2012 Predictions for the Middle East and Irish Politics

After years of amusing myself by watching the pundits having their ignorance played back to them on Nightline and in rival press columns, I am publicly putting my predictions forward. As my crystal ball has been in the shop for decades I claim no special insight into the future. My predictions are based only on the future being like the recent past and present.

One, Netanyahu will call elections this year and will emerge as prime minister again. Whether he calls them before attacking Iran in order to gain a popular mandate for such an action or after is anyone's guess. I'm guessing that being cautious he will be reelected then move to attack Iran.

Two, continued Islamist victories in Arab Spring elections in Egypt and elsewhere will make Israel more cautious than ever (except towards Iran) and make Hamas and Hezbollah provocative.

Three, Egypt will attempt to unilaterally alter the peace treaty with Israel by ending diplomatic relations.

Four, if Obama's reelection looks very uncertain he may attempt to strike against Iran or implement more stringent sanctions in order to win more support and ensure Israel's safety.

Five, Romney will pander to Jewish voters over Israel but most will vote for Obama. Romney's pandering, however, will help him with Evangelical Protestant conservative Republicans.

Six, with no major elections scheduled for Northern Ireland, the Sinn Fein--DUP relationship will continue smoothly. The UUP, TUV, and SDLP will continue to decline in importance. The new leadership of the SDLP will make little difference to the party's fortunes. There will be an uneasy relationship between the mainland Conservatives and the UUP.

Seven, Gerry Adams will attempt to become more of a figure in Southern Irish politics leaving Martin McGuinness to run the North. Fine Gael will recover its position as the preeminent party in Irish politics following the collapse of Fianna Fail in 2010. Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein and Labour will all compete for second place in Irish party politics. This may take several years to resolve. I'm betting that ultimately Fianna Fail will emerge in second place behind Fine Gael and ahead of both Labour and Sinn Fein. Labour should also remain ahead of Sinn Fein. 

Eight, if there is no further crash among the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain) in Europe and the Euro remains at its present level then Obama will likely be reelected over the Republican nominee, who will most likely be Romney. If there is a crash causing a major devaluation of the Euro then that will travel across the Atlantic leading to a return to recession or even depression. In that case the GOP nominee will win the election even if it is Ron Paul (who won't be the nominee). 

Nine, if there is a Euro crash this will either lead to a major shrinking of the Euro zone to leave out southern Europe and Ireland or the creation of a central bank with powers to devalue the currency, raise interest rates etc. --in other words the creation of a real monetary and economic zone. Short of that the European project will eventually stall and collapse.

Will Netanyahu Attack Iran?

Last week on one particular day the foreign policy and defense tollgate site Real Clear World featured two separate articles on Israel and Iran: one claiming that the former would attack the latter and the other the opposite. The case for attack consisted of reports of Israel Air Force aircraft practicing bombing attacks over Italy, statements by Israeli politicians, and the danger to Israel of Iran launching an out-of-the-blue nuclear missile attack on Israel. The case against consisted of the argument that Israel lacked sufficient aircraft to be able to thoroughly damage the extensive Iranian nuclear infrastructure--much of which is located underground--and thus any delay caused by bombing to the Iranian nuclear program would be temporary, the opposition of Washington to such attacks, and the likely blow-back damage that both Israel and the U.S. would suffer from Iranian revenge attacks. Will Netanyahu attack then? The truth is that I have no inside line into the psyche of the Israeli premier and even he probably does not know the final answer to that at the moment.

Bibi watchers are divided between those who see him merely as a shallow politician interested only in keeping his coalition together so that he can remain in power and those who see him as an ideologue interested in implementing neo-Revisionist Likud ideology. During his first term in office that meant stopping the Oslo process. During his second term that means keeping Israeli settlement activity going and weakening the peace process by destabilizing Israel's natural Palestinian partner, Mahmoud Abbas. When he ran for the premiership in January 2009 he made several statements about the dangers posed to Israel's future by Iran's nuclear project. The two politicians Netanyahu most admires surprisingly do not include Menahem Begin, the founder of the Likud's main component, Herut, or his successor Yitzhak Shamir. Instead he likes to quote Revisionist Zionism founder Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Winston Churchill. Jabotinsky warned in the interwar period of the dangers of a Holocaust among European Jewry even before Hitler had come to power in Germany. Churchill warned of the danger of Hitler to the international order and peace. For Netanyahu the Iranian leadership--personified by President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad--embodies both dangers. He is a personal threat to the survival of Jews living in Israel and a threat to the Middle East order.
  

Barack Obama has been content to try and stop the Iranian nuclear project through international nuclear sanctions. In this he has the support of Western Europe and the opposition of Russia and China--a more favorable situation than Bush faced vis a vis Iraq in 2002. Washington has also probably cooperated with covert Israeli efforts like the Stuxnet computer virus that reportedly destroyed several hundred Iranian centrifuges that were being used to enrich uranium. But Obama has resolutely opposed using force against Iran for good reason--the U.S. military is already overextended by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the international economy is very weak. With so much tinder and kindling lying around in the form of bad debt in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and the United States it does not do to play with matches.

So far Netanyahu has been content to warn Washington, support economic sanctions against Tehran, and support covert measures such as Stuxnet, possible sabotage or missile development sites, and assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. When Netanyahu contemplates Iran he should keep in mind that Churchill not only worried about the dangers of Bolshevism and supported Western intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918-19, but he also came to support a balance of terror between the West and the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Part of growing up as a nation means learning to live with ambiguity and danger and knowing what one can change in one's environment and what one must learn to live with. Netanyahu's real role as a great Israeli politician might be to help Israel come to accept this as well.

