May 16, 2008 4:21

Obama: Appeasement, or Engagement?

As I see it from my perch here in the Middle East, American voters certainly have a choice now: the flap over President Bush's apparent "appeasement" attack on Barack Obama crystalizes the different foreign policy approaches that would be taken by a President Obama compared to a President McCain. The choice that McCain and Obama offer is more American unilateralism versus renewed American engagement.

McCain sees the Middle East in the same black and white, with-us-or-against-us framework as Bush does. The Middle East is a contest that American must "win." America and its ally Israel selflessly stand for freedom, democracy and peace. The enemies of the U.S. and Israel must be vanquished. They are evil promoters of hatred and practitioners of murder. McCain's emphasis is on America's military power. Obama sees the Middle East in more complex terms. He has stated his intention to engage in "aggressive personal diplomacy" with Iran's leaders to seek Iran's cooperation on issues including Iraq, terrorism and Iran's nuclear ambitions. He's also said he would negotiate with Syrian leaders. His combined willingness to negotiate with two countries that support Hamas and Hizballah indicates that Obama is ready to initiate a comprehensive diplomatic engagement rather than rely largely on American military force to resolve the conflicts in the Middle East. That's the reason that Bush seemed to be attacking Obama during his speech to the Israeli Knesset on Thursday. He ridiculed those who would "negotiate with terrorists and radicals" as promoters of "the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

The stark differences in approach should be given a full airing during the presidential campaign if Obama becomes the Democratic nominee. Obama will be put in an extraordinarily uncomfortable position, being made to appear that he is weak, naive, somehow sympathetic to anti-American groups and supporters of terrorism, or all of the above. To his credit, he seems to be sticking to his diplomacy-first beliefs, telling the New York Times this week: "I constantly reject this notion that any hint of strategies involving diplomacy are somehow soft or indicate surrender or means that you are not going to crack down on terrorism."

It is far from clear that Obama's diplomatic approach to the Middle East will work. But there's an unreal quality about what Bush and McCain said this week that they must be called on.

Is it Obama who is weak, naive and giving succor to America's enemies, or is it Bush and by extension McCain? By unilaterally invading Iraq and bungling the occupation, Bush severely undermined America's global standing, our credibility even with close allies and the U.S. economy. Iran has benefitted enormously from Bush's foul-ups, and al-Qaeda has not been cowed much less defeated by U.S. military firepower. For his part, McCain has suggested the U.S. military--this is a former POW in Vietnam speaking--might have to stay in Iraq for 100 years. In a speech in Columbus, Ohio this week, McCain predicted that America could declare itself the winner of the Iraq war during his first presidential term, and that Osama bin Laden would be killed or captured as well.

Actually, as it happens, there is a glaring inconsistency in Bush's rhetoric about negotiating with terrorists. Leaving aside his negotiations with "evil" North Korea, Bush's only tangible accomplishment in the Middle East is the U.S. breakthrough with Libya. Bush's people secretly negotiated with Colonel Gadhafy--a long-standing state-sponsor of terrorism--and convinced him to abandon Libya's nuclear weapons program. This is a matter of public record--I've heard the full story myself in detail from the mouth of Gadhafy's son, Seif al-Islam. An American embassy is open again in Tripoli. Gadhafy is busy building luxury vacation resorts rather than nuclear bombs. If that's appeasement, maybe we need more of it.

Another case is the one that concerns the Palestinian group Fatah and its late leader, Yasser Arafat. When Bush took office in 2001, he chose to abandon Clinton's policy of mediating the Israeli-Palestinian dispute or dealing with Arafat. The next six years saw some of the worst violence in the history of the conflict and the rise of the Islamist group Hamas. After all that damage was done, Bush decided to engage Fatah once again--launching the intensive last-ditch Annapolis peace process. After all the tragic dead-ends, it seems Bush decided that negotiations were worth pursing after all. For his part, McCain is eager to show his disdain for including Hamas in talks. He ridicules Obama for having been "endorsed" by Hamas--an unworthy cheap shot distorting sympathetic comments expressed by a Hamas official. Yet the idea is a far cry from appeasement. In a Haaretz poll in February, 64% of Israelis themselves said they favored talking to Hamas.

Then there's the case of Iran. Bush calls Iran's leaders part of the "axis of evil" and with McCain's chiming in with support suggests that Obama is another Neville Chamberlain for indicating that he would talk with them. Maybe Bush forgot that he has sent State Department envoys to negotiate with Iranian counterparts on several occasions, related to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, Condi Rice has officially offered Iran high-level negotiations with the U.S. on one condition: it halts its uranium-enrichment program. The main difference between what Obama says and what Rice has actually proposed is that Obama does not place a pre-condition on negotiations. Yet, McCain this weak again wondered why Obama would want to talk with Iran's leaders. "Senator Obama ought to explain to the American people," he said.

