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Obama trapped behind wall of containment
By Ira Chernus
Damn the Iranians and full speed ahead. That was the United States policy in
the Middle East. But the waters have proved treacherous, with torpedoes
everywhere. Despite an initial hopeful sit-down with Iranian negotiators, this
won't be the October the White House wanted on the foreign policy front. By
now, President Barack Obama was supposed to have announced - with ruffles and
flourishes - the beginning of Middle East peace talks, leading to a final
status agreement by 2012. But something didn't happen.
Israel didn't heed Obama's demand to stop all settlement expansion in the West
Bank. So Obama didn't stick to that demand, settling instead for a temporary
freeze after a spate of new building. The Palestinians, buoyed by Obama's
initial strong
stance on the settlements, refused to negotiate until Israel stopped all
construction. Other Arab nations didn't offer Israel nearly as many concessions
as the US administration was demanding. Undermined by all that didn't happen,
the president had nothing of substance to announce.
What went wrong? The heart of the problem was not Israel's supposed power over
US policy. The US still has plenty of leverage over the Israelis and everyone
else in the region. Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea is right: "Everyone depends
on America, its money, its military aid and its moves vis-เ-vis Iran."
But it is precisely those US moves, meant to contain the power of Iran, that
are the main stumbling block on the path to a US-brokered two-state solution to
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Middle East is a textbook example of the
perils of containment.
The ghost of Cold War past
If Obama's troubles keep him awake late at night, he may hear the ghostly
voices of past presidents echoing down the White House hallways - Bill Clinton
saying, "I tried to get the Israelis and Palestinians together, too. It's a
bitch," or Dwight D Eisenhower recalling (as he once wrote to a friend) that he
felt "forced to give constant attention ... to problems that defy solution".
The loudest voice of all, though, may come from the ghost of the Cold War,
whose spirit of containment still haunts the White House and shapes foreign
policy decisions every day.
The drive for containment of "the commies" created problems that defied
solution. After all, containment meant maintaining total control over the
global chessboard, always making exactly the right move at exactly the right
time. The task was, quite literally, a mission impossible. Eisenhower revealed
why when, resorting to the imagery of his era, he described the American "wall
of containment" to his National Security Council as a "free world dike" holding
back the rising "red tide". When that dike got "leaky", he said, the US had to
"put a finger in" rather than "let the whole structure be washed away".
As any high school physics student knows, plugging that dike with your finger
merely increases the pressure, inevitably leading to yet another crack
somewhere else. In other words, containment turned the US into Sisyphus,
laboring at a task that never ends.
As Obama and his advisors make policy for "the greater Middle East" - that huge
swath of mostly Muslim lands from Somalia to Pakistan - they are guided by a
regional version of containment, with Iran as its object. The longer the
Israelis occupy Palestine, the more Iranian leaders profit by riding a wave of
anti-Israeli fervor throughout the area. Hence, the big push for a negotiated
peace.
Yet the first move in that push - the demand that Israel freeze settlement
expansion - set off a whole new series of stresses and strains.
After all, the US relies on Israel as a major weapon in its Iranian containment
policy. It also relies on that weapon being under US control, so that just the
right pressure can be exerted on the Iranian leadership by making just the
right threatening gestures to Tehran at just the right moment (without, of
course, letting the Israelis actually act upon those threats, which would
create chaos and mayhem in the region).
When the administration's freeze demand triggered right-wing outrage in Israel,
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turned his threats on Washington: If the
demand persisted, it could bring down his government, he claimed, leaving no
one holding the trigger on the necessary weapon of containment or (even worse)
running the risk that some crazy leader might grab the weapon and actually pull
the trigger.
So the US backed off a total freeze and, according to one Israeli report,
promised to deal with "Iran first ... The Palestinians will have to wait their
turn and pass the time in empty talks until Iran is restrained”.
But the US moves to shore up the Israeli part of its containment wall only
created a new crisis elsewhere - in this case, with the West Bank Palestinian
government headed by President Mahmoud Abbas. His appointed role is to make his
Fatah-led regime strong enough to keep Hamas out of power and out of any
negotiations, since Hamas is seen as a proxy for Iran. Whether that perception
is accurate hardly matters to policymakers. In the game of containment,
perceptions are the realities that matter most.
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, perceptions are the most important
realities, too. As recent research shows, majorities on both sides are not as
concerned about gaining substantive political and economic advantages as they
are about inflicting symbolic defeats on the other side. Anything that looks
like a victory, especially in intangible matters of prestige and pride, is a
victory.
If Abbas accedes to US demands to negotiate at a moment when Israel is
rebuffing the US on the freeze, he will look like a loser. That will make him a
loser and so, by default, Hamas will be the obvious winner.
Abbas has already created that impression in some circles simply by agreeing to
meet with Obama and Netanyahu, offering the Israeli leader a "tentative
handshake" at the United Nations. "The whole process has lost [Abbas] a lot of
credibility with the Palestinian people," said veteran Palestinian diplomat
Hanan Ashrawi. "For Palestinians it's very important that our leadership not
constantly be the one to give in." "How will anyone from now on take him
seriously?" another Palestinian official asked.
To answer that question Abbas, the designated agent of US interests in
Palestine, only has to look at other leaders who have been assigned the same
role: Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
They have both been holding on to power by publicly rebuffing the US, thus
laying claim to independence and turning anti-American sentiment in their
countries to their advantage. Why shouldn't Abbas do the same?
The Obama administration might be tempted to buy further concessions from Abbas
by strengthening the hand of General Keith Dayton, who oversees the training of
the Palestinian security forces that keep Hamas suppressed on the West Bank.
However, what many Palestinians scornfully call "the Dayton government" is
already unpopular. Giving it more power could easily boost the political
fortunes of Hamas.
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