On the street in Iraq, people give nicknames to the big longtime-expatriate politicians whom the Americans brought back to Iraq. They call former transitional Prime Minister Iyad Allawi “Iyad the Baathist” because of his background in that party. And they call Ahmed Chalabi “Ahmed the Thief.” How appropriate that Chalabi has again made a splash in a Washington, D.C., that looks increasingly like a kleptocracy itself.
On the surface Chalabi ought to be finished in Iraqi politics. But until Dec. 15, he is a deputy prime minister. His meetings in Washington this week with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley acknowledge his high political office — even though not so long ago the Bush administration tried to destroy him. What accounts for the turnabout in his political fortunes in the United States? Credit the shifting political winds in Iraq — and perhaps yet more savvy back-channel dealings by Chalabi with the Bush administration. It can’t be because of his rap sheet, whole reams of pages long.
Chalabi provided copious amounts of false intelligence to the United States in the late 1990s and through the run-up to the Iraq war. The defectors, con men and crooks he supplied to the CIA and the Pentagon made all sorts of extravagant and ridiculous claims that were eagerly swallowed by the hawks in the Bush administration.
One source, known as “Curveball,” alleged that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs, which is a contradiction in terms. One can only imagine what would have happened to Saddam’s biologists, experimenting with dangerous microbes, when the trailer had a flat tire or hit a pothole. Chalabi’s source nevertheless succeeded in getting such absurdities included in Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003.
Chalabi was convicted of massive bank fraud in Jordan in the early 1990s. He was given millions by the State Department and the CIA for the overthrow of Saddam, funds he never properly accounted for. When those agencies dropped him as a result, he cultivated contacts in the Pentagon instead.
In the spring of 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, had a secret plan to install Ahmed Chalabi as a soft dictator of Iraq and to arrange some sort of phony elections that would make it look as though he had a mandate. Larry Diamond, in his book “Squandered Victory,” writes that their plan was foiled by the State Department, which found out about it. The State Department convinced George W. Bush that it would be a disaster, and he agreed to send to Iraq a former State Department official, Paul “Jerry” Bremer to forestall such Pentagon flights of fancy.
By the spring of 2004, serious charges were launched against Chalabi, presumably at Bremer’s behest. He was accused of passing top-secret information to the Iranian government: that the United States had broken Iranian encryption codes. That is, before Chalabi allegedly spilled the beans, U.S. intelligence had deep access to what Iranian government officials said among themselves. After the Chalabi incident, Iran became more opaque to the United States, which already struggled to find out about what was going on inside the country. Chalabi was also charged with having in his possession counterfeit bills.
He managed, however, to survive the indictment. Soon after his indictment the Americans “transferred sovereignty” to the appointed government of Iyad Allawi. Further prosecution of Chalabi would have undertaken by the new government, which apparently was not keen to follow up. It remains unclear how it transpired or who was behind it, but gradually the judge in the case was marginalized and reassigned.
By the fall of 2004, Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress had joined the major Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, and he gained the no. 10 spot on the party slate. The UIA, which was endorsed by the spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, won 51 percent of the 275 seats in the Iraqi Parliament and was able to form a government in coalition with the Kurdistan Alliance. Chalabi managed to get himself installed as a deputy prime minister. He then parlayed that position into oversight of foreign contracts proposed for Iraq.
While Chalabi was able to ride the coalition of religious Shiite parties to significant power in the new system, despite being a secularist himself, that ride appeared to come to an end last month. Chalabi had been offered only three places on the United Iraqi Alliance slate, based on the coalition’s estimate of the number of seats his slate would likely garner in open elections. Then Chalabi abruptly announced that he would not run on the UIA slate, but that his Iraqi National Congress would stand for election alone.
