My beliefs on teaching in a nutshell:
Thursday, April 29, 2010 - 4:05 PM 
"When your adversary is making a fool of himself, get out of the way." So said Pat Buchannan last year in response to conservative hawks pushing for U.S. intervention in the wake of Iran's controversial Presidential election. At the time, those words made a lot of sense. Better for the U.S. to not give the Iranian government a handhold as it descended into infamy by making itself the focus of attention. Buchanan's advice could just as easily apply to the now-urgent question of U.S. economic sanctions. As a congressional conference committee begins to put the finishing touches on an Iran sanctions package, it's worth considering the evidence that the biggest threat to the Iranian economy is actually the regime itself. Economic sanctions might actually rescue the regime from its own failings, and produce the opposite of what their backers expect.
Iran's economy may not be on life-support, but it is in pretty terrible shape. While the statistics reported by the Iranian government paint a rosy picture, the reality is quite different. Iran's real per capita growth rate was 3.5 percent per annum from 2002-2009, but this period of growth coincided with a period of a steady rise in oil prices, suggesting the "government has not been very successful in achieving diversification of the economy." Inflation is also on the rise, reaching 10.4 percent in April. Though that's much lower than the annual rate of 30 percent from last year, the current government has consistently struggled to contain rising inflation (which is often attributed to President Ahmadinejad's redistribution of oil revenues). Actual inflation may be much higher. Looking at prices in downtown Tehran, the real number might be hovering around 20 percent.
If that wasn't bad enough, Iran continues to struggle with pronounced inequality. Virginia Tech Economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani notes that between 2005 and 2007, at a time when Iran was experiencing respectable economic growth, "the income of the top 20 percent rose more than four times as fast as that of the bottom quintile." Here again, rising oil prices appear to have had a negative effect. "The influx of oil revenues, which trickle down Iran's unequal structure of access to power and position, always seems to worsen the distribution of income," writes Salehi-Isfahani.
Iran's economic circumstances are sometimes attributed to sanctions, and sanctions proponents might be tempted to seize on the weakness of the Iranian economy as evidence that punitive measures are working to undermine the foundations of the regime's support. But this leaves out the role that Iran's own leadership has played in bringing the country's economy to such abysmal straights. Estimates are that the Iranian regime is involved, either directly or indirectly, in 70 percent of the country's economy. Former minister of commerce, minister of finance, and ambassador-at-large in Iran, Jahangir Amuzegar, slams the Ahmadinejad administration for having "established a dysfunctional economic environment" and for "worsening the business climate."
President Ahmadinejad once supported large consumer subsidies, which had been a significant contributing factor to rising inflation. Now, recognizing that his own policies have come to roost, Ahmadinejad has proposed a $40 billion cut in state subsidies. But if done improperly, such a cut could result in sky-rocketing prices in Iran's subsidy dependent energy sector. Iran's currency is also believed to be kept at artificially high levels, increasing imports to what Amuzegar calls "unprecedented levels," with attendant effects on Iran's domestic producers.
Skeptics could charge that Iran's oil and natural gas sectors ensure the regime's survival, even as the government's leadership does fundamental damage to the Iranian economy. However, as PFC Energy Partner and Gulf energy analyst Fareed Mohamedi has observed, the picture of the country's energy sector is quite mixed. Iran's oil supply is steadily diminishing. Perhaps more importantly, its ability to influence world oil markets may be hemmed in by growing production by non-OPEC countries, particularly Iraq. In Iran's vaunted natural gas industry, the picture also remains unclear. Mohamedi observed that worldwide, natural gas production, exploration, and technological innovation will likely increase in the years ahead, possibly reducing Iran's clout in that area as well. As is the case with the economy writ large, Iran's leaders have behaved irresponsibly, failing to pursue the diversification necessary in case of a decline in energy prices.
So where do the sanctions being considered by congress fit in with all this? Congress's sanctions are designed to place an economic stranglehold on Iran, in particular, by exploiting what is thought to be an Iranian dependence on imported refined petroleum. As petroleum costs rise, Iran will begin to feel the pinch. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of such sanctions doesn't quite match the hype. Gal Luft has cautioned that Iran's petroleum dependence is not what it appears. Thanks to combination of investments in domestic refinery infrastructure, pursuit of energy alternatives and effective rationing schemes, Iran is projected to be gasoline self-sufficient by 2012. This suggests that while the sanctions up for consideration may have a short-term effect, over the medium and long-term, the squeeze put on the Iranian economy is likely to be negligible. But the regime is sure to blame its economic woes on western sanctions in order to distract from its own mismanagement.
The overall picture is one of an Iranian economy that is heavily straight jacketed already. The current government is largely to blame. Based on the regime's track record of incompetence and the consequences of that incompetence for the Iranian economy, the U.S. would be wise to take a step back, allowing Iran to continue on its present course. As its position grows weaker, the U.S. position would grow stronger, shoring up American diplomatic leverage or at least making Iran easier to contain or deter. The U.S. would also sidestep accusations that its policies had contributed further hardship to the Iranian people. Congress is searching for the most effective means to weaken the Iranian economy; the best approach may be for it to do nothing at all
On October 18, 1991, against long odds and in front of an incredulous press corps, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin announced that Arabs and Israelis were being invited to attend a peace conference in Madrid.
Standing in the back of the hall at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that day, I marveled at what America had accomplished. In 18 months, roughly the time it took Henry Kissinger to negotiate three Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements and Jimmy Carter to broker an Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the United States had fought a short, successful war -- the best kind -- and pushed Iraq's Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And America was now well-positioned to bring Arabs and Israelis across the diplomatic finish line.
Or so I thought.
Baker, who lowballed everything, was characteristically cautious. "Boys," he told a few of us aides in his suite after the news conference, "if you want to get off the train, now might be a good time because it could all be downhill from here." But I wasn't listening. America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power to make peace. I'd become a believer.
I'm not anymore.
Etymologists tell us that the word "religion" may come from the Latin root religare, meaning to adhere or bind. It's a wonderful derivation. In both its secular and religious manifestations, faith is alluring and seductive precisely because it's driven by propositions that bind or adhere the believer to a compelling set of ideas that satisfy rationally or spiritually, but always obligate.
And so it has been and remains with America's commitment to Arab-Israeli peacemaking over the past 40 years, and certainly since the October 1973 war gave birth to serious U.S. diplomacy and the phrase "peace process" (the honor of authorship likely goes to a brilliant veteran State Department Middle East hand, Harold Saunders, who saw the term appropriated by Kissinger early in his shuttles). Since then, the U.S. approach has come to rest on an almost unbreakable triangle of assumptions -- articles of faith, really. By the 1990s, these tenets made up a sort of peace-process religion, a reverential logic chain that compelled most U.S. presidents to involve themselves seriously in the Arab-Israeli issue. Barack Obama is the latest convert, and by all accounts he too became a zealous believer, vowing within days of his inauguration "to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as Israel and its Arab neighbors."
Like all religions, the peace process has developed a dogmatic creed, with immutable first principles. Over the last two decades, I wrote them hundreds of times to my bosses in the upper echelons of the State Department and the White House; they were a catechism we all could recite by heart. First, pursuit of a comprehensive peace was a core, if not the core, U.S. interest in the region, and achieving it offered the only sure way to protect U.S. interests; second, peace could be achieved, but only through a serious negotiating process based on trading land for peace; and third, only America could help the Arabs and Israelis bring that peace to fruition.
As befitting a religious doctrine, there was little nuance. And while not everyone became a convert (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush willfully pursued other Middle East priorities, though each would succumb at one point, if only with initiatives that reflected, to their critics, varying degrees of too little, too late), the exceptions have mostly proved the rule. The iron triangle that drove Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and now Barack Obama to accord the Arab-Israeli issue such high priority has turned out to be both durable and bipartisan. Embraced by the high priests of the national security temple, including State Department veterans like myself, intelligence analysts, and most U.S. foreign-policy mandarins outside government, these tenets endured and prospered even while the realities on which they were based had begun to change. If this wasn't the definition of real faith, one wonders what was.
That Obama, burdened by two wars elsewhere and the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, came out louder, harder, and faster on the Arab-Israeli issue than any of his predecessors was a remarkable testament to just how enduring that faith had become -- a faith he very publicly proclaimed while personally presiding over the announcement of George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy in an orchestrated ceremony at the State Department two days after his swearing-in.
At first, it seemed that Obama, the poster president for America's engagement with the world, had found a cause uniquely suited to his view of diplomacy, one whose importance had been heightened by his predecessor's neglect of the issue and the Arab and Muslim attachment to it. Even before the Gaza war exploded three weeks prior to his inauguration, Obama had been bombarded by experts sagely urging a renewed focus on Middle East peace as a way to regain American prestige and credibility after the trauma of the Bush years. The new president soon hit the Arab media running as a kind of empathizer-in-chief, ratcheting up expectations even as Israelis increasingly found him tone-deaf to their needs.
Obama surrounded himself with key figures, such as chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who believed deeply in the peace religion. He named as his chief peacemaker Mitchell, a man with real stature and negotiating experience; and his national security advisor is James L. Jones, himself a former Middle East envoy who made the stunning pronouncement last year: "If there was one problem that I would recommend to the president" to solve, "this would be it."
All these veteran leaders were not only believers, but had extra reason to encourage a tougher line toward Israel; they had seen the Benjamin Netanyahu movie before and were determined not to let their chance at Middle East peace end the same way. In his first turn as prime minister in the 1990s, the brash hard-liner Netanyahu had driven Bill Clinton crazy. (I remember being briefed on their first meeting in 1996, after which the president growled: "Who's the fucking superpower here?") Confronted with Netanyahu again, Obama and his team needed no encouragement to talk tough on the growing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, an issue that experts inside and outside government were clamoring for Obama to raise as the first step in his renewed push for peace.
At the time, it looked to be a magical convergence of leader and moment: The Arab-Israeli issue seemed perfectly suited to Obama's transformational objectives and his transactional style. If Obama wanted to begin "remaking America," why not try to remake the troubled politics of peace, too? After all, this was the engagement president, who believed deeply in the power of negotiations.
Obama was not alone in his belief, of course. The peace-process creed has endured so long because to a large degree it has made sense and accorded with U.S. interests. The question is, does it still? Does the old thinking about peacemaking apply to new realities? Is the Arab-Israeli conflict still the core issue? And after two decades of inflated hopes followed by violence and terror, and now by directionless stagnation, can we still believe that negotiations will deliver?
Sadly, the answers to these questions seem to be all too obvious these days. And Obama's first 15 months as a disciple of the old creed tells you why. In 2009, the president pushed the Israelis, the Arabs, and the Palestinians to get negotiations going and was rebuffed by all three. He later told Time magazine ruefully that "we overestimated our ability to persuade." In March of this year, provoked by the Netanyahu government's incomprehensible announcement of new housing units in East Jerusalem smack in the middle of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel, Obama pushed the Israelis again, harder this time, though it seems without much of a strategy to put the crisis to good use.
Obama is clearly determined not to take no for an answer. Fresh from his victory on health care, he's King of the World again and in no mood to let the King of Israel frustrate his plans. This willfulness is impressive, and it makes it even more imperative now that he's engaged in the faith to give that old-time religion a fresh look, based not just on what's possible but on what's probable. We don't have the right to abandon hope, but we do have the responsibility to let go of, or at least temper, our illusions.
I can't tell you how many times in the past 20 years, as an intelligence analyst, policy planner, and negotiator, I wrote memos to Very Important People arguing the centrality of the Arab-Israeli issue and why the United States needed to fix it. Long before I arrived at the State Department in 1978, my predecessors had made all the same arguments. An unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict would trigger ruinous war, increase Soviet influence, weaken Arab moderates, strengthen Arab radicals, jeopardize access to Middle East oil, and generally undermine U.S. influence from Rabat to Karachi.
From the 1940s through the 1980s, the power with which the Palestinian issue resonated in the Arab world did take a toll on American prestige and influence. Still, even back then the hand-wringing and dire predictions in my Cassandra-like memos were overstated. I once warned ominously -- and incorrectly -- that we'd have nonstop Palestinian terrorist attacks in the United States if we didn't move on the issue. During those same years, the United States managed to advance all of its core interests in the Middle East: It contained the Soviets; strengthened ties to Israel and such key Arab states as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia; maintained access to Arab oil; and yes, even emerged in the years after the October 1973 war as the key broker in Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
Today, I couldn't write those same memos or anything like them with a clear conscience or a straight face. Although many experts' beliefs haven't changed, the region has, and dramatically, becoming nastier and more complex. U.S. priorities and interests, too, have changed. The notion that there's a single or simple fix to protecting those interests, let alone that Arab-Israeli peace would, like some magic potion, bullet, or elixir, make it all better, is just flat wrong. In a broken, angry region with so many problems -- from stagnant, inequitable economies to extractive and authoritarian governments that abuse human rights and deny rule of law, to a popular culture mired in conspiracy and denial -- it stretches the bounds of credulity to the breaking point to argue that settling the Arab-Israeli conflict is the most critical issue, or that its resolution would somehow guarantee Middle East stability.
The unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict is still a big problem for America and its friends: It stokes a white-hot anger toward the United States, has already demonstrated the danger of confrontation and war (see Lebanon, 2006; Gaza, 2008), and confronts Israel with a demographic nightmare. But three other issues, at least, have emerged to compete for center stage, and they might prove far more telling about the fate of U.S. influence, power, and security than the ongoing story of what I've come to call the much-too-promised land.
First, there are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of Americans are in harm's way and are likely to be for some time to come. Add to the mix the dangerous situation in Pakistan, and you see volatility, threat, and consequences that go well beyond Palestine. Second, though U.S. foreign policy can't be held hostage to the war on terror (or whatever it's now called), the 9/11 attacks were a fundamental turning point for an America that had always felt secure within its borders. And finally there's Iran, whose nuclear aspirations are clearly a more urgent U.S. priority than Palestine. Should sanctions and/or diplomacy fail, the default position -- military action by Israel or even the United States -- can't be ruled out, with galactic consequences for the region and the world. In any event, it's hard to imagine Netanyahu making any big decisions on the peace process until there's much more clarity on what he and most Israelis regard as the existential threat of an Iran with a bomb.
As Obama surely reckoned, moving fast on Arab-Israeli peacemaking would help the United States deal with these issues. But that linkage wasn't compelling when Bush used it to suggest that victory in Iraq would make the Arab-Israeli conflict easier to resolve; it's not compelling now as an exit strategy from Iraq either, as if engaging in Arab-Israeli diplomacy will make the potential mess we could leave behind in Iraq easier for the Arabs to swallow. Nor can the Arab-Israeli issue be used effectively to mobilize Arabs against Iran, because the United States could never do enough diplomatically (or soon enough) to have it make much of a difference. Finally, linking the United States' willingness to help the Israelis with Iran to their willingness to make concessions on Jerusalem and borders isn't much of a policy either. If anything, it risks the United States losing its leverage with Israel on the Iranian issue and raising the odds that Israel would act alone.
Surely the United States can do more than one thing at once, the foreign-policy equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time. But America must also do multiple things well. Obama can't have an inch-deep and mile-wide approach in which he commits to everything without a cruel and unforgiving assessment of what's really possible and what's not. Nor can the United States afford another high-profile failure based on what a brilliant and committed Clinton told us shortly before we went to Camp David: "Guys, trying and failing is a lot better than not trying at all." This is an appropriate slogan for a high school football team; it's not a substitute for a well-thought-out strategy for the world's greatest power. Obama already has made a commitment to the American people to end two wars, keep them safe from attack at home, and stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, not to mention tackling the challenges of a severe recession and growing deficit.
Governing is about choosing; it's about setting priorities, managing your politics, thinking strategically, picking your spots, and looking for genuine opportunities that can be exploited -- not tilting at windmills. And these days, Arab-Israeli peacemaking is a pretty big windmill.
Even if you could make the case for the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict, could you make peace?
Americans are optimists. Our idealism, pragmatism, and belief in the primacy of the individual convince us that the world can be made a better place. Unlike many countries that grapple with existential questions of political identity and physical survival, Americans today don't live on the knife's edge or hold (whatever our Puritan or Calvinist beginnings) a dark deterministic view of human nature.
All this drives our conviction that talking is better than shooting. Rodney King-like, we believe that if people would only sit down and discuss their differences rationally and compromise, a way might be found to accommodate conflicting views. After all, America is the big tent under which so many religious, political, and ethnic groups have managed to coexist, remarkably amicably. Perhaps this spirit is best embodied by Obama's Mideast envoy George Mitchell, who once told me that any conflict created by human beings could be resolved by them. Mitchell is truly convinced that solutions can be found and that serious diplomacy is what you do until that time comes. But he ended his first foray into Arab-Israeli diplomacy with three emphatic no's: from Israel on a comprehensive settlement freeze, from Saudi Arabia on partial normalization, and from the Palestinians on returning to negotiations.
Much of our earlier experience in the tough world of Arab-Israeli peacemaking seemed to bear out Mitchell's initial conviction. In the time from the 1973 war to 1991, two Republican secretaries of state (Kissinger and Baker) and one Democratic president (Carter) succeeded in hammering out a series of Arab-Israeli agreements that established America's reputation as an effective, even honest, broker -- seeming to validate the simple proposition that negotiations can work.
If there was anyone who represented the faith in that proposition, it was me. I recall giving a talk in Jerusalem in the fall of 1998, after Clinton had brokered the Wye River accords (never implemented), in which I argued that Arab-Israeli negotiations and the move toward peace were now irreversible. That remark, one of the great howlers of the decade, prompted a note from Efraim Halevy, then Israel's deputy Mossad chief, rightly questioning my logic, and though Halevy was too polite to say it in his note, my judgment as well. Still I believed.
And I continued to do so, all the way through the 1990s, the only decade in the last half of the 20th century in which there was no major Arab-Israeli war. Instead, this was the decade of the Madrid conference, the Oslo accords, the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, regional accords on economic issues, and a historic bid in the final year of the Clinton administration to negotiate peace agreements between Israel, Syria, and the Palestinians. But for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the Arab, Palestinian, Israeli (and American) unwillingness to recognize what price each side would have to pay to achieve those agreements, the decade ended badly, leaving the pursuit of peace bloody, battered, and broken. Perhaps the most serious casualty was the loss of hope that negotiations could actually get the Arabs and Israelis what they wanted.
And that has been the story line ever since: more process than peace.
Looking ahead, that process looks much, much tougher -- and peace more and more elusive -- for three reasons.
First, Arab-Israeli peacemaking is politically risky and life-threatening. Consider the murders of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At Camp David, I heard Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat say at least three times, "You Americans will not walk behind my coffin." Leaders take risks only when prospects of pain and gain compel them to do so. Today's Middle East leaders -- Israel's Netanyahu, Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and Palestine's Mahmoud Abbas -- aren't suicidal. It was Netanyahu, after all, who once told me: "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."
Second, big decisions require strong leaders -- think Jordan's King Hussein or Israel's Menachem Begin -- because the issues on the table cut to the core of their political and religious identity and physical survival. This requires leaders with the legitimacy, authority, and command of their politics to make a deal stick. But the current crop are more prisoners of their constituencies than masters of them: Netanyahu presides over a divided coalition and a country without consensus on what price Israel will pay for agreements with Palestinians and Syria; Abbas is part of a broken Palestinian national movement and shares control over Palestine's guns, authority, and legitimacy with Hamas. It's hard to see how either can marshal the will and authority to make big decisions.
Third, even with strong leaders, you still need a project that doesn't exceed the carrying capacity of either side. In the past, U.S. diplomacy succeeded because the post-1973-war disengagement agreements, a separate Egypt-Israel accord, and a three-day peace conference at Madrid aligned with each side's capabilities. Today, issues such as Jerusalem (as a capital of two states), borders (based on June 1967 lines), and refugees (rights, return, and compensation) present gigantic political and security challenges for Arabs and Israelis. One accord will be hard enough. The prospect of negotiating a comprehensive peace; concluding three agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, between Israel and Syria, and between Israel and Lebanon; dismantling settlements in the Golan Heights and West Bank; and withdrawing to borders based on June 1967 lines seems even more fantastical.
Bottom line: Negotiations can work, but both Arabs and Israelis (and American leaders) need to be willing and able to pay the price. And they are not.
Under these circumstances, the refrain from many quarters is that America must save the day. If the Arabs and Israelis are too weak or recalcitrant, then the United States must support and/or push them to make the deal.
Such forceful U.S. diplomacy succeeded in the past. Indeed, it's a stunning paradox that with the exception of the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, every other successful accord came not out of direct negotiations, but as a result of U.S. mediation. The Oslo accords, often touted as the miracle produced by direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians, proved to be a spectacular failure. All that's missing now, the argument goes, is the absence of American will.
I understand the logic of this view, and having spent more than 20 years in frustrating talks with the Arabs and Israelis, I can also see how it can be emotionally satisfying. But because I know a thing or two about failure and don't want to see the United States fail (yet again), I simply don't buy the argument. If I genuinely believed America could impose and deliver a solution through tough forceful diplomacy, I'd be more sympathetic -- but I don't. And here's why:
Ownership: Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, said it best: In the history of the world, no one ever washed a rental car. We care only about what we own. Unless the Arabs and Israelis want political agreements and peace and can invest enough in them to give them a chance to succeed, we certainly can't. The broader Middle East is littered with the remains of great powers that wrongly believed they could impose their will on small tribes. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran … need I continue? Small tribes will always be meaner, tougher, and longer-winded than U.S. diplomats because it's their neighborhood and their survival; they will always have a greater stake in the outcome of their struggle than the great power thousands of miles away with many other things to do. You want to see failure? Take a whack at trying to force Israelis and Palestinians to accept an American solution on Jerusalem.
The negotiator's mystique: It's gone, at least for now. When Americans succeeded in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, it was because they were respected, admired, even feared. U.S. power and influence were taken seriously. Today, much of the magic is gone: We are overextended, diminished, bogged down. Again Summers: Can the world's biggest borrower continue to be the world's greatest power? Our friends worry about our reliability; our adversaries, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, believe they can outwait and outmaneuver us. Nor does there appear much cost or consequence to saying no to the superpower. After Obama and Mitchell's fruitless first year, I worry that the mediator's mystique of a Kissinger or a Baker, or the willfulness and driving force of a Carter, won't return easily.
Domestic politics: The pro-Israel community in the United States has a powerful voice, primarily in influencing congressional sentiment and initiatives (assistance to Israel in particular), but it does not have a veto over U.S. foreign policy. Lobbies lobby; that's the American way, for better or worse. Presidents are supposed to lead. And when they do, with a real strategy that's in America's national interests, they trump domestic politics. Still, domestic politics constrain, particularly when a president is perceived to be weak or otherwise occupied. This president has been battered of late, and his party is likely to face significant losses in the 2010 midterm elections. Should there be a serious chance for a breakthrough in the peace process, he'll go for it. But is it smart to risk trying to manufacture one? The last thing Obama needs now is an ongoing fight with the Israelis and their supporters, or worse, a major foreign-policy failure.
U.S.-Israeli relations: America is Israel's best friend and must continue to be. Shared values are at the core of the relationship, and our intimacy with Israel gives us leverage and credibility in peacemaking when we use it correctly. But this special relationship with the Israelis, which can serve U.S. interests, has become an exclusive one that does not. We've lost the capacity to be independent of Israel, to be honest with it when it does things we don't like, to impose accountability, and to adopt positions in a negotiation that might depart from Israel's. It's tough to be a credible mediator with such handicaps.
Fighting with Israel is an occupational reality. It's part of the mediator's job description. Every U.S. president or secretary of state who succeeded (and some who didn't) had dust-ups, some serious, with Israel. (Remember how Bush 41 and Baker used housing loan guarantees? In 1991, the United States denied Israel billions in credit to borrow at reduced interest rates because of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's determination to build settlements.) But the fight must produce something of value -- like the Madrid conference -- that not only makes the United States look good but significantly advances the negotiations. In short, we need a strategy that stands a chance of working. Otherwise, why would any U.S. president want to hammer a close ally with a strong domestic constituency?
And this was the problem with Obama's tough talk to Israel on settlements. Not only was the goal he laid out -- a settlements freeze including natural growth -- unattainable, but it wasn't part of a broader strategy whose dividends would have made the fight worthwhile. Going after the Israelis piecemeal on settlements to please the Arabs or to make ourselves feel better won't work unless we have a way of achieving a breakthrough. That a tough-talking Obama ended up backing down last year when Netanyahu said no to a comprehensive freeze tells you why.
And that remains the president's challenge after the Biden brouhaha over housing units in East Jerusalem. In the spring of 2010 we're nowhere near a breakthough, and yet we're in the middle of a major rift with the Israelis. Unless we achieve a big concession, we will be perceived to have backed down again. And even if the president manages to extract something on Jerusalem, the chances that Netanyahu will be able to make a far greater move on a core issue, such as borders, will be much reduced. Unless the president is trying to get rid of Netanyahu (and produce a new coalition), he'll have no choice but to find a way to cooperate with him.
So now Obama faces a conundrum. A brilliant, empathetic president, with a Nobel Peace Prize to boot, has embraced the iron triangle and made America the focal point of action and responsibility for the Arab-Israeli issue at a time when the country may be least able to do much about it.
Trying to compensate for the absence of urgency, will, and leadership among Arabs and Israelis by inserting your own has always been a tough assignment. The painful truth is that faith in America's capacity to fix the Arab-Israeli issue has always been overrated. It's certainly no coincidence that every breakthrough from the Egypt-Israel treaty to the Oslo accords to the Israel-Jordan peace agreement came initially as a consequence of secret meetings about which the United States was the last to know. Only then, once there was local ownership or some regional crisis that the United States could exploit, were we able to move things forward.
Right now, America has neither the opportunity nor frankly the balls to do truly big things on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Fortuna might still rescue the president. The mullahcracy in Tehran might implode. The Syrians and Israelis might reach out to one another secretly, or perhaps a violent confrontation will flare up to break the impasse.
But without a tectonic plate shifting somewhere, it's going to be tough to re-create the good old days when bold and heroic Arab and Israeli leaders strode the stage of history, together with Americans, willing and able to do serious peacemaking.
I remember attending Rabin's funeral in 1995 in Jerusalem and trying to convince myself that America must and could save the peace process that had been so badly undermined by his assassination. I'm not a declinist. I still believe in the power of American diplomacy when it's tough, smart, and fair. But the enthusiasm, fervor, and passion have given way to a much more sober view of what's possible. Failure can do that.
The believers need to re-examine their faith, especially at a moment when America is so stretched and overextended. The United States needs to do what it can, including working with Israelis and Palestinians on negotiating core final-status issues (particularly on borders, where the gaps are narrowest), helping Palestinians develop their institutions, getting the Israelis to assist by allowing Palestinians to breathe economically and expand their authority, and keeping Gaza calm, even as it tries to relieve the desperation and sense of siege through economic assistance. But America should also be aware of what it cannot do, as much as what it can.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who probably didn't know much about the Middle East, said it best: "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, then in half the creeds." And maybe, if that leads to more realistic thinking when it comes to America's view of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, that's not such a bad thing.
By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 8, 2010; 9:31 AM
PRAGUE -- President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a sweeping new arms reduction pact Thursday that pledges to reduce the stockpile of deployed, strategic nuclear weapons in both countries and commits the old Cold War adversaries to new procedures to verify which weapons each country possesses.
Obama arrived in this historic city Thursday morning to formalize a step toward the vision he laid out here a year ago -- of a world without nuclear weapons.
The leaders met privately for about an hour before signing the pact in a ceremony hosted by the Czechs and full of symbolism. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was among the many dignitaries looking on as Obama and Medvedev began signing, at one point exchanging amused glances as if to say, "This isn't so hard."
"Together, we have stopped the drift, and proven the benefits of cooperation," Obama said in remarks a short time later. ". . . This day demonstrates the determination of the United States and Russia -- the two nations that hold over 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons -- to pursue responsible global leadership."
U.S. officials said the full treaty document, just now finished after months of negotiation, would be posted on the Internet later Thursday. The White House also announced that Medvedev would visit the United States for a summit this summer.
The treaty, called New START, imposes new limits on ready-to-use, long-range nuclear weapons and pledges to reduce the two biggest nuclear arsenals on the globe. Both countries will be limited to 1,550 ready-to-use, long-range nuclear weapons in addition to the other parts of their nuclear stockpile.
Arms control advocates have expressed disappointment in the treaty, saying it does not go far enough in reducing the dangerous weapons on both sides. Some conservatives have raised questions about the treaty's impact on the American nuclear deterrent.
But experts from the right and the left agree the treaty extends a verification plan that has allowed the world's two nuclear giants to maintain stability that has existed for the past 20 years.
In the United States, attention will soon turn to the Senate, where the White House is pushing for ratification of the pact by the end of 2010.
In a briefing on Air Force One en route to Prague, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs expressed optimism that the Senate will act despite the partisan rancor of the past year.
"We are hopeful that reducing the threat of nuclear weapons remains a priority for both parties," Gibbs said. White House officials said they will begin formally briefing senators Thursday.
Senior U.S. officials said Obama's trip to Prague is designed to set the stage for further efforts by the president to argue for reductions in the spread of nuclear weapons around the globe.
The treaty's new limits on Russian and American nuclear weapons are important in their own right, officials said, but are also crucial in restoring a "moral legitimacy" to both countries as they seek to restrain other nations from becoming nuclear powers.
"The signing of the new treaty is part of an overall strategy to put us in a strong political position to mobilize support," said one top White House adviser. "By restoring our moral legitimacy it puts us in a much stronger position."
White House aides said the treaty demonstrates that both countries have taken a "serious step" toward nuclear disarmament, and predicted in advance that the conversation would quickly shift to efforts by the world community to deal with Iranian and Korean nuclear ambitions.
"All of that will come to a head in May," when the U.S. hosts a conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty in New York, said one senior official. "Everybody understands that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. The question is whether the countries in the NPT and the United Nations will be acting together to stop Iran."
On the flight to Prague, Gibbs told reporters that the questions of sanctions on Iran would be a key part of the discussions, but said that both presidents would defer to the multilateral negotiations on that issue underway in New York.
"I don't expect any pronouncements today coming out of this meeting," Gibbs said before it started.
As they prepared for Thursday's signing ceremonies at the Prague Castle, Obama aides made clear that they viewed the president's meetings with Medvedev as a broader opportunity to discuss the improving relationship between the two countries.
Both countries sent full delegations to the Czech Republic, a sign that U.S. officials said reflects the desire for a wide-ranging discussion between the two leaders. One top Obama aide said the two presidents intended to discuss economic issues that have been largely overshadowed by months of nuclear talks.
"This is a full-blown summit," said one White House official, who predicted that Obama would raise issues including climate change, European security, missile defense issues and the conflict in Afghanistan.
"We're going to have a very substantive meeting with President Medvedev," the official said. "This is not just a relationship about arms control."
Obama advisers said the meeting will begin to lay the groundwork for a visit to the United States by Medvedev this summer -- a reciprocal visit for Obama's trip to Moscow last July.
U.S. aides are eager to portray the American-Russian relationship as vastly improved, an achievement they attribute to Obama's decision to "reset" relations when the two leaders first met in London last April.
"Let's remember where U.S.-Russian relations were when we took office," one top adviser said. "We were at one of the lowest points in a quarter-century. We're only now 15 months from that and we're in a different kind of relationship."
The fire of resentment and anger that has engulfed the Hazara districts can spread to other parts of the country, especially Southern Punjab, unless political parties do not rise above petty interests. It is clear that the PML-Q stoked the protests in Abbottabad, although absolute blame cannot be apportioned on them alone. After suffering electoral defeat in the 2008 elections PML-Q leaders have been groping for any opportunity that can resuscitate their political fortunes.
But apart from a dismal showing at the ballot the party has suffered from internal divisions leading to splinter groups, which have also been at a loss to find their desired political space. Renaming the NWFP has provided the party with a much-needed opportunity and several politicians belonging to Haripur and Abbottabad feel that they can now crawl out of political wilderness. Resentment in Hazara over renaming the province is not new. Such demands have been voiced in the past and more recently after the announcement of the Gilgit-Baltistan package. Latent anger already existed, waiting to be tapped.
The PML-N, which has traditionally been strong in these districts, exhibited its characteristic equivocation over the issue before caving in to the demands of political expediency. It failed to recognise the grass-root sentiments of the people of Hazara. PML-Q politicians, on the other hand, tried too hard. And the dynamics of the protests changed completely. The ANP, which has championed the cause of ‘Pakhtunkhwa’, acted with indifference and arrogance. Its ministers, sitting in Peshawar, thought that the tide of emotions would subside and police high-handedness would quell the unrest. The loss of six lives should be a learning lesson for all sides.
The damage is extensive: hundreds have been injured, and emotions run high, clouding reason and restraint.Protests in the country are turning violent in an alarming way. Violence should not take precedence over dialogue. The sense of neglect and depravation is pervasive in parts of Punjab and politicians in southern Punjab are already saying that the call for a Seraiki province will be the vote-getter in the next elections. Such demands can emanate not just from Punjab. Several other parts of the country, be they in Sindh or Balochistan, remain volatile. Political violence can further exacerbate the fissures that already exist within the country.
Politicians should have demonstrated more vision while going through the process of passing the 18th amendment bill through parliament. The haste was perhaps unwarranted. There is also need for a debate on the demands and futility of carving out more provinces from the existing federal structure. A lack of such informed debate over renaming the restive northwestern province has already caused unfortunate and avoidable damage.
