Democracy in the Arab world

Interesting interview I came across via Angry Arab. An Boston Globe interview with Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a pro-Western Egyptian democracy activist. His point about Middle East dictatorships thriving on the continuation of the conflict over Zionism, and disincentived to reach any resolution of it is very valid. Somehow Ibrahim exempts Sadat from this criticism despite Sadat's being possibly the single most perfect example of a dictator using the conflict to get Western support for the indefinite continuation of his dictatorial status.

But if peace is reached on Thursday, whether by a one-state solution or somehow, impossibly, Arab populations decide Israel as a Jewish state is legitimate where it is and accept a two state solution, then by Friday the dictators of Saudi Arabia, (I don't want to type out the whole list, Qatar, Syria, all of them) will come under greater pressure than they ever have to relinquish power.

The world superpower, and all of its most powerful allies actually are missionary ideological democrats. While the US would not invade Jordan to empower democratic institutions there, it would invest resources to parties in that country to strengthen their challenge to the dictatorship. Modern dictatorships are fairly fragile and in small countries they collapse under modest pressure. The string of Middle East dictatorships are fully aware of the necessity of a conflict over Zionism that they can use to avoid this pressure by being less anti-Israel than the most plausible winners of elections.

Q: Say you get your four-year transition. Civil society opens up, there's freedom of speech. But suppose when it comes time for the election, it appears the Islamists are going to win.

A: No, they're not. Look at the elections that have been held. Islamists did not get the majority in most of them; and if they get a majority once, they don't get it a second time. Look at Jordan, where there were elections in 1989. The Islamists got a plurality - but in the next election, they lost even that.

Q: You don't worry that if Islamists come to power through elections, their commitment to democracy may be limited to one man, one vote, one time?

A: That is a figment of Western fear. It has never happened. I challenge anyone who makes that proposition: Tell me where it has happened. Find me one example.

From time to time I run across the idea that "Islamists" oppose Israel, and the US/Israel are afraid of "Islamists" coming to power in majority Arab or majority Muslim countries. Nasser was not an Islamist. Saddam Hussein was not an Islamist. The "Islamist/Secular" distinction is more misleading than the "Sunni/Shiite" distinction.

As soon as Egypt holds elections, Egypt will get a government, secular or Islamist, that will refuse to support Israel's blockade of Gaza. That is the important issue to the US and Israel - and on this issue Mubarak and the State Department are correct even if the State Department is contradicting supposed US values.

Then if the Islamists win the first election and lose the second, they'll lose the election to another party that will refuse to cooperate with Israel's punishment of Gaza for voting for Hamas.

I've always taken "one person, one vote, one time" as projection. Pro-Western Middle East politicians routinely ''postpone" elections because of "emergencies". Abbas being just the most recent. The fact of the matter is that for at least a generation, anti-Western groups have been far more respectful of democracy as an ideal than the United States has in that region.

Obama's new formulation that the US will "lead by example" while funding and supporting dictatorships in the Middle East translates to "democracy is for us, not for you." Which is the only policy consistent with prioritizing the security of Israel in the Middle East.

Two questions I wish Obama would be asked about the Middle East

1- The Bush administration, in a manner open enough that it appeared in the New York Times attributed to an administration official, adopted the policy that Iran must not have "one spinning centrifuge" either for negotiations to begin or as a final outcome of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. Has that policy been changed? Will the US now accept some amount of uranium enrichment on Iranian soil?

2- Hosni Mubarak is an authoritarian dictator who you've described as good for the region because of his relations with Israel. Of course Hamas has poor relations with Israel but actually won an election. Is the message that relations with Israel are more important than democracy as a US interest in the Middle East? Are you willing to say you prefer Egypt be under an authoritarian dictatorship than have an elected government that would be less cooperative with Israel?

What's in it for Gamal?

