Policy as unrealistic as Bush’s, but more dangerous

...Although the policies of both Bush and Obama are based on ignorance of the realities of the Middle East, Obama’s is remarkable for its likely consequences. It deliberately strengthens an enemy without gaining anything in return, betrays allies, encourages proliferation of the most terrible weapons, encourages terrorism and will probably lead to war. What a deal!

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
12 July '15..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2015/07/obamas-policy-is-as-unrealistic-as-bushs-but-more-dangerous/


“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” – Winston S. Churchill

American policy toward the Middle East in the past two administrations has been disastrous. Maybe I’m missing something, indulging my historical hindsight or being dense myself, but it looks to me that nonpartisan ignorance and poor planning are the rule in Washington.

The Bush Administration kicked off the debacle by ending the “dual containment” policy of sanctions and restraints on both Iran and Iraq by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Saddam was a murderous thug who well deserved hanging, but the vacuum created by his removal and the breakup of his Sunni-dominated army could not be filled, as Bush apparently believed, with a democratic regime.

Instead, multiple factions went at each others’ throats, including Shiite militias (some aligned with Iran and some not), Baathists, Sunnis (some aligned with al-Qaeda and some not), Kurds, etc. Iran, Syria and Gulf-supported Jihadists vied for influence, provided weapons and pulled strings. Today, 12 years after the invasion of Iraq, it has become a failed state, wracked by violence as pro-Iranian militias vie with ISIS for control.

Bush did not understand the complexity of the situation or the intentions of the various players. He naively believed that any person would naturally prefer a free society to a totalitarian one in which his group was on top; and he didn’t realize that in the Middle East, the most violent and ruthless party usually prevails. Instead of a democratic Iraq that would anchor Western interests in the Middle East, he got chaos.

But Obama made it worse. If there was any hope of stabilizing Iraq in 2009, it was ended by his announcement that the US would withdraw all troops from Iraq by the next year. By the end of 2011, only a handful remained.

The Obama Administration, faced with the threat of the ISIS on the one hand, and the inexorable march of Iran toward regional hegemony on the other, made a cynical decision to throw in with the gang that looks the most like a winner. Here there is no naïve faith in democracy. Instead, there is a naïve faith in the efficacy of appeasement.

The decision to tilt toward Iran (and by extension to protect Iranian ally Bashar al Assad in Syria) flies in the face of common sense. Iran has been an enemy of the US for religious, ideological and geopolitical reasons since its Islamic revolution in 1979. From the US Embassy hostage crisis, through the terrorist attacks of the 1980’s (including the one that took the lives of 241 US Marines in Beirut) and the Khobar Towers bombing in 1995 that killed 19 Americans, to providing explosives to al-Qaeda to bomb US embassies in Africa and manufacturing sophisticated IEDs to be used against American troops in Iraq, the Iranian regime has been waging war against the US via its terrorist proxies from the start.

Iranian propaganda against the US and the West has been unrelenting. As nuclear negotiators in Vienna (in the words of Omri Ceren) “slouch toward a deal,” Iran observed its annual “al-Quds [Jerusalem] Day,” with chants of “death to America,” and “death to Israel,” burning flags and effigies of President Obama and PM Netanyahu. The ‘moderate’ Iranian President Rouhani took part in the festivities. And the Iranian ‘Supreme Leader’ Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said yesterday that the struggle against the US would continue regardless of any agreement that might be reached.

Obama’s Middle East Diplomacy and Iran’s Gaza Arms Shipment

...President Obama may believe he is embarked on a diplomatic quest with Iran that will result in a new détente that will lessen the chances of conflict and allow the United States to ease out of a strategic role in which it stands beside both Israel and moderate Arab states. But Iran has very different goals. The seizure of the arms shipment is a wake-up call for Washington. But it is an open question as to whether President Obama and Secretary Kerry are too besotted with their hopes for détente with Iran to listen to reason.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
05 March '14..

The news that Israel has intercepted an Iranian shipment of arms headed for Gaza has been overshadowed, along with just about every other foreign policy story, by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. But this is more than just a routine terror bulletin that will be noted, filed and then forgotten. The decision by Iran to ship missiles from Syria to the Hamas-run strip raises serious questions about a number of Obama administration assumptions about both Iran and the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

If, as now appears to be the case, Iran is back in the business of arming Hamas, then though does more than undermine the administration’s narrative about President Hassan Rouhani’s government being more moderate than his predecessors. It demonstrates that Iran is, as it always has been, up to its neck in the business of arming and funding international terrorism. That should make President Obama think twice about his belief that the regime can be trusted to abide by any nuclear accord. Just as important is the very real possibility that the captured arms were part of a rapprochement between Iran and its former close ally Hamas. If Iran is now seeking to strengthen the Islamist terrorist group’s ability to wage war on Israel, that could mean it is using the Gaza enclave as leverage against the possibility of an Israeli or Western attack on its nuclear facilities. But it is also possible that the attempt to create a Gaza arms buildup is aimed at reminding the Palestinian Authority that Hamas and other Islamist forces retain a veto over any peace deal with Israel. The seized arms are a signal to the U.S. and Israel not only of the essentially violent character of Iran but of its ability to create havoc throughout the region to serve its own interests.

Since 2011 Hamas and Iran have been at odds, as they have backed different sides in the Syrian civil war. In addition to pouring arms, money and some of its own forces into Damascus, Iran has deployed its Hezbollah terrorist proxies to back up the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. But Hamas sided with Islamist rebels and broke with Tehran over the dispute. But prior to that Hamas looked to Iran as its principal supplier of arms and cash during the second intifada fighting with Israel. Though Hamas is Sunni and Iran is Shi’ite, the two bonded over their mutual hatred for Israel and Jews.

