to the Muslim world in 2009, that he didn’t fully understand the rationale for Israel’s existence.  In my Bloomberg View column this week, I discuss this speech, the fallout from which illustrates, if nothing else, how complicated it is for a president to navigate the Middle East:

In the speech he gave there, which the White House titled, “A New Beginning,” Obama made a powerful statement in support of the Palestinian cause: “The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable,” he said. “America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.”

Notably, he didn’t avoid the touchy subject of the U.S. bond with Israel, which he called “unbreakable.” He said this knowing that such a statement would not fill his Muslim audience with joy. “Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust,” Obama said, by way of explaining U.S. support for the Jewish state. “Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant and it is hateful.”

Obama’s statement came at a moment when many Israelis believed he was preparing to dismantle the special relationship between his country and theirs. His aides hoped his words would serve to allay Jewish fears of a new president whose middle name is Hussein.

It didn’t work as planned. Why, you ask? Why would a moving declaration of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust — and a robust denunciation of Holocaust denial — alienate Israelis, and many of their friends in the U.S.? Well, welcome to the Middle East, where every tribe and creed has its own code, and mastery of these codes doesn’t come easy….

How did Obama leave this impression? At home, this view was cultivated partly by cynical Republicans who have been eager to turn support for Israel into a partisan issue.

With Israelis, it’s more complicated. The Cairo speech had a chilling effect because, to Israelis, the Holocaust alone doesn’t justify the existence of their state. “The Holocaust doesn’t explain why we’re here,” said Yossi Klein Halevii, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “The Holocaust explains why we fight as fiercely as we do to stay here, but it doesn’t explain our rootedness.”

In Cairo, Halevi said, Obama failed to acknowledge “Jewish indigenousness in the region,” the idea that history — the uninterrupted Jewish presence in the lands of ancient Israel for more than 3,000 years — justifies the modern Jewish claim to a state there. “In Cairo, Obama was asking the Arab world to feel sorry for the Jews,” he said, “and by doing so, he inadvertently played into the hands of those whose response is, ‘Well, if there was a Holocaust, let the Germans pay for it, not the Arabs.’ That’s a reasonable response if you don’t believe that Jews are from here.”

The absence of Zionist thought in the speech was unhelpful, though not thematically inexplicable (after all, it was a speech meant to woo Muslims, not Jews). But Obama is clearly acquainted with the ideas that energized Jewish nationalism. During his first campaign for president, in 2008, I spoke to him at length about the Middle East, and he told me of learning Israel’s story early in life, from a Jewish camp counselor who explained to him the “idea of preserving a culture when a people had been uprooted with the view of eventually returning home.” Obama went on, “There was something so powerful and compelling for me, maybe because I was a kid who never entirely felt like he was rooted.”

3) One other reason he’s going, of course, is Iran. There’s nothing like a face-to-face with Netanyahu to keep the prime minister onboard with Administration strategy. President Obama will reiterate to the prime minister something the prime minister doesn’t quite believe: That the U.S. has Israel’s back, as Obama has said repeatedly. Netanyahu will press the president specifics: At what point, he will ask, does Obama give up and move to consider a military solution to the Iranian nuclear program. Obama will argue that there is still plenty of time. They will not leave their meeting agreeing on all points, of course, but there’s a greater chance Netanyahu will remain patient if Obama makes the case for patience in person, and on Netanyahu’s turf. Netanyahu frets that Obama doesn’t understand Israel’s true security situation, and that he doesn’t have a feel for Jewish history (we saw this worry evince itself most dramatically in Netanyahu’s stunning, and stunningly inappropriate, Oval Office lecture).

The conventional wisdom about this trip is that it won’t accomplish much. But the upside potential for this trip is great: Israelis will be seeing someone who is actually a friend, and this will allow the friend, over time, to speak bluntly with Israelis about the direction of their country; and Netanyahu will get invaluable face-time with the only person who could truly, and semi-permanently, confront what the prime minister believes to be the most serious threat Israel faces.

I’ll have more later on the Palestinian and Jordanian portions of the trip. But suffice it to say that another reason for this trip is that the President really wants to see Petra. And who can blame him?