American Jews and the 2012 Election

Next to blacks, Jews have been the most consistently loyal ethnic constituency of the Democratic Party. And considering that until 1965 blacks could not vote in the South, and that many in the North do not vote, Jews have been a more electorally important one. Jews are concentrated demographically in the states with the largest electoral votes: New York, Illinois, California, Florida, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Texas (in roughly that order). Jews are only between two and two and a half percent of the American population, but because they vote in much higher numbers they are about three or four percent of the electorate on election day.  Jews have voted consistently Democratic since the Progressive Era when they voted for Woodrow Wilson.

About eighty-five percent of the affiliated Jewish community--Jews that participate in Jewish communal life through membership and attendance at synagogues or through other Jewish organizations--is made up of either secular Jews or Jews of non-Orthodox denominations that aren't officially recognized in Israel (Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist).  The fifteen percent of Jews who are Orthodox, either ultra-Orthodox or Modern Orthodox, tend to vote Republican because their religious views are more in line with Republicans on matters of personal morality than with Democrats. For secular and Reform Jews so-called Jewish values (tolerance, aid to the poor, equal rights) have replaced Orthodox ritual as the expression of their spiritual values. Most of these Jews consider themselves moderates or liberals/ Progressives politically and vote Democratic. About an additional ten percent of non-Orthodox Jews, roughly equal in number to Orthodox Jewish voters, vote for Republicans. This has been the situation for the past century, but with exceptions in individual presidential elections. Eisenhower and Reagan received about double the normal Republican  percentage of the Jewish vote. Eisenhower probably in gratitude and recognition for his role in defeating Hitler and Reagan in 1980 because Jimmy Carter was so disliked for attacking Menahem Begin over settlements. This previous analysis is based on several of the essays collected in Arthur Hertzberg's Jewish Polemics, a 1992 collection of his essays published over the previous decade. Hertzberg is a professor of religion who specialized in Judaism and the intellectual history of Zionism.  The present incumbent seems to attract the same disdain, contempt, and outright hatred among Jews that Carter did. But even Carter won 60 percent of the Jewish vote!


Obama is hated by those American Jews who are either already Republicans or who are Democrats but who identify with the Likud Party in Israel. Typical of this group is Martin Peretz, the publisher and former senior editor of The New Republic.  Peretz supported Obama in 2008, but then felt betrayed after Obama made overtures to the Arabs in 2009 and pushed for a settlement freeze in Israel. These Jews tend to put Israel at the top of their considerations when considering for whom to vote in presidential elections. Most American Jews, like other Americans, tend to vote on domestic issues and although Israel is important to them it is important as a homeland from which they can derive pride just as Irish-Americans identify in a vague way with Ireland, Italian-Americans with Italy, and Polish-Americans with Poland. These Israel-first voters might be compared to the Cuban exile community in Miami, where opposing Castro has traditionally been the only issue on which it votes.

The Republican Party now sees the 2012 election as an historic opportunity to part Jews from the Democratic Party in record numbers by casting the vote in terms of loyalty to Israel. Ironically, the insinuation that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to the U.S. was seen as an anti-semitic aspersion. Now some Jewish Republicans are making the charge that those who vote for Barack Hussein Obama are disloyal to Israel. I predict that this will backfire and that Jews will vote for Obama in their traditional percentages, if for no other reason than that they find the Evangelical Right supporters of the Republican Party to be more of a threat to their interests than they find Obama. This will be especially true if the GOP nominates a candidate other than Mitt Romney such as Rick Perry, Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich. And if that weren't enough there is always this Likud rally of Rick Perry to persuade all those J-Street supporters. And even Mitt, after flipping on all major social and economic issues from when he was governor of Massachusetts in order to win the nomination, will then be hard pressed to credibly flop back in order to win the general election.

Does trauma inhibit Netanyahu?

During apartheid South Africa's real period of siege from 1974 to 1994 there were three white rulers: John Vorster (1966-1978), Pieter Willem Botha (1978-1989), and Frederick Willem de Klerk (1989-1994). South African political scientist Dan O'Meara, who chronicled the apartheid years of the ruling National Party in Forty Lost Years: The National Party in Power 19448-1994, wrote about John Vorster that division within the party during the first half of his rule inhibited him from making necessary reforms during the second half. From 1966 to 1970 the party was torn by an ideological division between conservatives--verkrampte--literally cramped--and moderates--verligte--literally enlightened. This led to the split in the party with a small portion of the verkrampte forming the Herstigte Nasionale Party--Reconstituted National Party--under the leadership of Albert Hertzog. Hertzog was the minister of mines and, ironically, the son of the first leader of the National Party who had ended his career in ignominy rejected by Afrikaner nationalists during World War II. Except for appointing a pair of commissions late in his period of rule Vorster made no attempts at domestic reforms. O'Meara contends that this was in order to avoid the trauma of another ideological battle and another possible split. The HNP did not elect a single MP until 1985 in a by-election and then this MP lost his seat in the next general election in 1987. By calling a snap election in 1970, Vorster largely destroyed the HNP as an election threat to the National Party.

Vorster in his final four years in office concentrated on foreign policy. In October 1974 he initiated a peace effort with Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda aimed at mediating a peaceful solution within Rhodesia. This was before the guerrillas were a serious threat to white rule there. Vorster pressured Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith to release political detainees and to attend talks on a bridge overlooking Victoria Falls in August 1975. The talks got nowhere due to intransigence on both sides. Next Vorster teamed up with Henry Kissinger to pressure Smith into publicly conceding majority rule in September 1976. But when the nationalist leaders and their Frontline State backers rejected the concessions that Kissinger made to Smith, the initiative soon floundered. Both sides then headed to a constitutional conference presided over by a British diplomat at Geneva. The conference went nowhere as Smith refused to deviate from the Kissinger plan and the nationalists refused to accept that plan.

