Middle East peace not that important again
This is more evidence that Obama is not a decider, but a dawdling ditherer.Can anything else possibly go wrong for the Obama administration's Middle East policy? In the past ten days, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has twice reversed herself publicly on her attitude toward the Israeli settlements. Palestinians have refused her direct request to rejoin peace talks with Israel, and Palestinian Authority president Abbas has said he will not run for reelection. U.S.-Israel relations are in a state of frozen mistrust. The New York Times and Washington Post, among others, are calling Obama's policy a complete failure--in news stories as well as editorials. The only thing missing is a plague of locusts.
The policy is indeed a complete failure. In ten months the administration has managed to offend and demoralize Israelis and Palestinians, lose the support of Arab governments, and reduce previously excellent relations with the government of Israel to levels unmatched since the James Baker days. Meanwhile, George Mitchell's trips to the region are increasingly reminiscent of the Colin Powell visits in 2002 and 2003--producing little but embarrassment. The Israeli "100 percent settlement freeze" and the Arab outreach to Israel, early goals of the Obama team, are now forgotten, as is an early resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
These disasters are mostly the product of an ignorant and belligerent attitude toward Israel and especially its prime minister. The ignorance was most evident in the administration's view that a total construction freeze could be imposed not only in every settlement but in Jerusalem itself. But the U.S. policy was worse: We demanded a freeze that would apply to construction by Jews, but not by Arabs; could any Israeli leader be expected to support such a position? One does not need to be a member of the Knesset to understand that such a freeze was impossible for Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition as it would have been for any Israeli prime minister--but apparently this fact was beyond the understanding of Mitchell, Rahm Emanuel, and all the other "experts" on the Obama team.
The belligerence toward Netanyahu has been evident all along, but is best shown by the refusal to tell Israel's prime minister whether or not the president will see him this coming week when Netanyahu (like the president) addresses the United Jewish Communities annual general assembly in Washington. The Israelis gave the White House weeks of notice that Netanyahu had agreed to speak, would be in town, and hoped to see Obama. The White House reaction has been to keep him twisting in the wind, with news stories several days before his arrival saying the president had not decided yet whether to see Netanyahu.
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What is also clear is that the administration thought that the problem was that the Bush administration did not try to get peace in the region and that would facilitate the process. They are wrong on both counts. The Bush attempt was met by exploding Palestinians. The current process is met by passive aggressive behavior by the Palestinians and consternation by the Israelis.
Even Thomas Friedman in the NY Times seems resigned to there not being an agreement. It is a position I have espoused for years. The Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular are just not that interested in a deal and until they are, it is a waste of time and air miles.
'The way for the Palestinians to get a state is to go ahead and build it. If and when the institutions are there and functioning, from police and courts to a parliament,...'
ReplyDeleteSounds reasonable, does it not? Let the Palestinians show structure and rule of law, then start the negotiations.
One might be tempted to say your "one-up" recharacterization of Dick Cheney's claim that the President is dithering on Afghanistan, is merely a "repititious redundancy" -- to wit:
ReplyDelete"This is more evidence that Obama is not a decider, but a dawdling ditherer."
But doing so, I think, would ignore the obvious. It seems to be quite true, and on many fronts.
For example, his primary reaction to the mass murders at Ft. Hood was, that we should not jump to any conclusions.
"We don’t know all the answers yet, and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts."
Now that may be fine as far as it went. But where was his simultaneous declaration, as the Commander-in-Chief, that no stone would remain unturned in seeking justice for the families of those many victims, or his commitment to fully investigate and track down all the disturbing circumstances regarding Major Hasan, or his commitment to use all the resources of the federal government to determine how such a bizzare incident could have happened so that similar incidents could be prevented in the future?
It is one thing to have an idiot like ABC's Diane Sawyer musing, almost wistfully, and in a standard, institutionally-induced form of denial, about why it could not have been committed by someone named "Smith." We have learned to expect such rubbish from the MSM.
But it is quite another to have the POTUS neglect to even pay lip service to a public commitment to get to the bottom of this matter!