Hosni Mubarak has become even more of a model puppet for Israel and the United States than ever recently. Including a lurch towards Israel during the Obama administration - where Egypt has come into active opposition to Iran and Hezbollah. This is just speculation, but I have a feeling the reward for this behavior, in Mubarak's expectation, is more than the speech - but US acquiesencse to a dictatorial succession of power to his son Gamal.

There are two factors that lead me to suspect this. One is, again, that Mubarak is more openly anti-Iran than he was two years ago, and seemingly more anti-Iran than he was on US election day. The other factor is that Obama is moving towards openly espousing a "we'll mind our own business" policy about pro-US dictatorship.

Obama in both of his recent interviews said the US will lead in matters of democracy by example, but will not apply pressure on pro-US dictatorships. He was not asked follow-ups and obviously was becoming evasive to these questions.

When it comes to relations with Israel the US does not lead by example, but applies a tremendous amount of pressure. A fraction of the pressure the US applies on Egypt to ensure that Egypt does not, as the Egyptian people would prefer, open the Rafah crossing with Gaza for goods, would be enough to convince Mubarak to hold fair elections.

So the US has issues where it chooses not to apply pressure, but to "lead by example" (leaving aside what example is being set in several cases) and issues where it chooses to play a very active role in applying pressure.

I suspect Obama's effort to rationalize "leading by example, not pressure" towards democracy in Egypt is fueled by an agreement that Mubarak will be as cooperative as possible in gaining regional acceptance for Israel in exchange for the US being as cooperative as possible in gaining acceptance for Gamal's future accession to power.

Hopefully we are not headed for disaster in Cairo

Barack Obama really feels US positions are more reasonable, he likes using the word modest, than most people in his audience will on Thursday. This gap in perceptions will certainly be accentuated by the speech, and the US will certainly be seen more negatively than before. When Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah give their post-speech criticisms, most Iranians and Lebanese will agree with their co-religionists. Obama does seem to be cautious enough that there will not be a "birth pangs"-level mistake. Instead it will just be a reinforcement of what people in the region already understand to be US policy - which means that it will be a dashing of hope that Barack Obama ever represented a change in US priorities or policies.

Obama recently did an interview with NPR, the US left-leaning National Public Radio:

Norris: You've mentioned many times the importance of reaching out to Iran with an open hand, trying to engage that country. Are you also willing to try to engage with Hezbollah or Hamas, entities that have now had significant gains in recent elections?

Well, let's just underscore a point here. Iran is a huge, significant nation state that has, I think, across the international community been recognized as such. Hezbollah and Hamas are not. And I don't think that we have to approach those entities in the same way.

Norris: If I may ask though, does that change with their electoral — does that change with their electoral gains?

Well, look, if at some point — Lebanon is a member of the United Nations — if at some point they are elected as a head of state or a head of state is elected in Lebanon that is a member of that organization, then that would raise these issues. That hasn't happened yet.

With respect to Hamas, I do think that if they recognize the Quartet principles [referring to the United States, Russia, European Union and the United Nations] that have been laid out — and these are fairly modest conditions here — that you recognize the state of Israel without prejudging what various grievances or claims are appropriate, that you abide by previous agreements, that you renounce violence as a means of achieving your goals — then I think the discussions with Hamas could potentially proceed.

And so, the problem has been that there has been a preference oftentimes on the part of these organizations to use violence and not take responsibility for governance as a means of winning propaganda wars or advancing their organizational aims. At some point though, they may make a transition. There are examples of, in the past, organizations that have successfully transitioned from violent organizations to ones that recognize that they can achieve their aims more effectively through political means. And I hope that occurs.

And another interview with BBC:

Justin Webb: Do you regard President Mubarak as an authoritarian ruler?

President Obama: No, I tend not to use labels for folks. I haven't met him. I've spoken to him on the phone.

He has been a stalwart ally in many respects, to the United States. He has sustained peace with Israel, which is a very difficult thing to do in that region.