P.W. Botha came to power on the back of a corruption scandal--Infogate, which forced Vorster to resign as prime minister and to take up the then ceremonial position of state president. Botha spent the first half of his decade in power implementing several reforms to apartheid. First, he allowed certain black urban residents to have legal citizenship within South Africa, something which had previously been abolished under apartheid. Grand apartheid created bantustans or homelands, similar to Indian reservations in North America, and all Africans inside South African were assigned to one of them based on ethnicity. Next he legalized black trade unions and allowed them to collectively bargain over work conditions and wages. Then he implemented a major constitutional reform that created two new chambers of parliament for mixed-race "colored" South Africans, most of whom lived in the Cape Province, and for Indians, most of whom lived in Natal Province. But whites retained an overall majority in parliament and in the president's council that was created to replace the senate as the upper chamber. The president's council would reconcile disputes among the three houses over what were "general affairs" and what were "own affairs."  Seeing the powerlessness of these chambers, the vast majority--some 80-85 percent--of both communities boycotted the first elections for the new parliament in August 1984. The elections also led to protests that quickly turned into riots and an internal insurrection by blacks. The reform also changed South Africa from a parliamentary system to a presidential system.

Botha then spent the second half of his time in office repressing internal unrest, silencing domestic critics, and using South Africa's military to intimidate the surrounding countries that might pose a threat. From a triumphal tour of Western Europe in the summer of 1984, Botha was soon faced with trade sanctions from the U.S. and European Economic Community in 1986. 

So far there have been four Likud leaders in power as prime ministers: Menahem Begin (1977-1983), Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84, 1986-1992), Benjamin Netanyahu (1996-1999, 2009-present), and Ariel Sharon (2001-2006). Begin and Shamir were mainly responsible for the mass settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. That effort continued on subsequent Israeli governments. Begin had the solid backing of the American Jewish community and of the Reagan administration until he invaded Lebanon in June 1982. 

From 1982 onwards Likud governments--except that of Sharon--faced some hostility from Washington over their settlement policies. Netanyahu opposed the Oslo agreements in his first term as prime minister but agreed to withdraw from territory on the West Bank under American pressure from Clinton in October 1998. As a result his coalition soon collapsed. Sharon had very good relations with George Bush as a result of American antipathy towards Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat after October 2000. Clinton blamed Arafat--rightfully in my opinion--for the collapse of the Oslo process in late 2000. Bush came into office determined to avoid Middle East mediation and to support Israel. His conservative Republican backers demanded no less and this squared with Bush's own personal preferences. Sharon, like Botha from 1984 to 1988, spent his first several years battling the Al-Aksa Intifada by reinvading the West Bank in 2002 and assassinating Palestinian terrorist leaders.  He then unexpectedly withdrew from Gaza in 2005, defying his previous political support base of settlers and forcing the Gaza settlers to evacuate. Many Israeli conservatives now regard Sharon as the ultimate traitor.

Netanyahu has proven to be more like Vorster. He has consolidated his position within his own party following the exit of Sharon and his supporters in November 2005 to form the Kadima party. Now he has spent his second term in power balancing the various parties of the Right off against one another as Vorster did with the factions in the National Party. He implemented a temporary settlement freeze in 2010, but refused to renew despite the offer of considerable bribes from Washington. With Obama preoccupied with the economic crisis in the U.S. and with the support of American conservatives, Netanyahu can easily evade any serious pressure from Washington until at least well into 2013. By then there will be new elections in Israel. Netanyahu hopes that Mahmoud Abbas will disappear as a serious political force by then, leaving only Hamas to deal with on the Palestinian side. 

If a Republican president replaces Obama in 2013 the gamble will have paid off. Or if Obama is too weak in his second term to put pressure on Israel, it will also have worked. But in either case Netanyahu resembles Vorster in his political strategy.

The Republicans and Foreign Policy

About a month or two ago--I never saved the article--Real Clear World ran an article on the foreign policy experts advising the candidates. The only one to have many names I recognized was then frontrunner and establishment favorite Mitt Romney. He had three names I recognized: Richard Haass, Stephen Hadley, and Mitchell Reiss. Richard Haass was/is an expert on regional conflicts especially the Arab-Israeli conflict and Northern Ireland. He served as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council in the George H W Bush administration. For Dubya he served as the first American envoy to Northern Ireland, where he played a major role in convincing Gerry Adams that the IRA was actually disarm. Upon leaving there he took up a position with the Council on Foreign Relations that puts out the establishment Foreign Affairs magazine. Stephen Hadley served as Condi Rice's assistant at the National Security Council and then took over during Dubya's second term as National Security Advisor to George Bush. Mitchell Reiss was an expert on nuclear proliferation and a country expert on North Korea. When Haass left Belfast for New York, Reiss became his successor as American envoy. Reiss recently wrote a book exploring the question of when terrorist movements should be co-opted by negotiation and power sharing and when they should be shunned.

Perry relies on figures that he met while serving as governor of Texas. I did not recognize any names. The other candidate who had some recognizable names is Ron Paul. Paul has Leon Hadar, a former journalist working for the Jerusalem Post and the author of two books on American policy in the region, Sandstorm and Quagmire. He advocates an American military and political disengagement from the region. The opinion would be considered mainstream in the Democratic Party but is unsaleable to the Republicans. Because Paul is a libertarian running in a conservative party--a square peg in a round hole--he has no chance of being nominated.

Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and American ambassador to China, basically serves as his own foreign policy advisor. He was a Mormon missionary in Taiwan as a young man, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and is quite knowledgeable about trade matters and economic policy. But he registers at about two percent in the polls and is betting his whole future on New Hampshire, where he will have to compete with Romney, the other Mormon.

