The feebleness of France’s Middle East policy

...Richelieu was a cynic, no doubt, but at least he knew how to identity and defend his country’s interests. The same cannot be said of France’s current foreign minister, Laurent Fabius.

Dr. Emmanuel Navon..
i24 News..
15 April '15..

Israel’s position in today’s Middle East is somewhat similar to that of France in Europe during the Thirty Years' War, in that it is surrounded by neighbors who kill each other for religious reasons. As opposed to Cardinal Richelieu, however, Israeli leaders don’t need to betray foreign coreligionists for the sake of “raison d’État” (national interest). In today’s parlance, Realpolitik has replaced raison d’État, but both terms express the same policy of which Richelieu was a master: the interests of the state precede moral considerations. Richelieu was a cynic, no doubt, but at least he knew how to identity and defend his country’s interests. The same cannot be said of France’s current foreign minister, Laurent Fabius.

Fabius recently made a point of expressing support for Saudi strikes in Yemen, and he also indicated that France would support an upcoming United Nations Security Council resolution on Palestinian statehood. Both moves show the trickiness and pitfalls of selecting “good guys” in the Middle East, not least because embarrassing details were recently revealed about the involvement of Saudi Arabia and of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in terrorism.

Iran’s ruthless attempt to take control of Yemen should indeed be resisted, but the Saudis are hardly freedom fighters. They might be the least of two evils, but evils they are. Two days before Fabius’ official visit to Riyadh, lawyers representing Saudi Arabia filed papers in Manhattan’s federal court asking the judge to reject claims by families of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that the Saudi government “directly and knowingly” helped the hijackers who blew the Twin Towers. According to al-Qaida member Zacarias Moussaoui (who is serving a life prison sentence for conspiring with the 9/11 hijackers), Saudi Arabia did not cut ties with al-Qaida and with its ringleader Osama Bin Laden after 1994. Lawyers for the families of 9/11 victims claim that they have amassed new evidence suggesting that the Saudi government, or senior Saudi officials, individually funded al-Qaida. While this claim still needs to be fully substantiated, describing Saudi Arabia as a pro-Western ally is a fraud.


The same goes for the PLO. At the United Nations Security Council, France is working on a resolution that would impose the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1949 armistice lines between Israel and Jordan, including in east Jerusalem, as well as a “fair” solution to the refugees issue. France insists that it is promoting a Palestinian state on behalf of the PLO (“the good guys”) and not on behalf of Hamas (“the bad ones”). This, despite the fact that Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas added Hamas to his government last summer; that Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections; that Hamas would likely win the first (and last) elections held in a newly established Palestinian state; that Hamas’s regional backer is Iran; and that Iran has declared that it would actively arm a Palestinian state once it is established in the West Bank. So France is both supporting the anti-Iranian coalition in Yemen and the establishment of an Iranian base west of the Jordan River.

When It Comes to Analyzing the Middle East, We Live in the Age of Idiocy

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
22 February '10

After more than 30 years of watching people write dumb things about the Middle East, I believe that in the last month I've seen more nonsense than at any previous time. The problem arises from ignorance, lack of understanding of the region by those presented as experts; plus arrogance, treating the region and the lives of people as a game (Hey, let’s try this and see what happens!), fostered by the failure of such control mechanisms as a balanced debate and editing that rejects simplistic bias or stupidity; as well as a simple lack of logic.

To put it another way, I am reading material that simultaneously has no connection with the real world, is full of internal contradictions, and often seems deliberately tailored to misrepresent events in order to prove a false thesis. Fortunately, this stuff has not done actual damage in the real world--much of it has not been implemented in policy--yet but may in future.

As examples:

--The former director of for Gulf and South Asia affairs at President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council writes that al-Qaida will go away if a Palestinian state is created. (This article is so astonishingly bad in reshaping the facts and leaving out anything that proves the contrary point I kept thinking it was a forgery meant to discredit him. Alas, in these days people actually do write in this intellectually dishonest style all too often.)

--The most famous American columnist writing on the Middle East says the United States is responsible for radicalization in Saudi Arabia and Europe is to blame for Iran’s Islamist revolution;

(Read full article)
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What’s the Point?

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
12 October 09

George Mitchell spends lots of time traveling from Middle East country to Middle East country processing the peace. In Saudi Arabia he went in search of cooperation for a deal. Nada. In Syria he pledged his commitment to the peace process. He goes to Egypt. Not much support for peace in any of those places.

Mitchell, at a September 22 briefing following the president’s meeting with Mahmoud Abbas and Bibi Netanyahu, told us:

We do not favor more negotiations for the sake of negotiations. We do not believe in an endless, unlimited, unfocused process. We believe that the purpose of negotiations is to get a result, a positive result. We want more peace and less process. And so we are trying to launch – re-launch negotiations at the earliest possible time, but under circumstances in which there is a reasonable basis to believe that they can be successful.

The president expressed, we were told, that he was “impatient” with the lack of Middle East progress.

So Mitchell hits the road. How’s he doing? Here he is on October 8, following a meeting with the Israeli President Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman: “We’re going to continue with our efforts to achieve an early relaunch of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, because we believe that’s an essential step toward achieving the comprehensive peace to which I earlier referred.” Like Avis, he’s going to try harder.

On October 10: “It has been and remains an important objective of American policy and of President Obama and the secretary of state personally to achieve comprehensive peace in the Middle East,” Mitchell explained in yet another trip to Cairo.

And now we hear that his latest visit has accomplished nothing.

So when does Mitchell pack it in if he doesn’t favor negotiations for the sake of negotiations? He seems to have nothing to show for all his journeys. His incessant invocation of Obama’s and his commitment to peace is now like white noise — a buzz in the background you can safely ignore. The purpose of all this? Well, Obama snagged a Nobel Peace Prize for caring so much and for supposedly reactivating diplomacy. But if diplomacy has accomplished nothing more than racking up air miles for George Mitchell, maybe it’s time to give it a rest.

Related: Fatah Cools on Obama and Mitchell

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The Trouble with Washington: The Middle East Doesn’t Exist Solely in Their Minds

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
25 August 09

Washington, DC

It is hard to convey the enormous gap between Middle East reality and Washington thinking. To try to explain here what things are actually like in the region is to invite ridicule. People in the Nation's Capital—even if they don’t read regional languages or follow events really closely—are convinced they know everything. This is an old Washington phenomenon which has over the years been applied to many issues and often ended in failure or even disaster.

As a very successful lobbyist told me, “An idea in Washington is something you can express between floors on an elevator.”


And so such people—I won’t mention names but you can see it in the media as well as hear it in conversation—believe that President Barrack Obama’s approach is really great. (Come to think of it, this is where his advisors get it from in the first place and turn it into policy.) He would appeal over the heads of leaders to the people and the masses would say: “No more settlements! Peace with Israel! Two-state solution! Why didn’t we ever think of that?”

The more I hear, the more I’m reminded of how much this resembles the Bush administration’s shortcomings in this regard. It was going to show the benefits of democracy and,voila, the region would embrace it. Centuries of political culture, decades of ideology, the structure of dictatorial regimes will all melt as fast as a frozen dessert in an expensive K Street restaurant.

In turn, this mentality recycles basic elements of American elite political culture which seem to exist across the spectrum of partisan commitment and ideology:

--If history doesn't matter to us, why should it matter to them?

--If we've abandoned religion can they really take it serously?

--If war is always foolish and there's nothing worth dying for, they must be desperate for peace.

--If all that matters is material possessions and a nice life-style, let's give them that and they'll leave us alone.

And so on.

More than a half-century ago, a Republican senator from Kansas uttered the much-ridiculed line that the United States would help raise Asia up and up until it reached the level of Kansas City. That basic notion persists, though in contemporary administration parlance it would be Cambridge, Massachusetts or the Upper West Side of Manhattan, or the appropriate neighborhood in Los Angeles.

But don’t Obama and his crew believe in the celebration of differences, cultural relativity, and different strokes for different folks, all is equally valid?

Well, not really. It’s very superficial. Yes, you have the right to your forcing hijabs on women, religion, and world view. But suicide bombing is merely a career choice for those who have nothing better to do. Underneath everything all people are exactly the same, aren’t they? They all want a nice home, a good education for their kids, a chicken in the pot, and a car or two in the garage.

What multiculturalism gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. To stretch the point a bit but to convey the reality better, according to prevailing doctrine:

--If you suggest that everyone should think the same because there are universal values, that’s “racist.”

--But if you suggest that people in different parts of the world are profoundly different, that’s also “racist.”

--And if you suggest that you honestly believe your own culture is superior, that’s also…"racist.”

--If, however, you suggest that someone else’s anti-democratic, ideologically extreme, less-coinciding-----with-reality, more stagnant society or culture is superior to that of the West, that’s…really terrific.

