( The first and last paragraphs say it all.)
Published on The New Republic (_http://www.tnr.com_ (http://www.tnr.com/) )
Obama’s Middle East Is in Tatters, Utter Tatters
* Martin Peretz
* September 20, 2011
It is not actually his region. Still, with the arrogance that is so
characteristic of his behavior in matters he knows little about (which is a lot
of matters), he entered the region as if in a triumphal march. But it wasn’t
the power and sway of America that he was representing in Turkey and in
Egypt. For the fact is that he has not much respect for these representations
of the United States. In the mind of President Obama, in fact, these are
what have wreaked havoc with our country’s standing in the world. So what—
or, rather, who—does he exemplify in his contacts with foreign countries and
their leaders? His exultancy gives the answer away. It is he himself,
lui-mème. Alas, he is a president disconnected from his nation, without
enthusiasts for his style, without loyalists to his policies, without a true
friend
unless that’s what you can call his top aide de camp,Valerie Jarrett,
which probably you can. Obama is lucky, but it’s the only luck he has, that
there are nutsy Republican enemies who aspire to his job. Maybe Rick Perry can
save him from … well, yes, himself. I wouldn’t take bets on that, though.
Obama’s first personal excursions into the Middle East as president were to
Turkey and Egypt. Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed his visit. Indeed, the
president’s journey set the framework for the Ottomanization of modern Turkey’
s foreign policy. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne formally abrogated the empire
’s previous rights in North Africa, these being the rights it had lost in
the First World War. From then on, the country was content to make trouble
only for the Kurds across its borders and for Greece. A member of NATO,
with more than 600,000 troops under arms (omitting more than half a million
reservists and paramilitary), it certainly played a role in deflecting Soviet
ambitions in the Mediterranean. Now, with the Russian threat
(temporarily?) deferred, the military still faces minor annoyance from
Georgia, Armenia,
Iraq. But since Obama communed with Erdogan—by all accounts, it was love
at first sight—the prime minister has been taking on new projects. Only in
the last days has he made what can reasonably be called a conqueror’s march
through Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, evoking the old empire’s rule in North
Africa not so long ago
After all, let’s face it: Egypt is simply spent. Erdogan can seduce it with
a speech or two. Yet it does have up-to-date military equipment. But, if
it were tempted by war with Israel, Jerusalem would not give it the
respectful pity that it gave Cairo’s Third Army 38 years ago. The Egyptian
military
has lost control of the Sinai to the Bedouins, even though Israel has
already permitted thousands of Egyptian regulars, contravening specific
prohibitions of the bilateral 1979 peace treaty, to re-enter the peninsula
with
heavy military equipment. For far into the future, I would assume. So what
about the construction of Egypt in political, judicial, and economic terms? I’
d give you heavy odds that in a decade or even two the political system
will still be as undemocratic and corrupt as it has been since the comic and
corpulent King Farouk reigned. By the way, it was the CIA’s Middle East
head spook who initiated the coup that dispatched the monarch and his family
to Italy and then to Monaco where he joined other deposed royals in the
sedentary life. After Farouk came the reign of the colonels, a model favored
by
Allen Dulles whose wisdom spooked the region ever since. The courts will
be fair when hell freezes over which, given global warning, is not at all
likely. And the economy? My, my: With the desertification of the land, the
high birth rate, and the functional illiteracy of most of the population, do
not believe that anything will change quickly or, for that matter, anything
much will change at all.
Were it not for Libyan oil, no country would have been tempted to intervene
on “the shores of Tripoli” again. Even with its oil and with NATO
intervention, the outcome of the civil war will not be as clear as folks like
me
had hoped or as decisive as the huge claque of always optimistic Arabisants
have already concluded. Tout va bien. (Speaking of other Arabisants—without
Arabic, incidentally—I wonder what my sort-of Harvard colleagues Stephen
Walt and Joseph Nye now have to say about their notable protege Saif
al-Qaddafi. Indeed, Walt has written against targeted killing by the alliance
in
Libya, doubtless making a pitch to save Saif’s ass. Yet the Kennedy School
professor doesn’t seem nearly as interested in the random killings of Jews
by Palestinians and other Arabs.) Under Qaddafi, Libya set its sights
southward, trying to become a major force in sub-Saharan Africa. African
leaders
took the country’s petrodollars and gave Qaddafi the preposterous titles he
required for his self-respect. He did become a comrade of Robert Mugabe
and other gangster politicians, and even Nelson Mandela, yes, the sainted
Nelson Mandela, has stood by him through thick and thin. But this augurs
nothing special for the future of Libya. On the other hand, Erdogan’s stage
show
in Tripoli does put Turkey at the top of the list to dominate the crazy
tyrant’s family business in oil.