So far foreign policy, as distinct from immigration, has hardly registered in the Republican debates. The party is agitated by economic and social policies: abortion, immigration, health care, tax levels and debt. By slowly withdrawing from Iraq and continuing to oversee the assassination of leading Al Qaeda figures around the Middle East, Obama has effectively removed terrorism as a major political issue. Democrats still debate the American presence in Afghanistan; Republicans do not. It is almost a repeat of Vietnam forty years ago, but with the roles of the two parties reversed. The Democrats got us involved in Vietnam and then Nixon oversaw the withdrawal and the GOP spent twenty years talking about the Democrats as the party that was unreliable on national security. Maybe the Democrats can do the same about the Republicans for the next twenty years.

Should Perry or someone else other than Romney end up as the nominee, he (or she) can inherit the establishment foreign policy advisors by default. After all, Kissinger was never a Nixon advisor in the 1960s. He was a Nelson Rockefeller advisor whom Nixon inherited after he won the election in 1968. Obama inherited Clinton's stable of foreign policy advisors once he named her as his secretary of state. But he could have done so even without naming her--anyone who wanted to serve in government in a senior position had nowhere else to go in the short term. 

In American politics the conservatives determine who the Republican nominee is; the progressives determine who the Democratic nominee is. It is then up to the independents, who rarely vote based on foreign affairs, to determine which party's foreign policy establishment serves in office.

As a postscript let me add that on Friday Oct. 7, 2011 Romney gave his first foreign policy address of the race. Here is a link to a commentary on it. (See the article by  James Joyner in the Atlantic on the Sat. Oct. 8 panel.)                        )

Palestinian Statehood Is About Domestic Politics

There are three key players in the issue of Palestinian statehood: Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Barack Obama. All three made speeches at the UN ostensibly designed to convince and justify their actions before an international audience. But all three speeches were really aimed at domestic audiences. Abbas was presenting the Palestinian narrative and demonstrating that he can stand up to the Zionists and their American backers. Netanyahu was showing his coalition that he was not making any concessions to the Palestinians and that the lack of a solution was their fault. Obama, by adopting for the first time the Israeli narrative, was protecting himself in the 2012 general election from the charge that he was pro-Palestinian and soft on the enemies of the Jewish state. Here is a column by Jewish blogger M J Rosenburg on Obama's motives and the likely results of his speech. And here is a column by Thomas Friedman basically echoing my observation and pointing out its dangers.

Abbas was trying to defend himself from attacks by Hamas, while going around the Likud government in Israel that plays lip service to a two-state solution while opposing it with all of its might. Abbas mentioned the connections of Jesus and Mohammad to Palestine, but failed to mention Moses, Abraham or any other Jews.  Netanyahu through his pro-settlement policies was pushing the Palestinians to go for statehood before all of their territory is swallowed up by religious Zionists and right-wing settlers. And Obama was demonstrating again that his political bank account is empty--he withdrew everything to pay for the health care bill and the stimulus packages.

J Street's misdirected activism

On Sunday I attended a house party for the Madison chapter of J Street. There were about ten of us there to listen to the Midwest coordinator from Chicago explain J Street's strategy for the "two-state summer" to pressure the Obama administration to reengage in Middle East diplomacy on the Palestinian track. I spoke to him for about a half hour before the meeting and although we agreed on many things, we had a fundamental disagreement about American policy. I hold that the situation is fundamentally unripe for another attempt to renew Israeli-Palestinian direct talks. The Israeli government is opposed to a further settlement freeze or any substantial concessions to the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas is opposed to making any substantial concessions to the Israelis and has already committed himself to the UN route of seeking UN sanction and recognition for a declaration of Palestinian independence. Until he plays this hand out he is very unlikely to try to engage in another game with different rules in which he has always been dealt a losing hand.

Several of us at the meeting spoke of the possibility of J Street attempting to persuade the Obama administration to shape the Palestinian initiative by making UN recognition and pressure on Israel to end the occupation conditional on Palestine fulfilling certain conditions such as giving up the right of return. But apparently J Street believes that that is too dangerous a course. In other words Obama is politically healthy enough to be pressured into engaging in another high-profile round of the peace process, as in 2010, but not healthy enough to take on the UN and a unified Palestinian government. I fail to understand the logic here.

Either engaging in a peace process will cost Obama valuable political capital when he is gearing up for a reelection campaign or it won't. If it will it should be avoided. If it will not then he should spend that capital in a process that has not yet failed and has a slim chance of succeeding.

Aaron David  Miller wrote a very interesting article on how the Arab Spring has affected American Middle East calculations. Here is the link.

A Speech or a Policy?

President Obama's speech was a bit of a let down after all the publicity that preceded it. Most of the speech related to the Arab Spring, and was probably just an attempt to enunciate a coherent policy. While Obama came out squarely on the side of civil and democratic rights for Arabs, he was unable to really enunciate a single one-size-fits-all policy for the myriad of American interests and local circumstances across the region. He devoted a total of eight sentences to the unrest in Syria and failed to call for Bashar Assad's removal as he had previously called for Kaddafi's removal. This is a recognition of reality--our forces can only take on so many dictators and nation-building projects at a time.

On the Israeli-Palestinian issue, about ten minutes out of a fifty-minute speech (go here for the text), he pronounced a few policy guidelines rather than announcing a new policy or a plan to achieve peace. His most controversial statement from the viewpoint of Israeli and American Zionists and their supporters in Congress was that the 1967 borders (really the 1949 armistice lines) should serve as the starting point for a peace deal with territorial swaps to take account of Israeli settlement blocs. Senator Mitchell went on the Sunday talk shows to emphasis the feature of mutually-agreed borders. Netanyahu predictably ignored this so as to be able to posture for the folks back home in declaring the 1967 borders indefensible. The speech, although not as detailed as the December 2000 Clinton parameters was perfectly compatible with them as well as with a 2005 Bush letter to then Israeli Prime Minister Arik Sharon, as Mitchell Plitnick points out.

