WikiLeaks reveal flaws in US Middle East policy

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
02 December '10
Posted before Shabbat


As the fallout from the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables continues, one unmistakable conclusion is that the principal tenets of Washington’s foreign policy establishment’s conventional wisdom, not to mention the Obama White House’s public policy positions, have been clearly disconnected from reality in the Middle East. Also apparent, however, is the problematic role which dubious allies played in propping up the administration’s discredited grand narrative.

These shady regional players deliberately fed the illusions back to influential American visitors, especially congressional delegations, thereby manipulating an alternative channel, which, alongside the assurances and admonitions of so-called foreign policy experts, reinforced the administration’s impulse to seemingly dismiss sound counsel and double down on what were clearly bad policy decisions.

The basic conceptual assumptions that have driven the administration’s public positions on Middle Eastern issues were initially distilled in the dreadful 2006 Baker-Hamilton report – the bible of establishment thinking, which was also hailed by the American left as the template for its theology of “engagement.” It was meant to right the wrongs of the Bush presidency, because it was supposedly a grown-up and “reality-based” set of principles. This allegedly “realist” narrative purported to know what the priorities of US regional allies were and what those allies expected of the US.

Several astute analysts realized that it was all a fallacy, and indeed it was quite easy to deduce that from publicly available, open-source material. WikiLeaks has now provided the official confirmation and vindication. For instance, while the conventional wisdom holds that the key regional dynamic is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that the threats to US interests and allies, as well as to the stability of the region, directly derive from that conflict, a perusal of the leaked documents shows that the US’s Arab allies privately don’t assign to the Palestinian issue that level of centrality.

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