Chalabi explained in an interview with an Arabic-language magazine that his departure from the UIA was linked to the advent of the political movement of the young Shiite firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr. The original UIA had had a big bloc of moderate and even secular candidates, but its center of gravity was the religious Shiite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Sadr, who turned to civil politics after his Mahdi Army was defeated twice by the U.S. Marines, had maintained neutrality on the elections last year, though some of his followers ran and got elected anyway. For the upcoming Dec. 15 elections, Sadr’s followers were given 30 places on the UIA slate. The coalition was now swinging even further to the religious right — and Chalabi maintains that there was no longer any place in it for secularists such as himself.
That explanation makes no sense. Chalabi had developed good relations with Sadr and had mediated between him and his enemies. Up until a few days before the deadline for filing coalitions, Chalabi seemed to be on board. Then it was revealed that Muqtada al-Sadr had made it a prerequisite for his joining the UIA that it pledge not to recognize Israel. Chalabi had signaled he would do just that, and he therefore could no longer hope for the support of the American neoconservatives, his main backers, if he remained within the UIA framework. Sadr’s positions made that coalition an inhospitable environment for Chalabi’s kind of politics, which depends on his contacts and commitments in foreign capitals, and so he left.
The Iraqi National Congress is dominated by longtime expatriates and seems unlikely to do well in the elections scheduled for Dec. 15. Some observers are hoping that the Iraqi public will swing against the Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq because their prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, has been ineffectual and the new government has not provided security.
Such hopes are probably forlorn. Iraqis in recent elections have put more stock in identity politics than such considerations, and it is hard to imagine a pious pilgrimage center like the Najaf province voting for secularists at this time. Chalabi will be lucky to get enough votes even to get a seat in the Parliament if the elections are free and fair. Another old-time expatriate politician with secular leanings, Adnan Pachachi, found it impossible to get elected to Parliament last January.
Yet there is talk, both on the American and the Iranian scenes, of Chalabi’s becoming Iraq’s next prime minister. Somewhat bizarrely, Chalabi visited Tehran last weekend for warm consultations with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other politicians, just before his Washington trip. Then the Iranians came out and said that he would be acceptable to them as prime minister. Some speculate that Chalabi brought some sort of back-channel message from Washington aimed at reducing tensions between the two countries.
Could Chalabi come to power in Iraq? If the Shiite religious parties get a majority in Parliament, the post will certainly go to a UIA member. Chalabi and his backers may hope, however, that the United Iraqi Alliance will fall short of a majority this time. If so, it will need to form a coalition, and Chalabi may hope that he will be acceptable to all members of the resulting government. That is, he would emerge as a minority prime minister but with the acquiescence of much bigger parties.
It’s worth noting that Washington’s hopes of shaping Iraqi politics have, to say the least, often proved impractical. It is clear that the Bush administration had hoped to shoehorn the old CIA asset and ex-Baathist Iyad Allawi into power as prime minister last Jan. 30. The Americans gave Allawi all the advantages of incumbency by joining with the United Nations to appoint him transitional prime minister. In fact, his slate only got 14.5 percent of the vote and Allawi was quickly marginalized by the religious Shiites and the Kurds. The same thing could easily happen to Chalabi.
That Chalabi, a wily schemer and convicted crook, should continue his sleazy attempts to get control of Iraq’s billions in petroleum revenues is completely unsurprising. That a scandal-ridden Bush administration should warmly welcome the fraudster to Washington yet again and have him hobnob with top officials shows profound disrespect for U.S. troops risking their lives in Iraq. Chalabi lied to and manipulated the American public, reportedly passed top-secret information to Iran, and for a while allied with Muqtada al-Sadr. Officials in the administration are apparently hoping that the American public won’t notice that they are playing the same old games, with U.S. foreign policy and with Iraq. As we know all too well by now, they are disastrous games.
