Page 1 of 2 Obama's choice: Blood or treasure?
By Ira Chernus
Writing about United States Middle East policy used to be a boring job. You'd
start out with "The US supports Israel's stand on ..." and then just fill in
the details. No longer. Many pundits claim to smell the winds of policy change
blowing from the White House. Every word about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
from the president or his advisors is now parsed by journalists like so many
soothsayers studying oracle bones.
President Barack Obama himself remains as cryptic as those bones and as open to
divergent interpretations. At a recent press conference, he cautioned that "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'."
Aha! said the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Obama thinks peace "may be beyond
reach". Meanwhile, over at the Jerusalem Post, the headline was: "Obama: US
Cannot Impose Peace."
In the same breath, though, the president added: "It is a vital national
security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because ...
when conflicts break out, one way or another, we get pulled into them. And that
ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure."
Blood and treasure ... Aha! the New York Times exclaimed, the president is
signaling "a renewed determination to reinsert himself into the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute". "Obama's recalibration of US Middle East
diplomacy is ground-shifting," Times columnist Roger Cohen reported from
Jerusalem. "He's being pummeled from the usual quarters but he'll stay the
course." Noam Chomsky, however, speaks for the many skeptical observers who
expect Obama to stay on the old course of US backing for Israel's domination of
the Palestinians.
Yet rumors of change are distinctly in the air. "If Israeli-Palestinian talks
remain stalemated into September or October, [Obama] will convene an
international summit on achieving Mideast peace," says one typical report. The
US will no longer veto "UN security council condemnation of any significant new
Israeli settlement activity," says another. The US will push for a nuclear-free
zone in the Middle East, says a third.
Some Washington insiders claim that Obama intends to propose his own peace
plan. Obama denies this, but were he to change his mind, former president Bill
Clinton, for one, says he would "strongly support it". When White House chief
of staff Rahm Emanuel was questioned about the possibility and he responded
only, "That time is not now," he left plenty of room for speculation that the
time might be coming soon.
Such speculation is rife in Israel, where the editors of Ha'aretz advised
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "accede to Obama's
recommendations, lest it end with an imposed settlement".
So far there's nothing but a riot of rumors. Still, most of those rumors have
been floated - think "trial balloon" - by some faction inside the Beltway, if
not inside the administration itself. Right now, the rumor mill may be the
strongest weapon of those insiders eager to push US policy in a new direction
when it comes to Israel. In that sense, the unprecedented buzz of speculation
already in the air could be considered their first victory: opening up the
possibility of a serious debate in Washington (at last) about the realities of
the Middle East and American policy.
Right-wingers are, in turn, mobilizing to quash that debate before it really
begins. Whether they succeed - and what Obama actually does in the end -
depends largely on how much countervailing pressure he feels.
Certainly, a heated discussion on the left is now focused on precisely what
steps the US should take to curb the Israelis and gain justice for the
Palestinians - a vital question, to be sure. Yet there's a curious scarcity of
discussion about why the administration is opening up room for debate now and,
should it recalibrate policy, what its ultimate aims will be. Those questions
deserve careful attention and they turn out to be closely linked to each other.
Protecting troops or interests?
Obama seemed to explain his motives succinctly enough when he offered that
striking warning about the risks to American "blood and treasure". According to
the New York Times, he was "drawing an explicit link between the
Israeli-Palestinian strife and the safety of American soldiers as they battle
Islamic extremism and terrorism", echoing a recent warning from Centcom
commander General David Petraeus, the man in charge of the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
Apparently this new message from the military elite, more than anything else,
is moving the Obama administration toward pressing the Israelis, as well as the
Palestinians, to make real concessions for peace. As journalist Mark Perry, who
first broke the Petraeus story, says: no DC lobby - not even the Israel lobby -
"is as important, or as powerful, as the US military".
But are US military lives really the Pentagon's chief concern? As the Times
added in passing, Petraeus "has denied reports that he was suggesting that
soldiers were being put in harm's way by American support for Israel". The
general's denial was quite accurate. When he briefed the Senate Armed Services
Committee, he said nothing about troops. What he said was that "anti-American
sentiments" fomented by the Israeli-Arab conflict "present distinct challenges
to our ability to advance our interests" in what Washington still likes to call
the Greater Middle East. According to Perry, the Pentagon's private warning to
the White House, too, was only about threats to US "interests".
The sole administration official who may have issued a warning specifically
about danger to US troops was Vice President Joe Biden, who reportedly told
Netanyahu, "What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who
are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."
Troops or interests? The distinction is far from trivial. "Interests" are
measured in national wealth and power, not the quality of individual lives. So
here's the crucial question overlooked by most observers tracking Obama's every
halting step when it comes to Middle East policy: Is the administration's
highest goal to protect blood or treasure, human lives or American interests?
It cannot do both and so, sooner or later, it - or a succeeding administration
will have to choose one or the other.
That choice will be critical if the administration does indeed plan to change
the Middle East status quo. Not even Obama's most eloquent words will be enough
to get the job done. Palestinian Authority leaders have shown that they won't
come to the negotiating table in a serious way without concrete evidence that
they'll achieve a viable state of their own. To achieve anything less would
doom them in future elections.
On the other side, as Tony Karon has written, until there is a "downside to the
status quo for Israel ... things are unlikely to change". So if the Obama
administration is going to go down in history as the author of an
Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, it must do what Bill Clinton never did:
Put together the right package of sticks and carrots.
It really could happen. No conflict goes on forever, and no political leaders
are immune to carefully crafted pressures and inducements. But again, the
president and his advisors will have to make the most basic of decisions: blood
or imperial treasure?
Here's how the options look at the moment:
Convincing divided Palestinians: The Obama administration has
already dangled a big fat carrot in front of the Palestinian Authority: Biden's
statement in Ramallah that the US is "fully committed" to achieving a
Palestinian state "that is independent, viable, and contiguous".
The Palestine Liberation Organization rejected Clinton's peace parameters in
2000 because they would "divide a Palestinian state into three separate cantons
connected and divided by Jewish-only and Arab-only roads and jeopardize a
Palestinian state's viability". In fact, every plan Israel has ever offered, or
even hinted at accepting, would leave a new Palestinian state as an
"archipelago" (as the New York Times put it) of disconnected patches of
land.
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