Haggai's blog

Update to the Obama/Jerusalem freakout

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:14:29 +0000

Some "clarifications" are now coming through about Obama's stated support for an "undivided Jerusalem" in his speech to AIPAC two days ago. Sorting this out will require quite a bit of explanation, so here's my attempt at it:

Curtains for Olmert

Wed, 28 May 2008 13:47:53 +0000

Corruption charges, unsuccessful wars, what have you--ultimately, the only thing that matters for an Israeli prime minister's political survival is the ability to maintain a coalition. That possibility has now disappeared for Olmert, on the heels of Barak's demand that Olmert either resign or face early elections. Labor's withdrawal from the coalition and subsequent support for dissolving the government would be enough for a majority in the Knesset for new elections. It's technically still possible for the current coalition to remain in power if Olmert resigns and is replaced as PM from within Kadima, which might be Labor's preferred way ahead, but I'd have to see some more reporting to guess as to how likely that is (or if it's even going to be possible).

In any event, this clearly is the real "beginning of the end" for Olmert, unlike the rock-solid predictions of his imminent demise following the Lebanon war that all turned out to be wrong.

Across the pond

Thu, 15 May 2008 23:18:21 +0000

While it might be true that Bush just took "the basically unprecedented step of lashing out at his domestic political opponents
in a speech to a foreign parliament," why does it matter where he made the speech? Why should we care about that particular aspect of it?

Let's surmise this scenario: Obama becomes president and ends up in the circumstance of visiting Israel to advance negotiations on a peace agreement, while simultaneously drawing down American forces from Iraq. Let's say he gives a speech there talking about both of those things, and he argues for why American withdrawal from Iraq is better for Israel than the policies of the previous administration, including an argument about why invading Iraq in the first place was not beneficial to America or to Israel. Surely Republicans would cry foul about the U.S. president slamming his domestic opposition on foreign soil, but would any of us liberals be against it? I sure wouldn't be. Bush's remarks to the Knesset about "some people" wanting to appease terrorists were reprehensible because they were baseless demagogy, but who cares where he made them?

Obama on Bill and the Middle East

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:52:08 +0000

This isn't the biggest deal in the world, and with everyone anticipating the Pennsylvania vote tomorrow, I doubt anyone's paying attention to it. But Obama, in response to a question about Jimmy Carter meeting with Hamas, said the following yesterday:

"I actually disagree with him on his meeting with Hamas," Obama said... "On the other hand, what I also disagree with is a habit of American presidents which is every president in their last year, they finally decide, we're going to try to broker a peace deal," Obama added. "Bill Clinton did it in his last year and he ran out of time. George Bush tried to do it."

This is a pretty dishonest equivalence he's drawing. The most salient point is that Clinton's presidency began just before Israel and the Palestinians agreed to direct negotiations with each other for the first time in the entire history of the conflict. The Oslo accords specified a five-year "transitional period" starting from the first negotiated withdrawal of Israeli forces, which ended up happening in May of '94 (this was the "Gaza-Jericho" interim agreement). Permanent status negotiations were supposed to begin no later than the beginning of the third year of the five year interim period, i.e. May of '96, with a final deadline of May '99. So how, exactly, was Bill Clinton supposed to "broker a peace deal" during his first year in office?

Let me get more specific about what happened before moving on to Bush. Israel and the Palestinians signed another overall interim agreement ("Oslo II") in September of '95, which re-affirmed the negotiating deadlines I mentioned above. After Rabin was assassinated in November of '95, Peres went into May of '96 (deadline for the start of permanent status talks) seeking a mandate in the election which was held that month. He lost to Netanyahu, who immediately moved to put any permanent status talks on ice. After some fits and starts in more interim talks, the "Wye River Memorandum" agreement of November '98 again re-affirmed the May '99 deadline for reaching a final agreement. When that date came around, there was, once again, an Israeli election, with Barak defeating Netanyahu that very month. It was only at that point that final status talks began in earnest, which eventually led to the Camp David summit and everything that followed.