--And if you can figure out a good way to assume they are precisely like you, want to be even more so (because after all isn't your society the epitome of everything anyone must want), and help them to do so, that's foreign policy. High-five!

Make no mistake: that sense of superiority to all the rubes out in the world’s sticks (old American slang for suburbs and small towns) is still very much there.

[Brief digression: I grew up here and know this first-hand: They have equal contempt for all those outside Washington and a few other enclaves. And the worst snobs are those who come from flyover-land and intend never to go back there. Sometimes, as with Obama's famous speech dissing small-town people as a bunch of biased gun-lovers who actually believe there's a deity--the saps--that basic loathing slips out.]

Here’s how it manifests itself in foreign policy: the belief that we can make you an offer too good to refuse. We can persuade you to do what we want by offering you so much, by showing you where you went wrong. Because we are smarter than you, more advanced, and not caught up in your stupid little details of meaningless petty quarrels. If you get a degree in it, they call that "conflict management."

To truly understand this mentality, consider how in the film “Don’t Mess with the Zohan” the deepest desire of the master terrorist (from Hizballah?) is to own a chain of fast food restaurants. The mental message is: We respect you and your culture! But of course we know you really want to be like us.

From popular culture we go to administration terrorism advisor—talk about a charlatan—John Brennan who explains that Hizballah (and probably Hamas when he isn’t speaking in public) can’t be terrorists because they are in politics and some of them are even lawyers.

They don’t really mean it, you see, and are just behaving that way because they are enraged, haven’t been treated right, or haven’t been offered enough. Since Washington political culture isn’t too much into history, all the past events disproving this thesis are neglected.

For people in this world, like Brennan, an intransigent radical Islamist who believes that he knows precisely what the deity wants and will impose it on the world with automatic weapons is simply someone who hasn’t met him yet.

Nothing is more amusing than watching people in the inside-the-Beltway elite either predict the imminent success of Obama’s Middle East program or, among those who are brighter, now start to be puzzled about why it isn’t working.

I can think of no better way to end than with a joke that perfectly illustrates this mentality. It is most often told about Henry Kissinger, but having seen Kissinger in operation first-hand he’s one of the people who succeeded in Washington who least deserves it. I’ll leave the details on that for another time but I will tell the joke in a generic fashion:

A backpacking student and a high-level foreign policymaker are on a small plane. The plane develops engine trouble and the pilot says: “I’m sorry but there are only two parachutes and one of them is mine.”

The policymaker says, “Well, since I’m the only one capable of making Middle East peace I’m too valuable to the world to lose, so I’m taking the other one.” With that, he grabs a pack and leaps from the plane.

“I’m sorry, son,” says the pilot, “but I guess you’re sunk.”

“Don’t worry about me. There’s still a parachute left. The world’s greatest policymaker just leaped out of the plane holding my backpack. “

Yep, that about sums it up.
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Bullying Israel

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at Stanford University"s Hoover Institution.

By: Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com
Thursday, August 06, 2009

FP: Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I’d like to talk to you today about the Obama administration’s Middle East policy.

A recent piece in the Washington Post noted that the only country in the world with which the U.S. has worse relations since Obama took office is Israel.

An American administration is soft on butchers that rule Iran and desperately seeks dialogue with them, yet it is giving our friend and ally, and the only democracy in the Middle East, a hard time.

What gives here?

Hanson: Two thoughts cross my mind:

(1) In general, for a variety of complicated reasons, Obama sees those who dislike the United States—an Ahmadinejad, Assad, Castro, Chavez, Ortega, etc.—as somehow more authentic and representative of their own "people." In turn, reaching out to the 'real' leadership of the disadvantaged and oppressed requires special post-colonial, post-imperial skills of a postracial, post-American leader such as himself.

In a sort of messianic role, he thinks he's our bridge to the revolutionary leadership of formerly Third World peoples. But the Iranian democrats in the street, the Honduran Supreme Court, a Uribe, a Maliki government, or the Israelis, all these pro-American friends for some strange reason like the United States, and, most likely, like us for what Obama would call reactionary reasons; so there is nothing sexy about them for Obama really.

(2) Israel--democratic, capitalist, Western, pro-American--is emblematic of all the things that Obama in the past has been skeptical about, since Israel appreciates our values, history, and what we stand for. Again, this is passé for Obama--as if one in a Columbia University seminar on post-imperialism were to raise his hand and declare, "Isn't it great that Israel is a beacon of democracy and Western values in the region?"