Dan Fleshler declared this to be a "gutsy, principled speech"defying the Israeli government. It was nothing of the sort. It was in reality an attempt to demonstrate that Washington is still relevant to the region after the start of the Arab Spring. It was also an attempt to keep liberal Zionist groups and their supporters on board for Obama's reelection without endangering his support among Democratic and independent supporters of Israel who are more hawkish, by attempting another peace initiative. J Street, APN and Ameinu can all claim to their supporters that they are relevant and pressured Obama into acting. Meanwhile, Obama will be free to concentrate on his real priorities (the economy, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Russia) until after the 2012 election.  Call it Cairo 2009 Mark II.

George Mitchell--the canary in the mineshaft

George Mitchell has given up on Middle East peace and returned to a well-deserved retirement. He was coaxed out of retirement in 1994, after a career in the Senate, by President Clinton to chair a board looking at economic ideas for Northern Ireland. He spent the next five years working on the problems of Northern Ireland as the head of a commission investigating the problem of decommissioning, then as a mediator chairing the political talks and finally in the fall of 1999 heading a review of the working of the Good Friday Agreement that came up with a temporary fix to the decommissioning problem. Clinton again called on him in late 2000 to head an investigation into the causes of the outbreak of the Al-Aksa Intifada at the start of October. President Obama, to much acclaim by Jewish liberal groups, brought him out of retirement during his transition to advise on his Middle East policy. He ended up as Obama's Middle East envoy, the position once held by Dennis Ross in the Clinton administration.

His pending retirement has been rumored for about eight months since the renewal of the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was dead on arrival. Neither side was particularly interested in incurring the political costs of peace--concessions that would endanger its domestic standing. Netanyahu refused outrageous bribes to renew a settlement freeze and Mahmoud Abbas used this as an excuse to refuse to enter into talks.

Obama was too engaged with domestic problems dealing with the economy and with managing two--now three--foreign wars to put his own political future on the line. Why should he risk his presidency when Abbas was not prepared to risk his or Netanyahu his premiership?  The next big problem for Obama will be finding someone of sufficient stature to take on this thankless task for the rest of his first term. Dennis Ross is unacceptable to the liberals even if he wanted the job. Most of those qualified to take on the job are smart enough not to want it.

Ossama Bin Laden and Palestine: the Ramifications

Two important events for the Middle East took place within days of each other. On April 27, Fatah and Hamas signed a unity agreement that will lead to the formation of a government of technocrats. Eventually, if everything goes right, it will lead to the reemergence of a united Palestinian polity with Gaza and the West Bank once more being under one authority rather than under two. Almost immediately Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu denounced the agreement and said it made the Palestinian Authority unfit as a negotiating partner. His former top foreign policy advisor Dore Gold had similar comments. This exposes, as if anyone needed further exposure, the disinterest that Netanyahu and the Israeli political leadership in the present coalition have in negotiations and peace.

Such an agreement can lead to two likely outcomes: either Fatah eventually converts Hamas and the way is open for peace negotiations with Israel. Or Hamas converts Fatah and the possibility of peace recedes until decades from now Hamas realizes that it cannot destroy Israel. Which is the more likely outcome may not be clear for years. After all, if we use an Israeli analogy, has the cohabitation made Labor more like the Likud or vice versa? The answer has been that there has been movement in both directions. The Likud was split, creating Kadima, a more flexible and pragmatic party. But Labor was also split creating Atzmaut, a smaller and more hawkish party to serve as Ehud Barak's personal vehicle, possibly for a trip eventually into the leadership of the Likud. It may take years before it is established which camp, the Left or the Right, was the winner in the co-habitation sweepstakes. It will take even longer with Palestinian unity.

But this may help to set up a Middle East peace initiative in Obama's second term, if he has one.

Ossama Bin Laden's death in combat ensures three short-term effects. First, it raises the profile of the Navy Seals and gives them a good slice of the elite forces budget for the military. Second, it makes Obama's job of withdrawing from Afghanistan easier as it eliminates partially a good deal of the rationale for remaining there. Third, it visibly improves Obama's chances of reelection. Timing wise, if this had occurred a week before the election instead of 18 months before it, it would have been much better for Obama. People tend to have short memories when it comes to voting. But Obama has demonstrated that he is capable of decisive action, of keeping a secret, and of waiting until the proper moment to strike. I'm sure that Obama's reelection manager will have a few ads featuring Obama and the announcement of his death to show the electorate in the fall of 2012.

Confusion in the Obama administration

Yesterday the New York Times ran an article reporting that there was disagreement within the upper ranks of the Obama administration about its Middle East policy regarding Israel/Palestine. It was reported that both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton favored the former making a presidential speech to the nation on the Middle East that would address policy issues raised by both the Arab Spring revolutions and the stagnant peace process. J Street, the liberal pro-Israel pro-peace lobby, is lobbying Obama and Clinton to publicly set out their own terms for an Arab-Israeli peace settlement.  Senior National Security Council advisor for the Middle East Dennis Ross, who was the lead Mideast peace negotiator in the Clinton administration, is opposed to Obama making such a speech. Ross opposes such a speech because he fears that it will lead to a confrontation with Israel and is opposed to any American-Israeli confrontation. The New York Times's Israeli equivalent, Ha'Aretz, also ran an article on the subject. I agree with Ross, but for reasons that are slightly--but very significantly different.

Like Ross I believe that the situation at present is not ripe for peace. Neither Jerusalem nor Ramallah is willing to take the steps and make the sacrifices that would be necessary for concluding a peace agreement. This was demonstrated in 2010 when the PA refused to take advantage of the Israeli settlement construction freeze to return to negotiations. It was also demonstrated by PM Netanyahu's failure to renew the freeze and his manipulating of settlement construction starts as to render the freeze largely meaningless. Should Washington, at a time when it is busy fighting three wars in the region, want peace more than the parties to the conflict? 