A Palestinian family sit outside a disputed house as Jewish settler rests at the house door, in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Thursday, March 25, 2010. Following a seemingly chilly reception at the White House, Benjamin Netanyahu is learning the hard way that he can't have it all. The Israeli leader will not likely be able to settle east Jerusalem with Jews and maintain strong relations with the Obama administration. He will be hard pressed to please his far-right coalition partners and still negotiate credibly with the Palestinians. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)(Credit: AP)
The episode underlines the ways in which their forced statelessness leaves Palestinians (almost uniquely among major world nationalities) completely vulnerable to loss of the most basic human rights. That he was forcibly moved to Gaza by the Israelis suggests that many of those singled out for potential deportation from the West Bank may be moved to the small slum along the Mediterranean, which the Israelis have cut off from its traditional markets and which they keep under a blockade of the civilian population (a war crime). The Israeli establishment has decided not to try to colonize Gaza, and its isolation and hopelessness make it an attractive place for them to begin exiling West Bank residents, thus making more room for Israeli colonists.
The new policy, which is illegal six ways to Sunday in international law, is the brainchild of the government of far right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu, an Israeli hawk and expansionist, slapped President Barack Obama in the face again Thursday when he confirmed that he refused to halt construction of new homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is militarily occupied by Israel.
Netanyahu’s announcement is probably the nail in the coffin of any two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (in which the Israelis have thrown most Palestinians now living beyond the Green Line off their land and deprived them of citizenship in a state and all the rights that go with such citizenship). Palestinians are so despairing that only 57 percent even believe in having an independent Palestinian state any more. The rest are resigned to becoming Israelis in the distant future, when demographic realities and perhaps world-wide boycotts of Israel for its apartheid-style policies toward the occupied Palestinian will force Israel to accept them.
Palestinian leaders reject this formulation, which is intended to allow the Israelis to continue aggressively to colonize Palestinian territory while pretending that they are engaged in a “peace process.” The Palestine Authority, established in the 1990s, was already a sort of interim state then, and Palestine’s borders were then “temporary.” So temporary that Israel has made deep inroads into them through massive colonies and building a wall on the Palestinian side of the border, cutting residents off from their own farms and sequestering entire towns and cities.
Netanyahu’s various moves this week, from illegally expelling a Palestinian from the West Bank to Gaza — to blowing off the president of the United States and hitching his wagon to massive increased colonization of Palestinian land — all of these steps are guaranteed to mire Israel in violent disputes for years and perhaps decades. And the U.S., which has already suffered tremendously in Iraq and elsewhere from its knee-jerk support of illegal and inhumane Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, will suffer further.
“Yunus Muhammad” says in the interview that the Quran instructs Muslims to “terrorize the disbelievers.” It does no such thing. The Quran instructs Muslims to live at peace with non-Muslims who are at peace with them.
The verse to which this individual referred was in the chapter of the Spoils (al-Anfal), 8:60:
Wa a`iddu lahum ma istata`tum min quwwatin wamin ribati ‘lkhayli turhibuna bihi `aduwwa Allahi wa`aduwwakum
Which means, “Prepare against them all the power, and all the war horses that you can, whereby to strike fear into the enemies of God and your enemies.”
The context of this verse is the Battle of Badr on March 17, 624 of the Common Era. In the 610s, the pagan Meccans had persecuted the new religion of Islam and ultimately chased Muhammad and the Muslims out of Mecca for preaching the one God. They took refuge in the nearby city of Yathrib, which became known as Medina (i.e., the City [of the Prophet]). The wealthy Meccan polytheists hoped to wipe Islam and the Muslims out, and fought skirmishes with them. The early Muslims riposted by raiding Meccan trading caravans, in hopes of weakening their foe economically. That March in 624, the Meccans sent out their best fighters to protect a caravan. A Muslim force more or less stumbled onto this expedition. Badr, named after a well south of Medina, was the first major battle between the two sides, and the Muslims won it, thus saving themselves from genocide.
So what the Quran is saying in 8:60 is that the Muslims should keep a stable of fighting steeds at the ready and let the Meccans know about it, to strike fear into the hearts of an enemy trying to wipe out them and their religion.