So how, exactly, was Bill Clinton supposed to have "brokered a peace deal" before the parties themselves had reached the specific timetable that they had agreed upon between themselves? This isn't to exonerate Clinton of any and all criticism; one could argue that on a tactical level, they could have tried harder to keep the negotiations on track during the interim periods (Dennis Ross himself has essentially admitted as much), or maybe that they should have pushed harder for progress under the recalcitrant Netanyahu (on the other hand, such pressure might only have strengthened his position with a terror-weary Israeli electorate). In any event, I simply don't think it's reasonable at all to blame Bill Clinton for having "finally decide[d]" in his last year to try to broker a deal, as Obama said.

Regarding Bush, the record is quite different. It's true that he entered office with the peace process having collapsed into violence, and with a hard-line Israeli prime minister having just been elected in a historically massive landslide (Sharon defeated Barak by 25 points only two weeks after Bush's inauguration). So the atmosphere was hardly conducive to successful peace-making. However, as I noted here, Bush simply did not think that active U.S. involvement in negotiations was the right policy when he took office. Of course, anyone with even a passing familiarity in the conflict (and an honest desire to see it resolved) knew that the outbreak of the intifada and the apparent collapse of the entire Oslo framework had opened up a dangerous vacuum, and this was only going to lead to much worse violence unless something replaced it, which could only happen with assertive U.S. leadership. But that wasn't how Bush saw it, and Powell didn't try very hard to convince him otherwise, so things just kept getting worse.

So the overall point here is that it simply isn't fair at all to draw an equivalence between the fact that both Bush and Clinton have attemped to broker a final peace deal only in the last year of their two-term presidencies. Obama probably knows that and was just trying to score some more points by linking the Clintons to Bush and "old-style politics" or whatever. Obama has faced plenty of unfair or tendentious attacks directly from the Clintons, but his more enthusiastic defenders should probably realize that stuff like this is bound to annoy the Clintons in a big way, and that they're perfectly justified in taking umbrage at Bill's record being characterized unfairly by a fellow Democrat.

Fallon resigns from CENTCOM

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:38:55 +0000

What's this all about? First he denies the article which says that he disagrees with the administration on Iran and might be replaced because of it...and then he resigns and blames the article?

Hold the phone on that "bombshell"

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:04:28 +0000

As a smart person says here, regarding the David Rose Vanity Fair article on Gaza, "[Calling this story a "Bombshell" is] kind of a silly claim, since it was reported at the time and the Bush administration made little attempt to hide its plan." People who are freaking out about this need to step back and think things through a bit. More below the jump.

A blog post of unprecedented seriousness

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:09:24 +0000

An amusing detail in this column that's new to me is the name of the British government's emergency command center: COBRA. It's just an acronym for the mundanely titled Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, but many American males around my age who grew up watching cartoons on TV will automatically associate that term with the arch-villain organization* on G.I. Joe. Was Tony Blair using that command center for the secret development of a Weather Dominator, or for plotting to clone a super-leader from the DNA of long-dead historical figures to lead a new campaign of global conquest?

*You sure can learn a lot from Wikipedia. Who would ever have known that Destro was Scottish?

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mr. Donald H. Rumsfeld

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:28:15 +0000

Robin Wright's article about Rumsfeld's internal memos to his staff over the last few years of his tenure in the Bush administration details some unsurprising things--he would get angry about critical articles and request staff-written responses, which I'm sure is par for the course for publicly prominent cabinet members--but also a couple of sentences that register extremely high on the "WTF?" scale (my emphasis added below):

In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a "worldwide insurgency." The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to "end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world." He then advised aides "to test what the results could be" if the war on terrorism were renamed.

Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complained in the same memo. He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed," he wrote. "An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism."

I'm not sure what to say about "too often Muslims are against physical labor" besides "WTF?" And then he compounds that by observing that these same anti-physical-labor Muslims take care of that problem by bringing in workers from a country where over 96% of the population are Muslims.