I do not fear an American conflict with Jerusalem--I just don't want it wasted. Obama is in no position to take advantage of a confrontation. His domestic political position is too tenuous. He should wait either until he is safely reelected or until the PA gives him more leverage by declaring independence at the United Nations in September.  

Let's review the record of presidents who made major peace efforts in the Middle East. Nixon supported Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in the winter and spring of 1974 leading to two Arab-Israeli separation of forces agreements. Nixon was forced to resign that August to avoid impeachment. Gerald Ford supported Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in 1975 between Egypt and Israel that resulted in the Sinai II separation of forces agreement. Ford lost the presidential election to Jimmy Carter a year later. Carter spent much of his first two years in office negotiating a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. He remained a single term president. Reagan did not do any peacemaking during his first term in office and was reelected by a landslide. George H.W. Bush convened the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991 that eventually led to the Oslo process. Like Carter he remained a one-term president. Bill Clinton used the Oslo accords signing on the White House lawn as a photo op. But he didn't engage in heavy-duty peacemaking during his first term. He was easily reelected. He did make a serious effort at Camp David in July 2000 and Vice President Al Gore narrowly lost the election to George W. Bush in November 2000 (but won more popular votes). Bush didn't engage in serious peacemaking in his first term (or in his second) and was reelected.

The clear empirical law is that chances of being elected or reelected are inversely proportional to one's efforts to secure Middle East peace. While many other factors come into presidential elections including the economy, Middle East peacemaking does play a role. If the president invests serious efforts and energy and fails, he appears incompetent. If he succeeds, it is because he pressured Israel. For this he is punished by conservative single issue Jewish voters. Most Jewish voters are not single issue pro-Israel voters and will vote based on party identification. About two-thirds of Jewish voters are Democrats or vote Democratic. Obama risks losing the votes of independent voters who are pro-Israel, both Jews and non-Jews. Why take the risk now when the chance of success is very low?

Here is a post for Gershom Gorenberg backing up my analysis of Jewish voting patterns.

Israel's new peace plan

A private group of former leading security officials including three former heads of the Shabak internal security service, a former chief of staff of the IDF and a former major general and head of the Labor Party, have released an Israeli Peace Initiative nine years after the launch of the Arab Peace Initiative. It, however, like the Geneva Peace Initiative of 2003 and the Ayalon-Nusseibeh initiative is an unofficial rather than an official plan. The aim of the release is apparently to get Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, head of the Kadima party, to embrace the new plan. The fate of the plan, however, will depend on other actors such as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

If they keep quiet the plan may have a chance of getting traction with the Israeli public and developing an influential following. Most likely, however, some incident will cause tensions to escalate and emotions will take over and the news cycle will become occupied with other events. The intervention of Washington could possibly make a difference, but with Washington bogged down in three Middle Eastern wars and Obama potentially facing a tough reelection challenge next year, this seems unlikely.

The plan calls for a return to the 1949 armistice lines with territorial swaps, no significant return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, and Palestinian administration of the Temple Mount without possessing actual sovereignty over it. It is in many ways an extension or repeat of the terms of the 2003 Geneva Plan, that was negotiated between the Israeli opposition of the time and members of the Palestinian Authority. The plan generally respects the red lines of both sides and makes trade offs among them so that neither side gets all or even most of what it wants, but both sides get what they need to sell the deal to their publics if they are willing to get out in front of it.

In September 1982 the Reagan administration publicly announced the so-called Reagan Plan based on negotiations between Israel and Jordan over the West Bank and Gaza. The plan was basically a restatement of Labor Party policy--the Jordanian option. Likewise, Obama in a second term (or a future president, most likely a Democrat) could use this new Israeli plan as the basis for its own plan. The new plan is compatible with the 2002 Arab plan and an American administration would just have to finesse the differences. This means that the Israeli electorate would have to cooperate by giving Kadima a mandate. 

Here are links to a news article discussing the plan and commentary on it by Israeli journalist Gershon Gorenberg. 

Welcome to Reality, Noam

One of the leading bloggers on the Israeli Left, Noam Sheizaf, has finally recognized reality--the obstacles to peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not all on the Israeli side but are on both sides. The Israeli Left spends its time combating and deploring Israel's march to the right, so it is perhaps understandable that it misses the fact that the Palestinians are even more nationalistic. This is usually excused by the occupation when pointed out. The Palestinians believe that the occupation is a moral "get out of jail free card" that excuses any number of sins such as terrorism, irredentism, fascism, and a complete lack of political realism. No wonder the Israeli Left has problems convincing the Israeli Right (which has its own narcissistic agenda) of this! But in a recent post, No More Peace Plans Please, Noam recognized that the problem was not one of producing a compromise that reasonable people could live with, but of finding a way to get two unreasonable and traumatized peoples to conduct fruitful negotiations. Noam finally realized that the time is not ripe for peace.

During the transition to the Obama administration, I wrote a guest column for Dan Fleshler's Realistic Dove blog in which I argued that Obama would simply be too busy with other problems to invest the necessary time and political capital for a serious peace effort in the Middle East during his first term. It now appears that this will likely hold for his second term--if he receives one from the electorate--as well.

To negotiate peace in the relatively simpler and less complex Northern Ireland conflict the British and Irish governments had to focus their attentions on the problem for some 14 years--over three Irish coalition governments and two British governments. The only American administrations that have shown similar dedication to peacemaking in the Middle East were Jimmy Carter during his first two years in office and Bill Clinton during his final year in office. Carter felt he had a religious calling to solve the conflict. Unless we get a similar president--who is a two-term president who can work closely with the European Union, the conflict will remain unsolved. And before such a president can be effective, there must be an end to the power struggle among the Palestinians between Fatah and Hamas. And the Israeli Center must experience a revival to replace the Labor-Meretz Center-Left coalition governments of the Oslo process of the 1990s.  That is a tall order.