Proof of the sophisticated nature of the arms pipeline between Tehran and Gaza came in 2002 when the Israeli Navy seized the Karine A, a ship that was loaded with Iranian missiles and various other types of military hardware intended for use by Hamas. Iran’s intentions were clear. They were prepared to back any force willing to fight Israel and to kill Jews in any manner possible.

A Dramatic Reversal, a Radical Rupture

...The 1979 Islamic revolution added another revisionist actor intent on undermining the pro-American order. Iran presented itself as the leader of an alternative system, and developed an alliance network of its own, the so-called “resistance axis.” With training, funding, and arms from Tehran, this axis actively worked to subvert America’s Arab allies and waged war on Israel. The US still continued to see itself, and was likewise regarded, as the leader of the alliance of status quo states in confrontation with the revisionist resistance axis. Until now, that is.

Tony Badran..
NOW Lebanon..
04 December '13..

President Obama is overseeing a radical rupture with past American policy in the Middle East. Now that it has been confirmed that Washington has been secretly negotiating with the Iranians for a year, deliberately cutting out its allies, it has become apparent that the White House is determined to extract the US from the region and upend the American order that has been in place for decades. In the process, the Obama administration is building up Iran at the expense of historical partners.

Throughout the Cold War, the US saw itself as the leader of an alliance in the region in opposition to the revolutionary states in the Soviet orbit. US policy was geared not toward coexistence with Soviet influence and its revolutionary satellites, but rather toward rolling them back. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once explained, the “priority was to get the Soviets out of the Middle East.”

The 1979 Islamic revolution added another revisionist actor intent on undermining the pro-American order. Iran presented itself as the leader of an alternative system, and developed an alliance network of its own, the so-called “resistance axis.” With training, funding, and arms from Tehran, this axis actively worked to subvert America’s Arab allies and waged war on Israel. The US still continued to see itself, and was likewise regarded, as the leader of the alliance of status quo states in confrontation with the revisionist resistance axis.

Until now, that is. Under Obama, this paradigm has seemingly ended. Obama is apparently unconcerned with the careful maintenance of allies. For instance, consider the fact the White House kept its allies in the dark about its secret talks with the Iranians, and even maneuvered to box in various allies, like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and France, and to limit their maneuverability. Then there’s Syria. Instead of leading the pro-US bloc to roll back the Iranian axis, Obama doggedly shot down his allies’ concerns and dismissed their entreaties for US-led action.

But, as is now evident, this was not merely a matter of poor alliance maintenance. We now understand that Obama’s decisions in Syria over the last two and a half years were all geared toward the deal with Iran. Obama was pursuing a specific vision – a new regional configuration. The sales pitch is that the new framework puts in place a balanced structure of stakeholders, including Iran, thereby stabilizing the region. This in turn would enable Obama to achieve his principal objective of extracting the US from the Middle East.

However, this lofty picture, which is being marketed by the White House’s sympathizers in the media, will bear no resemblance to how things will unfold in reality – how they’re already playing out. That’s because Obama is pursuing a course that radically runs counter to historical US policy. Whereas in the past the US led and consolidated a bloc of allied status quo states against revisionist actors, Obama is now forcing the lead revisionist state down the throat of US allies.

When the West Prefers Illusion In Place of an Ugly Reality

This is the triumph of illusion, required because reality doesn't comport with the liberal, democratic Western standard in which every difference can be split. The reality is that Israeli fights every day against people dedicated it its destruction as a sovereign entity. Reality is ugly, so the West pretends we're only a minute or two, an Israeli concession or two, a settlement or two from Israeli-Palestinian "peace."

Shoshana Bryen..
American Thinker..
20 August '13..



The Palestine Liberation Organization was created in 1964. Like most revolutionary movements, it wrote a Charter to define its aims and fundamental policies, including:

Article 17: The partitioning of Palestine, which took place in 1947, and the establishment of Israel are illegal and null and void, regardless of the loss of time...

Article 18: The Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate System, and all that has been based on them are considered null and void. The claims of historic and spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history or with the true basis of sound statehood. Judaism... is not a nationality (and) the Jews are not one people with an independent personality...

Article 19: Zionism is a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goal, racist in its configurations, and fascist in its means and aims...

Article 24: This Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, (or) on the Gaza Strip.

Contrary to belief in some quarters, the Charter has never been amended and in fact, fealty to "armed struggle" (i.e., terrorism) was reasserted as late as 2011. In pursuit of its goals, Palestinian terrorism has killed more than 5,000 Israelis since 1949. Airplane hijackings; sniper shootings (including an infant in her father's arms), bombings on buses, in cafes and in restaurants; little boys bludgeoned to death; children murdered in their homes in front of their parents. Raw anti-Semitism pours today from Voice of Palestine Radio. School children learn that Israel is only a temporary impediment to Palestinian aspirations and that killing and dying is the highest good.

This would seem to preclude peaceful coexistence with the State of Israel.

Yet, it has become conventional Western wisdom that the Palestinian leadership -- bifurcated as a result of a brutal civil war, without an electoral mandate, beholden in part to Iran -- wishes nothing more than a split, rump state in the West Bank (and Gaza), areas it previously rejected. And furthermore, in exchange for that, Palestinians will accept a) the Jews as a national people "with an independent personality," b) the legitimacy of the 1947 partition (or 1949 Armistice Line), and c) Zionism -- not as fascist, racist and aggressive -- but as the legitimate expression of Jewish national peoplehood.