Strip away the rhetoric--with its jingoism, silliness and contradictions--and simply ask, Which approach works, unilateralism or engagement? Did America "win" the Iraq war? Did the invasion advance American influence and interests? Did the war in Afghanistan destroy al-Qaeda and its extremist ideology and make the U.S. more secure? Did abandoning the Middle East peace process for six years help end the Israeli-Palestinian dispute or increase America's standing in the region or the world? Did designating Iran's leaders as "evil" rather than negotiating with them make it more or less likely that Iran will acquire a nuclear weapon. In Columbus, McCain said he will look back after his first presidential term and be satisfied that "the Iraq war has been won," and that U.S. counterinsurgency efforts "led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden." As if just saying that will make it so. How marvelous if solving the Middle East's problems was only that simple.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo

May 15, 2008 9:43

What's Going to Happen to Lebanon? One Scenario

The Hizballah-led opposition removed its rubble barricades this evening / Photo by ALB

Last night the Lebanese government rescinded the two decisions that sparked last week's violent outburst from Hizallah -- to shut down Hizballah's private military telecommunications network and the firing of the pro-opposition airport chief who had probably been facilitating Hizballah wepaons shipments. In return, the Hizballah-led Shia Muslim opposition groups released their stranglehold on the city, bringing down its road blocks and allowing the airport to re-open. Everyone's back at work, flights are resuming, and no doubt tonight the bars will be packed.

Lebanon could go on humming like this for weeks, even months. Lebanon could have its first normal summer tourist season in years. But unless there is some kind of broad regional settlement that includes talks between American and Iran, and peace between Israel and the Arabs, the calm won't last. Hizballah's lightening quick armed incursion into Beirut was an illuminating moment, and a vision of worse to come.

For one thing, it showed that the Iranian-backed group -- despite years of saying that it would only use its weapons against Israel -- will do anything in its power to protect its military infrastructure, including using it on fellow Lebanese.

It showed that the American-backed ruling coalition is a government in name only. The army won't protect it (or risk splitting apart) the police can't (or they would be destroyed) and the street gangs in Sunni neighborhoods proved no match for Hizballah's ruthless efficiency and superior firepower. If Hizballah wanted to, it could drag Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's cabinet out of the Grand Serail by force.

But the fact that Hizballah didn't do so, and that it only attacked street gangs and political offices (not state institutions) was also illuminating. For all its military supremacy, Hizballah needs a political settlement in order to legitimize its role as a state-within-a-state. Hizballah can't run Lebanon on its own. With 17 different religious groups and a constitution that divides power among them, this place is a mess. Fighting Israel is a whole lot easier than governing Lebanon.

The ruling coalition knows this and is refusing to accept Hizballah's political terms: a new government in which Hizballah would have an expanded role and veto power over major decisions. The Siniora cabinet's only option is to delay, and cling to the symbols of international legitimacy even though it has little street credibility.

This is a dangerous game. With a vacuum at the top, the streets are reasserting themselves. Already the country is dividing up neighborhood by neighborhood, town by town, and gangs are forming to protect their turf and screen outsiders. Unable to contest Hizballah directly, Sunni gangs could start taking revenge on Shia civilians, and begin the cycle of violence and revenge. Already Al Qaeda types are clamoring to come here and kill Shia -- doing to Lebanon what they did to Iraq. And if the government refuses to cooperate, Hizballah may send its troops out again.

At this point the real darkness could begin. Lebanon itself could break up with a rump Hizballahstan taking over in southern Lebanon, southern Beirut, and the Bekaa valley, with an independent Christian Mount Lebanon in the north, and the Sunni city of Tripoli becoming the capital of Al Qaeda. After which, it would be only a matter of time before Lebanon's rival Christian parties start fighting amongst themselves.

This could be just what Israeli and American Likudniks and neo-conservatives want: the Lebanese fighting amongst themselves, and Muslims killing Muslims instead of Jews. But it would be a nightmare for everyone else, worse than any foreign occupation, or despotic government. It would be Fitna -- upheaval, strife, civil war.

Scene of a sectarian street massacre in Beirut last week/Photo by Pasqual Gorriz

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

May 15, 2008 1:16

Citizen Power and the Middle East

Check out two new books on or related to the Middle East, Tragedy in South Lebanon: The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006, by Cathy Sultan (Scarletta Press), and Re-engage! America and the World after Bush, by Helena Cobban (Paradigm Publishers). I'm prompted to write about them after a friend emailing from San Francisco recently asked whether I was optimistic about the Middle East, and whether the "peace movement" was effective or an exercise in futility. Well, I'm guardedly optimistic, despite scenes like those we saw in Beirut again over the past week. But I do think citizens have an important role to play if peace is to become a reality.