Is Counterinsurgency Warfare a Scam?

Some liberal writers have written as if counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare aka low-intensity or asymmetrical warfare is all a scam to support big defense budgets and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. COIN warfare was first developed as a field of military science in the 20th century by the British army based on its experience in colonial conflicts in Africa and the Middle East and by the U.S. Marine Corps based on its experience fighting "banana wars" in Central America and the Caribbean in the 1930s. It then underwent major modification based on British experience in colonial conflicts in the 1950s and the French experience in Indochina. It is continuously evolving based on experience. The lessons derived are genuine, even if they are often misapplied.

Five cases are usually cited as models or exemplars for successful COIN warfare:  the anti-Mau Mau campaign in Kenya in the 1950s; the Greek civil war of 1944-49; the Malaysian emergency of 1948-60; the anti-Huk campaign in the Philippines in the 1950s; and the British campaign in Northern Ireland. These campaigns have several features in common. First, the insurgents were usually separatist or Communist guerrillas from a minority ethnic group. Second, the insurgents were usually ill equipped in terms of arms and military training. Third, the insurgents were usually cut off from significant outside assistance or in the case of the Greek rebels suddenly had that aid cut off for political reasons. Still, these COIN campaigns lasted on average about eight years before they were successful.

Some advocates of COIN warfare have cited marvelous statistics demonstrating that most guerrilla wars are unsuccessful. This is true--most are. But in cases of wars of national liberation involving guerrillas fighting either against Western colonial powers or where Western armies are doing much of the fighting--as in the Vietnam War of the 1960s, Iraq from 2004--2009, and Afghanistan--the success rate is much lower for the government. This is for several reasons. First, the publics in Western democracies are impatient and want quick results. Second, they are fickle and wars they support today they may turn against tomorrow if the cost is significantly raised. Third, if Western armies use severe repression as did the French in Algeria with their widespread torture, they risk losing public support for the war effort. Fourth, native populations are often sensitive about a Western military presence because of colonialism or imperialism and will often turn against a ruler who depends on foreign soldiers.

If we look at these five cases in detail the results are not as impressive for COIN warfare as one might at first imagine. The Mau Mau warriors were limited to machetes (pangas), and a few shotguns and hunting rifles that they were able to steal from the houses of white settlers. In Kenya the native Kikuyu ethnic group was largely interned in special camps and so many died that Holocaust historian Daniel J. Goldhagen cites it as a case of eliminationist policy in his 2009 book Worse Than War. And three years after declaring the Mau Mau emergency over the British were forced to grant independence to the colony. In all the other settler colonies in Africa the white settlers were either militarily defeated or fought to a stalemate, or, in the case of South Africa, the whites were forced to concede majority rule while they still had the upper hand.

In Northern Ireland after a quarter century of warfare, most of that time against only a few hundred republican terrorists at a time, the British were only able to declare a stalemate and the unionists were forced to make major political concessions to the Irish Catholic nationalist minority (of which the republicans were a further minority at the time). These included power sharing and a political link to the Republic of Ireland. London kept up the fight only because Northern Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom only nine miles by sea from Scotland.

In the other three cases the insurgents were defeated in a shorter period of time without widespread repression. In Greece the royalists had British military advisors, but Greek soldiers did the fighting. When Tito had his falling out with Stalin he cutoff deliveries of East bloc arms to the Communist rebels. The Greek army was also led by a skilled general. In the Philippines an Air Force general served as an advisor to the local defense minister. But Filipino troops did the fighting. In Malaysia the rebels were limited to the ethnic Chinese minority who were disliked by the other main ethnic groups--the Malays and the Indians. The rural Chinese could be physically isolated from the guerrillas and then a "hearts and minds" campaign was successful. A decade later the successful advisors to the counterinsurency campaigns in the Philippines and Malaysia attempted to apply their lessons to another Asian counterinsurgency campaign. The United States ended up aiding a local effort for 21 years at great cost in both blood and treasure. The United States lost because it faced an enemy with an elaborate supply network and foreign sanctuary, the support or active acquisition of much of the rural and urban populations and sympathy throughout much of the Third World. If you haven't figured out yet I'm talking about Vietnam.

Afghanistan, although not as formidable an effort as Vietnam, is closer to being Vietnam than it is to being Malaysia, Kenya, the Philippines or Greece. The Taliban insurgency is backed by the majority ethnic group in the country, the Pashtun, who straddle the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. Army, as in Vietnam, has a severe shortage of personnel who speak the local languages. As in Vietnam, the United States and NATO controls much of the territory by day and the insurgents control it by night.

The main rationale for the war in Afghanistan is to avoid letting the territory again become a base for Al Qaeda. But this assumes that in the Muslim world there is a shortage of failed states that can act for Al Qaeda as an alternative. Remember, Al Qaeda came to Afghanistan from Sudan in the mid-1990s when Washington pressured the government in Khartoum to expel them. Today the tribal territories in Pakistan, Somalia, the southern Philippines, and Algeria are all possible sanctuaries for Al Qaeda, if it should attempt to rebuild. There are also Arab and Turkish ghettoes in Europe that can serve that same purpose--the banlieus in France, Turkish areas in the major German cities, possibly even Albania. President Obama once famously said that he is not opposed to all wars, just dumb ones--he should seriously consider adding Afghanistan to that category.

Was George W. Bush really at fault?