This is the triumph of illusion, required because reality doesn't comport with the liberal, democratic Western standard in which every difference can be split. The reality is that Israeli fights every day against people dedicated it its destruction as a sovereign entity. Reality is ugly, so the West pretends we're only a minute or two, an Israeli concession or two, a settlement or two from Israeli-Palestinian "peace."

No, we weren't, nor will we be. But it is through similar illusions that American policy toward Egypt is best understood.

The question that will be asked is not who lost Egypt, but who lost the Middle East.

Caroline Glick..
carolineglick.com..
17 August '12..



"But as is clear from the US's denial of the significance of Morsy's rapid completion of Egypt's Islamic transformation; its blindness to the dangers of Syrian chemical and biological weapons; and its complacency toward Iran's nuclear weapons program, by the time the US foreign policy establishment realizes it lost Egypt, the question it will be asking is not who lost Egypt. It will be asking who lost the Middle East."

In 1949, the Communist takeover of China rattled the US foreign policy establishment to its core. China's fall to Communism was correctly perceived as a massive strategic defeat for the US. The triumphant Mao Zedong placed China firmly in the Soviet camp and implemented foreign policies antithetical to US interests.

For the American foreign policy establishment, China's fall forced a reconsideration of basic axioms of US foreign policy. Until China went Red, the view resonant among foreign policy specialists was that it was possible for the US to peacefully coexist and even be strategic allies with Communists.

With Mao's embrace of Stalin this position was discredited. The US's subsequent recognition that it was impossible for America to reach an accommodation with Communists served as the intellectual architecture of many of the strategies the US adopted for fighting the Cold War in the years that followed.

Today the main aspect of America's response to China's Communist revolution that is remembered is the vindictive political hunt for scapegoats. Foreign Service officers and journalists who had advised the US government to support Mao and the Communists against Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists were attacked as traitors.

But while the "Red Scare" is what is most remembered about that period, the most significant consequence of the rise of Communist China was the impact it had on the US's understanding of the nature of Communist forces. Even Theodore White, perhaps the most prominent journalist who championed Mao and the Communists, later acknowledged that he had been duped by their propaganda machine into believing that Mao and his comrades were interested in an alliance with the US.

As Joyce Hoffmann exposed in her book Theodore White and Journalism as Illusion, White acknowledged that his wartime report from Mao's headquarters in Yenan praising the Communists as willing allies of the US who sought friendship, "not as a beggar seeks charity, but seeks aid in furthering a joint cause," was completely false.

As he wrote, the report was "winged with hope and passion that were entirely unreal."

What he had been shown in Yenan, Hoffmann quotes White as having written, was "the showcase of democratic art pieces they (the Communists) staged for us American correspondents [and] was literally, only showcase stuff."

Contrast the US's acceptance of failure in China in 1949, and its willingness to learn the lessons of its loss of China, with the US's denial of its failure and loss of Egypt today.

On Sunday, new President Mohamed Morsy completed Egypt's transformation into an Islamist state. In the space of one week, Morsy sacked the commanders of the Egyptian military and replaced them with Muslim Brotherhood loyalists, and fired all the editors of the state-owned media and replaced them with Muslim Brotherhood loyalists.

David Meir-Levi - Our Naked Emperor

David Meir-Levi..
frontpagemag.com..
26 April '12..

When the vain and delusional emperor walked naked through the streets of his capital to show off his new clothes, so light and so finely woven that they could not be seen or felt, it was only an innocent little child, ingénue, who told the world that the emperor was naked. The rest went along with the charade, and collaborated with the emperor and his dishonest clothiers in order to avoid imperial ire.

Recent events and disclosures at the highest levels of our government demonstrate that our own rulers, like the naked emperor, have through folly and dishonesty exposed themselves as “useful idiots” or worse, liars and functionaries whose loyalties may well be to other than the United States.

On April 10, Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, stated that “religion is not driving extremist violence” in Nigeria. This pronouncement was made one day after Boko Haram, the uber-violent Muslim jihadist Nigerian terrorists, bombed a church killing 39 Christians.

Carson told us an unconscionable and transparent lie. In addition to stating an obvious falsehood, given the Boko Haram’s overt and unabashed self-definition as a brutally violent Muslim terrorist organization which condemns all things non-Muslim as “Haram” (prohibited), Carson also contradicted earlier State Department assessments, [i] all of which argue that Nigeria’s Islamic religious terrorist violence was so much a concern that the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended back in 2002 that Nigeria be placed on the United States watch list.

What impelled Mr. Carson to lie such that anyone anywhere who does not live under a rock can see that he is lying? Joel Mowbray’s Dangerous Diplomacy provides a clue. Mowbray documents how the Saudi royal family has over the past decades insinuated itself into our State Department by promising State Department officials serving in the Arab world generous sinecures when they have retired from their official duties, as long as they represent Saudi interests to the US government while serving in the State Department. These Saudi long-range bribes render our officials servants of the Saudi government, representing Saudi interests to our government instead of the other way around.[ii]

Rubin - The Region: Saved by our enemies

Barry Rubin..
Opinion Columnist..
12 February '12..




It’s not Western policy but Middle Eastern radicals’ extremism that, ironically, saves the day

President Barack Obama is campaigning on the claim that he is a great friend of Israel despite the fact that this is clearly not true. After all, the announcement of a coalition government between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas, a genocidally oriented terrorist group that is openly anti- Semitic and rejects all of the agreements with Israel on which the PA is based prompts no US (or European) policy response.

In fact, it is only the extremism of the region’s radical regimes and movements, their refusal to accept the deals he offers them, that has prevented Obama from being a disaster for Israel. Meanwhile, great damage is done to US and Western interests.