But he has never resorted to, you know, unnecessary demagoging of the issue, and has tried to maintain that relationship. So I think he has been a force for stability. And good in the region. Obviously, there have been criticisms of the manner in which politics operates in Egypt.

And, as I said before, the United States' job is not to lecture, but to encourage, to lift up what we consider to be the values that ultimately will work - not just for our country, but for the aspirations of a lot of people.

These are pretty much the answers the US' opponents would expect from a US president, Obama, Bush, Clinton or anyone capable of being elected. The US positions themselves, without any exaggeration or distortion, are outside of the mainstream of political thought in the region.

Obama will not provoke the amount of anger Bush would have, as Bush would have been more clumsy if he attempted a speech like this, but Bush did something better. He didn't attempt a speech like this. The US seems hypocritical and biased in its policies because US policies are hypocritical and biased, but Obama is clearly if unintentionally delivering the hypocrisy and bias directly to a large Muslim audience.

I expect both Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah to do a little better in their elections this month than if the speech hadn't been given, but the speech will not be a huge issue in either direction.

Western liberal supporters of Zionism misunderstand the region

Western liberals, such as blogger Juan Cole, really seem to believe that there is a plausible Palestinian state that could be created that would end the conflict over Zionism.

So what about the Palestinians and allies of Palestinians who genuinely do not accept that Palestine has ever been a suitable place to put a Jewish homeland?

There was a non-Jewish majority when Herzl wrote that should have been able to veto the idea of a Jewish state in the territory, there was a non-Jewish majority in 1948 that should have been able to veto the idea. Today, including refugees and Palestinians under Jewish control, there is a non-Jewish majority that should be able to veto the idea.

Given sovereignty, they will be able to effectively veto the idea of a Jewish state - which from their point of view would serve the cause of justice.

This is a serious structural problem with any conception of a two-state solution.

Further:

What does "great friend" mean? Israel makes the US position in Iraq more difficult. If not for Israel, a stable pro-US government in Iraq likely could have been accomplished without sanctions, an invasion or occupation. Israel convinces mainstream Muslims that harboring enemies of the United States is justifiable - which makes the US missions in Pakistan and Afghanistan vastly more complex and expensive. Israel causes the US to publicly support dictatorships in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere. Israel's security needs drive the US position that Iran cannot be allowed to enrich uranium, despite Iran's clearly legal right to do so. And drives other costly anti-Iranian measures by the US.

It seems to me that Israel unambiguously makes US policy more difficult throughout its region, and nowhere makes it less difficult. "Friend" has a connotation of mutuality, but the US relationship with Israel is one in which the US devotes a huge amount of resources in many ways to its continuation and in return is given the opportunity to direct more resources towards Israel's continuation.

If the US recognizes a Palestinian government as a state, what would that change on the ground? Entry and exit would still be controlled by Israel both in the West Bank and Gaza. Water resources would still be under Israeli control. Israel would still hold Hamas elected parliamentarians in prison. Palestine would still be as powerless as now to protect Palestinians interests from either the Israeli government or Jewish settlers.

Other than one state, there is no solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. If the US insists that there must be a Jewish state, then US policy will face the difficulties it faces today.

The US problem in the region has never been that the US had taken the wrong tone in supporting a Jewish state. The problem has always, from the modern inception of Zionism, been that a Jewish state in Palestine is incompatible with the rights of the Palestinians and thereby the sensibilities of Arabs and Muslims throughout the region and the world.

Obama's independence from the Jewish lobby

Barack Obama has really found in the form of the internet, a new source of funding that overwhelms the previous political funding model. I have not seen much discussion about this, but Bill Clinton's median campaign dollar, likely came from a source that was relatively sympathetic to Israel. (Meaning if he collected $60 million, then put the contributors in a spectrum from most to least sympathetic to Israel, count from either side, and choose the contributor who gave the contribution that put him over $30 million.)