By the standards of that insanely misinformed sentence, the one about "an unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism" registers as trenchant sociological analysis. Of course, it happens to be almost completely false, though I guess the ol' SecDef was in better company in making that claim than he was in opining that Muslims think physical labor is icky and therefore import other Muslims to do it for them.

I guess people still want to talk about this

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:35:48 +0000

So get ready for an endless post on our old friends, Mearsheimer and Walt. In what follows, I’ll adopt a few abbreviations for shorthand: “TL” stands for “The Lobby” (in the authors’ sense of the phrase), “LRB” is the London Review of Books article that led to their book, and “M&W” are the authors themselves.

First of all, some disclaimers. As anyone even vaguely familiar with my thoughts on the subject knows, I’m far from a fan of the current U.S. administration’s Israel policy, and in ways that are often similar to some of the arguments presented by M&W. I agree with most of what Daniel Levy says in his review of the book, particularly his perceptive argument that “the neocons co-opted the Israel lobby, and Israel itself, to their own vision of regional transformation. This is more PNAC than AIPAC. Still, most of the Israel lobby were willing accomplices, and this represents their historic error.” I also concur with his advice that “liberal American Jews who care about Israel…[should end] the outsourcing contract with neocons and right-wing evangelicals.”

To a fairly significant degree, this puts me in agreement with M&W’s positions on the Bush administration and the loudly right-wing voices within what they characterize as “The Lobby.” It seems to me that many people out there have decided that this (and the unjustified screams of anti-Semitism from some of the usual suspects on the right, plus some slightly less than usual suspects who should know better than to use that accusation lightly) constitutes sufficient grounds for defending the book. But—a very important but (to quote one of my favorite movies)—I still think this is a bad book.

Even some of M&W’s defenders have conceded flaws in some of the book’s key arguments, especially its characterization of the Iraq war as being driven by TL. I’ll attempt to go through what I see as some other significant problems with the book’s arguments, relative to Israel-specific policies (more below the break).

Yeah, well...that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 13:40:04 +0000

Forget Commander in Chief, Decider in Chief, or what have you. In the interview discussed here, we seem to have gotten a glimpse of The Dude in Chief:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, "The policy was to keep the army intact; didn't happen."

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush's former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army's dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, "Yeah, I can't remember, I'm sure I said, 'This is the policy, what happened?' " But, he added, "Again, Hadley's got notes on all of this stuff," referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

As Steve Benen observes:

Let's not brush past this too quickly. The disbanding of the Iraqi army was one of the biggest mistakes of an administration burdened by near-constant missteps, one that was largely responsible for the creation of an Iraqi insurgency. On the subject, Bush sounds like a confused child -- he didn't understand the decision, he's not sure how the decision was made, and asked for his reaction to the decision, Bush is left to conclude, "Yeah, I can't remember."

But The Dude abides. Or perhaps, to quote Walter Sobchak, "You have no frame of reference here, Donny. You're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know..."

In the interview, Bush actually did (unintentionally, one assumes) reveal a thoroughly clear understanding of the fact that the surge is his policy, not Petraeus', unlike much of the rhetoric we've heard for months:

[Bush] otherwise addressed his unpopularity as a tactical issue. For instance, in May he said that this fall it would be up to General Petraeus to convince the public that the Iraq strategy is working.

“I’ve been here too long,” Mr. Bush said, according to Mr. Draper. “Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized and then it doesn’t make it on the news.”

So once Petraeus testifies to Congress, I guess the White House could just play this clip over and over instead of having Bush make any more statements:

Look, man, I've got certain information, all right? Certain things have come to light. And, you know, has it ever occurred to you, that, instead of, uh, you know, running around, uh, uh, blaming me, you know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, I-I-I-I... this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it's not just, it might not be just such a simple... uh, you know?

US-Saudi-Israel arms deals: a brief history

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 16:49:44 +0000

I wanted to chime in on the news of the increased arms sales to the Middle East. It does seem to be a pretty dubious policy, but I just want to mention a couple of previous instances where similar things happened, even without the Bush administration's unusual indifference to diplomacy.