Imagine the reaction of the professor and students to that poor fellow, and, presto, there is what bothers Obama about Israel. In domestic policy terms, Israel is like the present health care system, Wall Street, the 5% who need their taxes raised, "they" who raised the bar, the insurance companies, etc., the Palestinians more like the victimized, poor American middle and under classes.

FP: It would be fair to say that there is a strain of anti-Semitism in the Obama administration, yes? A black pastor recently reflected on the problem of anti-Semitism in the black community and noted that it has definitely influenced Obama. Your thoughts?

Hanson: I don't know the answer to that. But I do know that any 20-year devotee of Rev. Wright would have been bombarded with thousands of anti-Semitic tropes and asides, all reinforced by current 'inner-city' hip-hop propaganda and blame-gaming.

I think it was Prof. Henry Louis Gates himself who once warned of the new anti-Semitism of the black inner-city. So Obama as a Chicago organizer and contributor to Trinity Church would have been surrounded by anti-Semitic types.

And we know the writ: at home Jews are supposed blood-suckers whose stores profited off the ghetto, whether the old Pawnbroker type or the new record exec that takes the lion share of profits from black rapping geniuses, to abroad where Israel--small, Western, without oil, without terrorists, without third-world romance--simply either is nothing to be afraid of, or represents the collective rich, overachieving and exploiting Jew.

Rev. Wright said even worse about Jews, and many of Obama's former associates reflect such stereotyped views as well. I suppose in one sense of being objective and disinterested, it speaks well of American Jewish voters that the majority of them voted their generic liberal principles that trumped concern for Israel, since Obama clearly will prove to be far more anti-Israeli than Jimmy Carter.
FP: Obama is being hard on Israel and yet doesn’t appear to be cracking down on Palestinians for their terrorism against Israel, let alone their refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist. Your take on this?

Hanson: Our historically challenged President seems to think not only did the Muslim world invent the printing press and supposedly showed tolerance during the Inquisition in Cordoba, but that there were no Israeli-Arab wars before the 1967 "occupation" of the West Bank.

In his mindset, Jewish exploitation explains West Bank and Gazan poverty and failure, not any intrinsic pernicious ideologies, much less aggressive acts by the people who live there.

So go back to 1967 borders, with proper affirmative action remedies for past exploitation like the right of return, and there is no longer grievance, just perpetual peace and shared thanks for the messianic conciliator. In Chicago terms, Israel is the exploitive landlord, Palestinians the oppressed tenants--and Obama the superior, all-knowing organizer-mediator who will give pep talks to the Palestinians on "responsibility" and "self-help" while drawing material concessions from the too wealthy Israeli building owner.
(Full article)
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More Obama PR Will Not a Mideast Policy Make

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions
03 August 09

Barack Obama hasn’t gotten very far with his efforts to promote peace in the Middle East. But let it not be said that the White House is satisfied with what it has achieved so far. The administration has evaluated the situation and is prepared to correct the course, not with any concrete action, but with what our chief executive does best: more talk. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that:

In coming weeks, senior administration officials said, the White House will begin a public-relations campaign in Israel and Arab countries to better explain Mr. Obama’s plans for a comprehensive peace agreement involving Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world.

The campaign, which will include interviews with Mr. Obama on Israeli and Arab television, amounts to a reframing of a policy that people inside and outside the administration say has become overly defined by the American pressure on Israel to halt settlement construction on the West Bank.

For believing that the preceding administration was a collection of arrogant imperialists who didn’t understand the rest of the world, the Obama team surprises with this decision, which is reminiscent of how stereotypically “ugly American” tourists respond to foreigners who don’t understand English by merely speaking English louder.

It’s not as if Israelis don’t understand that Obama’s intentions toward them are good and his motives pure. The reason they think they have been singled out for rough treatment by Obama is that he has singled them out. The dispute about settlements was a calculated decision on the part of Washington to pick a fight with its ally and raise the stakes until Netanyahu gives in, handing Obama an easy triumph and a signal to the Arab world that friends of Israel no longer have a decisive say in American foreign policy.

Obama’s eloquence is a formidable diplomatic tool, but the idea that it can be used to convince Israelis to, as the president has said, “reflect” on their policies and change their tune is not only astoundingly arrogant; it’s also wrong. The Israelis already want peace and have shown time and again they are ready to make sacrifices to achieve it. What is lacking is a similar commitment from the Palestinians. No amount of patently insincere sweet talk from the president is going to convince Israelis that more bullying of Israel is the path to peace.

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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