Jewish Americans, the US' single most wealthy ethnic group, was during Clinton's time by far the most wealthy segment of the Democratic coalition that Clinton, Gore or Kerry would have needed to win election.

Obama had vastly outsized contributions by African Americans supporting the exciting prospect of another African American with a realistic chance of winning. He also had, through the internet, a more effective way to extract money from a young urban cosmopolitan demographic that contains Jewish people but not is not nearly as disproportionately Jewish as Clinton's support base.

Contrary to Bill Clinton's, Barack Obama's median campaign dollar likely came from a donor less invested in the continuance of a Jewish state, or less willing to accept or justify misery imposed on others such as the Palestinians as necessary for the greater goal of Israel's security even than Obama himself is. There is no pro-Israel donor who can credibly say to Barack Obama that without the viewpoint I represent, you cannot amass the resources necessary to win election.

This possibly marks a structural change in US politics.

Stratfor's Friedman describes the play-acting that is the Israel peace process

Stratfor's George Friedman presents a two-state solution to the conflict over Zionism as inherently unreachable, but argues that the appearance of progress on the front is in the interests of Israel and the pro-Israel Arab dictatorships. He is right about this and accurate in his description of the play-acting on the issue whose objective is to accomplish nothing but a continuation of the status quo while presenting the appearance of progress.

The pro-Israel dictatorships are relics of the colonial era that depend for their existence on the continued unresolved status of the struggle over Zionism. A solution either way would end the unnatural situation in which the world's preeminent power has an inherent interest in a large group of people, the Arabs, living under unrepresentative regimes. Without that interest of the US in their sustenance, natural processes would either quickly or gradually remove them from power, and would have generations ago.

I wonder to what degree the defeat of the US effort, ultimately largely on Israel's behalf, to contain Iran will have on the sustainability of the essentially transparent farce Friedman describes. When Western reporters describe secret expressions of alarm from Arab sources, they are likely describing concern over this question.

Westerners like Friedman, citizens of essentially democratic countries with competitive and effective political processes, should feel ashamed of themselves for their open identification with the needs of Arab dictatorships to continue repressing their subjects, but do not because of their sentimental attachment to Israel. The Arab dictators themselves, as they invent rationalizations and diversions, are being self-centered as most non-ideologically motivated human beings are in comparable circumstances. They are also thereby demonstrating the ideological ineptness of their versions of religion, religion is ostensibly inherently ideological, to which they subscribe.

Obama may see more clearly than Friedman that the US will not indefinitely be able to sustain the farces necessary to support Zionism, which leaves that ideological movement the choices of either accommodation to the concerns of the Palestinians or defeat.

Or Friedman may see more clearly than Obama that there is no such thing as an accommodation to the concerns of the Palestinians that will stave off defeat. Leaving the choices of a prolonged status quo or the defeat of Zionism.

One thing that is clear is that the process, now openly described by both its supporters and detractors as intrinsically dishonest, of making illusory progress towards peace to cover the interest of those aligned with Zionism with maintaining the current situation is becoming more difficult for the US to support, both morally and in terms of resources, as the US becomes less able to bear those costs.

A difficult speech on June 4

I thought the speech in Turkey was his major address to a Muslim country. I did not expect this.

This speech is very close to the Lebanese election and less then two weeks before the Iranian election.

The problem with the speech is that no matter what he says, Nasrallah gets the last word in Lebanon and Ahmadinejad gets the last word in Iran.

Hopefully he'll say nothing specific like in Turkey. In that best case, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad will rightly say he is only saying words but not changing policy that is very harmful to a lot of Muslims. He is just George Bush with better speeches. That wouldn't sell in the United States, but Nasrallah is far better at Lebanese politics than Obama, and Ahmadinejad is better at Iranian. This will on net benefit them, but if he is upbeat and vague, it can be a small loss.