Nobody wants to say this, and no one in any Israeli government should do so, but they know Israel cannot depend on the Obama administration for real support.

Still, a strategy in which Israeli leaders say nice things about Obama, try to be as cooperative as possible, and are patient – while doing what needs to be done directly – has worked out precisely because the Obama administration’s policies were wrong.

For example, the US effort to engage with Iran failed due to Iranian behavior which forced an end to that policy. The same applies to the White House’s pro-Syrian policy. And the administration’s hamhanded effort to push forward the Israel-Palestinian peace process also became a mess that Obama had to abandon.

Eventually the same thing will happen with the Muslim Brotherhood when sufficient evidence of its radicalism and anti-Americanism accumulates that even the White House can no longer ignore it.

Consider this example of how the process works, doing damage but eventually being fixed.

Sultan Knish - Muslim Firsters and Israel Firsters

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
31 January '12..



If you were to suggest in a public forum that just possibly Israel's failure to reach a peace agreement with a terrorist organization, run by kleptomaniacs and homicidal maniacs, which still continues to applaud the murder of Israeli children, might possibly be due to the terrorists and not because of Israel, then according to the consensus of the left, you are an Israel Firster.

The paradigm of the Israel Firster only works if you assume that the America First position is to support Islamic terrorists. Even if we were to dismiss the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States then a position sympathetic to the territorial claims of Islamic terrorists in Israel would still not be the America First position, it would be the Muslims First position.

The left which deploys names like Israel Firsters is certainly not calling for neutrality in the conflict, rather it would like us to side with the Muslim Brotherhood and the assorted Islamic terrorists scattered throughout the region. Arguably the United States has been doing this for some time already.

Obama stuck his finger in Prime Minister Netanyahu's chest, but bowed to the Saudi King. When he visited Turkey, he made no mention of the Turkish settlements in occupied Cyprus, but when Biden visited Israel, he threw a fit over a partial approval for a few houses in Jerusalem. The United States doesn't fund many terrorist groups, but the bulk of the funding that it allots to terrorists goes to terrorists operating in Israel and killing Israelis.

Obama's altruistic foreign policy

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
22 April '11

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/04/obamas-altruistic-foreign-poli.php

If only in the interest of intellectual hygiene, it would be refreshing if the Obama administration would stop ascribing moral impetuses to its foreign policy.

Today US forces are engaged in a slowly escalating war on behalf of al Qaida-penetrated anti-regime forces in Libya. It is difficult to know the significance of al Qaida's role in the opposition forces because to date, the self-proclaimed rebel government has only disclosed ten of its 31 members. Indeed, according to the New York Times, the NATO-backed opposition to dictator Muammar Gaddafi is so disorganized that it cannot even agree about who the commander of its forces is.

And yet, despite the fact that the Obama administration has no clear notion of who is leading the fight against Gaddafi or what they stand for, this week the White House informed Congress that it will begin directly funding the al-Qaida-linked rebels, starting with $25 million in non-lethal materiel.

This aid, like the NATO no-fly zone preventing Gaddafi from using his air force, and the British military trainers now being deployed to Libya to teach the rebels to fight, will probably end up serving no greater end then prolonging the current stalemate. With the Obama administration unwilling to enforce the no-fly zone with US combat aircraft, unwilling to take action to depose Gaddafi, and unwilling to cultivate responsible, pro-Western successors to Gaddafi, the angry tyrant will probably remain in power indefinitely.

In and of itself, the fact that the war has already reached a stalemate constitutes a complete failure of the administration's stated aim of protecting innocent Libyan civilians from slaughter. Not only are both the regime forces and the rebel forces killing civilians daily. Due to both sides' willingness to use civilians as human shields, unable to separate civilians from military targets, NATO forces are also killing their share of civilians. In deciding in favor of military intervention on the basis of a transnational legal doctrine never accepted as law by the US Congress called "responsibility to protect," US President Barack Obama was reportedly swayed by the arguments of his senior national security advisor Samantha Power. Over the past 15 years, Power has fashioned herself into a celebrity policy wonk by cultivating a public persona of herself as a woman moved by the desire to prevent genocide. In a profile of Power in the current issue of the National Journal, Jacob Heilbrunn explains, "Power is not just an advocate for human rights. She is an outspoken crusader against genocide…"

Heilbrunn writes that Power's influence over Obama and her celebrity status has made her the leader of a new US foreign policy elite. "This elite," he writes, "is united by a shared belief that American foreign policy must be fundamentally transformed from an obsession with national interests into a broader agenda that seeks justice for women and minorities, and promotes democracy whenever and wherever it can—at the point of a cruise missile if necessary."

As the prolonged slaughter in Libya and expected continued failure of the NATO mission make clear, Power and her new foreign policy elite have so far distinguished themselves mainly by their gross incompetence.

But then, even if the Libyan mission were crowned in success, it wouldn't make the moral pretentions of the US adventure there any less disingenuous. And this is not simply because the administration-backed rebels include al Qaida fighters.

Obama Administration: When Peace Treaty Fails, Its Time to Sign Another One

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
14 April '11

http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2011/04/obama-administration-when-peace-treaty.html

It's very difficult to overstate the illogical nature of Obama Administration Middle East policy. Here's a small example.

Israel made a peace treaty with the government of Egypt. The government of Egypt has now been overthrown. All the political forces in the country now openly talk about unilaterally revising or throwing out that peace treaty. The "moderate" candidate for president said that if Israel attacked the Gaza Strip (after being attacked from the Gaza Strip of course) Egypt should go to war with Israel.

SO the Obama Administration concludes that Israel must rush to make a deal with another government (which doesn't even control half the territory that it claims to represent) that might be overthrown and...

Well, you get the picture. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration doesn't.

Add to this:

--Israel's other peace treaty is with Jordan. And while that regime probably won't fall (and if it did its successor would definitely tear up the peace treaty) it is facing a bigger possibility of being overthrown than at any time in 40 years.

--Israel's other main agreement was to end the war with Hizballah in 2006. At that time, the U.S. government guaranteed and the UN promised to have a force to keep Hizballah from returning to southern Lebanon. Now, Hizballah has more weapons than ever and a recently released Israeli map of Hizballah's military positions in Lebanon shows dozens of them, more than in 2006.

So are these the people and this is the advice to be followed?

The funny thing is that I doubt you could see the chain of reasoning above even mentioned anywhere in the Western mass media.

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Obama’s Contradictions on the ‘Will of the People’

Joseph Puder
pajamasmedia.com
06 March '11

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obamas-contradictions-on-the-will-of-the-people/?singlepage=true

He endorsed the "will of the people" in Egypt without knowing what it is, and he actively rejected the will of the Israeli people who voted for a center-right government.

In his appeasement speech to the Muslim world titled “A New Beginning,” delivered on June 4, 2009, at the University of Cairo, President Barack Obama declared:

I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other. … That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.

President Obama failed to talk truth to power at his Cairo speech, ignoring the fact that virtually all of the Arab/Muslim states are governed by military dictators or unelected hereditary-imposed sheikhs who do not reflect the will of their people. Ironically, where the will of the people has been exercised — Israel — Obama and his administration have not respected the results. They have sought to reject the will of the Israeli people who elected a center-right Likud government, whose mandate was to expand settlements in the West Bank rather than comply with the Obama administration by abandoning the Jewish settlements to Mahmoud Abbas and his unelected regime.

The support by President Obama of the will of the people in Egypt, which resulted in the deposing of President Mubarak after a 29-year rule, is most significant for Israel. What appears evident is that Israel’s peace treaties with both Egypt and Jordan are not treaties between two nations. Rather, each is a peace treaty between the Israeli people/nation and the Egyptian and Jordanian ruling elites only. Once these elites are overthrown, the will of the people — determined largely by Islamist indoctrination — is to void the peace treaty with Israel.

Mubarak did little to educate his nation of 84 million people with regard to Israel being a legitimate nation which as part of the peace treaty sent experts to Egypt to help them develop agriculture, medicine, etc. Contrary to the peace agreement, the Egyptian press — largely government controlled — allowed the dissemination of anti-Semitic TV programs, songs, and publications, in addition to near daily inflammatory articles that fostered hatred for Israel and Jews. And yet, the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, signed in 1979 at the White House, brought 32 years of quiet along the Egyptian-Israeli frontier, albeit not a people-to-people peace. And while hundreds of thousands of Israelis flocked to Egypt, only several hundred Egyptians visited Israel, and those who did were shunned by their colleagues and communities.

Left to the “people’s will,” Egypt would have to impose Sharia law, since 64% of the people demand it, and an even larger percentage wishes to abrogate the peace with Israel. The “people’s will,” which will most likely be championed by the Muslim Brotherhood, will be characterized by a deep hatred of America and the rejection of equal rights for women and religious minorities.

“Progressives” in the Obama administration were prepared to talk to Hamas, designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. Progressives in Israel, Europe, and in the Obama administration have argued that the will of the people must be respected, despite its jihadist agenda that includes the destruction of Israel. But the same voices, while threatening Israel with boycotts because of its Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, rarely invoke the idea of sanctions and boycotts against the Hamas terrorists.

The will of the people is hardly a prescription for freedom and democracy, especially given that most of the “people” in the Arab-Muslim world are largely uneducated and their worldview has been manipulated by the leadership of their local mosque and “informed” by Al Jazeera. In any democracy, including an Arab democracy, there must be basic rights that are guaranteed by law, including human and civil rights, religious freedom, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press.

In the absence of such freedoms it is virtually impossible to gauge what the people really want. How are we to know what the people want if they do not go to the polls or are too intimidated to honestly answer a pollster? With all due respect to the demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, who may have shouted the right slogans about freedom and democracy and used sophisticated social media such as Facebook and Twitter, they do not necessarily reflect the will of tens of millions of Egyptians who did not participate in the demonstrations.

The truth of the matter is that Obama’s Cairo speech and his inference that “governments should reflect the will of the people” was merely an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Arab and Muslim masses in the Third World. Obama, like most Western educated thinkers, wants the same things he experienced in the free world for the Arab-Muslim world: freedom of speech, the rule of law, disarming of political militias, tolerance and rights for religious and ethnic minorities, and resolution of conflicts by peaceful means.

Obama’s quick endorsement of the Egyptian demonstrators in the name of the “will of the people” and his expressed support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in the future government of Egypt contradict the very prerequisites of a free and democratic society. An Egypt led or influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood will not attain the kind of democracy and freedom wished for by ordinary people in the free world. More often that not, in the Arab Middle East the takeover of power through “democratic” means does not reflect the ultimate will of the people.

Joseph Puder, a freelance journalist, is the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Taskforce for America and Israel (ITAI).


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Playing Israel's good hand

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
25 February '11

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/02/playing-israels-good-hand.php

The brilliant academic president who theorized that diplomacy-by-apology was more powerful than governing-by-strength is being outmaneuvered -- and outright humiliated -- by the Arab world: Hamas, the Muslim brotherhood and Fatah

 Wednesday night, Israelis received our first taste of the new Middle East with the missile strike on Beersheba and Netivot. Iran's Palestinian proxy, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood known as Hamas carried out its latest war crime right after Iran's battleships entered Syria's Latakia port.

Their voyage through the Suez Canal to Syria was an unadulterated triumph for the mullahs. For the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran's warships sailed across the canal without even being inspected by the Egyptian, US or Israeli navies. On the diplomatic front, the Iranian-dominated new Middle East has had a pronounced impact on the Western-backed Fatah-led Palestinian Authority's political posture towards the US.

The PA picked a fight with America just after the Obama administration forced Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to surrender power. Mubarak's departure was a strategic victory for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and for its sister branch Hamas in Gaza.

As part of his efforts to neutralize the threat the Muslim Brotherhood posed to his regime, Mubarak sealed off Gaza's border with Egypt after Hamas seized power there in June 2007. The Gaza-Sinai border was breached during last month's revolution. Since Mubarak's forced resignation, the military junta now leading Egypt has failed to reseal it. The revolution in Egypt happened just after the PA was thrown into a state of disarray. Al Jazeerah's exposure of PA documents indicating the leadership's willingness to make minor compromises with Israel in the framework of a peace deal served to discredit Fatah leaders in the eyes of the Israel-hating Palestinian public. In the wake of the al Jazeerah revelations, senior PA leaders escalated their anti-Israel and anti-American pronouncements. The PA's chief negotiator Saeb Erekat was forced to resign.

The shift in the regional power balance following Mubarak's fall has caused Fatah leaders to view their ties to the US as a strategic liability. If they wish to survive, they must cut a deal with Hamas. And to convince Hamas to cut a deal, they need to abandon the US.

And so they have. Fatah's first significant move to part company with Washington came with its relentless bid to force a vote on a resolution condemning Israeli construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria at the UN Security Council. In an attempt to avert a vote on the resolution that the US public expected him to veto, Obama spent fifty minutes on the phone with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas begging him to set the resolution aside. Obama promised to take unprecedented steps against Israel in return for Abbas's agreement to stand down. But Abbas rejected his appeal.

Not only did Abbas defy the wishes of the most pro-Palestinian president ever to occupy the White House, Abbas told the whole world about how he defied Obama.

Abbas's humiliation of Obama was only the first volley in the Fatah leader's campaign against the US. Abbas, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and their PA ministers have sent paid demonstrators into the street to protest against America. They announced a boycott of American diplomats and journalists. They have called for a boycott of American products. They have scheduled a "Day of Rage," against America for Friday after mosque prayers.

While excoriating Obama and the US, the PA is actively wooing Hamas. Wednesday the PA accepted the legitimacy of Hamas control over Gaza. Three and a half years after Hamas wrested control over Gaza from Fatah in a bloody coup, on Wednesday Fayyad said that the PA is willing to end its objection to Hamas control over the area if Hamas agrees to participate in the general elections Abbas has scheduled for September.

At the same time as he publicly beseeched Hamas to join forces with Fatah, Fayyad announced that the PA is willing to forego US financial assistance if that assistance continues to come with political strings attached. The only real string attached to US aid is the stipulation that no US financial assistance can be used to finance Hamas.

The PA's announced willingness to end its receipt of US aid is by far its boldest move to date. With the Arab world going up in smoke Fatah officials know they cannot expect to receive any significant funding from Arab states for the foreseeable future. That makes them entirely dependent on US and Europe.

And make no mistake; the PA budget is entirely a creation of foreign aid. The PA is the largest per capita foreign aid recipient in the world. Last year it received $1.8 billion in foreign assistance. US direct assistance accounted for $550 million or nearly a third of that amount. The US gave the PA another $268 million in indirect assistance through UNRWA. UNRWA is the UN agency devoted exclusively to providing welfare benefits to the Palestinians while subordinating itself to the Palestinian political agenda.

Without US assistance, the PA would cease to be a political factor in the region. So by offering to forego the aid, Fayyad, Abbas and their colleagues are essentially threatening to commit political suicide.

The Palestinians' declared readiness to forego US aid is all the more remarkable when compared to Israel's refusal to countenance the thought of foregoing or even cutting back the assistance it receives from the US. Whereas the Palestinian economy will collapse without US assistance, were Israel to forego the $3 billion in military assistance it receives every year from Washington, the move would have little impact on the economy.

Economic analyses of US military assistance have noted that several factors degrade the value of the aid. The US requires Israel to spend 75 percent of the assistance in the US. Israel's inability to open its purchases to competitive bidding in the world market has forced it to pay inflated prices for much of what it buys.

The ABCs of the Middle East Revolution

Thomas Neumann
Executive Director
JINSA
23 February '11

http://jinsa.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/the-abcs-of-the-middle-east-revolution/

Over the last month there has been an absolutely incredible amount of speculation over the chain of events unfolding in the Middle East that so far has toppled two governments and threatens many more. Were the protests spontaneous or planned in advance and who is behind them? These are just two of the many key questions pundits are scrambling to answer. The most important question, however, may be, what is the significance of these events for the United States?

After reading what seemed to be an endless stream of analysis by the multitude of prognosticators and so-called experts one clear thought emerges – every one of their interpretations reflects nothing more than their particular worldview. They are all clueless.

So here I offer another piece of speculation and assumption about the sequence of events that triggered the political wildfire raging across the Middle East with, more importantly, assumptions as to where it is heading.

As with all revolutions, it matters less who started it and why they did so than who is still standing at the end of the day. Seldom in history has the first post-revolution government endured. Aside from historians, who today remembers Kerensky or Robespierre? And how short was the shelf life of the Articles of Confederation?

