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Obama trapped behind wall of containment
By Ira Chernus
So the US has to stand by, watching Abbas stiffen his spine and negotiate with
Hamas, while hoping he doesn't emulate Maliki's game of cozying up to the
Iranians as a counterweight to the Americans.
The perils of perception
Beyond backing off the settlement freeze, the administration also offered
another concession to the Israelis. They leaned on Abbas to defer a draft
proposal at the UN Human Rights Council that would have endorsed the
recommendations of the Goldstone report, which found evidence of Israeli war
crimes in last winter's attack on Gaza. Israel desperately wants US help in
hanging onto
its image as an oppressed, blameless victim.
For the same reason, the US also encouraged Arab states to join the proposed
peace talks, rather than making it simply a one-on-one Israeli-Palestinian
affair. Here's how the Israeli paper Ha'aretz summed up recent remarks on the
subject by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, "In negotiations with the Palestinians,
Israel is the 'only one that can give. The Palestinians are the underdog and
the talks are asymmetrical'. But in regional talks ... it becomes clear that
Israel is the isolated party."
To the Obama administration, however, regional talks fall into another
category: promoting a regional containment policy against Iran. Containing
Iran, in fact, is the one goal the Israelis, the Fatah-led rump Palestinian
Authority, and all the major Arab states might have in common. According to
Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the US message is, "If you don't engage in
the process of making peace, you give Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran, who are
enemies of the peace process, and vocal opponents of it, a veto."
If the US had the kind of total control that containment theory requires, it
would, indeed, use such peace talks to strengthen a region-wide anti-Iranian
alliance. But the leaders of the major Arab states run up against the same
problem that Abbas faces: domestic publics, wary of any pro-American moves,
might be swayed into seeing Iran as their champion. So the Arab states have
offered few concessions indeed, which the Israelis then point to as yet more
"proof" that they are surrounded by enemies on all sides and can't afford to
give up one more thing.
When Washington leans on the Arab states, it highlights Iran's purported
nuclear weapons program as the number one threat. And Arab leaders might be
happy enough to go along, were it not for the obvious image problem: How can
they say with straight faces that they are banding together to stop an imagined
Iranian nuclear menace, while sitting down to negotiate with an Israel that has
at least 100 - perhaps 200 or more - very real nuclear weapons? Even the
increasingly hawkish s Defense Minister Ehud Barak admits that Iran's nuclear
program is not an "existential issue" because "Israel is strong".
Every time the US warns about Iran's nuclear program, it merely calls more
attention in the region to Israel's ignored and unacknowledged nuclear arsenal.
Then Arab leaders feel forced to take a tougher public stand against Israel's
nukes because their people want to see Israel firmly contained. And in the game
of containment, where image is reality, the first rule is: Always show resolve.
That's the prevailing rule in Washington, too. On the same day that Obama met
Netanyahu and Abbas at the UN, his hometown newspaper, the Washington Post,
chastised him editorially for "Wavering on Afghanistan". When containment
prevails, firmness is required. No waverers need apply. (Extra fingers are,
however, useful.)
The president gets the message. Last week, when the Iranians surprised the
world with significant concessions at their first meeting with American
negotiators in Geneva, the New York Times urged Obama to "push Iran's leaders
hard" and "be ready to impose tough sanctions if Iran resists". But he was a
step ahead, having already declared, "We are prepared to move towards increased
pressure."
Times reporter Helene Cooper saw that as "the exact opposite of what a White
House usually does ... Instead of painting lukewarm concessions as major
breakthroughs ... officials were treating a potentially major breakthrough as
if it were a suspicious package". But this was, in fact, an exact echo of what
a Cold War White House usually did. In those superpower standoff days, endless
negotiations, with each side making offers deflected by the suspicions and
stern rebuffs of the other, actually fueled the ritual of containment.
In reality, Obama's troubles are not caused primarily by "the bad guys", nor by
Israel's supposed power or that of the domestic "Israeli lobby", nor even, as
some critics charge, his own tendency to vacillate. Instead, he's trapped in
the conundrum that's built into US containment strategy in the Middle East. No
matter what other nations do or don't do, everything that looks like it might
be a solution only turns out to create new problems.
The US will keep on pursuing Middle East peace. Obama will keep getting intense
pressure from the hawks at home to capitulate to every Israeli demand. He will
certainly look for maneuvering room. And the rising influence of the Jewish
peace lobby will give him more room than his predecessors had. But even a peace
movement strong enough to offset the "pro-Israel" right might not offer room
enough as long as the overriding aim of US Middle Eastern policy is to make
Iran say uncle; that is, to make its leaders accept the image of a humbled,
overawed loser.
If the administration sticks to that approach, no move to cut through the
Gordian knot of Israeli-Palestinian relations will truly work, not with Obama
and his team trapped behind a wall of containment. Obama and his advisors will,
instead, live in terror of the image of Iran that the US has had such a hand in
creating. Like Eisenhower and all the Cold War presidents after him and all
their advisors, they will remain endlessly plagued by problems that defy
solution.
The recent Iranian concessions offer the president the beginning of a way out,
a chance to make good on his own message to the United Nations, "The future
does not belong to fear ... All of us must decide whether we are serious about
peace."
Now he and his administration, too, must decide if they are serious. They would
do well to modify the old mantra of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign for president
and put it everywhere: It's the Iranians, stupid. If they can rid themselves of
their Cold War-style Iranian obsession, another path is possible. If they make
the two-state solution an end in itself rather than just another means of
containment, if they transcend the fear that is the brick and mortar of the
wall of containment, if they tear down that wall and exorcise the ghost of the
Cold War, then they just might guide the Israelis and Palestinians to the peace
that both sides so badly need.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and author of
Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity.
Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and American Jews on his
blog.
(Copyright 2009 Ira Chernus.)
(Used by permission Tomdispatch)
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