Obama’s efforts in Mideast a disaster

By Joel Brinkley

Now we can say, with no real doubt, that the Obama administration has suffered its first major foreign policy failure, and it’s hard to see a way to recover.

In fact, the administration’s Middle East strategy has been nothing short of a debacle, borne of inexplicable naivete. Couldn’t they see that previous presidents, going back more than two decades, had asked Israeli and Arab leaders to make exactly the same “gestures” — and none of those presidents had succeeded?

Certainly it is laudable that a new president plunged into this, the oldest major festering sore of the modern world, weeks after taking office. Presidents George W. Bush, Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Reagan and Carter all paid lip service to the issue until late in their terms. Every one of them realized that the problem was so fraught, the chance of success so faint, that the most likely outcome of any major effort was embarrassment.

That’s exactly what happened this time.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton returned home from the Middle East a few days ago furiously arguing, against the facts, that her trip had been something better than a humiliating flop.

Special envoy

Days after taking office, Clinton named former Sen. George Mitchell special envoy for the Middle East. Given his background, that was a strong statement of interest. Mitchell’s mission: to convince Arab states that they should offer some sort of gesture toward Israel, as a show of their interest in peace, and to persuade Israel to order a halt in new settlement activity.

Every president over the last 25 years has tried to persuade Israel to stop settlements. Twenty years ago, President George H.W. Bush held back $10 billion in loan guarantees until Israel froze settlement expansion. Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister then, refused nonetheless. No president since then has fared any better. Couldn’t Obama and Clinton see that they were taking on a nonstarter? Similarly, every effort over the last 25 years to cajole the Arab states to offer Israel even the most modest gesture has been meet with intransigent refusals. Nine months into this futile exercise, Clinton plunged into the debate with full force, putting her own reputation on the line.

The Obama administration had already alienated most of the Israeli public by pressuring Israel while “cozying up” to the Arabs, in the Israeli view.

Obama gave a major speech in Cairo to demonstrate American friendship with the region. As president, he has never set foot in Israel. Trying to make amends, Clinton stood beside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and praised him for his talk about a so-called partial freeze of settlement activity, saying: “What the prime minister has offered in specifics of restraint on the policy of settlements” is “unprecedented.”

Not true. Prime Minister Yithzak Rabin announced a freeze in new settlement construction in 1995, just as Netanyahu has done. That “freeze” quickly thawed. Religious zealots ignored the rule, and the government did little to stop them. The same is likely to happen now.

More important, however, is this: As soon as the Obama administration announced that settlements were America’s singular issue with Israel, every major actor in the Arab world seized on settlements — long an item on their list of grievances, but now all of a sudden their No. 1 complaint. And when Clinton told Netanyahu his “restraint” was “unprecedented,” all of them erupted with anger and dismay.

Backpedaling

For the next several days, Clinton had to backpedal, try to explain-away her remarks, saying, in Cairo, “The Israeli offer was not at all what we prefer. It did not go far enough. But it went farther than anyone has before.”

Well, remarks like that left both sides feeling unsatisfied, even offended. The next day, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, announced that he was discouraged and disgusted and would not run for office again. In truth, Palestinians (and Israelis) often announce resignations one day and then change their minds the next. It’s a negotiating tactic.

Still, even with his many flaws, Abbas is an irreplaceable player, the one Palestinian who is a credible, eager partner with the West.

X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University.