The spark was a Tunisian street merchant named Mohamed Bouazizi who on December 17 set himself on fire to protest humiliation he suffered at the hands of Tunisian government officials. Bouazizi became a powerful symbol of the hopelessness and frustration felt by nearly the under 30 generation of Tunisians who were similarly suffering under President Ben Ali’s regime.

Without Twitter and Facebook, Bouazizi may have become just another faceless victim of injustice. But with these tools not only spreading the story but also the accompanying rage and anger at unprecedented speeds, Bouazizi was the match that started the fire.

When Ben Ali fled Tunisia it sent a message not only to young people all over the Middle East who saw their future as hopeless but also to opposition groups from all points of the political and religious spectrum that had been waiting for such a moment.

From among these organizations it is unlikely that an American-style democratic movement will emerge. Democracy to Americans means something very different than it does to an Egyptian. Outside of Israel, there is no current or historical experience of democracy in the Middle East.

That the protesters or any of the groups behind them were American-style forces of democracy was a myth created by both the Western media and the State Department. That myth at first did not take hold as evidenced by the White House’s initial calls for Mubarak to remain in office. The Administration soon caved and by the second week of protests was resolutely declaring that Mubarak had to go and the protesters became the forces of democracy

Rather than forthrightly acknowledging the stability that President Mubarak brought to the region and the peace with Israel he maintained, our long-standing relationship with him was disavowed. Mubarak’s relationship with the United States became a liability rather than an asset.

What the Administration failed to understand was that outside of Israel there are only two types of governments in the Middle East, pro-American dictatorships and anti-American dictatorships. The battle at the end of the day would not be between a democratic movement and a dictatorship, but between two types of dictatorships – one pro-American and the other resolutely opposed to America.

Unfortunately, our ambivalence became public policy and served to frighten our other regional partners, especially Saudi Arabia. Surely, the Saudi royal family is questioning the wisdom of placing their country under the American security umbrella. If Mubarak couldn’t depend on the U.S. how can they? Just as bad, American ambivalence has emboldened our enemies, particularly Iran and Hamas.

If this policy continues, it would be logical to assume that at the end of the day anti-American dictatorships will replace pro-American dictatorships. In order to stop the hemorrhaging of American partners we must put at least as much pressure on the Iranian theocracy as we did on the Egyptian autocracy. Shockingly, but not surprisingly, we have not been as forceful in demanding restraint on the part of the Iranian government as we have been with the governments of Egypt or Bahrain.

No one knows how this will end but if Middle East history and political culture are indicative, readers of tea leaves should not be too optimistic.

Thomas Neumann is Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

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Obama's devastatingly mixed signals

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
22 February '11

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/02/obamas-devastatingly-mixed-sig.php

For better or worse, each passing day the Middle East is becoming more unstable. Regimes that have clung to power for decades are now being overthrown and threatened. Others are preemptively cracking down on their opponents or seeking to appease them.

While no one can say with certainty what the future will bring to the radically altered Middle Eastern landscape, it is becoming increasingly apparent that US influence over events here will be dramatically diminished.

This assessment is based on the widespread view that the Obama administration has failed to articulate a coherent policy for contending with the rising populist tides.

Last Friday's UN Security Council vote was a case in point. On the one hand, the US vetoed a Lebanese-sponsored resolution that criminalized Israel's policy of permitting Jews to exercise their property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. On the other, after vetoing the resolution, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned their own actions and explained why what they did was wrong.

As Rice put it in her explanation of the vote: "We reject in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity. For more than four decades, Israeli settlement activity in territories occupied in 1967 has undermined Israel's security and corroded hopes for peace and stability in the region. Continued settlement activity violates Israel's international commitments, devastates trust between the parties, and threatens the prospects for peace....

"While we agree with our fellow Council members - and indeed, with the wider world - about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity, we think it unwise for this Council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians. We therefore regrettably have opposed this draft resolution."

It is important at the outset to point out that Rice's claims are either wrong or debatable. Israel has not committed itself to barring Jews from exercising property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Permitting Jewish construction in these areas does not violate Israel's international commitments.

"This is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder": Understanding Incompetent Western Policies

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
24 December '10

Some of my readers are always bothered when I say that mistakes in Western Middle East policy are caused by stupidity and ignorance—abetted by ideology—and want to argue that the shortcomings are due to deliberate sabotage or evil intentions (often against Israel).

I can certainly understand why people think such things. But almost forty years of studying the Middle East and Western policy toward it have shown me hundreds of times that foolishness, misunderstanding, wishful thinking, and naivete are powerful forces in international affairs. As the great statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand put it almost two centuries ago, “This is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.”

Remember that we are dealing here with people (policymakers, journalists, academics) trying to function across cultural, experiential, historical, linguistic, and usually religious lines. And what is their biggest handicap at present? Why, the very denial that such lines exist! Once you accept the assumption that everyone is basically alike in their thoughts, dreams, goals, and world view, you have no hope whatsoever of understanding anyone who has a different standpoint.

True, sometimes these decisionmakers and opinionmakers (especially the academics and European journalists) have taken up partisan positions. Yet this is far less true for politicians and policymakers who must keep in mind both their own personal and their country’s national interests. We tend to focus on extreme exceptions—who certainly exist—but they are a minority.