During both the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections the Democratic nominees, John Kerry and Barack Obama, as well as several unsuccessful presidential candidates criticized Bush for not doing enough to make peace between Israel and the Arabs on his watch. In this post I'd like to examine if that criticism was justified, but I should also confess that during his term I signed several letters from Americans for Peace Now (APN) and Brit Tzedek v'Shalom calling for a more vigorous peace effort. Brit Tzedek is now the local grassroots arm of J Street.

Former State Dept. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller in his 2008 book The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam) described how the outgoing Clinton administration briefed the incoming Bush administration on Camp David and the Al-Aksa Intifada and blamed it all on Yasir Arafat. Everyone from National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Clinton himself blamed the failure on Arafat--the Liar. Bush quickly concluded that he didn't want to waste time and precious political capital on a fruitless quest for peace. A month after Bush came to power, Ariel Sharon replaced Ehud Barak as prime minister in Jerusalem. Sharon thought that peace with the Palestinians was for subsequent generations, not his. This meant that as long as either of them remained as leader of his country, peace was unlikely. Bush until September 9, 2011 as a minority-vote president had very little political capital to spend and none to waste.

Sharon and Arafat spent the first eighteen months of the Bush administration trying to get rid of each other. The Al-Aksa Intifada soon deteriorated from conventional warfare to terrorism with suicide bombings rapidly escalating as Hamas's armed wing, the Izzadine al-Kassem Brigades, and Fatah's armed wing, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, held a body bag competition. In March 2002 the IDF reinvaded the West Bank and gradually destroyed the terrorist infrastructure there. In June 2002 Bush made a presidential speech on the Middle East in which he declared Arafat persona non grata and openly invited the Palestinians to come up with a new leadership.

In 2002 as Bush organized the upcoming invasion of Iraq with British Prime Minister Tony Blair he was urged by the latter to follow Blair's example in Northern Ireland and wage a peace process as well as a war. An American peace initiative became the price for getting Britain's involvement in the war. It also became the price of support from Jordan's King Abdullah II. As a result, in 2003 Bush announced the road map for peace. He forced Arafat to create the post of prime minister in his administration and tried to force him to turn over all executive power to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Arafat easily outmaneuvered both Abbas and Secretary of State Colin Powell and so Abbas soon resigned in frustration.

Arafat died of a mysterious ailment (some said poison, others said AIDS) in November 2004. Abbas became interim president until he was elected president in early 2005. But throughout 2005 Sharon was preoccupied with carrying out an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This was the first major Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory since Lebanon in 2000 and the first voluntary withdrawal of Israeli settlers in Israeli history. Then, after the withdrawal, he was preoccupied with creating a new political party based on "liberal" Likudniks and a few Labor people, Kadima, which was launched in November 2005.

Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke in January 2006 and was replaced as Kadima's leader by former Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert. That month parliamentary elections were held in the Palestinian Authority at American insistence, despite Israeli warnings that Hamas would improve its status and maybe even win. But Bush equated democracy with elections and wanted to be the president to bring democracy to the Arabs and the Middle East. Hamas won the election and a majority in the Palestinian Assembly. Hamas refused to accept the preconditions that the U.S. and the European Union insisted on for being involved in the peace process. Sharon now had an official excuse not to deal with the Palestinians.

During Bush's second term from January 2005 to January 2009 his new secretary of state was his former National Security Advisor Condi Rice. Dr. Rice, a former Soviet specialist--trained by Madeleine Albright's father, was new to the Middle East. She had spent much of her time since 2001 dealing with Al Qaeda and with Iraq and Afghanistan. Largely because she was afraid of her legacy, she pushed for a new peace initiative in the Arab-Israeli conflict in late 2007.

The Annapolis Conference in November 2007, like the Madrid Conference of 1991, kickstarted a peace process. But it was a peace process that was doomed from the start. Ehud Olmert and his government had been fatally weakened by Israel's poor performance in the July 2006 Second Lebanon War, which Hezbollah began by kidnapping a pair of Israeli soldiers. Olmert had the first defense minister in decades who was not a former general or defense industry technocrat, but simply a civilian novice. In the summer of 2007 Hamas had driven Fatah out of Gaza and seized control of the strip after two decades of power struggle finally boiled over into open warfare. The result was that the Palestinians were deeply-divided politically between two rival parties and two rival territories. The Annapolis initiative got nowhere as the sand ran out on the Bush administration.

Clinton administration veterans and apologists are quick to explain Clinton's failure to negotiate a peace treaty in the Middle East in terms of the failings of Arafat, Netanyahu, Sharon, and even Barak. But they don't extend the same courtesy to Bush. If Bush can be faulted for not being vigorous enough in pushing for peace between Arafat's death and the Palestinian elections of January 2006, then Clinton can be faulted for not pushing hard enough for peace between Rabin's assassination in November 1995 and Netanyahu's election in June 1996 or during Barak's first year in office.

American presidents cannot handpick the Israeli, Palestinian and Syrian leaders that they have to work with in the Middle East. Their best bet is to wait until conditions make the situation ripe for peace and then use all the influence they have to conclude realistic agreements. In order to do this they must realize what is doable--the best is the enemy of the good in the Middle East as elsewhere. An American president whose campaign biography was Why Not the Best had to learn this the hard way in 1977. But once Carter had set his sights lower and on a realistic target--a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty rather than a comprehensive peace--he went flat out until he was successful.

Presidents cannot produce the conditions for peace with an inspiring speech, or what appears to be a successful war. They must wait until the parties themselves are forced by events to seek peace. American Jewish organizations wanting to relieve the discomfort of American Jews over the actions of Israel do not have this luxury. Like other politicians or political interest groups they must appear to be constantly in motion fighting the good fight.

There is another alternative suggested by Leon Hadar in his 2005 book Sandstorm. I will discuss this in my next post.

My last post was picked up and reproduced by Ralph Seliger at the MeretzUSA blog.