Examining Obama’s own defenders on missile defence
In the interests of making sure I avoided the echo chamber that we can sometimes get stuck in on the blogosphere, I’ve spent some time today explicitly looking for people who defend Obama’s missile decision and considering their points. And where better to start than the administration itself. Robert Gates has written in defence of the decision today, and he offers three main points. He says it will provide a defence capability earlier than the old plan, that it will be more adaptable than the old system, and that it will defend against the short-range missiles that are more likely to be a threat in the near future.
None of this is necessarily untrue, but it is not the whole story. “We are strengthening — not scrapping — missile defense in Europe,” is how Gates ends his article. However, there is no way the administration can deny that the new plan has the effect of pushing back defence against ICBMs from 2015 to 2020. It’s true that it introduces defences against short and medium-range missiles, and on a shorter timeframe than the old plan would have delivered anything, but there was no reason why the administration couldn’t simply have combined the two systems. They are not mutually exclusive. The new plan doesn’t defend against ICBMs on a shorter timeframe; in fact, it doesn’t defend against them at all.
The new plan is certainly more flexible. From a military and technical standpoint, placing defences on ships is favourable to having static land-based sites that are at the mercy of the host governments. In theory, anyway – in practice, it might be difficult to operate ships in the Black or Baltic Seas. And the plan is only flexible insofar as it addresses threats other than ICBMs. Any defence against ICBMs would require a land-based site such as the one planned in Poland, and the vague hints than such a site might eventually be placed in Israel, the Balkans or Turkey certainly don’t indicate that there is a a well-thought-out plan for tackling the ICBM threat. Getting a foreign government to agree to host such a site is not necessarily going to be easy – so, despite the flexibility of the new plan in tackling other threats, it must be stressed away that Obama has traded away a defence against ICBMs.
“Russia’s attitude and possible reaction played no part in my recommendation to the president on this issue,” writes Gates, who tries to portray the decision as an entirely pragmatic move made on purely military grounds. Clinton has repeated the assertion that the decision was “not about Russia”. It may be true that Russia’s attitude played no part in Gates’ advice to the president, but no-one can be expected to believe that it played no part in Obama’s decision. Indeed, if the administration wants us to believe that this decision was taken without any consideration of the Russians at all, then it wants us to believe that it is running an incompetent and ignorant foreign policy. This decision is of a piece with the rest of the administration’s policy towards Eastern Europe and Russia.
Commentators outside the administration are more free to admit this, and can try to justify the grimey realpolitik that the administration has carried out but dare not speak the name of. Hence, Meir Javendanfar writes that Obama is “prioritising” the desire to stop Iran becoming a nuclear state by trying to woo Russia. He doesn’t address, however, the extremely tenuous nature of the evidence that this will work. Indeed, even if the Russians were to agree not to wield their veto against tougher sanctions on Iran, the Chinese could still prevent them. Furthermore, even if Chinese opposition could somehow be dropped and sanctions passed, it’s far from clear that Iran will capitulate and stop developing its nuke anyway.
There’s a more pertinent point to be made about prioritizing here. You could argue that this decision means that the Obama administration is accomodating itself to the inevitability of an Iranian nuke. In July, Clinton talked about pitching a “defence umbrella” over the Middle East to hedge against an Iranian nuke. At the time I noted that she had omitted to say “nuclear umbrella” (which would imply the threat of nuclear retaliation), and now that this new plan involves talk of deployments to Turkey and Israel, we may be seeing the advent of this “defence umbrella”. I cannot criticize them for taking this move, because I am extremely pessimistic about our ability to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. However, it’s worth remembering – again – that they have abandoned their hedge against an ICBM until at least 2020, which makes for an inconsistent policy if they are trying to hedge against the inevitability of an Iranian nuke.
Writing in The New Republic, Peter Scoblic hopes this will ease U.S.-Russian relations and adds that it shouldn’t worry the Eastern Europeans, because the system didn’t afford them any meaningful defence anyway. On the last point, he is ignoring both the symbolic importance of the move in demonstrating the U.S. commitment to the region, and also the practical benefit of having American forces stationed there. Both would militate against Russian interference.
And while it might improve the atmospherics in U.S.-Russian relations, any self-satisfaction on that score might well be restrained by the realization that good relations are about policy rather than warm feelings. If the U.S. gave the Russians everything they want – entry into the WTO, high-technology transfers, recognition of their control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and a free hand to interfere in its near abroad – then I’m sure the Russians would consider their relations with the U.S. to be excellent. This idea that we capitulate to other countries in exchange for a blissful state of nirvana described as “good relations” plays a large role in Obama’s foreign policy, and it is misguided.
A few other criticisms can be batted off more easily. Stephen Walt apparently isn’t aware the ICBM-detection system was designed to prevent the East Coast of the United States as much as it was Europe, so the limited chance of the Iranians nuking Eastern Europe is not relevant; nor was this why the Czech and Polish governments wanted the facilities, as described above. Fred Kaplan follows the administration’s explanation almost point-for-point, adding little, and notes that the ball is now in Russia’s court for proving if this decision was worthwhile – hardly a reassuring prospect.
That’s it. I’m sure there’s more; feel free to link me to any particularly interesting articles that contain points I’ve missed. But nothing I’ve read convinces me that this was anything short of a poor decision, executed terribly. The technical and intelligence rationale behind it is incomplete, because it doesn’t take into account the possibility of Iran developing an ICBM capability earlier than is apparently now envisaged – or, indeed, by 2015, as every extant intelligence estimate indicates. And on a political level, it has the appearance almost as a calculated snub to U.S. allies and a nod and a wink to Russia. If I could believe that it would achieve the goals for which it was apparently designed – enlisting Russian help on Iran and elsewhere – I would have pause for thought before condemning it. But the fact it is unlikely to even achieve the ends for which it is intended is the most damning indictment of all, as it is for any policy.
Add comment September 20, 2009
Obama’s missile decision and the Israeli military option
It’s hard to find anyone willing to defend Obama’s decision to scrap Bush’s Eastern Europe missile defence plans today, outside of the White House and their house publication, The New York Times. The administration’s explanation that it plans to deploy short and medium-range missile defences because the threat of long-range missiles has not yet emerged is somewhere between illogical and disingenuous, because the Bush plans did not envisage deployment until 2013 anyway, and intelligence estimates indicate the Iranians could have long-range missiles by 2015.
Obama also did not explain why he couldn’t deploy both systems, all the better to defend both the United States and European allies. His explanation only makes sense if there is new intelligence to indicate that the Iranians will not have long-range missiles until a much later date, but of course we have not seen that evidence and even if we had we would have every reason to doubt its validity given the American intelligence community’s track record of assessing WMD and missile programmes.
The administration has been planning to do this since taking office, and it fits broadly with its policy towards Russia on the one hand and America’s allies on the other. It’s clear that this decision wasn’t made on the basis of new intelligence, but on the basis of a cynical realism which, whatever its title, this blog does not endorse. It’s a decision that also makes an eventual Israeli military strike on Iran more likely.
The cynicism of the move is compounded by its hamfistedness. If this is supposed to be “smart power“, I dread to see how the administration will act on an off day. First, there was the implementation. Poland and the Czech Republic were formally informed of the decision by phone calls in the middle of the night – this is hardly the way to deal with close allies. Even worse, the phone calls came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet assault on Poland in World War II. The fact that nobody in the Obama White House knew or cared about this speaks volumes about the people making policy towards Central Europe.
The Eastern Europeans do not care much about Iranian missiles – they are not likely to be a target of them. But they do care about Russia’s threat to the region. It already rankled that the administration did not send a senior official to the ceremonies marking the anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland earlier this month. Obama spends a lot of time giving speeches condemning mistakes he thinks were made by America in the past, but couldn’t even spare Joe Biden for a ceremony to commemorate last century’s most brutal war and, implicitly, America’s morally unobtuse intervention to save Europe from itself. This may be a generational thing, but it’s also an ideological one. It’s clear that no significant constituency would support the administration’s disdaining of this ceremony – except, of course, Moscow, which participated in the brutal carve-up of Poland and the initiation of Hitler’s genocidal wars.
All of this aside, there’s also the substance of the policy to consider. As Jennifer Rubin writes, this decision was “deeply cynical” but also “deeply naive”. It was cynical because it represented a cave-in to Russian demands and a hurried brushing-off of American allies, and it was naive because it mistakenly assumes that America will somehow be rewarded for its cave-in. But make no mistake, this decision was not part of a negotiation in which the administration gained something. The idea was that this would push Russia into helping with Iran or nuclear disarmament talks, but Putin has already reacted by calling for further concessions.
The Russians don’t regard this as a favour to be reciprocated, but a unilateral concession to be extracted from a weak president. Russia’s ambassador to NATO said that the planned shield was like a “decomposing corpse in your flat … [it] prevented us from doing the real work”. According to the Guardian, Russia had begun raising serious objections to Obama’s plans for further talks to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear arsenals, and this may have influenced Obama’s decision on the shield. Such talks are of course laudable, but there was no need for Obama to make this concession to enable them: the Russians need these talks much more than America, because they cannot afford to maintain their nuclear arsenal and certainly can’t afford a new arms race.
Similarly, the idea that Moscow will now help America with a new sanctions regime against Iran is likewise misguided. Russia has almost nothing to gain and much to lose from some sort of concerted international action against Iran’s nuclear programme. This is especially the case, of course, now that the Obama administration has validated Russia’s principle of seeking concessions in Eastern Europe in exchange for possible support against Iran. Moscow benefits from having Iran acting as an irritant for America in the Middle East, sapping the superpower’s energy and diverting its attention from other areas. Any escalation of the crisis which affected global energy markets would benefit Russia because it exports oil and natural gas – Russia is the one major country that has the most to gain and least to lose from turmoil in the Middle East.
Russia also has the power to fatally undermine any sanctions regime against Tehran. A crippling sanctions regime against Iran would need to cover gasoline, because Iran imports 40% of its gasoline. However, Russia and China can sell Iran all the gasoline it needs, which means if they don’t participate in sanctions then they will be flawed. There is little incentive for Russia to participate in the sanctions, especially because the failure to achieve international consensus now will, in their view, just lead to another round of negotiations in which Moscow can hopefully extract yet more from Obama – such as backing to join the WTO, which Putin has explicitly asked for in the aftermath of the missile decision.
But the Russians might be wrong in thinking that will follow will be another round of talks. Obama is moving the pieces around the chessboard in the hope of achieving a checkmate against Iran, but when he is shown to have failed to do so then the Israelis might just decide to take matters into their own hands. The Israeli government already believes that Obama is not out to protect their interests, and they are unlikely to be impressed by his lack of nerve in dealing with either the Iranians or the Russians. Obama had a honeymoon period in which to try and block the Iranian nuclear programme through diplomacy, and that period is nearly over.
When it is over, it’s not at all clear that it makes more sense for the Israelis to wait until a later point in the Obama presidency to launch a military strike. Netanyahu’s government is congenitally-inclined to take matters into its own hands, and Obama’s decision to initiate a squabble over settlements has not made the Israelis inclined to follow an American lead. When and if Netanyahu makes that decision is when things will get really interesting, and also when we’ll see what this president is really made of – and hopefully discover that his inside is firmer than his outside.
7 comments September 18, 2009
Obama abandons missile shield
Update: See the latest from The Realist on this decision.
In one of the first major breaks he has made with Bush’s foreign policy, Obama has abandoned the missile defence facilities that the Bush administration planned to place in Poland and the Czech Republic. The shield was designed to allow for the detection and interception of a missile fired from Iran at Europe or the United States. The Obama administration now plans to deploy smaller and less sophisticated missile defences on ships in the area.
The Russians viewed the initial plans with alarm because they claimed that the facility was aimed just as much at intercepting a possible Russian missile. This was always a disingenuous claim, because the facility would not have altered the strategic balance between Russia and the United States: its capabilities would have been far too restricted to do that. The Russian reaction can be seen as part of a pattern in superpower relations stretching back as far as the Cuban missile crisis. The missiles on Cuba didn’t alter the strategic balance between Washington and Moscow – they didn’t make it much easier for Russia to nuke America – but their geographical proximity to America was an affront. Similarly in this case, the Russians would resent having American missile defence facilities on ex-Soviet territory.
As such, the decision is understood by many in Eastern Europe as representing a U.S. retreat from the region and the recognition of a Russian sphere of influence. With the war in Georgia in recent memory, they have reason to be alarmed – although as members of NATO, Poland and the Czech Republic are not likely to see Russian tanks streaming over the border anytime in the near future.
But Obama’s decision will only enhance the disenchantment with the President that had already set in east of the German border. There were few regions of the world that enjoyed a love affair with the Bush administration like Eastern Europe did – remember Donald Rumsfeld’s talk about “New Europe”? – and Obama’s apparent indifference to the region rankles, especially because leaders there feel they went to considerable lengths to support Bush’s wars, his missile shield, and even in the case of Romania his secret prisons. They sometimes did these things in the face of considerable domestic opposition.
However, the abandonment of the missile shield is a logical step given Obama’s stated intention to “reset” relations with Russia. This will inevitably involve worsening ties with Eastern Europe, and encouraging the Russians to push for more concessions in a region they consider their own backyard. The reason for making this announcement now is obvious – Obama is hoping that Russia can be persuaded to support further sanctions against Iran as the latter’s intransigence continues on the nuclear issue.
Given the overwhelming importance of stopping Iran getting the bomb, and the fact that the missile shield can always be initiated again sometime in the five years it will probably take Iran to test a weapon, then unfortunately this particular piece of horse-trading is one Obama cannot avoid. If, however, the Russians don’t respond positively or constructively – and it’s far from clear that they will – then this move will look like a needless and desperate concession in retrospect. A first test will be whether they enthusiastically welcome the move, or whether they push for the abandonment of the plans for ship-based defences as well.
3 comments September 17, 2009
Again with the settlements
U.S. envoy George Mitchell is entering hyperdrive to try and allow everyone to extricate themselves from these messy negotiations over settlements while still being able to claim victory. For Netanyahu, this means getting the Obama administration off his back on terms acceptable to his right-wing; for Obama, it means being able to demonstrate that he has inflicted some pain on Netanyahu, which he believes will boost his credibility in the Arab world; and for Fatah it means getting some sort of concession from the Israelis which it can proudly present to the Palestinians as an example of the possible fruits of talks. The result is likely to be unsatisfying to everyone.
If it all seems rather confusing, there’s an excellent article in the New York Times which takes a step back and analyzes the West Bank settlement enterprise. I really can’t recommend it highly enough, so I’m not going to try and summarize it, but just suggest that you read it in full.
Okay, I will summarize one bit of it. That bit is the numbers and the breakdown of the settlers. This is one of the most important facts about the settlements, but I’ve never seen it discussed anywhere in the U.S. or British press outside of two feature articles in the NYT. It’s part of the general tendency in the West to see Israel as a sort of monolithic black box, almost like a dictatorship with hidden, inscrutable plans. I should add that I’m not claiming that this is because of anti-semitism or anything sinister of that nature, and indeed a similar simplicity often prevails in considerations of, say, Iran. It is exacerbated on the subject of Israel merely because of the ease with which the topic lends itself to moralizing.
But I digress. In the West Bank there are about 300,000 settlers. About 100,000 of these live in settlements close to the Green Line which are expected to become part of Israel as part of a final-status agreement. Many of the people in these settlements are ultra-Orthodox Jews who felt out of place in Israel’s increasingly secular society and moved to the West Bank to establish separate communities. They are not ideologically committed to the settlement enterprise and their leaders have publicly stated that they would be just as happy in Israel proper. About 100,000 settlers are viewed as being ideologically committed to the settlement enterprise, and only about 50,000 of them live deep in the West Bank in settlements that will have to be dismantled as part of a final status agreement.
These numbers are important to remember because the significance of the settlers in Israeli society is often over-stated. Israel is a country of seven million people, of whom only 300,000 – or about 4.3% – live in West Bank settlements. Only about 0.71% of the Israeli population are settlers deep in the West Bank who are ideologically committed to the settlement enterprise, i.e. to Jewish control and settlement of the West Bank. Their number, 50,000, is admittedly larger but still of the same family as the 8,000 settlers who Israel forcibly evacuated from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
The reason I think this is important is because one sometimes gets the impression from the Western media that Netanyahu’s government, the Israeli right-wing, or Israeli society as a whole (delete as appropriate) is committed to the settlement enterprise and ideologically opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state if it means the dismantling of the settlements. The idea that seven million Israelis would mortgage their future out of concern for 50,000 or even 300,000 settlers is tenuous and not borne out by reality, especially as the soul of Israel has increasingly migrated from traditional Jerusalem to modern, carefree Tel Aviv. Israelis overwhelmingly backed the evacuation of Gaza, and they would overwhelmingly back the evacuation of the West Bank if they had reason to believe it would bring peace.
The same goes for the Netanyahu government. Netanyahu may be many things, but he is not stupid. He knows that Israel cannot afford to hang on to the West Bank for ever. The occupation is a military and economic drain on Israel and clearly exacerbates tensions between Israel and the Arabs. The threat of suicide bombings and missiles hangs constantly over the heads of Israel’s citizenry. And the Palestinian birthrate is so high that eventually Israelis will be a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, a situation which threatens the Jewish state’s existence unless a political settlement can be found. Even Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister reputed for his extremist views, doesn’t oppose an eventual two-state solution: instead, he wants to transfer more land and Arab citizens out of Israel’s control through land swaps.
All this being said, clearly the settlements mean something; otherwise they could be dismantled today. When Israelis think about the dismantlement of settlements, they have a recent historical example to relate to: the 2005 disengagement from Gaza and parts of the northern West Bank by Ariel Sharon’s Likud government (Likud, remember, is the ruling party today). This was the test case of land-for-peace, the idea that dismantling Israeli settlements and military control would lead to peace. Instead, it led to the Hamas takeover of Gaza and an unremitting barrage of missiles blanketing the south of Israel. Hamas, in their typically blatant disregard for the true interests of Palestinians, managed to convince Israelis that concessions only lead to more violence. A similar withdrawal from the West Bank today would put the entirety of Israel in missile range. It is because of the example of Gaza that Israelis oppose a West Bank pullout now, not because they have a wide-eyed ideological commitment to hanging onto the whole of the Holy Land.
What, then, of the settlement freeze? Surely this would keep everyone happy. Yes and no. The important thing to understand is that the issue of a settlement freeze does not involve the expansion of settlements, or the acquisition of more West Bank land for the Jews. This has long been illegal. It still happens sometimes, and the resultant dwellings are what we hear referred to in the media as “illegal outposts”. As you can see from these pictures, the outposts are usually on barren hilltops in the desert and have a minimal impact on the Palestinian population. However, they do need to be dismantled as soon as possible, and Israeli security forces need to find a way of stopping their re-establishment: sporadic attempts have been made to do this, but much more needs to be done. One of the obstacles is the fact that the fanatics who inhabit them frequently torch Palestinian orchards and fields in retaliation for Israeli security forces trying to dismantle their hilltop redoubts.
The main argument over settlements at the moment, however, is not about these small outposts, but the continued construction of new buildings on existing land. This includes in the settlements that are likely to become part of Israel in a final status settlement anyway. Settler communities have much higher birthrates than the Israeli average, and they need new buildings to house their children: hence, a freeze on new construction in the settlements is essentially an attempt to strangle normal life in the settlements. This would quickly bring about their ossification and decline; it would be dismantlement by other means, because the young would leave. It is hence not a concession to be made lightly.
The enforced decline of the settlements might seem like a good thing. After all, the settlements need to disappear eventually anyway; on that we are all agreed. But it puts the cart before the horse: the settlements need to disappear as part of a final status agreement that will finally end this war, not as part of a unilateral concession of the type Israel made in Gaza, which eventually came at a high price in both Israeli and Palestinian blood. Nor is it clear that the increase in the settlement’s population or density makes their eventual dismantlement any less likely: their population growth rate is less than 5% a year, and it is the people and not the buildings that have to be evacuated.
This is how the issue is understood among the great mass of Israelis who make up the country’s political centre, and who want peace but not at any price. They understand that the continued existence of the settlements makes it more likely that their children will be blown apart on a Jerusalem bus, or that a rocket will strike an old people’s home in Beersheba. But they also understand that in the hard-headed real world of negotiations, simply making a huge concession does not make these events much less likely; recent history has taught them that. If the settlements are going to go, then they want something in return. This isn’t because they believe Jewish control of the West Bank is a divine right. It’s because they understand the settlements are one of Israel’s largest bargaining chips, especially now they have demonstrated that they are willing to dismantle them – if they get something juicy enough in return. They have also learnt through bitter experience that unilateral abandonment does not advance the cause of peace.
A construction freeze which resulted in the slow, managed decline of the settlements might be acceptable if the Palestinians agreed, for instance, to stop educating their children to believe that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews are inherently evil. But a construction freeze that resulted only in another round of fruitless talks that Hamas would sabotage with a barrage of Qassams as soon as it looked like it was delivering progress would only make substantive concessions from Israel less likely in the future. It would also make everyone involved look rather foolish. Unfortunately, that is precisely how they are beginning to look already.
And meanwhile, as everyone squabbles over a balcony in this settlement and a new nursery in that one, far away over the Jordan, the centrifuges at Natanz continue to spin – and the world continues to do nothing.
Add comment September 15, 2009
Crunch time for Obama’s presidency
September is going to be the most crucial month of Obama’s presidency so far, and it could well determine the course of the rest of it. Anyone who wants him to succeed needs to keep an eye on what he does this month in three crucial areas – healthcare, Afghanistan, and Iran – and one auxillary one, the Israeli-Arab conflict.
For a candidate who campaigned on an aggressive platform of “change” and activism, Obama has shown remarkably little of either since he got into the White House. He has farmed out key decisions to other groups – Congressional Democrats in the case of healthcare and the stimulus bill, and Attorney General Holder in the case of investigations into Bush-era intelligence activity – and simply carried on business-as-usual in other areas.
His Iraq policy has been to continue with the agreements signed by the Bush administration, and he’s talked about this issue as little as possible. He’s not much closer to closing Guantánamo Bay – and that deadline of a year is fast approaching – and nor has he fundamentally altered U.S. foreign relations, beyond making some speeches designed to act as outreach to foreign populations.
North Korea staged procative nuclear tests and his response was to invite Pyongyang back to the six party talks begun by the Bush administration. Iran continued to develop a nuclear weapon and launched a stunning domestic crackdown and his response was to write letters to the Supreme Leader while continuing the Bush administration’s policy of wait-and-see. Afghanistan slipped further into a morass and his response, wisely, was to dispatch more troops to pursue the goals laid out by his predecessor – but that far from settles the issue. Pakistan continues to slip into chaos and Obama has continued Bush’s policy of support for the government.
Change in foreign policy is slightly more marked towards Israel, Russia, China, and Latin America – but not much. Obama has criticized Israel in far stronger terms than Bush, and laid out a genuinely new policy on settlements: the outcome of this remains to be seen. It might lead to new talks, but if it does the outcome is almost certainly likely to be negative and lead to a new round of bitter recriminations.
He has adopted a strictly realist approach to Russia and China, trying to minimize differences with the former and explicitly stating that human rights would not be made an issue in discussions with the latter. He has stepped back from the Bush administration’s obsession with trying to influence these countries to adopt western values, but this has amounted more to a difference in tone than substance because Bush’s ability to influence these countries in that area was always limited. When Russia invaded Georgia and China cracked down in Tibet, the Bush administration barely squeaked; Russian troops continue to occupy Georgia and China continues to brutally crack down on its ethnic Muslims and Obama has hardly made a peep, either.
In Latin America, Obama has continued with Bush-era policy of increasing co-operation with Colombia and Mexico to battle drug traffickers and guerillas. He said he was going to normalize relations with Cuba but hasn’t done anything about it. When the American military base deal in Ecuador expired, he turned to Bush’s (and, indeed, America’s) traditional ally in the region – Colombia – to sign a new ten-year lease on base access that has irked the Latin American left. Hugo Chávez has blasted the agreement, but other Latin American leaders rallied around it. On Honduras, Obama’s policy has been in step with the rest of the region, who all refuse to recognize the new de facto government and call for Manuel Zelaya to return to office.
None of the above is necessarily meant to be an indictment. We’re only seven months into the new presidency and Obama has faced a crushing domestic agenda, although one that he has himself complicated by pushing for early action on healthcare.
The United States’ ability to act abroad is also limited by financial and domestic problems. In the absence of clear crises that have demanded resolute decisions, Obama has remained much like Bush after the invasion of Iraq – the prevaricator-in-chief. He hasn’t had bold ideas or actions to offer us that might fundamentally alter the approaches he inherited from Bush.
But the time of crisis is now upon us – and it starts at home.
Healthcare. Obama has taken on one of the most politically-sensitive issues in America. It nearly destroyed Clinton, and it largely contributed towards the drumming that the Democrats took in Congress in 1994. The Obama administration is sure to be aware of the relevant history – Rahm Emanuel was an aide to Clinton, and Hillary was at the forefront of Clinton’s healthcare drive - but the devil in the details is what lesson they will derive from it. We’ll find out when Obama gives his healthcare address to Congress tonight – he’s going to be staking a lot of his credibility on getting the outcome he wants, so it’s important that he keeps expectations realistic.
It’s also important that he make an attempt to speak to the vast majority of Americans who now oppose healthcare reform and think there are more urgent priorities. These people may be wrong, but it won’t matter one way or another who was right if the Democrats ram through an unpopular bill and then get decimated in the 2010 elections. The healthcare reform process is going to take a long time – probably decades – to fully enact after a bill is passed, and it’s essential that it has widespread public support. An issue that affects one fifth of the U.S. economy and every one of its citizens cannot be addressed without some form of consensus. Just as the uninsured need help, the majority of Americans who are sceptical about reform deserve slightly more than to be angrily dismissed and written off as the tool of special interest groups.
What happens on healthcare is also important for Obama’s foreign policy agenda. The left-wing of his party have been denied some of the red meat they expected: quicker drawdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq, a legal pursuit of Bush administration officials, a gutting of the CIA, a more marked change in rendition (which, in case you hadn’t heard, Obama is continuing), and an even harder stand on Israel. Winning on healthcare reform will allow Obama to have more slack elsewhere; losing on it will mean that he has to govern with increasing reference to the extreme wing of his party.
Afghanistan. Soon, General Stanley McCrystal will request more troops for Afghanistan. There is apparently a split within the Obama administration on whether he should get them. Obama is reported to be leaning towards providing them, which is all to the good, even if the appearance of indecision can only help to weaken the resolve of NATO allies and strengthen that of the Taliban. This is by far the most consequential decision that Obama will make this year for the future of the United States and the world.
The growing chorus of voices calling for disengagement from Afghanistan are, to me, baffling. The consequences of failure are all too clear: the re-assertion of Taliban control over the country, with all the attendant human horror (have we forgotten already how they ruled before?); the destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan and the strengthening of militants there; the increased chance of terrorist attack all over the world, from Australia to India to London; a possibly-mortal blow to the credibility of NATO as an effective military alliance; and the grimly predictable, indeed inevitable, need for the world to intervene yet again, perhaps years later but certainly under much less advantageous conditions.
Afghanistan was the “good war” for so long, and went so unquestioned, that there now seems to be a whiff of panic as people finally wake up to the reality of the situation. Upon discovering that what they thought was an adequate situation is in fact a deteriorating one, they have over-reacted and decided it is beyond salvation. But just because the Bush administration made mistakes that we are only now waking up to, it does not mean that all is lost. McCrystal is one of the most experienced and successful generals in the U.S. military, and he is certainly not under any pressure from this administration to declare that the war is winnable if it is not: his judgement should be respected. And, that judgement given, Obama should follow it, otherwise he sows the seeds of a mortal danger.
Iran. September was the deadline that the Obama administration placed on talks with Iran. If they had not borne fruit by this point – and if the IAEA’s report out this month was negative – then Iran will face further sanctions and isolation. Well, the IAEA says that Iran continues to enrich uranium and be unco-operative, and the newly-powerful conservative government in Iran has said that it has no interest in further talks. This was one of the problems with Obama’s campaign plank of talking to America’s enemies – sometimes they’re not interested. Obama will have to seek more sanctions with the support of Russia and China, who are unlikely to be helpful.
Sanctions are anyway unlikely to persuade the Iranians to change their behaviour. They can endure them until they have carried out successful nuclear tests, and then the rest of the world will gradually have to change its approach to them anyway – especially this administration, which has proven realistic to the core. A military strike by the U.S. on Iran is unthinkable given the likely opposition to it at home, especially among Obama’s core voters – who, as discussed, he is having trouble keeping enchanted as it is. But, on the other side, a strike by Israel – which could further inflame the Middle East and certainly make the Israeli-Palestinian issue unsolvable in the timeframe of this administration – is made more likely by the tense relations between Israel and Washington. It’s also unlikely to set the Iranians back by more than a few years, and will no doubt harden their resolve to eventually be successful.
These are the three big decisions that make up September for Obama: how to proceed on healthcare, in Afghanistan, and towards Iran. It’stime to see if this remarkable and charismatic politician turns out to also be the statesman he promised us, with original solutions that will change the rules of the game rather than just continuing in the well-worn lines of his predecessor. I’m hoping that he does.
1 comment September 8, 2009
The size of the Afghan force
If the Afghan war is going to be won, the U.S. has to send more troops. NATO forces are currently woefully incapable of controlling enough territory in Afghanistan, and the lack of ground forces has led to an over-reliance on air power that leads to tragedies like today’s airstrike in the north, which could have killed as many as fifty civilians. This isn’t only horrific but also actively counter-productive because it serves to turn the Afghan populattion against NATO and the Afghan government, which is the surest way to lose this war.
Just like in Iraq in 2006, the most urgent task awaiting NATO is to take control of as much territory as possible, clear it of Taliban, hold it, and build civilian projects that benefit the local population. This simply cannot be done when a few tens of thousands of troops are rattling around 250,000 square miles of territory. Afghanistan is much bigger than Iraq, and it’s considerably less urbanized as well: Iraq’s population density measured in people per square mile is nearly twice that of Afghanistan. Almost 75% of the Iraqi population live on the flat plain between the Euphrates and Tigris, which was where the majority of U.S. forces were stationed. Nine million people live in Baghdad and only about 2.5 million live in Kabul, meaning the population is much more spread out. Obama says he wants the Afghan National Army to be about 260,000 strong if it’s going to control all this territory.
Why then do we persist in trying to do the job with a NATO force of less than 100,000, of whom only the 68,000 U.S. and 9,100 UK forces actually do any fighting? There are a few reasons about which not a lot can be done, such as the need to keep a large footprint in Iraq for another year or so; the fact very few NATO countries are willing to make meaningful contributions; and the limitations placed on spending by the global economic crisis. But there’s also another reason: because the Obama administration is splint internally on whether more troops would actually be productive or not:
Leading those with doubts is Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has expressed deep reservations about an expanded presence in Afghanistan on the grounds that it may distract from what he considers the more urgent goal of stabilizing Pakistan, officials said. Among those on the other side are Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative to the region, who shares the concern about Pakistan but sees more troops as vital to protecting Afghan civilians and undermining the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has been vocal in favor of more troops, and while some officials said she had not shown her hand during the current deliberations, they expected her to be an advocate for a more robust force.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has voiced concern that putting so many troops in Afghanistan would make the United States look like an occupier, but during a news conference on Thursday he sounded more supportive of the prospect.
This debate sounds a lot like the one that we had prior to the surge in Iraq. Iraq was seen as an unwinnable war because of political conditions, and it was argued – by many people currently in this administration, up to and including President Obama – that sending more troops would just alienate the population more and lead to more violence. That turned out to be entirely incorrect, because what was alienating the population from the U.S. and the Iraqi government was the fact neither could provide them with security or a credible future outside of the insurgency. More troops allowed security to be established and the writ of the Iraqi government to be extended, and as a result the future of the country looks much more secure today than it did in 2006.
The idea that the presence of more forces would act as a recruiting sergrant for the insurgency turned out to be misplaced. As one of the major strategy documents on which the surge was based noted, “There is no reason to imagine, moreover, that it matters to the insurgency whether there are 100,000, 140,000, or 200,000 Americans in Iraq. Insurgent rhetoric does not count our soldiers; rather, it denounces the presence of any American troops on Iraqi soil.” Furthermore, the main thing that led Iraqis to join armed groups was ”not so much that coalition forces are perceived as occupiers, but rather that coalition forces are occupiers who have not made good on their primary responsibility — securing the population.” With U.S. forces and the Iraqi government incapable of providing security, people had to seek it elsewhere. The same thing is now happening in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, given that many young men who join the Taliban do so not for ideological reasons but for social or economic ones, there is reason to believe that the international forces can change their calculus if they begin to beat the Taliban back and secure territory. Currently the Taliban believe they are winning, as does the Afghan population: only by inflicting military defeats on the insurgents and physically wresting control of territory from them can NATO begin to turn this around. It might be true that the Taliban opt to vanish rather than stand and fight when NATO forces move into a new area, but so long as the foreign forces stay there and establish effective governance then this is all to the good; the main focus of this war isn’t physically killing the Taliban anyway, but sapping their support.
This can’t be done without a larger NATO footprint. To hear people suggest otherwise is frankly quite surprising after our recent experience in Iraq. It’s true that Afghanistan is not Iraq, but this is about a basic principle: you can’t win if you’re not in the game. Currently NATO are barely in the game, and that needs to change.
Add comment September 4, 2009
Obama advisors to Netanyahu: give us what we want and be a historic figure
Here’s one that caught my eye in Politico:
U.S. officials are stepping up the pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cut a deal on curtailing Israeli settlements, and they’re holding out a prize that both Netanyahu and President Barack Obama badly want: strong ties between the two leaders.
Both sides said that the U.S. and Israel are near an agreement on a halt to expanding Israeli settlements on disputed territory. If Netanyahu approves, U.S. officials said, it could reopen direct negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Middle East peace for the first time since before Israeli’s invasion of Gaza last winter.
But the Israeli premier and the American president have gotten off on uncertain footing, with neither proving willing to make early compromises as the other expected. The relationship is important to both leaders’ domestic politics, and now U.S. officials say the settlement negotiations give Netanyahu a way to show he’s committed to the Middle East peace process.
“Netanyahu’s at a pivotal moment,” said a senior U.S. official. “Depending on what he decides, he could wind up with a very strong relationship with President Obama and potentially become a historic figure in Israel.”
I’m not sure that whether Netanyahu will become a historic figure – if he isn’t already – in Israel depends entirely on his relationship with President Obama. A strong relationship with Obama would presumably mean becoming involved in a peace process that is doomed to fail, which I suppose would be a historic action of a sort. Jaw jaw is definitely better than war war, and there’s nothing per se wrong with Israel becoming involved in final status talks even though Hamas control of Gaza makes the concept somewhat ludicrous. But the idea that following the Obama lead on settlements and other issues would make Netanyahu “historic” smacked to me slightly of the messianic tone we heard from these guys when they were in campaign mode.
“It could very well hinge on what he decides in the next couple of weeks,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Another senior U.S. official held out a similar carrot for Netanyahu: This moment offers the opportunity to “forge a very important and positive relationship between Netanyahu and the president,” the official said.
And here’s the problem: I’m not sure exactly what benefit this “very important and positive relationship between Netanyahu and the president” is supposed to bring if a key characteristic of the relationship is that it involves Netanyahu doing what Obama says. Diplomatic goodwill isn’t some sort of end in itself that is independently valuable and separated from actual interests. On the contrary, it springs from a harmony of interests and co-ordination in executing them. It says a lot about this administration’s approach to foreign policy that they’re essentially saying, “Do what we say, even if you don’t want to do it, and we can have a good relationship”. I’m sure a relationship like that would be great from the U.S. point of view, but I’m not so sure it would look too good to Israelis. It’s also an arrogant scolding of a good ally living in a dangerous neighbourhood and perfectly capable of assessing its own interests.
To round it off, it’s all for diplomatic show anyway. There’s a de facto freeze on building in the settlements. Don’t take it from me – take it from the leaders of the settlement movement, who say the Netanyahu government is “humiliating” them.
Prominent local heads of West Bank settlements spelled out their dissatisfaction with the Netanyahu government in an August meeting with the prime minister’s aides and to the man himself at one point.
The heads of four West Bank settlements (and all members of the Likud Central Committee) bitterly criticized current government policy on the settlements, according to the minutes of the meeting, which were released by the office of Eyal Gabai, the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, who was there. The critics were Ma’aleh Adumim Mayor Benny Kashriel, Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman and two local council heads, Gush Etzion’s Shaul Goldstein and Beit El’s Moshe Rosenbaum.
Kashriel appears in the minutes as saying: “The [West Bank settlement] heads in Judea and Samaria are in a situation today in which they are humiliated and ridiculed. There was never such a bad period [as the present]. Before the elections, there was talk of construction in settlement blocs. Now we are not seeing an end [of this]. Everything is frozen. Under the prior [Olmert] administration, it was possible to build between houses. Now this is not [allowed]. The situation also has direct economic implications. There is no construction. There is no income from permits, from the sale of land or from property taxes. Charitable foundations are not coming to Judea and Samaria. There was a meeting with the finance minister in which promises were made, but since the approval of the budget, it has not been possible to get [what was promised].”
So there you have it: there’s no construction anyway. What exactly does the U.S. administration want, then? They want a formal agreement that they can trumpet to other governments who are critical of Israel and to their left-wing base. They want to force some official and preferably mildly humiliating concession from Israel because common wisdom says that this is how progress will be made, even though a decade of Israeli concessions have not brought peace. We all want peace. A settlement freeze might be a vague contribution towards it. But this administration’s approach and its focus have given an outsized role to the issue and opened a window on its wider approach. And what we can see through it is not encouraging.
Add comment September 2, 2009
Hamas: teaching about the Holocaust is a “war crime”
Usually I’d steer clear of things like this because it’s so obvious, but this one is particularly interesting:
A Hamas spiritual leader on Monday called teaching Palestinian children about the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews a “war crime,” rejecting a suggestion that the U.N. might include the Holocaust in Gaza’s school curriculum.A senior Israeli official said such statements should make the West think twice about ending its boycott of Hamas, in place since the group seized Gaza by force in 2007. Israeli officials called the comments as “obscene” and said they place Hamas in a pariah club of Holocaust deniers that includes Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Hamas spiritual leader Younis al-Astal lashed out after hearing that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the main U.N. body aiding Palestinian refugees, planned to introduce lessons about the Holocaust to Gaza students.
Adding the Holocaust to the curriculum would amount to “marketing a lie and spreading it,” al-Astal wrote in a statement.
“I do not exaggerate when I say this issue is a war crime, because of how it serves the Zionist colonizers and deals with their hypocrisy and lies,” he wrote.
A U.N. official said no decision has been made about introducing Holocaust education in Gaza.
Let’s unpack this. Obviously it’s not surprising that Hamas would want Palestinian children to be lied to about the Holocaust. It is slightly quizzical, however, that they would refer to it as a “war crime”. It certainly doesn’t seem plausible anyone could believe that it constitutes a war crime of the type of, say, firing thousands of Qassam rockets at unarmed civilians. But on the other hand the language of war crimes and international law has proven to be an extremely effective form of attack on Israel, so you can hardly blame Hamas for trying it on here. More interestingly, this statement sheds light on their agenda and the reason that no peace that includes them will ever be sustainable.
One of the major factors standing in the way of a sustainable final status agreement is the poisoning of young minds that takes place in Palestinian schools and the camps. This is true not just in Gaza but also in the West Bank. Most Palestinian school textbooks do not show Israel on maps at all and certainly do not acknowledge its right to exist; the Holocaust isn’t taught at all, which in itself is an incredible indictment of the education system. This isn’t a matter of speading propaganda or lies, after all: the Holocaust is established historical fact and I can hardly see how anyone interested in peace in the Middle East would think that denying it somehow served that cause. Indeed, the alarming rise in Holocaust denial among Israeli Arabs – a whopping 40.5% no longer believe it happened, up from 28% in 2006 – is a grave indication both of the barriers to peace and the extent to which the sort of extremism promulgated by Iran is infecting the region. If Arabs and Jews can’t even agree on something as basic as whether the Holocaust happened, how on earth can they ever achieve peace?
After all, teaching children about the Holocaust does not even necessarily imply any particular opinion on the state of Israel. Moderate Arabs have long held that the state of Israel is illegitimate precisely because, in their view, Europeans gave Jews land of their own at the expense of the Arabs to atone for the crimes Europeans commited against Jews in Europe during the Holocaust. This may not be true, but it at least has the merit of being based on historical fact because it does not deny the Holocaust happened. Hamas accept the basic premise – that Israel is viewed as legitimate because of Holocaust – and then deny the Holocaust ever happened, hence denying Israel’s legitimacy. Teaching about the Holocaust, says a Hamas spokesman, “aims to reinforce acceptance of the occupation of Palestinian land” – the land he means, by the way, is from Jordan to the Mediterranean, not just the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This is, of course, a misunderstanding of Israel’s claim to legitimacy, which stems not from the Holocaust but from the need to give the Jewish people a homeland.
Hamas are obviously not interested in the truth, but merely in anything that will allow them to further their goal of destroying the state of Israel. It’s good that they make statements like this every so often just to remind everyone of that. The idea of teaching the Holocaust, they say “contradicts with our Palestinian beliefs” and “contradict[s]… Palestinian values and principles”. Why? Because it “excites sympathy with the Jews” and “play[s] with the emotions of our children”. So, according to Hamas, sympathy for the Jews- who under a two-state solution they’re supposed to live at peace with – is un-Palestinian, as is a correct understanding of history. And would Hamas ever play with the emotions of Palestinian children by, say, creating children’s TV programmes which show Mickey Mouse and a host of other fluffy characters killing Jews? Of course not!
Then the plot thickens. Because a crucial factor in allowing this state of affairs to continue is UNRWA, the UN organization which educates 200,000 children in the Gaza Strip. When you consider it, the very fact that they don’t teach the Holocaust already is stupendous. According to the UNRWA website, “one of UNRWA’s key programmes is aimed at the promotion of non-violent conflict resolution and human rights”. But when Hamas levelled this accusation about the Holocaust being taught, the UN body was quick to reject it:
Such reports are totally untrue. The current curricula taught to pupils at UNRWA schools do not contain anything on the subject of the Holocaust,” Adnan Abu Hasna, UNRWA’s Gaza spokesman, told the German Press Agency, dpa.
Another spokesman hastened to add that no-one had even THOUGHT about making it part of the cirriculum. No ambiguity there, then. And the UN still won’t say if they’re eventually going to include it in the curriculum; but don’t hold your breath. UNRWA’s teachers’ union is run by Hamas, after all. UNRWA has to operate with local consent and so has repeatedly proven that it will compromise with Hamas and bend to their wishes. These compromises carry inherent contradictions and at best provide mild benefits. For instance, an UNRWA education is almost certainly better than education provided in schools run directly by Hamas, but if an UNRWA education is going to be largely dictated by Hamas then the benefit is only minimal. UNRWA doesn’t have much choice in the matter.
But all this reveals the exact nature of Hamas, once again thrown open. The group has got no interest in truth, understanding, or peace, and in its current form it never will. It will continue to pressure a craven UN organization into following its educational wishes, allowing it to poison the minds of 250,000 schoolchildren into war. This poison is one of the biggest structural obstacles to any durable peace. We can only watch with horror as the gap of understanding between Israelis and Palestinians widens yet further under the Hamas regime. While they’re there, there will never be peace. Settlements can be torn down, but poisoned minds can rarely be mended.
(P.S. It’s true that Israel recently removed the word nakba from school textbooks. Nakba, or “catastrophe”, is the word used by Arabs to describe the creation of the state of Israel and the refugee crisis that ensued. But the removal of this word from Israeli schools is not close to being an analagous move to Hamas’ refusal to countenance anything at all being taught about the Holocaust. The basic facts of the 1948 war are still being taught in the schools, simply without the state of Israel’s educational system being obliged to refer to the foundation of that state as a “catastrophe”. )
4 comments September 1, 2009
Obama and the Middle East
Excellent, excellent column by Michael Young, who is the opinion editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star. He talks about how Obama has a “dangerously personalized” approach to Iraq and an inconsistent policy with regards to Iran, Hamas and Israel:
With respect to the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, Obama has taken Israel on over its settlements. It was about time, since the Bush administration’s permissiveness on settlement construction neutralized its own “road map”. However, there is more to Palestinian-Israeli peace than settlements. Obama is exerting considerable political capital to confront Israel, but it may be capital wasted at a moment when Hamas can still veto any breakthrough from the Palestinian side. In other words, Washington is working on a narrow front whereas its failure to weaken Hamas may render the whole enterprise meaningless. But how can the US weaken Hamas when improving relations with the movement’s main regional sponsors, Iran and Syria, remains a centerpiece of American efforts?
Read the whole thing.
Add comment August 28, 2009
Spectre of a Velvet Revolution in Iran
Amid all the debates about the possibility of the U.S. engaging with Iran and reaching some sort of modus vivendi, I think one crucial element is often overlooked. Roger Cohen used to frequently write that whichever Iranian political leader managed to achieve normalization with the U.S. would be hailed as a hero throughout Iran. He’s right that there are segments of the Iranian population who would welcome normalization with the U.S. – the students and protestors chief amongst them – so long as it did not come at too high a price. It’s worth bearing in mind that even for these groups, giving up the nuclear programme might well be considered too high a price; Mousavi never said he would do this, after all. But all of this is rendered irrelevant by the fact that normalization with the U.S. goes directly against the interests of all the people who actually wield power in Iran right now.
Somehow the fraud and violence in the last election seems to have driven this home, but it was really obvious beforehand. As our learned commentators never tire of telling us, it’s all about power struggles within the complicated Iranian political system. The dominant force in Iran right now is the Revolutionary Guards (pdf), who count Ahmadinejad and many other top leaders as former or current members. For the last few years, the Revolutionary Guards have been expanding their control of Iran in all spheres. This has taken the form not just of institutional domination but also the personal enrichment of many members of the organization. The Guards have grown rich on military and state contracts, and actually benefit from Iran’s international isolation because it means they don’t have to compete for contracts. They have a significant vested interest to defend in Iranian society, even if – just like Putin’s cabal in Moscow – they explain their role (and perhaps even genuinely view it themselves) as undertaken for the good of the nation as a whole.
The official role of the Revolutionary Guards is to do what it says on the label: guard the revolution, not just from outside attack (as during the Iran-Iraq war, which cemented their position in society) but also from internal dissent. They interpret this as a widespread cultural mandate to stop the infilitration of Western values and ideas into Iran. Since the colour revolutions swept across Eastern Europe and Lebanon, they have justified their creeping power by claiming that Western countries are trying to incite a “velvet revolution” in Iran through links with protest groups who aim to overthrow the Islamic system. Hence, the Guards have justified their strong ideological and security role as a necessity in the face of this threat. They smear their political opponents by claiming they are linked to the West, and because this is such an explosive charge it precludes any actual Western help to the protestors, as this would hardly do the latter any good in the long-run.
We have to realize that, all this been said, the idea that Ahmadinejad or his cabal will ever aim for normalization with the West is frankly ludicrous. He and his closest allies would lose their entire justification for power if they were ever to admit that the West is actually an ally and not a mortal enemy aiming to overthrow the Revolution; for his Guards to continue to legitimately exercise their role in defending the revolution so stridently, the revolution needs to be threatened. It does not make sense for Ahmadinejad to call for the prosecution of opposition leaders for treason while secretly planning to make friends with the same country that the opposition are accused of treasonous links with. He’s not going to do it. And we need to accept that fact.
The only glimmer of hope is the growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. The Supreme Leader said earlier this week that he had not seen any evidence that the protestors were linked to outside elements. Khamenei is much more worried about the credibility of the system of Islamic rule than Ahmadinejad is, especially because the former is an old man who has to worry about his succession and the fate of the system after he is gone. Some analysts think that the Guards might try to impose some sort of military dictatorship, albeit possibly with a clerical facade, after Khamenei dies. So this difference in opinion isn’t so much about who is more “hard-line”, but about which part of the system the speaker is most interested in defending: the clerics, or the Guards.
For now, the Guards and the clerics need each other, and they have shown they will close ranks when they are seriously threatened from outside. Their disagreements and posturing over how to deal with the final crushing of the domestic opposition movement aren’t so much a sign of their weakness and their strength: they can afford to have these little family disagreements for so long as they face no real threat. So, again, whatever their squabbles, don’t hold your breath for engagement.
Add comment August 28, 2009