(Read full "This is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder": Understanding Incompetent Western Policies")

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Lessons of the Peace Process: The Missing Reflection

Rick Richman
Contentions/Commentary
23 December '10

The final chapter of Dennis Ross’s 800-page book on the Oslo Process (The Missing Peace) is entitled “Learning the Lessons of the Past and Applying Them to the Future.” Among his lessons was a warning that the process can become “essentially an end in itself” — self-sustaining because there is never a right time to disrupt it. He concluded that less attention should have been paid to the negotiators and more to preparing their publics for compromise. With respect to the Palestinians, it is a lesson still unlearned.

The lessons the Bush administration drew from the Clinton experience were that Arafat was an obstacle to peace; the Palestinian Authority needed new leadership and democratic institutions; and peace could be achieved only in phases, not all at once. Bush endorsed a Palestinian state in 2002; arranged the three-phase Roadmap in 2003; assured Israel in 2004 of the U.S. commitment to defensible borders; facilitated the Gaza withdrawal in 2005; began moving the parties in 2006 to final status negotiations; and sponsored the Annapolis Process in 2007-08, which produced another Israeli offer of a state and another Palestinian rejection. In the meantime, the Palestinians elected Hamas — an inconvenient fact that peace processors simply ignore.

There were multiple lessons to be drawn from the successive failures of Clinton and Bush, but Obama did not pause to consider them. He appointed George Mitchell on his second day in office and sent him immediately to the Middle East on the first of an endless series of trips. He sought a total Israeli construction freeze and reciprocal Arab concessions — getting nothing from the Arabs but obtaining a one-time Israeli moratorium, which produced nothing. The administration has tried “proximity talks,” followed by “direct talks,” and now “parallel talks.”

(Read full "Lessons of the Peace Process: The Missing Reflection")

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America's Israel Policy Stuck on 1949

Ted Belman
American Thinker
19 December '10

American policy regarding the Arab/Israel conflict has not changed since the Armistice Agreement in 1949. U.S. policy has sought to achieve a holy balance in the conflict.

This policy had its origins in the tripartite U.S.-British-French declaration in 1950, against arms sales to either side. The Soviets exploited this policy to sell arms to the Arabs, and the French looked after their own interests when they supplied weapons to Israel, but the Americans preserved an outward appearance of egalitarianism.

So reported Haaretz in 2007 based on then-recently released documents.

Washington's support for the existence, independence and territorial integrity of all the states of the region was translated into adherence to the armistice lines of 1949: not to allow Egypt, or any combination of Arab states, to destroy Israel, but also not to allow Israel to expand westward, into Sinai, or eastward, into the West Bank. The American pressure in this regard brought the IDF back from El Arish in Operation Horev in 1949 and from Sinai in 1956. A version of it would appear in Henry Kissinger's directives after the IDF encircled Egypt's Third Army at the end of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

America even had plans for intervention should intervention be needed to maintain their policy. In late May 1967, these plans were dusted off with the intention of updating them. But events unfolded so quickly that they had to be scrapped in favor of working as quickly as possible through the U.N. and Russia to establish a ceasefire.

(Read full "America's Israel Policy Stuck on 1949")

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Hillary And US Mideast Policy: Forward Into The Past!

Daled Amos
11 December '10

Back to the Future was a great movie.
Forward into the Past is just the continuation of failed US policy in the Middle East.

Last night at the Saban Forum, Hillary Clinton made it clear that the US will continue to make Israeli construction an issue:

The United States will not shy from criticizing the sides in Israeli-Palestinian talks when they take unilateral actions, including when Israel builds in eastern Jerusalem, Hillary Rodham Clinton said..."Provocative announcements on East Jerusalem are counterproductive. And the United States will not shy away from saying so."

Of course, "unilateral actions" are only a problem when they are no unilateral concessions by Israel--but that is not the point of this post.

The point here is that Hillary went further than merely reiterating the issue that directly led to the derailing of his Mideast peace talk initiative.

Clinton went one step further, reviving the Saudi plan:

(Read full post "Hillary And US Mideast Policy")

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Video: How The US Conducts Diplomacy In The Middle East

Daled Amos
30 December '10

From Mere Rhetoric:

Accurate dramatization, per State Department cables published by Wikileaks, of how the United States conducts diplomacy in the Middle East.

Looks accurate to me--down to the opposable thumbs...



The basis for the rather unflattering portrayal of 'Mideast experts' may be based on an article in Just Journalism on how Mideast experts downplay Arab fears of Iran and insist on blaming Israel:

(Read full post)

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Two Cheers For Wikileaks!

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
29 November '10

The Wikileaks could be a beneficial revelation, a turning point, changing Western perceptions of the Middle East.

After all, only the leak of U.S. secret documents is forcing--finally!--the mass media to recognize that its entire model of the Middle East has been wrong. For years, we have been told that the region revolves around the Arab-Israeli conflict.

And that was to some extent true up through the end of the 1980s. But now the Middle East revolves around the battle between Islamists and nationalists, and especially between the Iran-led bloc (Iran, Syria, Hizballah, Hamas, Iraqi insurgents, the government that rules Turkey) and most of the other countries.

Here's how the New York Times put it in an article:

"The cables reveal how Iran’s ascent has unified Israel and many longtime Arab adversaries — notably the Saudis — in a common cause. Publicly, these Arab states held their tongues, for fear of a domestic uproar and the retributions of a powerful neighbor. Privately, they clamored for strong action — by someone else.

"If they seemed obsessed with Iran, though, they also seemed deeply conflicted about how to deal with it — with diplomacy, covert action or force. In one typical cable, a senior Omani military officer is described as unable to decide what is worse: `A strike against Iran’s nuclear capability and the resulting turmoil it would cause in the Gulf, or inaction and having to live with a nuclear-capable Iran.'”

(Read full article)


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