Obama Middle East Policy: Clueless is an Understatement

By Barry Rubin
3 August 09

The best thing to read about Western Middle East policy is Richard Dowden writing about some of the anti-AIDS campaigns in Africa, in his book Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. The difference is that in Africa there are also some good anti-AIDS campaigns. He explains:

“It is these vital cultural perceptions that outsiders miss when they rush to save Africa from the HIV/AIDS pandemic. They bring with them quick, slick jingles and images thought up in…New York, London or Paris and try to impose them on…rural and shanty-town Africa. Often they do not even know they are imposing anything. They have no idea that they are in a different cultural world. When the results don’t work, they become frustrated and angry and start muttering about stupid Africans.”

Well, there are some differences. The problems with the Middle East are not just cultural but also ideological, historical, and political, too. And when the results don’t work, they start muttering about stupid Israelis.

And the amazing thing is that they never learn. Here is President Obama’s Middle East envoy, as quoted in the New York Times:

“George J. Mitchell likes to remind people that he labored for 700 days before reaching the Good Friday accord that brought peace to Northern Ireland. So the fact that Mr. Mitchell has shuttled back and forth to the Middle East for the last 190 days without any breakthroughs, he said, does not mean that President Obama’s push for peace there is stalled.”

True, the length of time alone does not prove failure, though it can be an indication. For the record, U.S. policymakers have been working on Israeli-Palestinian peace since 1974 which is roughly 12,775 days. Moreover, there is the not unimportant detail that in Northern Ireland, both sides wanted peace while in the Middle East only Israel (along with the Egyptian and Jordanian governments) does.

You can keep doing the wrong thing as long as you like, the wise person starts to understand why it's wrong; the merely smart person simply recalls that tough tasks sometimes take a long time.

Oh, yes, and there’s that little thing about using political analysis to understand the motivations, goals, and limits in the policy of those involved in the conflict.

Mitchell explains:

“One of the public misimpressions is that it’s all been about settlements. It is completely inaccurate to portray this as, ‘We’re only asking the Israelis to do things.’ We are asking everybody to do things.”

Problem here: this has only been really true for about one month out of the six the administration has been in office, and even that came about only due to the obviousness of its failure. In addition, the administration wasn’t “asking” Israel to do things, it was ordering it.

He also says it isn’t true Arabs have refused to make any concessions. “We’ve gotten, over all, a very good response, a desire to act, some public statements to that effect from the crown prince of Bahrain, the president of Egypt,”

I think that totals about one op-ed piece. If I were him, I’d cite Jordan rather than Egypt, but the point is that those two countries aren’t the main problem.
(Full article)

Related: U.S. to Push Peace in Middle East Media Campaign
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