The verse does not command any act of “terrorism.” It commands that Muslims attempt to forestall irrational violence against a Muslim state through deterrence. It is defensive in intent.
The verse does not say anything about mere ‘disbelievers’ or non-Muslims. It is warning of the designs of “enemies of God,” i.e., militant and violent anti-Muslims. Moreover, there is no implication that Muslims should act as individuals or vigilantes. Medina was a city-state that the Prophet Muhammad ruled, and he gave the orders. Muslims could not just run off and attack whomever they pleased whenever they pleased. A duly constituted Muslim state was in charge of defense of the community.
So unless Yunus Muhammad can find a group of armed individuals who aim at violently attacking Muslims en masse and trying to wipe out them and their religion, he should stuff a sock in it and go home.
In fact, trying to import terrorism into the Quran is an infinitely greater blasphemy than that of any Western cartoonist, and one would hope Muslim groups would get more upset about Yunus Muhammad and “Revolution Muslim” than about an irreverent American TV program.
Unfortunately, along with people with genuinely hurt feelings, there will be some cynical political forces that manipulate Muslim fundamentalists and will try to advance their agendas by taking advantage of this “South Park” controversy. (The show depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit to avoid showing him — which is about as close as “South Park” gets to deference to religious feelings.)
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said at Columbia University that a military strike on Iran over its nuclear enrichment activities would be his “last option.” He makes an excellent point, too often overlooked. In some instances the price of doing something is just about as high as the price of doing nothing. A U.S. strike on Iran would risk throwing Iraq and Afghanistan into chaos, with our troops in the midst of it.
The Obama administration is now moving to tighten economic sanctions on Iran, as an alternative to a more direct approach. These measures include pressuring countries and firms not to buy Iranian petroleum and gas; pressuring them not to sell gasoline to Iran; and attempting to make it difficult for Iranian banks to interface with the world economic system.
While these measures could impose costs on Iran, these costs can easily be borne by the country, and more especially by the regime.
Moreover, it is unclear that President Obama can even swing further sanctions on Iranian petroleum and gas. Such harsh measures are opposed by Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC bloc of nations that are emerging diplomatic and economic players outside the U.S.-dominated G-7 nations. At the BRIC summit in Brazil last week, a consensus emerged against strong new sanctions on Iran. Brazil is on the U.N. Security Council at the moment, and in May Lebanon will assume the rotating chairmanship of that body. Given that Turkey also currently has a seat and is strongly opposed to new Iran sanctions, it may be difficult for Obama to get a significant new resolution.
Financial sanctions are not all that they are cracked up to be. Iran Oil & Gas reports that from March ’09 to March ’10, Iran swapped 450,000 tons of petroleum products. Some 90 percent of the swaps were with nations of the former Soviet Union (CIS), and 10 percent were with Iraq. Likely we are talking about Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. This item is an example of how Iran can import refined gasoline (it has a temporary shortage of refineries) without needing to go through the international banking system. Even if some sort of official ban on trading with Iran could be arranged by the U.S. with these CIS countries and Iraq, private traders and corrupt government officials would simply step into the resulting black market and make a pile. Smuggling oil products out of Iraq on trucks was a specialty of Jordan and Turkey in the 1990s, and that sort of black market would operate quite efficiently were Iran to be put under the sort of sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein.
Few commodities are more easily transported and more fungible (easily exchanged for other goods or for cash) than gasoline, and the plan for a gasoline embargo on Iran (popular in Congress) is a pipe dream.
But we are hardly in a stage of black marketeering. Rather, direct deals are being done by major players, despite the withdrawal of some players, such as Lukoil, from exporting gasoline to Iran. Chinaoil just directly sold Iran 600,000 barrels of gasoline, and Sinopec, another Chinese oil giant, is preparing to resume direct gasoline sales to Iran. Soft gasoline demand in Asia because of the global economic downturn has left petroleum companies with high inventories that they are eager to offload anywhere they can, and Iran as a destination suits them fine.