Frankly, Tunisia doesn’t matter much in high politics. History was mostly
made on its people rather than by them. When, for example, Israel drove the
leadership of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization out of Lebanon,
the Arab League forced the organization onto Habib Bourguiba’s calm country
from which it continued its elevated work. Bourguiba tried nonetheless to
pacify the Israeli conflict with the Palestinians, to no avail, of course.
Jews settled in this region long ago, after the destruction of the First
Temple. So Tunisia was the home of one of Jewry’s earliest and most
significant
settlements outside its promised land. What with the “return,” however,
and the emergence of Palestinian terror, there are fewer than 1,800 Jews in
the country, a rough thousand in the legendary island of Djerba and the
rest in Tunis. The Berber presence has played a role in both the Libyan and
Tunisian revolt. But since journalists have barely heard of the Berbers they
will not get their due in the media. This will soon change. Of course,
Erdogan has now more or less placed the Turkish flag on this turf and he will
extract whatever he can from the country. Good news: Small though it is,
Tunisia is the most advanced country in the Maghreb, not a huge or
intimidating comparative pool. Still.
All of this is in no way real big potatoes for Erdogan. But he surely
required a build-up by someone at the top to pull off even this relatively
modest adventure. That top guy was Barack Obama. And I suspect that the
president is not surprised by the malevolently cranky despot’s success in l’
Afrique du nord. The real query is whether Obama is at all startled by
Erdogan’s
seriously consequential mischief against Israel. I am not reporting. But I
can well imagine the president of the U.S. and the prime minister of
Turkey having a good chat about the troubles the Netanyahu government brings to
the area where Islam is the dominant mode of thought, the dominant way of
life, and the dominant religion. If such a conversation took place it was
surely at Obama’s initiative. He was the one whose conscience burned for the
question of Palestine.
As it happens, Erdogan had never shown much empathy for the trials of his
Palestinian fellow-faithful. The contrary is true. The posture of his
country for decades was that it and Israel would through their dominance on
the
military scene pacify the neighborhood. Israel considered Turkey a buffer
against Muslim millenarianism. To Turkey, Israel was a vital trade partner, a
technocratic mentor, an ace in the hole against Islamic fanaticism which
surged all around it, most significantly in Iraq and Iran. But Erdogan had
raised the passions of Turkey’s own ummah in his movement’s political
conflict with both of his enemies, civil society and the military. Trying to
use
religious extremism also made him captive of its fanatics.
The instrument of this mobilization was mounting a campaign against the
Jewish state. There were gradual lead-ups to the confrontation between the
Israeli military and a noxious combo of the Free Gaza Movement (a Hamas
affiliate) and the International Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and
Humanitarian Relief. But the IHH, shorthand for this flatulently named and
militantly hostile agit-prop group, had no other object than to get the IDF to
fire on its flotilla. As it happens, even an independent UN investigation
found this spring that Israel’s intercession was entirely legal, if a bit
too eager. Still, Erdogan has clutched on to the cause and he won’t let it
go. He gave a hardline speech to the Arab League in support of the
Palestinian campaign to get the UN to recognize and give credentials to the
phantom
state. Ankara is now fully enlisted in the PA’s effort to substitute an
insubstantial resolution sanctioning a “state” for a real transaction setting
one up with the intricate and, indeed, cumbersome provisions that alone
might end a century-old war.
Now, even the Obama administration is hostile to this effort. Some of the
team, especially Dennis Ross and our ambassador in Israel, Daniel Shapiro,
have followed this saga for decades. It realizes that this is not the first
time that the Palestinians have declared statehood. In fact, 124 of the 193
governments represented at the United Nations already have recognized the
State of Palestine. Presumably, the Palestinian Authority has dispatched
ambassadors to some of these countries, although I don’t know with what
activities they fill their time. No doubt, also, a good number of these
recognizing states send their ambassadors to wherever the State of Palestine
really
is. Which actually is nowhere. Or maybe Ramallah where it would be quite
an adventure for a young diplomat to serve. Jeffrey Goldberg has just
published _a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek_
(http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-09-17/palestine-may-win-a-vote-but-won-t-be-a-state-jeffrey-goldberg.html)
arguing that “Palestine May Win a Vote, But Won’t Be a State.” That’s
the way I see it too.
I wish there would be a Palestinian state, not because there is actually a
real Palestinian people. I’m not persuaded of that. And, of course, I don’
t think that there is a Nigerian people which is why, when younger, I was
an active supporter of Biafra, the would-be Ibo state, squashed by an
indifferent world in behalf of the territorial integrity of, yes, Nigeria
which
is breaking apart before our eyes, in part because of the machinations of
Muslim extremism. The world will some day have to come to grips with the fact
that most governments are not really representative of their peoples. The
whole notion of a country’s UN membership being a certificate of legitimacy
is morally corrupt. UN membership is an admission ticket to the expensive
blandishments of New York.
So I want a Palestine because I want Israelis not to have to burden
themselves with an internal population that has neither the coherence of a
nation
nor a tradition of democratic norms. President Obama is enamored of the
current Palestinian narrative, as false as it is self-pitying. This is a
simple narrative and an over-simple projection into the future. It assumes
that
a 1949 map of the cease-fire lines—yes, of course, with appropriate but
tiny land exchanges—will assure the peace. I do not think it assures anything
except that Israel would be deflected from the art and science of building
an ever freer society, a chore—if you’ll forgive me—it has shown some
talents in doing. I do not know Obama’s head. Maybe nobody does. But his
fervent and fervid clamoring for a simple Israeli route to an independent
Palestine misled no people so much as the Palestinians. When he retreated from
his
formulae, which the PA assumed he could impose on Israel, they were
already on an independence high. His somber entreaties could not bring them
back
to any semblance of reality.
This conundrum of a non-negotiated state for the Palestinians appeals to
the ardent déclarateurs. It ignores the fact that free and responsible
politics has never been a habit in the Arab world. Read me right: never. There
is nothing in Palestinian history to have made the Arabs of Palestine an
exception to this stubborn commonplace now being played out again in virtually
every country in the region. A commitment is never a commitment. A border
is never a border. A peace is never long-lasting. Turkey has now added its
serious mischief to the scenario. Erdogan himself will now unravel Cairo’s
peace with Jerusalem, as Erdogan has already locked the PA into phantom
international politics.
Poor Barack Obama. His adoring view of Erdogan has stimulated the Turkish
regime to be a force not for stability in Cairo or reason in Ramallah. What’
s more, Obama’s Palestinian initiatives have all collapsed. But the most
striking collapse of his Arab politics has been in Syria where he posited
that there were sensible and dependable men with whom Israel could make peace.
Of course, that would entail giving up the Golan Heights (which are not
the Great Plains) to Dr. Assad. The administration courted the family tyranny
and its epigones. Responsible, reasonable, reserved. Two smart-assed
Jewish boys were dispatched to play computer games with the Damascus elite.
They
were also enthused by the possibilities. I know that none of these people
pulled the triggers on any of the thousands who are now dead. They just
encouraged the clan to think they will get away with murder forever.
The fact that Obama so thoroughly misunderstands the Middle East, so
thoroughly also misunderstands militant Islam, has blotted out for both the
Arabs and the Israelis the bona fides of the official American intermediaries.
It is not simply that some of them are biased, a bit to Israel, a much
larger cohort to the victim mentality of the Palestinians and to the oil
deposits of other Arabs. It is that this administration has been stupid about
the
whole region and entranced with the Palestinian narrative which is, to be
utterly brash but candid, nearly wholly false.
--
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