Why the Silly Deal Is a Bad Deal

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
18 November '10

Some genuine friends of Israel have shrugged their shoulders over the latest foolish attempt by the Obami to lure the parties back to the non-peace talks. OK, they concede, it won’t work and is absurd (another 90 days won’t matter), but what is the harm? Besides, Israel gets those planes (but what if after 90 days the talks end?). Elliott Abrams succinctly explains in a Voice of America interview why the deal is not just ludicrous but also dangerous:

“They have been negotiating for a very long time and they have not been able to overcome the differences on some critical issues like Jerusalem or security arrangements,” said the former foreign policy advisor to U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. “It may be too optimistic to expect the Israelis and Palestinians to come to an agreement by 2011 on all issues which separate them when they have not yet started negotiations.” …

“It is the linkage.” he says. “The Israeli agreement to extend their construction freeze in the West Bank by 90 days is now linked to a squadron of jets and to U.S. vetoes in the U.N. Security Council.”

Abrams believes neither of these linkages should be connected with the issue of a West Bank construction freeze by the Israelis. He said the U.S. should be making decisions in the Security Council on the basis of principle.

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Obama's Mid-East Policy Boils Down To 3 Assumptions--All Of Them Wrong

Daled Amos
02 July '10

Tablet Magazine has a symposium of foreign policy experts on Obama’s Middle East policy. One of them, Elliott Abrams, writes in part:

The Obama Administration appears to have three basic premises about the Middle East. The first is that the key issue in the entire Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The second is that it is a territorial conflict that can be resolved in essence by Israeli concessions. The third is that the central function of the United States is to serve as the PLO’s lawyer to broker those concessions so that an agreement can be signed. I think these premises are all wrong.

I think we can agree that there is nothing in Obama's conduct of his Mideast policy that would contradict any of the 3 premises that Abrams ascribes to him.

Now of course, there is nothing novel in assuming that the conflict is at the center of everything that goes on in the Middle East. The problem is that considering the Israel-Palestinian conflict in particular to be the key to peace in the Middle East means conveniently forgetting that the long history of Arabs killing Arabs predates the reestablishment of the State of Israel.

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How to Stand Up to Israel-Bashers

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
06 June '10

On Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN this morning Elliott Abrams faced off Peter Beinart and Zakaria (who, frankly, was the more virulent of the two Israel-bashers). He demonstrated how to engage and decimate those whose mission is now to propound in “polite” company the notion that Israel is a pariah state.

First, don’t let them define the terms of the debate:

ZAKARIA: Elliott, let me ask you — Peter, in a recent article — I think it was in “The Daily Beast” — points out that the Gaza blockade which Israel has imposed is not simply a blockade against munitions and arms. It blockades, among other things — these are the things Israel will not permit to enter into Gaza: cilantro, jam, sage, chocolate, dried fruits, notebooks. What is the purpose of a blockade of such goods?

ELLIOTT ABRAMS, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: The purpose of the blockade of Gaza, of course, is to prevent Gaza, which is already “Hamastan,” from firing another 10,000 rockets and missiles into Israel.

ZAKARIA: And how will the jam and cilantro help them make those rockets?

ABRAMS: You know, I’m sure that you can find equal examples in the U.S. and U.N. blockade of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. You can always find in any government action some marginal activity, some list that you don’t like. That’s not the point.

The point is that Israel has stopped two Iranian ships from carrying arms to Gaza. Israel interfered, thank God, this week with a group of armed Turks who came prepared for a fight with iron bars, night vision devices, ceramic vests, despite what, frankly, are the lies that the Turkish foreign minister told on this show today.

Why is it that only Turks out of the 32 nationalities got hurt? It is because only Turks were involved in the violence.

If there is to be an international investigation, it needs to start where the ships started, in Turkey. We need to know what the Turkish government did in helping this armed group of men hijack what was supposed to be a humanitarian effort.

Second, debunk ridiculous arguments. Zakaria asks why Bibi isn’t agreeing to an international investigation. Abrams responds:

I mean, who is kidding whom, Peter? Peter knows, you know, Fareed, and [Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet] Davutoglu knows himself there isn’t going to be a fair international investigation. There wasn’t a fair investigation of the Gaza war. There isn’t going to be a fair international investigation of the Turkish role in this.

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Obami Spin: Bibi Needs to Be “Pragmatic”

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
11 April '10

Oh, this is rich (via Politico, which dutifully conveys the Obami’s spin):

If U.S. officials were bothered by the latest turn in their constantly evolving relations with Benjamin Netanyahu — the Israeli prime minister’s abrupt decision to cancel a planned trip to Washington this week for a nuclear summit meeting — they did their best to disguise it.

Bothered by the “latest turn”? It is as if they were bystanders rather than those steering the car that went off the road and into a ditch. We are led to believe that after weeks of Bibi-bashing and leaks of a potential imposed peace plan, what the Obami really seek is a “pragmatic Bibi.” Graph after graph passes in this otherworldly discussion of the state of U.S.-Israeli relations until Elliott Abrams supplies some much needed reality:

Only a president who appears friendly and concerned about Israeli security can evoke pragmatism in any Israeli politician,” Abrams said. “But Netanyahu has not seen the ‘pragmatic Obama,’ only the ‘ideological Obama.’ The Administration has taken a hostile stance toward Netanyahu not since he took office — but even before he took office; and it has pressed policies that show a deep lack of understanding of Israeli politics.

Indeed, it was Bibi who agreed to yet another West Bank building freeze. It was Bibi who agreed to proximity talks. Only if one defines “pragmatic” as capitulation to Obama’s hard-ball tactics could one see Bibi in all this as inflexible.

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The Error-Ridden Obama Middle East Policy

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
27 March '10

In a must-read analysis of the Obami assault on Israel, Elliott Abrams writes:

Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, 17 years of efforts under three American presidents and six Israeli prime ministers have taught five clear lessons. Each of them is being ignored by President Obama, which is why his own particular “peace process” has so greatly harmed real efforts at peace. Today the only factor uniting Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab leaders is distrust of the quality, sagacity, and reliability of American leadership in the region.

The lessons Abrams enumerates suggest that we are in for a dangerous and destabilizing period in which the U.S.-Israeli alliance is torn asunder. First in the list of grievous errors: rather than provide Israel with security and reassurance, the Obami are out to bludgeon the Jewish state to cough up concessions:

During the George W. Bush years, the leader of the Israeli right, Ariel Sharon, decided to abandon the idea of a “Greater Israel,” impose constraints on settlement construction in the West Bank (no new settlements, no outward expansion of settlement territory), and remove every settlement in Gaza and four small ones in the West Bank. His closest advisers say all of this was possible for him only in the context of unwavering American support for Israel’s security steps—including the targeting and killing of Hamas terrorists and the refusal to deal with a terrorist leader like Arafat. What was the turning point for Sharon? Bush’s June 24, 2002, speech, where he abandoned Arafat, denounced Palestinian terrorism, and said thorough reforms were the only possible basis for Palestinian statehood. Reassured, Sharon began to act.

Contrast this with the Obama administration, where Israel has been “condemned”—the toughest word in the diplomatic dictionary—for a housing project.

Second, the Obami have failed to hold the Palestinians accountable for their own behavior or make any demands that one would ordinarily place on a party to a negotiation:

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The Shadow Viceroy

Lee Smith
Tabletmag.com
24 March '10

If no one was sure what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to tell the 7,500 delegates who descended on Washington for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference early this week, everyone knew what Elliott Abrams was going to say. For more than a year, the former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush has been the most vocal critic of the Obama Administration’s handling of the U.S.-Israel relationship. With the recent Washington-Jerusalem confrontation over 1,600 apartment units still simmering, Abrams drew a standing-room-only crowd to his two AIPAC panels.

“If we distance ourselves from Israel,” Abrams told the audience, “the Jordanians, Egyptians and the rest of our allies in the Middle East will think, ‘if they can do it to the Israelis, why not us?’ ”

Abrams, while well under 6 feet tall, is a commanding physical presence, with broad shoulders and a prominent chin and nose, a profile worthy of a Roman coin. And like a provincial governor, he wielded power on behalf of a hegemon in a way that earned him more enemies at home than abroad. His rivals mock the policies he advocates, describe him as arrogant, and fear winding up on the wrong end of his sharp wit. While in the United States he is best known for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, in the Middle East, he is simply “Elliott”—the man tapped by Bush to administer the daily conduct of U.S. policy in large parts of the region, with particular attention to democracy promotion and the Bush Administration’s “Freedom Agenda” in Egypt and throughout North Africa, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the Palestinian territories.

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AIPAC Panel: The Sands of Change Here in D.C.

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
21 March '10

A mesmerizing discussion Sunday afternoon was held among Elliott Abrams, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, and Asher Susser of the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University as they examined the “sands of change in the Middle East.” Both Stephens and Susser traced the emergence of non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey (which is pivoting away from Europe as it becomes increasingly more Islamist in domestic policy and anti-Israel in its foreign policy), the decline of secular pan-Arabism, the tension between radicals and moderates, and the ascendancy of Shia regimes, which are displacing aging Sunni leaders as the region’s powerhouses.

Abrams made a different case: “The most important shift is in Washington.” He noted that in 1967, Israel won a tremendous, and the British left Aden, opening an era in which the U.S.-Israel alliance dominated the region. (”It took the 1973 war for the Arabs to learn that lesson.”) The question Arabs are asking now, Abrams said, is about what the American policy is on maintaining its dominance in the region. They want to know “whether the U.S. is prepared to maintain its position or let the region slip into a period of Iranian dominance.” On Iran’s nuclear ambitions specifically, Abrams reminded the crowd that the Obama administration says it is “unacceptable” if Iran gets a nuclear weapon. “But do they mean it’s unacceptable or just that it is a bummer?”

As for the Obami’s effort to separate the U.S. from Israel to increase our credibility with the Arabs, it is “no accident” Abrams said, that the Saudi’s 2002 peace plan, while not the basis for any viable peace agreement, would have ended with the recognition of Israel. When the Arab states realize that the U.S. commitment to Israel is unyielding and that they “can’t do anything about Israel, they begin to make peace.” If the U.S. should begin to change its position, Abrams cautioned, their attitude toward Israel will change as well. Then, Abrams added, citing Lee Smith’s book The Strong Horse, they will decide which is the weak and which is the strong horse in the region and act accordingly. How we act toward Israel affects how Arab states regard us. As we distance ourselves from Israel, the Arabs see that we “are proving to be an undependable ally.” So the place to determine the fate of the Middle East, he summed up, is “here.”

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Cheering Their Failed Israel Policy

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
20 March '10

The Washington Post headline — “Experts question whether U.S. has a real Israel strategy or ‘talking points’” – suggests the disarray in the Obami’s approach and the general consternation that has greeted their bully-boyism directed at the Jewish state. Indeed, the Post can find no one but George Mitchell’s lackey Martin Indyk (more on him later) who agrees with Hillary Clinton’s obnoxious claim that the staged hissy fit with Israel is “paying off.” (And if it were bearing fruit, then we are back to amateur hour when Hillary announces as much, and on the Israel-hating BBC, of all places). Elliott Abrams dryly notes: “It has made life harder and has made negotiations harder for the Israelis and the Palestinians.” Certainly taunting one side in public has that effect.

We are now in a fencing match. Hillary demands some concessions; Bibi tries to serve up some small gesture or soothing platitude so Hillary and company can climb down off the roof on which they have perched themselves to impress their Palestinian friends. But all we have to show for this is Palestinian stone-throwing, a dead Thai worker, a strained but not yet broken relationship with Israel, and further reason for Palestinians to do what they do best — play victim and demand unilateral concessions.

But nothing is more telling than the comments of Indyk, an adviser to Mitchell, who presumably channels the Obami’s thinking:

Martin S. Indyk, vice president for foreign studies at the Brookings Institution and an adviser to Mitchell, said the administration in the past 10 days has made the Israeli government “supersensitive” to the issue of Jerusalem. He praised the administration for not revealing its demands and said U.S. officials adroitly turned down the heat as quickly as they turned it up.

“I think they handled it quite well,” he said.

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Humility Isn’t in the Obami Repertoire

Jennifer Rubin
The Weekly Standard
18 January '10

Elliott Abrams sums up the mess that is the result of a year of the Obami’s “smart” Mideast policy:

So the Obama administration’s Middle East adventures in 2009 came to a close with Netanyahu, whom the administration has never much liked or treated well, stronger politically; and Abbas, whom the administration wished to strengthen, weaker and talking of retirement. In Arab capitals the failure of the United States to stop Iran’s nuclear program is understood as American weakness in the struggle for dominance in the Middle East, making additional cooperation from Arab leaders on Israeli-Palestinian issues even less likely. A strongly pro-American former Israeli official shook his head as he evaluated the Obama record in 2009: “This is what happens when -arrogance and clumsiness come together.”

While George Mitchell prattles on about a time limit on peace negotiations that have no starting point, no attendees, and no hope of success, Abrams suggests there is another way: forget the “peace process,” the endless churning of diplomats in European capitals with the same impediments to meaningful progress (not the least of which is a viable Palestinian negotiating partner for Israel), and instead create “a Palestinian state from the bottom up, institution by institution, and ending with Israeli withdrawal and negotiation of a state only when Palestinian political life is truly able to sustain self-government, maintain law and order, and prevent terrorism against Israel.” Despite the inescapable logic of the idea and the presence of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who is devoted to such an approach, the Obami seem insistent on trotting out Mitchell to rehash what has been tried not for only a year but for a couple decades.

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The Wrecking Crew

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
05 November 09

In yet another “My, how they messed it all up!” assessment of the Obami’s Middle East peace efforts, the Washington Post finds consensus: “the administration’s efforts have faltered in part because of its own missteps.” The reviews are in and they’re not pretty:

Daniel Levy, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator now at the Century Foundation in Washington, summed up the administration’s efforts in recent days as “amateur night at the Apollo Theater.” He said the administration did not game out the consequences of its demands on the parties — and then flinched. “They just dug deeper and deeper their own grave,” he said. “All of this talk of negotiations doesn’t cut the mustard in the region.”

Turns out, just as conservative critics argued, the key error was in adopting the Palestinian bargaining gambit as our own — namely, insisting on an unattainable absolute freeze on settlements. This of course encouraged Palestinian intransigence and Israeli mistrust. The amateur show reached its climax as Hillary Clinton, like a flighty teenager, first praised Israeli concessions as unprecedented and then rushed to soothe the scorned Palestinians, assuring them that the absolute settlement freeze was still the U.S.’s aim.

As they were knocking over the furniture, the Obami felt compelled to deny the Bush-era agreement with Israel for reduced settlement activity. Rather than spruce that up with a bit of self-serving rhetoric and garner some credit for advancing the “peace process,” the Obama brain trust embarked on its fruitless quest for a settlement freeze, ultimately alienating both sides. As Elliott Abrams, George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser, observed, “We had nine months of nonsense.” The Obami have earned the contempt of both sides and left the parties so estranged that face-to-face talks may no longer be in the offing.

This is the “smart diplomacy” set. This is Middle East strategy brought to us by Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, the sage gurus of international diplomacy who we are told egged Obama on and figured they might outfox Bibi Netanyahu or, better yet, orchestrate his downfall. For this they give the Nobel Peace Prize.

In many administrations, heads would roll. You’d see a shake-up of the advisers who presided over this debacle. But so sign of that yet. Emanuel and Axelrod have moved on to running the Afghanistan war, Clinton is “reasserting herself,” George Mitchell is racking up the frequent-flyer miles, and James Jones is doing whatever it is James Jones does. Should the mainstream American Jewish community be pleased with this display? Well, they’ve gone a bit mute, perhaps abiding by the advice that if you have nothing nice to say, better to be quiet. Nevertheless, those who vouched for the Obami’s brains and Zionist credentials were, we now know, duped.

As for the country as a whole and our allies, it is a sobering sight — the full extent of the Obami’s incompetence and arrogance and the results of both, that is. For those hoping to “restore America’s place in the world,” it’s about time to realize that our standing, at least in the Middle East, has never been lower. And let’s not forget: the same underachievers are supposed to be devising an Afghanistan-war plan and working to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. Do you feel safer yet?

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