Possibly Obama will give a detailed evaluation of the region and some of its problems. There is no way a speech by Obama could do that without at some point clumsily offending a lot of Muslims. There is no speech that could get the approval of the US foreign policy apparatus that would not hand hundred of thousands of votes to any anti-US politician in the Middle East.

The fact that the speech is in Egypt was shocking to me. I'm sure Obama does not understand the symbol he's making by doing that. To even say the word "democracy" while standing in Egypt discredits Obama and his country. It likely is a repayment for Egypt's recent increase in cooperation with Israel, but Obama must not realize what it makes him look like. If he understood, he would have spoken somewhere else and come up with a different repayment.

I wish Obama the best of luck. But if he manages to minimize his losses, that will be an accomplishment.

The Link Between the Settlements and the Iran

Short one.

My feel is that Obama is going to make a proposal to Iran that will allow Iran to keep domestic enrichment. He has already told Netanyahu, long before their recent meeting and everyone else in the region.

The connection between Iran's nuclear program and Israel's settlements is not that if Israel freezes its settlements Obama will have more leverage to stop Iranian enrichment. It is that once Iran is enriching in an accepted way, and sanctions begin to be relaxed world-wide, including by the US, then peace with the Palestinians, or at least tangible progress towards peace, for which a settlement freeze is a pre-requisite, is important for Israel's survival as a Jewish state.

There actually is not a rush, that settlement must have been stopped by September, or the end of this year. However, as time passes, the region is turning against Israel in a process the US has little leverage to contain. The US will have more leverage to slow the process if Israel has made concessions to the Palestinians.

New York Time's Cohen shifts into the next gear

Somebody at the New York Times has decided, for some reason, to give voice to full-fledged advocacy of US reconciliation with Iran. This advocacy now goes way beyond what is comfortable for the right-wing hawk section of pro-Israel thought in the US and in Israel. It is also by now far ahead of where the US' overall consensus position on Iran is.

The New York Times now is closer in its view of Iran to the US defense establishment than it is to the US civilian foreign policy establishment. The US foreign policy establishment is heavily influenced by Jewish Americans who feel a sentimental connection to Zionism. Most people who care enough about the region to steer themselves into the direction of working on the Middle East for their careers are Jewish. Everybody who works on that region as a career works with a large amount of Jewish Americans. This has given US policy up to now a very heavy pro-Israel tilt. This effect is far stronger in the State Department than in the Army because people at state have more flexibility to serve where they are most interested. The state department is also more Jewish to start with than the Army.

In the run up to Iraq, the Army and State Department were aligned. Americans, even professionals, were angry in a vague way at the Arab/Muslim people. An invasion offered an opportunity to cause a lot of damage. Hussein's armed forces clearly could not win a confrontation directly. The New York Times infamously hosted Judith Miller, who worked to advance the cause of invasion. At the time though, there was no institutional opposition to the invasion in either the civilian or military foreign policy establishments.

Iran 2009 is a different story than Iraq 2002.

Possibly partly to make amends for its role in advocating the Iraq war that is now seen as a failure, the New York Times has become the media source in its class that is the most vigorous in opposition to hostility with Iran. Another possible motivation may be that the New York Times may be more well attuned with the US military foreign policy establishment than other media organizations. This would not have made a difference in the run-up to Iraq because then the military was as enthusiastic as the civilians. The difference may be coming into view today.

So we have Roger Cohen expressing anger at Barack Obama for not more forcefully imposing his views on Netanyahu.

Obama must remind Israel of that. He should also tell Bibi that the real existential threat to Israel is not Amalek but hubris: An attack on Iran that would put the Jewish state at war with Persians as well as Arabs, undermine its core U.S. alliance, and set Tehran on a full-throttle course to a nuclear bomb with the support of some 1.2 billion Muslims.

Last week we had Flynn and Hillary Mann Leverett call for a complete reversal of US Iran policy as the only way to prevent disaster.

Why has President Obama put himself in a position from which he cannot deliver on his own professed interest in improving relations with the Islamic Republic? Some diplomatic veterans who have spoken with him have told us that the president said that he did not realize, when he came to office, how “hard” the Iran problem would be. But what is hard about the Iran problem is not periodic inflammatory statements from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or episodes like Ms. Saberi’s detention. What is really hard is that getting America’s Iran policy “right” would require a president to take positions that some allies and domestic constituencies won’t like.

I agree with both. Though Obama's style has always been to cede symbolic victories to his opponents to make what seem to him as more substantive issues easier for his opponents to accept. My best guess at this point is that Obama intends to go back on the US position that Iran cannot enrich uranium and if I'm right the symbols that are alarming Cohen and the Leveretts really are less important.

I'm most intrigued though, by the role the New York Times is playing in advocating more cooperative policy towards Iran. The NYT is famously Jewish owned and managed and was far more hawkish on the Iraq invasion than the median American, to say nothing of the median New York City resident, which itself was more opposed to the invasion than the rest of the United States.

Last year the Boston Globe was publishing stories that Iran had achieved "escalation dominance" in its region. The implication was that Iran was too potentially dangerous to the US position in the region to confront directly. This assessment clearly came from US military sources. Time Magazine was the first major source to clearly describe the difference between having a nuclear weapon and being "nuclear capable", defying US policy of trying to confuse those two concepts as much as possible. Last year at this time, the New York Times hewed the line that capability is a weapon very annoyingly.

The Boston Globe and Time Magazine may well be more flexible in what sources they allow themselves to give voice to. The change in perception towards Iran, felt more strongly in some parts of the US foreign policy establishment than others, may have reached those media sources earlier than they reached the NY Times. Or possibly the New York Times took longer to make the decision to publish that point of view. But the New York Times is certainly publishing that point of view now, in its own name and attached to its own prestige and credibility, to the US decision-making class.

Why is Iran Behaving So Provocatively Towards Israel?

My feel is that Iran has not been acting especially provocatively towards Israel. My take is that from the Iranian point of view, Iran has been taking reasonable positions that are being deliberately stretched and distorted by Israel and friends of Israel for their own political reasons.

There is the "wiped off the map". Which is famous by now. Iran does not consider Zionist Israel a legitimate state as it did not consider Apartheid South Africa a legitimate state. He gave examples of other regimes that no longer exist the way Israel's Zionist regime will no longer exist according to him. His examples were the USSR, Saddam's regime and the Shah's regime. There was nothing genocidal in that statement. The idea of Ahmadinejad making a threat against the Jewish people or people of Israel really was not a reasonable interpretation of the speech. The actual speech was not provocative, beyond the fact that government of Iran and the vast majority of its citizens do not consider Israel legitimate (pretty standard for the region, even if a lot of rulers part with their subjects under Western pressure).

On the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad has only ever made two points, 1 is that it occurred in Europe and Palestinians should not pay for it and 2 the story has a privileged status, to the degree that people in the West are imprisoned for expressing doubts about the official story. He's never asserted that a certain number of people died or didn't die. Far less has he ever expressed sympathy or support for Hitler, to whom he has referred as "that criminal" or the Nazi party.

Most important is the nuclear program. Iran believes it has the right to the nuclear status Japan has. Japan does not have a weapon today, or a weapons program today, but if Japan's strategic environment was to change in some unforeseen way in the future, Japan has the right to leave the treaty and make a weapon if it perceives the need. This right of Japan is not in any way abrogated by the NPT.

The United States, following Israel, has adopted the position that Iran must not have nuclear enrichment under its domestic control. This position is very unreasonable at least by the terms of the NPT. From there the situation becomes weird.

The United States and Israel often deliberately conflate what they call a nuclear "capability", which is legal, with a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu recently said there would be a great dangers if Iran "arms itself with a nuclear weapons capability".

Nobody closely following the issue is confused but Israel's people could be forgiven for being fooled by their leaders into thinking enrichment is a weapon. But this is not "ambiguity" on Iran's part. It is dishonesty on the part of US and Israeli leaders.

US and Israeli leaders often use phrases such as "we are confident Iran wants a weapon or at least the capability to create one if it decides to". That "or" is carrying a lot of weight, because one side of the disjunction is prohibited by the NPT as long as Iran remains a signatory, while the other is perfectly legal.

What is happening, the source of the perceived ambiguity, is that in order to maximize pressure on Iran to renounce a legal right, US and Israeli leaders are often deliberately conflating it with a weapon. This is not Iran's fault.

When US Admiral Mullen recently said the believes Iran is trying to build a weapon maybe he meant he has information that nobody else knows about that Iran actually has a weapons program. But maybe by "weapon" he means "weapons capability". US and Israeli policymakers, deliberately attempting to mislead, use these vastly different concepts so interchangeably that it is never clear anymore what they mean. And they are never questioned closely on it.

Lastly, still about the nuclear program, Iran likely calculates that Israel cannot bomb Iran's program without US permission and the US will not give permission.

So regardless of any hysteria Israel's leaders whip Israel's people into, without the US on board, this is nothing more than a bluff, possibly to scare the Europeans into adopting sanctions.

If the US was willing to allow Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear plants, the US would do it itself, the US has more planes and cruise missiles closer than Israel has, and the blowback from a US or Israeli attack on the US would be the same.

If Israel doubted the US would shoot Israeli jets out of the sky attempting to bomb Iran without permission, Israel would have already bombed Iran.

So for those reasons, the nuclear issue seems like a higher-stakes, more risky endeavor in Tel-Aviv than it does in Tehran.

Iran's nuclear behavior, from Iran's point of view, is not only not provocative, but a reasonable position in a dispute that would have been resolved in 2004 if the US was willing to accept Iranian domestic enrichment under an inspection regime as stringent as anybody wants. The US position has never been for a more stringent inspection regime, but for Iran not to be "nuclear capable" in the way Japan is. Iran does not consider itself any more provocative than Japan or Brazil.

New US attack preparations against Iran?

A story originally posted, then apparently removed from Ynet News.

Obama orders Gates to update plan for Iran strike

American defense secretary tells NBC television president has instructed him to refresh plans for military action against Tehran prepared during Bush era.

I'm fairly confident there will be no US or Israeli airstrike on Iran's nuclear facilities for the next two presidential terms. But this story represents an increase in belligerency that goes against the direction in which US/Iranian relations had seemed to be moving.

On the other hand, 1) it is an Israeli source and in line with the direction Israel would like to see US/Iranian relations move and 2) it may have been withdrawn, meaning it may have been placed accidentally.

Having plans is not a big deal. Announcing plans is a big deal, not necessarily an indication that plans will be carried out, but a statement in themselves. It is not clear to what degree this story represents a US announcement, but it would have been better if it had not happened.

The Obama administration is really hitting a lot of wrong notes in the run ups to the elections in Iran and Lebanon in June. One reason is that Obama is not an extraordinarily talented foreign policy president and does not seem to have a clear and specific vision of what he wants to see happen in the Middle East. Another reason is that the United States does not have an institutional apparatus capable of making the type of change in tone Obama says (probably sincerely) that he wants to make in the Middle East.

Is an Israeli Jewish sense of victimization perpetuating the conflict with Palestinians?

January article in Haaretz

Among the same Jewish public, 40 percent are unaware that at the end of the 19th century, the Arabs were an absolute majority among the inhabitants of the Land of Israel. Over half of respondents replied that in the United Nations partition plan, which was rejected by the Arabs, the Arabs received an equal or larger part of the territory of the Land of Israel, relative to their numbers; 26.6 percent did not know that the plan offered the 1.3 million Arabs a smaller part of the territory (44 percent) than was offered to 600,000 Jews (55 percent).

Bar-Tal claims that this distortion of memory is no coincidence. He says that the details of the plan do not appear in any textbook, and this is a deliberate omission. "Knowledge of how the land was divided could arouse questions regarding the reason why the Arabs rejected the plan and make it possible to question the simplistic version: We accepted the partition plan, they didn't."

However, his study shows that a larger percentage of the Jewish population in Israel believes that in 1948, the refugees were expelled (47.2 percent of respondents), than those who still retain the old Zionist version (40.8 percent), according to which the refugees left on their own initiative. On this point, not only do almost all the history books provide up-to-date information, but some local school textbooks do as well. Even on the television program "Tekuma" ("Rebirth," a 1998 documentary series about Israel's first 50 years), the expulsion of the Arabs was mentioned.

I had meant to write something about this earlier, but there's not much to say. I'll just keep a link and maybe come back to it later.

Peres: We can't attack Iran without the US

Bush denied Israel authorization to strike Iran, as is now publicly known. Bush had good reasons to deny this authorization. Israel refused to attack without that authorization. Israel had good reasons not to try to attack Iran without US permission.

Barack Obama in office is clearly less likely to give such permission than Bush. So when Israel admits that it will not attack Iran without US support, Israel is essentially admitting there will not be an attack on Iran.

And now, here is Shimon Peres:

"We certainly cannot go it alone, without the US, and we definitely can't go against the US. This would be unnecessary," stressed the president.

This has been common sense for years now. I'm glad to see the beginnings of an acknowledgment of reality.

For all of the dishonest claims that the US and Israel have been motivated by a desire to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, the nuclear issue until this point has really just been an exercise in attempting to broaden and internationalize, as much as possible, sanctions the US has been applying on Iran, on behalf of Israel, nearly since the Iranian revolution.

Iran does intend to retain its right to the nuclear fuel cycle the way Brazil and Japan do. But at least in the near term, having enrichment does not, in a practical way, give Iran the ability to build a weapon.

“In the race between an Iranian bomb and bombing Iran, we would win,” said Jeffrey G. Lewis, a nuclear specialist at the New America Foundation, a research group in Washington. “We would cave in the roof before they got a bomb’s worth of material.”

An Iranian enrichment capacity, while it does not give Iran a short term ability to build a weapon does shatter any Israeli expectation of a long term monopoly over nuclear power in the region. It also pressures Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to build weapons, but to match Iran's capability to create a weapon in theory.

The main problem with an accepted Iranian enrichment capacity, from Israel's point of view, is that it removes a pretext for sanctions, which weakens Israel's most important lever for maintaining economic and technological dominance over its region.

Developments on Iran's nuclear issue have been major setbacks for Israel's strategic position. But not for the reasons Israel and its friends have been saying.

US drops preconditions for Iran talks

I guess and especially hope we're seeing the wind-down of the Iranian nuclear issue.

The US and Europe are preparing to make a major concession to Iran to end the deadlock over its nuclear programme, according to American and European sources.

In what amounts to a major policy shift, the Obama administration is set to drop a precondition for the start of negotiations on the nuclear issue - that Iran first suspends its uranium enrichment process.

The precondition has been the biggest stumbling block in efforts over the past few years to open talks. The Bush administration insisted upon it but Tehran adamantly refused.

How I've read the process described is that talks will commence without any suspension, but the goal will still be suspension. I find it unlikely that Iran will suspend after talks begin, but if the US ultimately plans on accepting Iran having the same status as Brazil, Japan or Romania - having enough of a fuel cycle to make weapons in theory but under IAEA inspections, this is a good first step towards that goal.

If the US is adamant that it will not allow enrichment at the end of negotiations, there is no reason to even begin negotiations unless Iran indicates it is willing to stop enrichment. Bush's position that negotiations should not begin without suspension as a precondition was reasonable given the US position that Iran must ultimately give up enrichment until it gets permission from the US or the security council. That position that Iran must ultimately give up enrichment was what was unreasonable.