Reuters reports, “As long as there is money to be made, and economic benefits to be taken advantage off, Iran will always find ready sellers of gasoline from the international market,” a trader said. “The politicians don’t understand markets … sanctions are cosmetic.”
And if direct sales became difficult, indirect ones would be substituted. And if that became difficult, smugglers would step in. A lot of Iraqis would get rich. And while paying extra to smuggle things in would hurt ordinary Iranians, the regime would use its oil profits to cushion the elites and keep them happy. (That cushioning is why very severe sanctions on Iraq never had a chance of shaking the Baathist regime.)
The man said it all: “Sanctions” are purely cosmetic, designed to make it look as though U.S. politicians had taken some dramatic and effective step. It is odd that the politicians in Washington, who are always loudly proclaiming their belief in the market, think its iron laws can be suspended by a simple vote on their parts.
And another development taken as a bellwether of increasingly effective sanctions turns out to have been a mirage. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak clarified remarks he made last Thursday about creeping sanctions on Iran. He was misunderstood to have said that Petronas, the Malaysian petroleum company, had suspended gasoline sales to Iran, but he never said any such thing and it never happened. He referred to a canceled third-party spot oil deal that collapsed for purely economic reasons.
Moreover, Iran’s need to import gasoline is probably temporary. It has the wherewithal to build new refineries, and is doing so. Germany’s ABB Lummus has a a $512 million deal with the National Iranian Oil Co. and a consortium in Iran to raise gasoline production at the Bandar Abbas refinery to about 3.5 million gallons a day from the present 1.3 million gallons.
In fact, there are 10 such projects to expand existing refineries, which could allow Iran to nearly double its production of gasoline by 2012. In addition, Iran is investing nearly $40 billion in building seven new refineries. So even a successful squeeze on Iran’s gasoline imports, if it could be implemented right away, would only have much effect for two years. But such a squeeze is unlikely to be successfully implemented in the first place.
Nor is Iran lacking for customers. A Swiss company just signed a deal worth $13 billion to import Iranian natural gas over the next 25 years. As for financial sanctions, so far Iran is evading them through banking partners in the United Arab Emirates, and Iran and Venezuela have two joint banks. These measures provide Iran with a back door, allowing it to mitigate the effects of financial sanctions.
Very few sanctions have actually produced regime change or altered regime behavior. The U.S. could not even accomplish this goal with regard to a small island 90 miles off its shores, Cuba. That an oil giant halfway around the world with a population of 70 million that is as big as Spain, France and Germany can be effectively bludgeoned with sanctions is not very likely.
The U.S. needs to engage in comprehensive security talks with Iran, in hopes of striking a grand bargain. Because as Adm. Mullen rightly says, there are no good military options here.
Robert Wright argues that not only is assassination (including by drone) legally and ethically troubling, but there is reason to think that it is counterproductive when deployed against religious terrorist groups. He cites the study of Jenna Jordan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, in the journal “Security Studies.” Jordan did a large-scale study of violent organizations that had been dealt with by the assassination of leaders, and found that such assassinations generally caused the organization actually to last longer than groups that had not suffered such assassinations.
As for the first question Wright raises, of the legal implications of assassinations, such as the one President Obama authorized for American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, they are horrible. Having CIA officers operate the drones makes the attacks a covert operation, which cannot be spoken about publicly by U.S. government officials, and which cannot be investigated by ordinary Americans worried about the direction of their government. The drone assassinations are lawless, and they have killed large numbers of innocent civilians, as Wright notes. For Obama to take out a contract on al-Awlaki diminishes us as a nation. If al-Awlaki is guilty of a crime, he should be brought to justice if possible, and tried, even in absentia. Yemeni authorities should arrest him and extradite him on that basis. For the U.S. to allow 300 al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula guys to draw it into unethical actions and perhaps even into an unwinnable war in Yemen, would be foolish.
