Settlement Freeze: An Unacceptable Veto

J. E. Dyer
Contentions/Commentary
23 September '10

It has always been the case that Israel’s government would have to choose, at some point, to lift the freeze on settlement construction. The reason is simple: Israel can’t give anyone else an effective veto over settlement activities. Protecting settlements in Judea and Samaria is a matter of national security: it prevents the Palestinian Arabs from using the territory to menace Israelis across the Green Line. Past Israeli withdrawals from strategic or disputed territories have produced ever-present menaces along its other boundaries, as demonstrated in Gaza and the Hezbollah fiefdom in southern Lebanon. The West Bank, moreover, is an even more dangerous case from a geographic standpoint, because its mountainous heights look down on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the heart of Israel’s national and economic life.

In the absence of an enforceable, good-faith agreement with the Palestinian Authority, Israel can’t let either the PA or the U.S. exercise a de facto veto over its administration of the settlements. The right to such a veto, once established, would be wielded in incremental steps to prejudice Israel’s security and bargaining position. It would amount to much more than a minor concession in the interest of the current talks. Accepting a de facto settlement veto would open the door to a campaign of attrition against the settlements, just as it would validate the Palestinian negotiating principle of winning major and debilitating concessions as a prior condition of talks — and therefore without the Palestinians themselves having to commit to anything.

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How will US respond to coming Hizballah war?

Fresnozionism.org
05 August '10

Recent events make it clear that a war on Israel’s northern border could break out at any time. Hizballah’s capabilities are far ahead of what they were in 2006, and while the IDF has worked assiduously to develop answers to its threats, nobody thinks that the inevitable war will be cheap, either for the IDF or for Israeli civilians who will be the target of Hizballah’s rockets.

In 2006, the Bush Administration saw the destruction of Hizballah — an Iranian proxy, destabilizing force in the Mideast and nexus of international terrorism — as in the interest of the US. So, at least for the first few weeks, it did not intervene to rein in Israel. After that, US officials either realized that the Olmert government was incompetent and the IDF unready, or they were influenced by Hizballah propaganda about civilian casualties in Lebanon, or both. At this point the war was brought to a close by the toothless UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which Hizballah has openly flouted ever since.

The US response to the next round, therefore, will be supremely important. If Israel suffers a large amount of damage and/or casualties in a war which is again forced to an inconclusive end, Israel’s deterrence posture will be severely weakened, not to mention her economy, morale, etc.

Hizballah knows this and we can expect that the propaganda techniques that were used in 2006, refined by Hamas in 2008-9 and deployed yet again in the Flotilla affair, will make their appearance again.

But a great deal depends on how the US perceives its interests. And given the powers in ascendancy in the Obama administration, it doesn’t look good. Dan Kurtzer is a former ambassador to Egypt and Israel, and a close adviser to the president on Middle East issues. Here is how he evaluates American interests:

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Look at who holds the South Lebanon trigger

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
03 August '10

(This was written and posted by Tony Badran just before the LAF border attack. In general, he is very on topic, and this is excellent background material as to what may or may not develop. Y.)

On the eve of last Friday’s mini-Arab summit in Lebanon, the United States quietly, but noticeably, renewed a 2007 Executive Order designating parties deemed to be undermining Lebanese sovereignty.

The renewal was a welcome reminder of the problems overshadowed by the photo-op in Baabda that included President Michel Sleiman, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. However, it did not compensate for the lack of active American involvement in Lebanon’s affairs, nor its substitution with an “over the horizon” policy allowing local and regional actors to take the lead in addressing initiatives potentially damaging to Washington’s interests.

In his message to Congress about the renewal of EO 13441, President Barack Obama identified the major source of Lebanon’s destabilization and the undermining of its sovereignty: continued arms smuggling to Hezbollah, including, of course, that carried out by Syria. This helped refocus the issue amid all the surreal statements about Syria’s role in safeguarding Lebanon’s stability at the Baabda summit.

