Hafez al-Assad's student

The House of Assad (Beit Assad in both Arabic and Hebrew) stayed in power for forty years (and counting) not by being nice. But not merely by being brutal and cruel either...after all the Saddam dynasty was even more cruel and it is no longer in power. Hafez al-Assad was a very astute student of the politics of power, both domestically and in the region. He saw that it was in his interest both domestically and regionally to remain in a state of no war, no peace with Israel. He lacked the strength militarily to compel Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria, but could use the quest for it as the legitimizing feature of his regime, based as it was on the minority Alawite group and an alliance with other sectarian minorities such as the Druze against the Sunni Muslim majority.

Assad perfected the art of negotiating so as to extract the less morsel that the opponent could give. He extracted the return of Kuneitra, captured in 1967, along with the territory captured in the 1973 Yom Kippur War from Israel in separation of forces agreement negotiated in May 1974. He then managed to extract a promise from Yitzhak Rabin that Israel would return all the territory captured in June 1967 in exchange for peace before negotiations even began. He, and his son Bashar, at times made what seemed like generous offers but he refused to make any gestures like Sadat did in November 1977 or as King Hussein did to reassure the Israeli public that he was a trustworthy partner for peace. He preferred the appearance of being open to peace more than the actual peace itself.

He was notorious during Bill Clinton's first term for keeping Secretary of State Warren Christopher waiting for meetings and for engaging in meaningless small talk for hours before getting down to the matter at hand. Both Assads only appeared eager for negotiations and peace when there was movement on the rival Palestinian track with the PLO. Thus, the seemingly far-reaching offers by Bashar Assad to Olmert's secret envoy in 2007-08 when Olmert was engaged in negotiations with the Palestinians. Peace talks or hints at peace were more common after the collapse of Syria's Soviet patron in 1992 than before. Both Hafez al-Assad and Bashar needed to keep the administration in Washington sweet.

Damascus's main regional alliance under the Assads was with Tehran. After Anwar Sadat, Assad's partner in the 1973 October War, went to Jerusalem in 1977 Assad was "forced" into the rejectionist camp with his Ba'athist rivals in Baghdad. So when the mullahs came to power in Tehran in 1979 Assad eagerly embraced them as a means of escaping the hated regime in Iraq and allying with a powerful protector. It was a pan-Shite alliance consisting of the Shite regime in Iran, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, and the Shia Alawites in Damascus.

Knowing the obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace on the Palestinian track, and the Syrian record for keeping agreements on the Golan, the Israeli security establishment became a prime advocate of a deal with Syria during the 2000s. They envisaged Damascus trading its alliance with Tehran for one with Washington as Cairo had done under Sadat thirty years before. But that was never seriously in the cards. Tehran never complained about Syria's internal affairs as Washington would have done constantly. And Syria could never have continued its ploy of being the champion of pan-Arabism if it was allied with Washington. But the Iranian alliance prevented the Assads from having any Arab imitators. But they did have one imitator in the region.

In his first term in office Benjamin Netanyahu came into power opposed to the Oslo process, was forced by pressure from Washington to make territorial concessions at Wye in October 2008 and then saw his coalition collapse before he could implement the agreement. Bibi claimed to have learned his lessons. But rather than opting for a coalition with Tzipi Livni and Kadima a decade later he concluded an agreement with rightwing parties with Labor as window dressing. He then paid lip service to accepting "two states for two peoples" in June 2009 in a speech at Bar Ilan University. But he made this conditional on the Palestinians recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, something that Israel's Arab minority vehemently opposes. Like Assad Netanyahu knew when to make concessions to Washington and when to thumb his nose at the Obama administration. He is blessed with Palestinian partners who seem to be as hesitant about making peace as he is. Just as Hafez al-Assad was blessed with the weak Shimon Peres in 1996 and the hesitant Ehud Barak in 1999-2000.

Netanyahu's balancing act will be much more delicate than Bashar Assad's. He cannot call the police and army out into the streets to shoot down protesters...or at least not Jewish ones. So he will be forced to creatively bob and weave with a housing freeze here and new settlement construction there. And he may be forced to change dance partners soon from Avigdor Liebermann to Tzipi Livni. At least then he will have a foreign minister then who can speak passable English and is not loathed by the international community. Should this occur we can expect lots of renewed talk about the new Bibi, just like the new Nixon in the 1960s. There were multiple new Nixons and there will be multiple Bibi's.

So Basher Assad should stop worrying, at least if he is forced into exile he leaves a legacy behind.

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.

Learning from the Masters

Few people realize that Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize and it was not a Nobel Peace Prize--rather, it was the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was awarded the prize for his historical writings over decades--his histories of World War I, World War II and his multi volume biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill earned his living before being elected to parliament and between the world wars as a writer. There are two writers that I would compare to Winston Churchill in both having been skilled statesmen and skilled writers: Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher.

I read Kissinger's three volumes of memoirs, which must amount to more than 2,000 pages altogether, when I was a graduate student and after receiving my doctorate. The first volume, The White House Years, deals with his period as national security advisor to Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973 during Nixon's first term as president. Most of it concerns detente, the opening to China, the arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the Vietnam War. It was published in 1979. Three years later the second volume, Years of Upheaval, appeared dealing with the period from Nixon's second inauguration in January 1973 to his resignation in August 1974. During this period Kissinger wore two hats: as national security advisor and as secretary of state. The book deals with detente, the opening of the SALT II arms control negotiations, the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 and the start of the Middle East peace process from October 1973 to May 1974 with Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem, Cairo, Amman, Riyadh and Damascus. I read this volume before I started graduate school and it was an education in itself about mediation, negotiations, and power politics. Kissinger explained in detail his motivations behind his policies and why they worked or did not work in practice. His third volume, Years of Renewal, covering his period as secretary of state under President Gerald Ford did not appear until 1999. I found this disappointing. It covered among other topics his involvement in the Angolan civil war in 1974-95, the negotiation of the Sinai II agreement between Egypt and Israel of September 1975 that served as a foundation for the later Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, and his mediation in Rhodesia in October 1976. I had written about Rhodesia in my doctoral dissertation and had read of Kissinger's involvement in many journalistic accounts. I found his explanations unrevealing compared to his earlier discussions of his Middle Eastern mediation.

Kissinger wrote a history of diplomacy entitled simply Diplomacy, which appeared in 1994. It is a brilliant discussion of the techniques of diplomacy used by master practioneers of realpolitik  such as Richelieu, Metternich, Cavour, Disraeli, Bismarck, Churchill, Helmut Kohl, and Margaret Thatcher. I recommend it for anyone interested in this subject. In 2001 he wrote a book entitled Does America Need a Foreign Policy? that he answered decidedly in the affirmative. It is a good short work. He also wrote essays on foreign policy for Newsweek in the 1970s and 1980s after he had left office.

Richard Nixon between the appearance of his memoirs in 1978 and his death in 1994 wrote a series of books dealing with foreign policy that were aimed at rehabilitating his image as an elder statesman of the Republican Party. In seven books he discussed the Cold War, Vietnam, Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders, and American interests. In my opinion the best of these was Leaders, which dealt with various foreign leaders that Nixon had dealt with during his career in politics. The book is well written and offers genuine insights into the figures and their policies. His other books are good for those interested in the general subject, but not as well written as Kissinger's writings and suffering from Nixon's attempt to dumb them down for a general audience. He also lifted and repeated entire sections from earlier books--something much easier done in the computer age than earlier.

Thatcher, the longest-ruling British prime minister in the twentieth century, was also the most controversial and, after Churchill, the most important. She wrote two volumes of memoirs, the first dealing with her period as prime minister and the second with her life before Downing St. In 2002 she published  Statecraft, her primer on international affairs and foreign policy from a British perspective at the start of the twenty first century. In it she covers the end of the Cold War and America's role in ending it victoriously, the Middle East and terrorism, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Asia, Russia, and Europe. This is a tour de horizon or overview of international affairs during the end of the Cold War and the New World Order by a realist and Euroskeptic. I find it to be both eloquent and convincing. In terms of British politics if I were British I would probably be a floating voter between being a "wet" Tory and a Liberal Democrat. So I'm not a Thatcherite at all.