As detailed in Steven Spiegel's historical overview of US Middle East policy, the most similar precedent to the new arms deal was Jimmy Carter's "triple arms sale" of 1978, where fighter jets were sold to three countries simultaneously: F-15s to Saudi Arabia, F-15s and F-16s to Israel, and F-5Es to Egypt. The sales to Israel and Saudi Arabia were already in the pipeline when Carter came into office, as a result of negotiations that Kissinger had supervised under Ford. For instance, the impending sale to Israel partially grew out of the Kissinger-mediated negotiations that had produced the "Sinai II" agreement between Israel and Egypt that built on the disengagement following the October 1973 war. Apparently Carter was initially opposed to selling the planes to the Saudis, but:

[V]arious bureaucratic studies urged the Saudi sale. When Carter travelled to Saudi Arabia in January 1978, he had found the Saudis nervous because of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem [in November 1977]. They had pleaded for the planes and Carter acquiesced. Finally, the Egyptians sought 120 F-5Es as a reward for cutting themselves off from the Soviet Union since 1973 and creating the peace initiative.

Carter decided to resolve all those issues simultaneously: he presented a deal to Congress to sell the various jets to all three of Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, all as part of one package that would have to be accepted entirely or rejected entirely. The Israel lobby sprang into action to try to block the sale to the Saudis, but about three months later, the deal passed the Senate by a vote of 54-44. The administration's arguments won them enough support to get the deal passed, but their predictive power wasn't so hot, as Spiegel points out:

Proponents of the sale argued that it would increase Riyadh's confidence in the United States, encourage Saudi support for the peace process, and lead to decisions keeping oil production high and prices low. The argument proved effective but not prophetic, for within a year the Saudis opposed Camp David and helped triple oil prices.

Another controversial Middle East arms sale that followed just a few years later was Reagan's sale of five AWACS aircraft to the Saudis, in his first year in office. Israel and AIPAC were vehemently opposed, but the sale ended up going through. This Haaretz article from a few days ago says it was the Saudis and the oil lobby that played the decisive role:

On October 26, 1981, The New York Times did an inventory count: The paper discovered that 53 senators opposed the sale of AWACS espionage planes to Saudi Arabia and only 38 were in favor of the proposed deal. Nearly two weeks earlier, Newsweek had reported that the Saudi deal would probably "become [President Ronald] Reagan's first major foreign policy defeat." The magazine said that the likely outcome of the vote would be a "humiliation." Those two weeks proved an illuminating lesson in the Saudis' juggling ability in Washington's power games. On October 28, two days after the Times published its count, 52 senators voted for the deal, 48 voted against.

The chairman of an American concern persuaded Sen. Orrin Hatch; the CEO of Union Pacific, the railway company, spoke with Senators Jim Exon and Edward Zorinsky, from Nebraska; the oil companies put pressure on Senator David Boren, from Oklahoma.

On the other hand, Spiegel credits the Reagan administration with getting the sale pushed through:

Proponents of the sale promoted the slogan, "It's Reagan or Begin." Indeed, the president himself suggested at a 1 October press conference, "It is not the business of other nations to make America's foreign policy." The slam on Israel and its supporters was clear...the scales were tipped in favor of the AWACS sale by the president's forceful intervention. Without him, opponents of the sale would certainly have won.

So, I guess my point in all of this is just to point out that this type of sale is not uniquely a Bush thing. Even an administration as wrapped up in diplomacy as Carter's was willing to pursue a controversial arms sale to both Israel and Saudi Arabia, in the midst of what turned out to be the most successful achievement in the history of America's Middle East diplomacy (although it failed to gain any support from the Saudis). Reagan also pushed through a similar sale before getting militarily involved in the region at all--the Lebanon intervention was still more than a year away. These two previous sales also demonstrate that as powerful as "The Lobby" has been for many years, it doesn't win when a president is determined to fight it on any one particular issue. Indeed, Teh Lobby has never managed to prevent a major arms sale to any Arab country. So Bush probably just wanted to minimize any potential problems he might face in getting the sale through, and since he's basically sympathetic to the more militarist line of thinking vis-a-vis Israel anyway, bumping up U.S. arms sales to Israel obviously isn't something he sees any problem with.

