No Shortage of Hollow Advice on Mideast for Clinton

"No Shortage of Advice on Mideast for Clinton"
A1, Tuesday 1/13/09
By Mark Landler

Landler writes that “people who know Mrs. Clinton say she is eager to recruit a fresh face to handle the Arab-Israeli issue, perhaps reaching beyond the circle of Middle East stalwarts.”

Not to worry, “members of this group” are being referred to on “cable talk shows and in opinion columns”. What better group than the Addams Family of Middle East advisors to offer their specific brand of flawed advice on the Middle East.

This “coterie of emissaries" are Miller, Indyk and Kurtzer (with a passing reference to Ross), “all of whom are Jewish,” (pheew!). They're all “pushing for a more assertive and balanced American approach.” There's no shortage of this advice in the Times.

The lone good point is early in the piece. The experts say that the Obama administration “should avoid becoming too heavily vested in a single solution”. This makes sense since it keeps open possibilities like Jordanian control over the West Bank and Egyptian responsibility over Gaza, as well as a more gradual, economic, peace with the Palestinians, followed by the ceding of land.

Landler’s flawed premise precedes the flawed advice:

“At the heart of the debate is whether Washington should continue to embrace Israel as uncritically as it has during the Bush administration and should it become as deeply engaged in the minutiae of peace talks as it did under Bill Clinton.”

This trite line about the US embracing Israel uncritically is almost never followed up with examples, as is the case here.

“Uncritical” isn’t the best adjective to describe the following Bush administration actions unfavorable to, and objected to by, Israel:

- Refused Israeli requests to pardon Jonathan Pollard
- Insisted Israel hand over to the P.A. control of the Rafah crossing in 2005
- Pushed Palestinian elections – in which Hamas won
- Reneged on a promise to – at least try to – move the US embassy to Jerusalem
- Reiterated time and again that a major impediment to peace was Israeli settlements
(Did Clinton publicly express concern that settlements would render a Palestinian state "swiss cheese"?)
- Advocated as official policy the idea that the Palestinian Authority is committed to peace, when its leaders, curriculum and media say otherwise

and most recently...

- Refused to sell Israel bunker-busting bombs, distancing itself from a likely Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites

Readers are introduced to Aaron David Miller, who says "we’ve allowed our special relationship with Israel to become exclusive. We acquiesced in too many bad Israeli ideas; we road-tested every idea with Israel first.”

Miller fails to provide even one example of these bad Israeli ideas acquiesced to by the U.S. Road-testing with Israel important ideas that involve war and peace seems like a good idea to anyone who truly gets the US-Israel relationship. Does Miller advocate the US, with its power and influence, simply impose its solutions on Israel?

He pays lip service to the US’s special relationship while demonstrating that he misunderstands it.

Miller “argues that [Bill] Clinton’s embrace of Israeli leaders, while well-intentioned, undermined the ability of the U.S. to seal a deal with the Palestinians.” “Nonsense, says Martin Indyk, who argues that the U.S.’ close relationship with Israel is crucial because it assures the Palestinians and other Arabs that the U.S. has leverage with Israel.”

That would be a fair point, if only the Palestinians and other Arabs were looking for a deal to be struck. They’re stalling, and seeking – through international pressure, stemming from guerilla wars and self-imposed Palestinian hardships – to gradually pressure Israel into politically and militarily indefensible positions. The U.S.’ embrace of Israel has strategic import, since it tells Israel’s adversaries that the world’s lone superpower will back Israel, against this pressure.

Indyk continues with another promising statement that ends up flat. “The school of beating up on Israel is fundamentally wrong because it just causes Israel to dig in its heels.” Well, it’s fundamentally wrong because Israel has done nothing to deserve the beating, not because Israel might – as Indyk euphemizes – become more war-prone and trigger happy if left beaten and friendless.

The next paragraphs are just empty clichés about America improving its role as peace broker: a more “realistic” push; “less naïve in its assumptions, more modest in its ambitions, more imaginative in its anticipation of what can go wrong.”

Interestingly, and perhaps revealingly, Dennis Ross is the lone emissary to go unquoted. There’s a breezy reference to his book being published in 2004. Why is it more important to report when his book was released, rather than its best-known conclusion that Arafat tanked Camp David?

These men “all agree on one thing: the disengagement from Israeli-Palestinian issues that President Bush practiced in his first term was a failure. The Obama administration will have little choice but to dive into the issue.”

First, that counts as two things. Second, what disengagement from Israeli-Palestinian issues? The launching of the Road Map in Bush’s second year in office was while Israel was victim to an unprecedented terror war, with much of its responsibility pointing to supposed peace partners Arafat and Fatah. Bush actually advocated sidelining Arafat so a peace accord could move ahead. Was this simply careless disengagement?

Indyk is given the last paragraph, and it’s fitting. For him, it’s not the maniacal terrorist strategy that caused the current Israeli operation, but just "the Gaza crisis" – seemingly stated to include Israel’s operation – that “has so weakened the hands of those who would make peace.”

Clinton would do better to recruit that fresh face.