There Is No Plan

Lincoln, eat your heart out.

Among Thespians quoting Macbeth is seen as tempting the fates, but I hope they hold off from bringing me bad luck, because there really is no better way of describing the quintessential Obama than to borrow from the Bard.

Obama clearly loves the idea of being an orator. He stands at the podium, poised, easy, modulated, with a careful cadence to match his apparently oracular wisdom. There really is nobody around that’s better than Barack at looking the part. But it’s a con job. He seems so good at soaring rhetoric, he fools most of us that he is actually that good.

He isn’t.

His speeches are grab bags of ideas guaranteed to address every angle of every situation, the pros the cons, the acceptable, and even, flirtingly, the unacceptable. They please everyone and no-one, are both bold and conservative. And the result is that when the speeches are all added up, nobody really knows what the man has said, and thus begins the – to quote one pundit’s apt response to the recent Middle East speech – talmudic parsing of every word.

In the current round of tea-leaf sorting that’s going on over Obama’s State Department speech, many people are under the mistaken impression that he signalled a sea-change in US Middle Eastern policy, drawing together the strands of US policy up until now haphazardly expressed in the so-called “Arab Spring”.  It’s not true. Nothing has changed about US policy. It’s still the same as it was in Condi Rice’s State Department, an unseemly, and ill-coordinated compote of neo-conservative wishful thinking on the one hand, with Bismarckian realpolitik on the other. And with these two being essentially exclusive in concept, and message, we’re in the same old hot mess we’ve been in for a decade. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a whirlwind in the Middle East since the turn of the year.  Dictators toppled, others wobbled, others definitely off their appetites. There’s been a profound ‘decolonization’ of the Arab World, to the point where we can hardly talk of an “Arab World” at all. The fragmentation of the historical legacy of Western control of these disparate collections of people, most Muslim, many not is in full flow. There are and will be many changes, and the history of profound stagnation might alter for better and perhaps for worse.

Among the many truths that is emerging is this, Palestinians can no longer depend on the same friends they once had. In many respects, in Syria, Jordan, the Emirates, and in Saudi Arabia, a new-found urgency to remedy the injustices of their own populations means that the Palestinian cause isn’t quite so useful as a means of social control anymore. The Egyptian transitional government’s brokering of ‘peace’ between Fatah and Hamas, is an apparent exception, but even that is more about jockeying for domestic points with a restive Egyptian population.

Fatah and Hamas realize that without attempting to unify they can never hope to make any headway against an economically and militarily strong Israeli state that has been bolstered by the chaos outside their borders. This at a time when Fatah has made it clear it’s focused on a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian sovereign state. Ramallah knows that the world will not look kindly on the creation of that state unless the orphan status of Gaza is taken into account. Is Gaza to be a part of it or not? And if not, what will its status be. Therefore, in order to declare that state, Gaza must be part of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Iran nukes out. Palestinian State in. No problem.

Struggling with a Middle-East Peace Process that seems to have bogged down in a matter of months, President Obama is probably thinking he needs Iran’s nuclear ambitions like a he needs a Republican filibuster.

But looking a little deeper, it’s possible that Iranian nukes and creating a Palestinian state could be connected, and each helps the other problem go away.

How come?

We’re told that President Obama is a chess grandmaster when everyone else is still getting a handle on checkers. So let’s get some moves going and find out.

There’s no chance an Iranian nuke could be lobbed at the USA, but it’s totally unacceptable to both Israel and Saudi Arabia that Iran gets to nuclear “breakout”.

Neither of these countries has a chance of knocking out Iran’s nuclear facilities alone.

The Saudis are militarily weak and let other people do their dirty work.

Israel acts belligerently, but would have to overfly US controlled airspace to strike Iran, at maximum range, against advanced surface-to-air missile systems, and against hardened underground targets. It’s a stretch that they’d do anything more than enrage the Arab world, and make us Great Satan all over again. People try to suggest that Israel could do the job on Iran just like they did on Saddam’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. But Osirak is a first-grade spelling test next to attacking Iran’s hardened bunkers.

The only nation that can stop Iran from reaching nuclear break-out is the USA. From our bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and other long-range bases, the US could bring to bear overwhelming air and naval power, to protect air-delivered special forces that could knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities and then get the hell out of Dodge when the job’s complete.

Are we going to reach that point? It’s not unlikely, it’s probable. Read the rest of this entry »

how can we help them? by being bold and brave.

“I don’t accept the term “Jewish Lobby”,  tweeted William Daroff, Vice President for Public Policy at the United Jewish Communties. The American Jewish community is incredibly powerful, economically, and politically, but wisely doesn’t want that power to be categorized in easily pejorative terms.

At the heart of the mission of Jewish organizations that have a political presence in Washington is strengthening US-Israel relations, but as Mr. Daroff makes clear that mission remains limited for the most part to what happens Stateside. The American Jewish Community doesn’t have favorites between the left, center or right of Israeli politics. “It’s up to the Israeli electorate. It’s not my role in the Diaspora to tell them who their leaders should be”,  says Mr. Daroff.