Is it good policy? It doesn't seem like it. U.S. gains from those previous arms sales to the Saudis did not materialize in the way that their proponents predicted, and there are plenty of reasons to doubt those same arguments today. But it didn't spring out of a vacuum, and it's not unprecedented for administrations of hugely divergent ideological outlooks to try the same thing.

A gigantic post on what to do now

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 17:00:16 +0000

In this post, I'm going to argue differences with a few other posts from other blogs about Gaza and where to go from here, first in order to point out some important principles that I think are being overlooked in many corners, before coming to my own "what should be done" conclusion. The rest is below the break.

Where I read dozens of pages of forty-year-old Congressional transcripts so YOU don't have to

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 03:18:05 +0000

Here are some thoughts about Ken Baer's article that misquoted Ezra, and without saying much of anything in particular about what U.S. policy vis-a-vis Iran should be. Baer quotes from recently declassified Senate Foreign Relations Committee transcripts in the run-up to the Six Day War, attempting to draw an analogy between the potential threat from Iran against Israel today and the threats facing Israel in that crisis. He argues for a connection on the basis of analyzing "how American foreign policy works under the weight of a foreign adventure gone horribly wrong," and he ends up urging progressives "not [to] use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on." I think there's a different analogy to be made between the events surrounding the Six Day War and Iran today, which I'll detail later, probably in another post. But for now...(more after the break)

Warning: actual debate fodder imminent

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:37:18 +0000

So do we have a "debate" on Israel policy in America? On the substance of the issue, the answer is actually "yes," and it has been for the last several years, even if a lot of the people who constantly pine for "debate" haven't bothered to notice. I'm going to trace a few instances of that in this post.

Ever since the collapse of Oslo with the intifada and the election of Sharon in late 2000/early 2001, all roads to a "new" Israeli-Palestinian policy for America have led inevitably in the same direction. Oslo was predicated on the concepts of interim steps and confidence-building measures that would eventually lead to final status talks at the end of the process. The only peace-process-type framework that's been put forward by the Bush administration, the "road-map," isn't very different from that at all, aside from the interim tactic of a "provisional" Palestinian state (which I blogged about a couple of months ago). But with pretty much any and all mutual trust having been destroyed by the events of the last 7 years, and for various other reasons related to the leadership situation on both sides, the chances that the two parties could reach a mutual acommodation in face-to-face talks is practically nil. So, almost by definition, the cornerstone of any genuinely new approach to trying to end the conflict has to change the sequence of "interim steps first, final status issues last" in a fundamental way, i.e., reversing them. This means that a final status package would be on the table from the beginning, with the rest of the process being devoted to implementing it, as opposed to the familiar sequence of interim/cease-fire/hudna/confidence-building what-have-you at the beginning that then (theoretically) lays the groundwork for final status negotiations.

The foundation of any such implementation would have to be a concerted international effort at keeping the two parties locked into the framework, with no back-door escape routes. Somewhat along those lines, MY recently linked to an op-ed in Ha'aretz by Shlomo Ben-Ami (Barak's foreign minister at Camp David and afterwards) about attempting to strike a final status deal based on the Clinton parameters and the Saudi initiative. New idea, right? Not so much. There was a NY Times op-ed along very similar lines five years ago, written by...Shlomo Ben-Ami:

The poor record of observance of agreements in this process shows that a multinational peacekeeping force and strict mechanisms of implementation and monitoring are required. It can be argued that the Oslo accords collapsed because they lacked such mechanisms, relying instead on the desperately diminishing asset of mutual trust...

The concept of interim agreements -- in principle a reasonable means of restoring trust -- has run its course and is no longer valid. But both Israelis and Palestinians are afraid, indeed incapable, of taking a step toward a reasonable final compromise. Only the international community under assertive and resolute American leadership can coax them into crossing the chasm together in one big step.

People interested in pithy bon-mots can note that he characterized this proposed shift from a bilateral negotiating process to an internationally supervised one as moving from "the peace of the brave" to "the peace of the exhausted."

On the question of whether this approach could generate enough support to work, at least in Israel, Ben-Ami wrote the following in his recent book:

The government is incapable of responding to the popular yearnings for peace. For, regardless of party loyalties and according to most studies, the overwhelming majority of Israelis would support a peace settlement that is based on the Clinton parameters -- two states, withdrawal from territories, massive dismantling of settlements, two capitals in Jerusalem -- but they trust neither their political system nor, of course, the Palestinian leadership to come to an accomodation on that basis. Which may explain the results of a poll conducted in 2002 by the Steinmetz Centre for Peace at Tel Aviv University indicating that, convinced of the incapacity of their political system to produce solutions, 67 percent of Israeli Jews would support an American effort to recruit an international alliance that would coax the parties into endorsing such a settlement.

Also note in that poll that when words like "imposed" settlement got thrown around, support within Israel dropped to around the mid 40s. I haven't seen any more recent polling on questions like this, but my educated guess is that similar results would be true today. But what would be the difference between an "imposed" and a "coaxed" settlement? At this point, I'll just observe that this is the sort of thing that requires what some would call "diplomacy."

An even more ambitious proposal for resolving the conflict was spelled out in Martin Indyk's May 2003 Foreign Affairs article, where he presented a fairly detailed approach for a "trusteeship" that would aim to reconstitute the Palestinian Authority in the territories under international supervision, under the umbrella of a final status package much like the Clinton paramters. For various reasons, I doubt that this specific approach would be workable today (and Indyk might agree)--just a few of the key things that have changed since the time of that article are the death of Arafat, the passing of Sharon from the political scene, the election of Hamas, the Gaza withdrawal, the Lebanon war, and the collapse of support for involvement in Iraq within U.S. public opinion. But Indyk's case in that article is still important to consider, especially the points he made about how/why the U.S could try to persuade both sides to accept the arrangement. Many of his arguments remain applicable to any concerted effort the U.S. might undertake to effect an internationally supervised end to the conflict.

One of the things I want to emphasize is that these ideas have been around for the last several years, and that they were put forward by people who were intimately involved with the peace process in the '90s at a very high level. People who have been complaining about "no debate" have either been ignorant of these ideas or actively chosen not to engage them. Everyone's favorite "there's no debate" taboo-breaking act of courage, the good old Mearsheimer and Walt article, specifically named Indyk four times as a negative influence on the Israel debate in America. Whether they were even aware of his proposal for a U.S.-supervised international trusteeship that would replace Israel's occupation of the territories on the way to a Palestinian state is open to question; if they did know about it, they chose to ignore it.

In other words, if one wants to debate this issue, then OK, let's debate it. Go out and read the different ideas that have been proposed. It might actually help, as opposed to the muddled crap-flinging that inevitably results from lumping the proposals of Ben-Ami and Indyk together with the preferences of Doug Feith and Martin Peretz.

Not quite the lobby of the Grand Hotel

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:06:19 +0000

Which was described (ironically, of course) as a place where "People come, people go. Nothing ever happens." A few things swirling around the blogosphere prompted me to collect a lot of thoughts into some good old-fashioned long-winded posts.

Nicholas Beaudrot, guest-blogging at Chez Ezra, braces himself and asks:

Why is there not even a remotely sizeable lobbying outfit devoted to less-hawkish methods of guaranteeing Israel's security? When answering, consider that the last two Democratic Presidents (a) made substantial efforts to ensure Israel's long-term security, and (b) presumably have some personal acquaintance with high-dollar Democratic donors who consider Israel's long term security important, and thus might be persuaded to help fund such a group.

I'll eventually get around to dealing with those questions, with my eventual point being that I don't think they're exactly the right questions to ask. Much bloviating to follow, below the break: