Obama Meets Netanyahu: No Love Fest But As Good As It's Gonna Get

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
06 July '10

(This is assessment #2, so that will be it for tonight. As with most initial takes, time will tell. Y)

Why was the meeting this time between President Barack H. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a success? The answer is simple though not all the reasons are publicly known. So I'll tell you about them.

The president couldn't have been more effusive. They had an "excellent" discussion, Netanyahu's sttement was "wonderful" and the U.S.-Israel relationship is "extraordinary." Hard to believe this is the Obama we've seen before.

Obama wants to improve relations with Israel for several reasons. Obviously, he doesn't want to be bashing Israel in the period leading up to the November elections is an important incentive. Polls show that for Americans his administration’s relative hostility toward Israel is its least popular policy. But there is more to this trend than just that point.

What Obama wants is to be able to claim a diplomatic success in advancing the Israel-Palestinian “peace process,” perhaps the only one he can so spin. Keeping indirect talks going and even better, moving them up to direct talks is his goal. So he wants Netanyahu’s cooperation for that.

The same point holds regarding the Gaza Strip, where Obama wants to claim he has defused a crisis he has called “unsustainable.”

(I hate that word. When you hear something is “unsustainable” immediately become suspicious. This has everything to do with perceptions and little to do with realities where quite a lot of things are quite sustainable. Pretty much every single Middle East problem has been sustained for decades.)

And he also wants to keep the Israel-Arab front calm while he deals with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, seeking above all to avoid crises and confrontations and to keep up his (bogus) bargain of trading flattery for popularity.

(Read full article)

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