This clarification also served to refocus, at least conceptually, the priorities of US policy toward Syria and Lebanon. Syria is, understandably, nowhere near the top of the list of the Obama administration’s main concerns. However, this has led to ill-advised steps, one being the introduction of myriad American interlocutors with Damascus, which has led to a muddling of policy priorities.

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The Peace Process Story So Far: Israel's Cooperation with the US

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
03 August '10

In one of his out-of-control anti-Israel rants, Andrew Sullivan included in his list of alleged evils that Israel had repeatedly "defied" the United States. That point stuck in my mind and made me reflect how demonstrably untrue is that charge contrary to what people might think.

Certainly, there have been incidents of friction and disagreement--though always fairly short-lived--and at times Israel has either convinced U.S. policymakers of its position or the two sides agreed. Yet consider on all the key issues of the last twenty years how Israel did heed every major U.S. request.

In 1991, President George Bush asked Israel not to respond to Iraqi attacks. This was a huge request for any country whose civilians were being targeted by missiles and especially for Israel which has always believed that retaliation is essential to maintain its credibility. I can speak from personal experience here, with the nearest hit about ten blocks away. The country not only faced the terror of sudden missile attacks, with the possibility of bacteriological or chemical warheads, but was also largely shut down economically for weeks. Yet Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir agreed, and Israelis stood by passive while the United States fought Iraq in Kuwait and Baghdad shot missiles onto its soil.

The Oslo agreements were an Israeli initiative yet during the nine years of negotiations that followed, Israel and the United States cooperated closely. Israel made a very forthcoming offer in 2000 supported by the United States that was rejected by the Palestinian leadership. There were no major incidents of conflict during the Clinton Administration.

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Albert the Alligator and the British Ambassador

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
30 July '10

Once upon a time in an intellectual galaxy now seemingly far away, liberals and conservatives shared a common view. There were the forces of democracy and the forces of totalitarianism (or, if you prefer, authoritarianism) that threatened the world, took away freedom, and held back both economic and social development. The goal of Western foreign policy was to help those favoring liberty against the tyrants and would-be tyrants.

Naturally, there were different views about how to do this, for example should some dictatorships be backed against those deemed worse, but the basic template was the same.

Then came a turning point which can be symbolized by a line in Walt Kelly’s comic-strip “Pogo.” A dialogue balloon destined to shake the world: “We have met the enemy,” said either Pogo the possum or Albert the alligator, “and he is us.” Kelly later wrote that he originated this line in 1953 in an essay opposing McCarthyism but it really took off in a 1972 cartoon, perfectly timed for the "1960s," the era whose ideas rule us today in much of the West.

The sentence was a parody of Oliver Hazard Perry’s message—“We have met the enemy and they are ours”—describing his naval victory during the War of 1812. So what had once been a triumphant shout of American victory was transmuted in a post-Pogo world to symbolize a vitriolic yell of self-induced anti-Americanism.

And so if there are evil forces in the world, they are said either not to be evil at all (mislabeled as so by false Western propaganda) or were only made to behave that way by our (Western, American, democratic, capitalist, etc) sins. In other words, the guilty party is the democratic victim whose bad behavior created the monsters. In this spirit, a supposedly great American intellectual claimed America was the cancer of the world. Formerly, it had been known as the last, best hope of humanity.

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Leaks on mass civilian casualties in Afghanistan could form basis for Goldstone style prosecutions against US, Britain and other coalition countries

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
26 July '10

This weekend’s release of thousands of secret official files about coalition operations in Afghanistan paints a harrowing picture of the fog of war, most troubling of all of the accidental killings by our soldiers of hundreds of innocent civilians – revellers at wedding parties, kids in school buses, ordinary people going about their daily business who tragically found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Given that the Taliban systematically hides behind the civilian population this sort of thing is, of course, inevitable. Nonetheless, it is understandable that the revelations by Wikileaks have caused embarrassment to the governments of all the coalition countries.

But for those coalition countries in Europe – Britain first among them – who are currently cheerleading the passage of the Goldstone Report on Gaza through the United Nations this is more than an embarrassment. In the light of Goldstone, it represents an outright threat to the security of their soldiers on the ground as well as to their national interests in international tribunals.


In my experience, the MidEast crowd at the British Foreign Office and its equivalents elsewhere in Europe tend to be a little on the slow side. So, let me spell this out so there is no ambiguity.

International laws, norms and procedures to a great extent operate on the basis of precedent. So when Britain and other European countries allowed the Arab dictatorships to push a report through the United Nations specifically designed to criminalise the Israeli military’s attempts to deal with terrorists hiding behind a civilian population in Gaza, they simultaneously set a precedent for all countries, including their own.

Now that it has been revealed — via official documents — that British soldiers, for example, have been involved in exactly the same kind of operations against exactly the same kind of terror groups using exactly the same tactics and resulting in exactly the same kind of outcomes in terms of the loss of civilian lives, British soldiers and ministers could face exactly the same kind of censure and penalties as Israel.

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U.S.-Israeli Security Ties: In Some Ways, Hanging in There

J.E. Dyer
Contentions/Commentary
16 July '10

It’s a great thing to have a friendly press. You can tally up the list of things you were going to do anyway — programs and measures instituted by your predecessors — and tout them as your own initiatives, and no one will expose what you’re doing. Indeed, a friendly media will obediently retail your narrative for you, accepting your evidence without critical analysis.

The Obama administration, under political fire for straining U.S. ties with Israel, has a friendly press. The latest example is a July 16 Washington Post puff piece on military relations with Israel, entitled “Despite Diplomatic Tensions, U.S.-Israeli Security Ties Strengthen.” The article takes up the administration’s current theme that security cooperation between the U.S. and Israel has never been closer. Only some of it can be substantiated, however, and the verifiable information ends up mostly tracing back to initiatives from the George W. Bush presidency or before.

President Obama and the current Congress are to be credited with the May 2010 decision — referenced in the Post piece — to fund the deployment of Israel’s new “Iron Dome” defense system against short-range rockets. But no other security “tie” listed in the article qualifies as an Obama initiative. High-level exchanges between defense officials, for example, have been frequent for decades. Such exchanges are typical with close allies and would be remarkable only if they were rarer. This reference sounds like a pure filler. Likewise, the sharing of information on vehicle armor and protection against IEDs has been underway for years; U.S. funding was allocated for such cooperation (and related programs) during the Bush administration.

The article alludes to the exercise “Juniper Cobra,” which took place in October 2009, as “the first such exercise involving boots on the ground between the two nations.” But that assertion is simply wrong. Juniper Cobra, a U.S.-Israeli air- and missile-defense drill, has been conducted in alternating years since 2001 and has involved boots on the ground each time. The 2007 iteration involved the smallest number of deployed troops to date, with 500, whereas the 2009 drill featured the largest number: 1000. The scope of the latest exercise is a positive sign about both nations’ seriousness regarding the defense of Israel at a time when the threat from Iran is growing rapidly. But the implication that it represents a strengthening of security ties specific to the Obama administration is invalid.

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Israel, US and the blockade on Cuba

Yisrael Medad
Green-Lined/JPost
04 July '10

Let's open with a quick quiz question:

Which country, threatened with a missile attack on its southern border, instituted a blockade of the dangerous territory, restricting the transporting of food stuffs to the area and limiting travel as part of its political, not security, policy and continues to maintain that blockade due to the ideological nature of the regime of that territory?

If you guessed Israel and its blockade of Hamastanian Gaza, you're wrong.

If you guessed Turkey, which has blockaded Armenia since 1993, you're wrong because Armenia is not south of Turkey.

However, if you guessed the United States, which has legislated into law several times, blockades against Cuba, then you are correct.

Amazing, eh?

Think about it: US President Barack Obama has disdainfully referred to the Gaza situation as "unsustainable", and wants to pour in millions of dollars into the region with no regime change. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called Gazans' plight "unacceptable", but does not even consider the situation in her own backyard [and this was before that oil spill].

This past April, a congressional panel decided to take a first step toward ending its decades-old ban on travel to Cuba and removing hurdles to food sales to the Caribbean island. However, conservative lawmakers and Cuban-Americans opposed the move until a democratic government comes to power in Havana.

TheUnited States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic and financial embargo. It has been in place since October 1960, and was legislated as the Cuban Democracy Act and codified into law in 1992 for the purpose of maintaining sanctions on Cuba so long as the Cuban government continues to refuse to move toward "democratization and greater respect for human rights." In 1996, Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act, which further restricted United States citizens from doing business in or with Cuba. In 1999, US President Bill Clinton expanded the trade embargo even further by ending the practice of foreign subsidiaries of US companies trading with Cuba.

That is a fairly tough foreign policy approach. Tougher than Israel vis-à-vis Gaza, if you ask me. To think, it didn't start with terror attacks, rocket launchings, Hamas "eradication-of-Israel" ideology or even Russian missiles.

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Syrian Rep Promotes Blood Libel at UN Human Rights Council

And the U.S. stays silent.


Anne Bayefsky
The Weekly Standard
08 June '10

Meeting today in Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council heard the following statement from the Syrian representative, First Secretary Rania Al Rifaiy: “Israel…is a state that is built on hatred…Let me quote a song that a group of children on a school bus in Israel sing merrily as they go to school and I quote 'With my teeth I will rip your flesh. With my mouth I will suck your blood.'" The Obama administration chose to join this Council, the UN’s lead human rights body, and its representative was present. But they said nothing after hearing this blood libel.

On the contrary, rather than expose the Council and its anti-Jewish agenda, one of President Obama’s first foreign policy moves was a decision to pay for it. Hence, American taxpayers will pay 22 percent of the cost for this speech to be permanently posted on the UN website, translated, and broadcast around the world.

There is a reason that none of the members of the UN Human Rights Council thought this statement was sufficiently repulsive or shocking to complain. The blood libel against the Jewish people is a calling card of UN proceedings, with UN members usually casting their anti-Semitism as vicious anti-Israel attacks. For instance, last week’s Council debate over the attempt by Turkish-backed extremists to break the Israeli blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza included the following outbursts. Along with references to Israel’s desire for “bloodshed,” came Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua’s accusation that “the Zionist regime” conducted an “indescribable” and “brutal massacre.” Pakistan said Israel committed “crimes against humanity,” Algeria described Israelis as “butchers,” and Libya distributed a statement entitled “The Massacre Committed by the Zionist Entity Forces.”

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Organized antisemitism growing in the U.S., too

Fresnozionism.org
11 April '10

News item:

The past year has seen a marked rise of anti-Semitism, increasing over 100 percent throughout the world, the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism of Tel-Aviv University outlined on Sunday, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day.

According to the institute, violent anti-Semitic attacks, ranging from vandalism and arson against Jewish targets to beatings of Jews, increased in 2009 by a startling percentage. The report underlined the severe increase in anti-Semitic attacks, specifying that 2009 displayed the highest amount of attacks recorded in over 20 years…

The report illustrated that that this year was particularly charged due to international reactions to Operation Cast Lead, which resulted in anti-Jewish demonstrations around the world.

Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress — which sponsored the report — said that the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in Western Europe can be blamed on forces outside the region.

“This new phenomenon is financed and organized by pro-Islamic, pro-terrorist organizations and states,” Kantor said. [my emphasis]

I was present at a local demonstration at the time of Operation Cast Lead, which illustrated this (on a smaller scale, of course):

The participants in the demonstration expressed themselves in strongly antisemitic — not just anti-Zionist — ways.

Although there was no actual violence — it was close at times, but local organizers prevented it — the intent was clearly to frighten and intimidate the small group of counter demonstrators.

A massive number of demonstrators, who appeared to be mostly high school and college age and of Middle Eastern origin, were brought in from out of town by the organizers.

This occurred shortly after the start of the operation, and long before the various ‘human rights’ groups and Goldstone produced their tendentious reports.

This demonstration was significantly larger and more confrontational than a similar one held in 2006 during the Second Lebanon War. I expect this trend to continue.

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Rosner's Domain: Lee Smith on why the US should not "hazard its human and financial resources on democracy promotion in the Middle East"

Lee Smith

Shmuel Rosner
Rosner's Domain/JPost
07 April '10

Lee Smith's The Strong Horse is a "clear-eyed analysis" in which "Smith explodes the many myths permeating Americans' understanding of the Arab world: colonialism spurred the region's ongoing turmoil; Arab liberalism is waiting for U.S. intervention; technology and democracy can be transforming. In response to these untruths, Smith offers what he terms the "Strong Horse Doctrine" - that Arabs want to align themselves with strength, power, and violence".

Smith is a Middle East correspondent for The Weekly Standard and also has written for Slate, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and a variety of Arab media outlets. I read his book (highly readable, entertaining, not too long, recommended!) and sent him a couple of questions:

1. You wrote that, "We took 9/11 too personally. The result is that we've come to see our multiple engagements in the Middle East - from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to our contentious relationship with Iran - in the framework of a clash between Western and Islamic civilization". Please explain to those readers who haven't yet read your book, how it is the "clash of Arab civilizations" that is the real cause for Middle East (and world) trouble?

Most of us are accustomed to looking at the region as a massive sea of some 300 million Arabs, and 9/11 suggested they were all squared off as one against the West. Thus, an Iraqi Shia and a Lebanese Christian presumably all share the same convictions, hopes and fears as a Sunni living in the Egyptian capital. This is not the case, a fact documented in the history of intra-Arab conflict: civil wars in Lebanon and Yemen; wars between regimes and their insurgent opponents in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Jordan; sectarian conflict in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. And yet despite all the bloodshed, the Arabs are not a warlike people, as the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi told me, but are rather a feuding people. What keeps the Arabs from making total war against each other is in effect a tribal covenant: the purpose of Arab nationalism is to bind the Arabs as one in order to keep them from destroying themselves while projecting their enmity on an alien tribe. The two most popular targets, as we know, are Israel, and America. And so, as I write in the book, "What was extraordinary about the attacks on lower Manhattan and the Pentagon was not the carnage - certainly not compared to some of the most vicious intra-Arab campaigns over the last several decades - but that the Arabs had shifted the field of battle to the continental United States." September 11, "is the day we woke up to find ourselves in the middle of a clash of Arab civilizations, a war that used American cities as yet another venue for the Arabs to fight each other."

2. You write that "the Americans had taken the wrong side" in the Middle East "war of ideas". How so?

Since the Muslim reform movement of the 19th century, the central question in the Middle East's war of ideas has been whether or not Arabs and Muslims should accept the cultural values of the West.

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American Jews, take a stand

Fresnozionism.org
04 April '10

It’s time for Jewish Americans to stand up.

Does the state of Israel have special meaning for them, or is it just another foreign country? They should decide.

This is because the Jewish community in the US, for whatever reasons, has an influence that’s much greater than numbers (about 6.5 million) would indicate. And it’s become urgent to exert this influence in a positive direction and in a coordinated way.

It’s beginning to be clear that the relatively pro-Israel policy that the US has followed since 1967 — I say this even though I know that there have been ups and downs in this period, that some influential institutions (the State Department) have always been less than friendly, etc. — is coming to an end.

This isn’t surprising. Since before 1948, the proponents of a Jewish state have struggled against opposition from the Arabs and from antisemites, and the founding of the state didn’t make it go away — on the contrary. Israel’s history for the past 62 years can be seen as a series of attempts to eliminate it. Its enemies have tried various approaches, but in recent years have realized that a regional military confrontation alone won’t achieve their goal.

Israel’s enemies have come to understand that in order to win they must isolate Israel and remove the international support that has, over the years, allowed this small nation to prevail militarily over the much larger Arab armies. As everyone knows, the goal is to delegitimize Israel, to demonize her, and to split her supporters away from her. Their desired practical results are these:

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Can the US Contain a Nuclear Iran?

Emily B. Landau
INSS Insight No. 171
24 March '10

With any hope of a new round of UN Security Council sanctions on Iran now postponed until June, and the understanding that if at all, these will be weak and ineffective measures, Obama's diplomatic initiative is slowly grinding to a halt. Taking into account Iran's steady progress in developing fissible material, its work on producing a nuclear warhead, and its ever-improving missile capabilities -- together with low expectations that anything in this dynamic will impress upon the Obama administration the need to ultimately take military action -- part of the discourse on this topic is changing track. Instead of focusing on the stinging failure to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions, some are arguing that it's now time to move on. They say that in the likely scenario that Iran becomes the next nuclear state, the US will simply resort to its ultimate strategy that has worked in other cases: it will contain a nuclear Iran.

But will the US indeed be able to contain a nuclear Iran? The answer to this question involves two levels: first, US credibility vis-à-vis Iran, and second, what the US will be seeking to contain. On both counts, there is little room for optimism.

Containment (and deterrence) of an adversary necessarily depend on a state's ability to transmit to the adversary credible threats of consequences for certain behavior on the part of the adversary. In this regard, the idea that the US can contain Iran cannot be divorced from what has transpired over the past year vis-à-vis the diplomatic initiative that Obama has pursued from his first day in office. The lesson that Iran has learned from the Obama administration is that while there has been no shortage of threats of consequences, there have been little to no actual consequences. Iran has seen that the US sets red lines and deadlines that in practice are virtually meaningless. The US has undermined its own ability to present a credible threat by saying outright that it has no intention of taking military action because it is overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it has clarified through its actions that broad multilateral agreement is more important than demonstrating resolve to Iran in the economic realm as well. Why should we assume that the US will be any more successful in projecting credibility toward Iran when this state becomes a nuclear state than it has been in the period before Iran crossed this line?

(Read full report)
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The bunker-buster story

Fresnozionism.org
21 March '10

British newspapers have been credibly reporting for about of week that the US has shipped 387 bunker-buster bombs to a US base on the British possession of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean.

There are at least two possible interpretations. One is that the US is planning to attack Iran (some Brits are very upset about this possibility), or at least to make a strategic move designed to show the Iranians that they mean business. Some air attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan have originated on Diego Garcia. That’s the good interpretation.

The other one is that the bombs were intended to be sent to Israel, but were diverted to Diego Garcia to prevent Israel from using them against Iran, or, worse, to punish Israel for its insouciance in building apartments in Jerusalem:

In 2008, the United States approved an Israeli request for bunker-busters capable of destroying underground facilities, including Iranian nuclear weapons sites. Officials said delivery of the weapons was held up by the administration of President Barack Obama, Middle East Newsline reported.

Since taking office, Obama has refused to approve any major Israeli requests for U.S. weapons platforms or advanced systems. Officials said this included proposed Israeli procurement of AH-64D Apache attack helicopters, refueling systems, advanced munitions and data on a stealth variant of the F-15E.

“All signs indicate that this will continue in 2010,” a congressional source familiar with the Israeli military requests said. “This is really an embargo, but nobody talks about it publicly.”

Under the plan, the U.S. military was to have stored 195 BLU-110 and 192 BLU-117 munitions in unspecified air force bases in Israel. The U.S. military uses four Israeli bases for the storage of about $400 million worth of pre-positioned equipment meant for use by either Washington or Jerusalem in any regional war…

(Read full post)
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When Bibi Meets Biden

Allison Kaplan Sommer
Pajamasmedia.com
08 March '10

As Joe Biden’s plane fueled up to head in the direction of the Middle East for today’s arrival, even the most optimistic of Israelis were viewing the U.S. vice president’s trip to Israel with skepticism — and the more pessimistic anticipated his mission with outright suspicion.

Publicly, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu waxed enthusiastic and “praised” the upcoming visit by his “personal friend of 30 years,” even as a “senior diplomatic official” (presumed to be either Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman or Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon) was quoted as angrily asking why Israel must settle for second best. President Obama, the official pointed out, seems to have no trouble showing up in person to woo Arab countries — and yet he keeps his distance from Israel.

“If the president speaks to one side, why do you send the No. 2 to speak to us? He can’t give a speech in Cairo to the Arabs, and suffice with speaking to us through videos.”

The answer isn’t complicated. In the Obama playbook, countries that are hostile to the U.S. deserve a charm offensive. Allies like Israel can be taken for granted. But to be fair, even the most supportive presidents have rarely graced Israel with their presence, unless there was a significant diplomatic achievement to take pride in. And at this moment in time, diplomatic progress has never seemed further from sight.

And so, with the possible exception of Netanyahu, Israelis weren’t exactly waiting for Biden’s arrival with bated breath. On Sunday’s news programs, news of preparations for his visit followed stories of multiple car accidents, coverage of crimes, and long discussions of the chances of Israel’s entry Ajami to win the Academy Award for best foreign-language film (with the mini-scandal that accompanied the entry after one of the directors, an Israeli Arab, declared that his “film shouldn’t represent Israel because Israel doesn’t represent me”).

When the hosts of the morning news shows finally got around to talking about U.S. envoy George Mitchell’s meeting on Saturday night with Defense Minister Ehud Barak to prepare the ground for the Biden arrival, they rolled their eyes and exclaimed, “Déjà vu!” Indeed, it seems as if Mitchell has been dropping in on a weekly basis as the latest Sisyphus of the peace process. His comings and goings have become part of the landscape.

(Read full article)
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Arabs Fear Iran As a Tidal Wave; The West Thinks It's Easily Contained by a Sand Castle

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
22 February '10

How do leading Arab forces view the U.S. and Iranian maneuverings over Tehran’s drive to get nuclear weapons, the world’s number one political and strategic crisis? Such reactions are almost always either left out of Western calculations on the Middle East or treated in a distorted manner, replaced by clichés: they only react to what the West does and they are overwhelmingly concerned about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

If treated properly, however, such primary materials are a gold mine for comprehending world views, the situation, and probable responses. Al-Sharq al-Awsat is probably the most interesting Arabic-language newspaper today. It is Saudi-owned, London-based, and the closest thing to a liberal daily. Still, though, it reflects Saudi elite viewpoints.

The newspaper’s editor, Tariq al-Homayed, in a February 18 article, sees the region heading toward war, and he is far from alone in doing so. What he says is extraordinarily important even if—especially if—one doesn’t take it literally.

In the words of the MEMRI translation:

“The notable thing is that [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad threatens Israel and the West... not with his own country's weapons but in the name of 'the resistance and the countries in the region'....

"If a war breaks out, it will be an Iranian war, and Iran will be its target... Why [then] does [Iran threaten to] attack our region and our countries? This is not our war, nor are we working [to promote it]–this war belongs only to Iran and its proxies. As for us, we will be Iran's victims whether it acquires nuclear [weapons] and whether a war breaks out [against it]..."

(Read full article)
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The Most Unethical Act: Losing a War

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary Magazine
07 February '10

(Excellent article. Y.)

Monday night, PBS’s American Experience series will broadcast a new documentary titled The Bombing of Germany, about the strategic-bombing campaign carried out against the Nazis by American forces in World War II. Coming from the liberal-leaning PBS and in an era where denunciations of American military actions — even in the “good war” against Nazi Germany — have become commonplace, it would have been no surprise if this film was yet another revisionist attempt to decry Allied tactics as immoral. This impression is reinforced by the introduction to the film on PBS’s website, which highlights the number of German civilian casualties incurred by Allied bombing and the “defining moments that led the U.S. across a moral divide” that would make it easier to drop a nuclear bomb on Japan. Indeed, the narration heard during the opening moments of The Bombing of Germany goes straight to this conclusion when it says that by the time the war ended, the bombing left “both German cities and America’s lofty ideals in ruins.”

But, fortunately, there is more to this documentary than the facile conclusion that the bombing of Germany was so immoral that it cannot be defended even in a war in which the future of civilization was at stake. By the time the 50-minute film is over, liberals expecting another trashing of America are left with some conclusions that not only reinforce the morality of American tactics during that war but also might affect the way we think about contemporary conflicts.

The story of the bombing offensive is complex. During the war, Britain’s Royal Air Force believed that the key to knocking German war industries was to burn down the cities where the factories existed. From their frame of reference, there was no moral distinction between the factories themselves and the homes of the defense workers who created the material that enabled the Nazi regime to commit the crimes against humanity that made the war a matter of life or death for the free world.

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Defining “Victory” and “Peace”: How the U.S. and Israel Reject General Sherman’s Solution and Get Blamed Any Way

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
07 Februray '10

“War,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman, “is Hell.” He knew what he was talking about. Sherman’s march through Georgia and into South Carolina at the end of the Civil War helped end the Civil War while destroying a lot of civilian homes, farms, and towns..

His strategy was to inflict such terrible punishment on the South that it would surrender faster, thus saving lives. His men did things shocking to Americans even after such a bloody conflict, burning plantations and destroying everything in their wake. Ironically, though, even Sherman's deeds have been exaggerated.

But Sherman was no mere brute. He was so depressed by the prospect of the Civil War—being among the few who understood how long and bloody it would be—that he had a nervous breakdown at its onset and tried to escape the responsibility of service that he ultimately knew would be impossible for him to avoid. Like other Western generals of his time, and almost up to the present day--but no longer--he simply believed, in his words, "I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early [that is, complete and quick] success."

After the war, Sherman became commander of the U.S. army and about 1870, regarding the Franco-Prussian War but it applies generally:

How are wars won? The preferred way is for one side to see that its own victory is impossible and that it will face much heavier costs by continuing than by surrendering or making peace. By making a deal sooner, the side that’s losing often reasons that it can get better terms.

What do you do, though, if the other side isn’t going to give up? Here’s what Sherman said about the French-German conflict but which also applies to America’s Civil War and many other conflicts as well:

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Parsi's Precedent

Backspin/Honest reporting
30 November 09

At the Huffington Post, Trita Parsi argues that the US can and should stop Israel from attacking Iranian nuclear facilities. He even cites this precedent:

On August 2, 1990, almost a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Iron Curtain divide, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Within months, the George H. W. Bush administration carefully assembled a coalition of states under the UN flag and defeated the Iraqi army and restored Kuwait's ruling family, the House of Sabah. The Bush senior administration saw particular value in ensuring that the international coalition contained numerous Arab states. But to get the Arab's to join a war alongside the US and against another Arab power, Israel needed to be kept out of the coalition.

This turned out to be a tricky issue, particularly when Saddam Hussein hurled thirty-four Scud missiles at Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, in an obvious attempt to lure Israel into the war . . . .

Just as Israeli retaliation against Iraq in 1991 would have been devastating for the US, an Israeli preventive attack against Iran today would spell disaster for US national security.

The Israeli debate over deterrence vs. undermining coalition forces was as anguished as Parsi goes on to describe. There was the added uncertainty -- which Parsi doesn't acknowledge -- of Saddam's Scuds being outfitted with chemical or biological warheads. Fortunately, Saddam Hussein didn't raise the stakes with a non-conventional attack.

Parsi expresses no concern for the threat Iranian nukes pose to Israeli national security (and Palestinian national security, for that matter).

We've seen that the Israeli public is remarkably resilient in the face of Iraqi Scuds, Palestinian Qassams and Hezbollah Katyushas. But Parsi's then-and-now comparison breaks down because air strikes on Iran would be to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

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Iran Speeds Up

John Podhoretz
Contentions/Commentary
29 November 09

Iran has announced its intention to build ten new nuclear-enrichment sites. What? How could this be? Surely the international community’s outrage at Iran’s deception, which then led last week to a really strong letter to the editor—excuse me, scolding from the International Atomic Weapons Agency—was going to teach the Persians a thing or two!

It would seem logical to assume the purpose of these multiple sites is to make a successful military strike to downgrade or destroy Iran’s nuclear bomb-making capacity difficult to the point of impossibility. It would be hard enough for Israel or the United States to stage a complex series of simultaneous surprise aerial bombings against four locations; from four to fourteen would certainly be beyond Israel’s capacity and would significantly strain our own.

Remember when everybody was saying, including in the Democratic primary for president, that it would be unacceptable for Iran to get the bomb? Remember when President Bush said those who allowed Iran to get the bomb would enjoy the same reputation in the annals of history as the Western leaders at Munich?