In Tragedy, as in her earlier books, A Beirut Heart and Israeli and Palestinian Voices, author and peace activist Sultan expresses an honest citizen's outrage over the region's continuing conflicts and describes the human toll on all sides through the fascinating testimonies of people on the ground. Tragedy also has its merits as a good citizens' handbook to the problems in Lebanon and the Middle East. But what I like most about the book is how she tells the story through her eyes as a concerned citizen seeking a better world whose own eyes were opened wider by the personal experience of living through the 1975-90 Lebanese Civil War. American-born Sultan, now residing with her Lebanese husband in Wisconsin, helps open other eyes through her books as well as through her work in such organizations as the National Peace Foundation, which is involved in sending delegations to Israel and Palestine.

Journalist Helena Cobban's Re-engage! is a citizens' manual with a broader agenda. Cobban feels that Bush's invasion of Iraq has led to a strategic failure of a similar magnitude as the 1956 Suez crisis, which effectively diminished the global role played by once-great imperial powers Britain and France, and as the 1979 Afghanistan invasion, which helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Believing that the next American president has a new chance to put things right, Cobban calls for a revamped foreign policy of global inclusion to replace Bush's unilateralism. Cobban is formerly a foreign correspondent for major media outlets like the London Sunday Times. Her search for a better world likewise has the citizen's touch to it now; besides her mainstream writings and books, she draws inspiration--and had help with this book--from her Quaker congregation in Virgina. Since 2003 she has operated Just World News, a lively, informative blog on world affairs that is popular with specialists and non-specialist citizens alike. Just World News, like Re-engage!, is a good example of the role citizens can play in helping shape a new, better narrative for the Middle East and the world.

Back to my friend's question that prompted this blog post:

I'm not too worried about radical Islam, the "clash of civilizations" or Iran's nuclear ambitions. The main obstacle to a better future is the power politics over security, and I think very broadly speaking that the region's players and interested outside parties like the U.S. have gradually moved toward a more realistic understanding of how to live together. There's a long, long way to go, of course, but here's one important example of the way mindsets have evolved in the right direction. Twenty years ago this week when Israel was marking 40 years of independence, the PLO and its leader Arafat were branded as terrorists by the Israeli and U.S. governments. A few years later, the U.S., Israel and the PLO found a way of dealing with one another. Arafat and Rabin signed the Oslo peace agreement at the White House with Clinton. That was based on the realistic view that Israel was not going to disappear, yet the Palestinians' legitimate rights needed to be addressed. Today, as Israel marks 60 years of independence, the U.S. and Israel are desperate to keep Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, as a negotiating partner. All three parties are looking over their shoulders at Hamas. Yet, even Hamas, for all its radicalism, shows a willingness to compromise reminiscent of the old PLO. Who would have imagined that a former American president, the mediator of the Camp David peace accords, would be holding talks with Hamas leaders in the Syrian capital, as Jimmy Carter did last month? The U.S. brands Hamas a terror group and Syria a state sponsor of terrorism.

More important, mindsets among ordinary people have changed, too. In a Haaretz poll in February, 64% of Israelis said they favored talking to Hamas. That's quite remarkable, given the unforgivable suicide bombings the group has inflicted on Israeli civilians. But it also reflects the growing realism and impatience for peace at the grassroots level that you can see throughout the Middle East.

Ultimately, political leaders must take the necessary steps to make peace. You would be starry-eyed to believe that citizen groups have the capacity to foment some kind of popular hands-across-the-wall revolution throughout the Middle East. But I do think that the role of NGOs including peace groups--and including the work of folks like Cathy Sultan and Helena Cobban-- is vital for expanding the space for tolerance and understanding and challenging the conventional wisdom (as well as real fears) driving the conflicts onward.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo

May 13, 2008 10:37

Yes, I'm Still in Beirut

Sorry I haven't been blogging folks, but I've been overwhelmed with the upheaval in Beirut. Hopefully you've been catching my stories about the Hizballah siege of Beirut on time.com

If not here are two of them:

After the Blitz, Hizballah Runs Beirut

Surrendering to Hizballah

And tomorrow I'll return to regular programming, I promise.