There has always been a sharp cultural divide between Jews who live in Israel, and those who live in the rest of the world, (known as the “diaspora”), and Mr. Daroff makes clear that Diaspora Jews shouldn’t have a say in how Israel is run. “We don’t interfere in the elections of others, just as I don’t want them interfering in American elections.”

But in many respects American Jews already do have an undue influence. Home to more Jews than in Israel itself, about six and a half million, American Jews care deeply about defending the State of Israel and their votes, and financial contributions, in Presidential and Congressional elections increasingly reflect that concern. Nobody denies that representatives from the US Jewish community watch the White House and Congress very carefully and try to maintain firm US support for Israel. That support comes in the form of an aid package worth $2.5 billion in 2007, mostly in the form of a military grant, and cements the single most important strategic alliance in the Middle East.

Despite White House concerns over the years that Israel is not doing its part to push forward the Middle East peace process, the idea of removing or substantially reducing the aid package is a third rail. Doing so would unleash an uproar against the incumbent President and would never be sanctioned by Congress. Which is unfortunate, because it’s the only bargaining chip the US has that Israel really cares about.

The idea that American Jewish groups would support or not oppose a US move to remove aid from Israel seems laughable now, but there may be more to the idea than meets the eye. And here’s why.

Israel is at a historical crossroads. It has three choices. Read the rest of this entry »

Israel must control its destiny

There are three possible paths for Israel to take, and two outcomes.

The paths are as follows;  First, a two-state solution, in which Israel and Palestine sit side by side and Palestine becomes a client state of Israel.  Second, a one state solution in which Israel falls under the demographic hammer and loses its identity after a monumental all-consuming war. Third , resistance to any solution in which Israel falls under the demographic hammer, and loses its identity after a monumental all-consuming war.

Clearly, the only path that is remotely feasible is the first, and yet there is a very good chance that the next prime minister of Israel will be a man for whom all but the third option are complete anathema. Netanyahu speaks the language of pragmatism, but with Avigdor Lieberman breathing down his neck, it’s unlikely to go anywhere. This is a problem, a very, very big problem. And it’s made worse by the fact that in a few years the demographic future of Israel will become very obvious to the Palestinians who will quite simply wait Israel out, until they outnumber the Jews in Israel proper. That possibility makes the two-state option all the more important to pursue now. To do it, Israel needs to both assert its power, and make powerful and strategic concessions.

Read the rest of this entry »

it all starts right here

The Neo-Cons are dead. Long live the Neo-Libs.

It’s not just conservatives who believe that the continued hegemony of the United States is critical to the wellbeing of human-kind.  But the Neo-Lib prescription veers from the Neo-Cons very substantially after that. We neo-libs do not feel that military power is the key to our continued dominance. Instead Neo-Liberalism calls for a Wilsonesque revival of America’s power through goodwill and largesse, backed by  a Rooseveltian (and I mean Teddy) “big stick”. For too long, under the Neo-Cons, we talked loudly and carried a stick that frankly got smaller and smaller the deeper we fell into the morass of Iraq and Afghanistan.

It may seem like an odd time to be talking about American hegemony.  Our nation is in an economic crisis unlike any it has experienced in decades. The threat to our continued power is probably at its highest point since the Second World War, which would seem a perfect time to reassert it. Fortunately, our adversaries around the globe aren’t in any better shape than we are, and in many respects have further to fall. Even more fortuitous is the presence of a new President who could be the beacon for Neo-Liberalism. While Obama may have shown some early weakness on the domestic policy front, particularly with his reluctance to detach himself from tried-and-failed centrism, but on the foreign stage, he has an opportunity to rebuild and reinvigorate US power.

So let us begin to forge a plan for the rebuilding of American power. Here’s how. Read the rest of this entry »

it's got to the point that israel needs to project raw power to secure a two-state solution.

From now on, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy in Israel. Promising “a disproportionate response” to Hamas for rocket attacks signals a new direction for Jerusalem. For years they have been on the wrong end of one of the most successful PR juggernauts of recent history – the Palestinians.

Nothing seems to dent the Palestinian love-bubble. The fact that Hamas has been targeting innocent Israelis for years through suicide bombings and rocket attacks seems to mean nothing, the fact that they use human shields means less, the fact that they brutally murder anyone remotely seen as an informer, irrelevant. Hamas has maintained lock-tight control on Gaza in order to further its longstanding total war against Israel. It gets as close as it can to starving its own people into hatred. The constant portrayal of Gazan as victim is incongruous with the fact that most of Hamas leadership has nothing to do with the place. To them maintaining the degradation of the world’s largest refugee camp is a means to an end.  Read the rest of this entry »

don't fumble my legacy, dude

Among all the other total disasters Bush is handing over to Obama is the small matter of finding peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the current attacks on Gaza are part of an old school of thought. The future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have a completely new landscape.

Benny Morris, a prominent historian of Israeli History wrote a superb primer on Israel’s current predicament in the New York Times. To sum it up, Israel faces unconventional enemies in both Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza, as well as the looming threat of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and the demographic ticking time bomb of the increasingly radicalized and fast growing Arab-Israeli population that is likely to outnumber the Israeli Jews by 2040 or 2050. Read the rest of this entry »