Jordan’s study seems to me generally sound, and one can think of lots of supporting evidence. It seems to me that it would be useful to further amplify a distinction that Jordan makes, between highly organized and more inchoate religious organizations, with the latter being more common.
The Greens in Iran since last summer have been a movement, and it seems obvious that Mir Hosain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi as leaders are not all that central to it. The Sadrists in Iraq are a movement, and after a campaign of arrests and assassinations waged against them by the U.S. and British militaries and then the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki over years, they continue to survive and reemerged to take some 12 percent of seats in the Iraqi parliament on March 7.
What is often missed about Hamas is that it, too, is a movement. They have gotten up big demonstrations, and waged campaigns, including political campaigns. They aren’t just a terrorist group, and they depend on kinship links and informal networks, not a corporate-style leadership flow chart.
Movements that are embedded (as most are) in a particular population can draw on enormous resources.
Ariel Sharon was convinced by some game theorist who knew nothing about Palestinian Arab society that if he could kill off one-quarter of the Hamas leadership, he could cause the organization to collapse. What I heard was that the original basis for this thesis was risk studies of corporations like IBM, where the models had shown that in case of a catastrophe that took out a quarter of the management, the organization would implode.
So Sharon’s government assiduously assassinated suspected Hamas leaders, killing the spiritual leader of the movement, Shaikh Ahmad Yasin, in his wheelchair as he came out of a mosque, along with 17 others, including juveniles. Then titular leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi was assassinated. And so on and so forth. But Hamas did not collapse. It won the 2006 Palestine Authority elections, and even when the resulting government was overthrown by the PLO in the West Bank — with U.S. and Israeli help — it proved powerful in Gaza. The Gaza war was another Israeli attempt to destroy Hamas, which failed miserably. Israeli military leaders professed themselves astonished at how little resistance to the invasion Hamas put up, showing that they don’t understand movements. Movements can afford to lie low during attacks, because they have the resources and support to reemerge once the heat is off.
Assassinating movement leaders, as opposed to organization leaders, is usually worse than useless, especially if the movement has a strong social base in a compact population.
On the other hand organizations such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping (al-Gama’a al-Islamiya) in Egypt were effectively defeated by the Egyptian security forces. They arrested some 30,000 militants in the 1990s, and they engaged in running street battles with armed members. Since 1997, these groups have been defeated in the Nile Valley and seldom can pull off even a small attack. The Egyptian government caught a break, because the radicals’ 1997 attack on Western tourists at Luxor produced profound revulsion toward them among almost all Egyptians. The leadership of the Islamic Grouping (whose blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, is in an American penitentiary for involvement in the first World Trade Center bombing) has even renounced violence and now sees the Koran as forbidding terrorism. This leadership had not been systematically killed, however. It was incarcerated in Tura prison.
In this regard, U.S. drone attacks on al-Qaida figures in Pakistan must be contrasted to assassinations of Taliban leaders. Al-Qaida is more like an organization, and its leaders seldom have a lot of local support (the Arabs in the northwest of Pakistan are not embedded in a local population that adulates them, but rather live among Pashtuns who have a variety of views of Arab expatriates). There has never been a big al-Qaida demonstration (I mean by al-Qaida Osama Bin Laden’s organization, and don’t consider the Islamic State of Iraq to be actually al-Qaida), because they don’t have the numbers to pull it off.
In contrast, just killing Pashtun insurgent leaders, whether in Pakistan or in Afghanistan, is unlikely to destroy the Taliban, because they are a movement embedded in an often supportive population.
President Barack Obama acknowledged Tuesday that, despite the expenditure of substantial political capital by his administration, progress may not be made on Israel-Palestine peace. The AP quoted his reply to a question about how recent successes in negotiating nuclear arms reduction with Russia — and getting 48 nations to sign on to a nuclear material security agreement — might translate into diplomatic successes elsewhere.
The two sides “may say to themselves, ‘We are not prepared to resolve these issues no matter how much pressure the United States brings to bear,’” Obama said.
Obama reiterated that peace is a vital goal, but one that may be beyond reach “even if we are applying all of our political capital.”
Obama may be right. But note the implications of no progress between Israel and the Palestinians on political settlement of their dispute:
Iran – the primary rejectionist state in the region, will grow in power and popularity in the Middle East
Anger in the Arab world toward Israel and the US will grow in intensity
Israeli policy toward East Jerusalem could itself be the cause for a war. Jerusalem is sacred to Muslims and Christians as well as to Jews
Israel’s status as a de facto Apartheid state will be made permanent and the boycott movement will grow, ultimately affecting the Israeli economy
If the two-state solution is dead as a doornail Israel will either have to give the Palestinians citizenship or face a long and bitter struggle to make their own state in the teeth of Israeli opposition
Obama’s team tried to get Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to restart negotiations last year, but the long-suffering Abbas insisted first on a freeze of creeping Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank. That is, he insisted that Israel not be actively annexing the very territory at issue while the talks proceeded. It would sort of be like negotiating to buy a mansion from a seller who was dismantling wings of it, carting them off to his new residence, while he kept jacking up the asking price on his increasingly diminished domicile.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally agreed to an eight-month settlement freeze on the West Bank. But the offer was insincere. Building within existing settlements would continue; they would just get denser. And the parts of the West Bank Israel had illegally and unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem would continue to be settled.
The first, flawed offer by Netanyahu was enough to bring Abbas to indirect negotiations. But then the implementation of the second bit of insincerity scotched any movement toward peace talks as the Palestinians decided that they had to retain a modicum of self-respect. The building of 1,600 new homes on Palestinian land near Jerusalem was announced just as Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Israel to kick off the proximity talks made it look as though Israel is not only a fickle and unreliable diplomatic partner. Beyond that, it looked as if its government was intent on kicking Biden in the teeth and humiliating Washington.
One problem Obama faces is that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a coordinating body for the Israel lobbies, has successfully mobilized congress against him with regard to putting further pressure on far right-wing Netanyahu to stop building settlements. Congress decides on how much money to give Israel annually, and how many weapons to sell it. Obama cannot effectively threaten Netanyahu with a reduction in the billions of dollars a year in aid, trade privileges, loan guarantees, and military equipment sent to Israel by the U.S. Those goods are giftds from Congress, and Congress typically yields to AIPAC and its colleagues.
As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have demonstrated in The Israel Lobby, these lobbies cultivate congressmen and senators from the beginning of their careers. The Christian Zionists, who form a significant movement within U.S. evangelicalism, probably number some 10 million, and it is not hard to get them to write their senator on behalf of Israeli expansionism. Pro-Israel organizations and individuals are disproportionately politically active and likely to give to political campaigns.
A recent Israeli government decree that could lead to the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank has stirred extreme anxiety in the region.
According to the London pan-Arab daily, al-Quds al-Arabi, the Jordanian government fears that Netanyahu and his even more right wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, will engineer clashes between Israeli colonists on the West Bank and the Palestinian villagers on whom they are encroaching, as a pretext for pushing tens of thousands of Palestinians into Jordan.
Certainly, Israeli-Jordanian relations are at their lowest point since the 1994 peace treaty between the two countries — a treaty that King Abdullah II says he is beginning to regret. He worries that Jerusalem is a keg of dynamite, that Gaza and Lebanon could explode into hot war at any time, and even that Israel and Iran may go to war against one another.
Yep, that’s what you worry about if you know the region well.
A Palestinian family sit outside a disputed house as Jewish settler rests at the house door, in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Thursday, March 25, 2010. Following a seemingly chilly reception at the White House, Benjamin Netanyahu is learning the hard way that he can't have it all. The Israeli leader will not likely be able to settle east Jerusalem with Jews and maintain strong relations with the Obama administration. He will be hard pressed to please his far-right coalition partners and still negotiate credibly with the Palestinians. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)(Credit: AP) 