--ALB

May 13, 2008 8:14

A Reporter's Take on Iran in Iraq

For an alternative look at Iran in Iraq, read Nir Rosen's provocative piece on Steve Clemons' Washington Note. Rosen challenges the conventional wisdom of Beltway policymakers and media narrative-setters. He pulls no punches in taking on everybody from the U.S. military's Gen. Petraeus to the Washington Post's editorial board. Nir, a former colleague of ours in TIME's Baghdad Bureau, has written extensively for the New Yorker, the New York Times and others. He's a reporter who has covered America's military involvements after 9/11 more closely on the ground as anybody has. His reporting on that is contained in his book, just re-issued in paperback, The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.

A few excerpts from his take on Iran in Iraq, "Selling the War With Iran":

I have remained shocked, like many journalists and academics familiar with the region and its languages, that the Americans have shown no improvement in their understanding of the Muslim world with which they are so deeply engaged militarily and as an imperial power... too often the so called experts are equally ignorant. Remarkably, their lack of background, expertise or language skills and their repeated errors have not diminished the credibility of people such as Fred Kagan of the far right American Enterprise Institute (a Russia expert!), or Kenneth Pollock of the Brookings Institute or their cohorts...

Moreover the dominant parties in the government and in those units of the security forces that battled their political rivals in Basra and elsewhere are the ones closest to Iran. The leadership of the Iraqi government regularly consults Iranian officials and is closer to Iran than any other element in Iraq today. Moreover, the Americans have always blamed their failures in Iraq on outsiders, Baathists, al Qaeda, Iranians, because they refuse to admit that the Iraqi people don't want them. So Iran is a convenient scapegoat to explain the strength of the Sadrists, a strength actually resulting from the fact that they are a genuinely popular mass movement. Blaming Iran also lets the Americans maintain the illusion that the Mahdi Army's ceasefire is still in effect. I expect this from the Bush administration and the ideologues who back it. But when the American media, which, in the build up to the American attack on Iraq abdicated its duty to challenge those in power and inform the public, continues to demonstrate the same lack of skepticism, it is very distressing...

The truth is, most allegations about Iran's role in Iraq and the region are unfounded or dishonest. Iran was responsible for ending the recent fighting in Basra and calming the situation after Iraqi parliamentarians who backed Prime Minister Maliki approached it. The Iranians, never close to Muqtada or his family, were so annoyed with Muqtada and his presence that they reportedly ordered him out of Iran where he had been living in virtual house arrest anyway since arriving six months earlier. Iranian officials and the state media clearly supported Prime Minister Maliki and the Iraqi government against what they described as "illegal armed groups" in the recent conflict in Basra, which is not surprising given that their main proxy in Iraq, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council dominates the Iraqi state and is Maliki's main backer. The Supreme Council is of course also the main proxy for the US in Iraq and somehow in the Senate testimony it was forgotten that its large Badr militia was established in Iran and is actually the only Iraqi opposition group to have fought on the Iranian side against Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. Moreover, the Badr militia was a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that is so demonized today, and Badr dominates the ministry of interior, if not most of Iraq at the higher echelons. But none of this openly available information made its way to the Post's editorial writers or the dominant discourse in the US...

There is no proxy war in Iraq, because the US and Iran share the same proxy and the US installed that proxy and empowered it. Today, to the extent that we can talk about an Iraqi "state," it is dominated by the Supreme Council and its Badr militia. The Sadrist movement of which the Mahdi Army is a loose militia is also the largest humanitarian organization in Iraq, providing homes, security, rations, clothes and other services to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It is a complex movement and certainly is as guilty of crimes as all the other groups that took part in the Iraqi civil war, including the Americans...

Most of those who fight the Americans in Iraq do so not at the bidding of a foreign power but out of genuine and sincere opposition to the American occupation. The Americans never grasped this and always assumed it was about the money, or al Qaeda, and now part of a silly Iranian conspiracy. After at first siding with Iraq's Shiites much to the consternation of America's so called "moderate" Sunni allies, the Americans are now targeting Shiites and perhaps even Shiite Iran as Bush prepares for once last war on his path to the "New Middle East." But without the help of an acquiescent media supplicating to Bush administration and US military officials they might not be able to go to war once again...

I believe that in fact Iran is a positive influence in Iraq, that it has a close relationship with the Kurds and the Shiites and that the Iranian regime, unlike its Sunni neighbors, is not sectarian and is very pragmatic. If Iraq's Sunnis dislike Iran it is because Saddam Hussein initiated a war of aggression against Iran and succeeded in demonizing Shiites. Admiral Mullen was wrong when he said that Iran prefers "see a weak Iraq neighbor." Iran and the former Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al Jaafari even discussed Iran training Iraq's security forces. Iran has close relations with Sunni Islamist Hamas and its foreign policy is not a Shiite one at all. Iran does not seek to conquer or control its Arab neighbors but it also chooses not to be an American puppet or client regime, and that has always been the sin the American empire will never pardon...

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo