Secretary Rice has been a frequent traveler to Israel/Palestine in the recent past (17 times in the past 2 years), and she is now in the middle of another visit in an attempt to broker an agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians by the end of 2008. Read her remarks with Israeli Foreign Minister (and now Acting Prime Minister) Tzipi Livni here and with Mahmoud Abbas here. Settlements, unsurprisingly, continue to be a thorn in the side of all three parties; PeaceNow, an Israeli pressure group, released a report shortly before Secretary Rice’s visit documenting a rise in settlement activities relative to this time last year. (Almost twice as many new buildings are under construction as there were in the first half of 2008). Rice said, in her press conference with Livni, that the settlement activity was “not helpful” but pointed out that negotiations were proceeding despite it. Abbas and Livni were slightly more pointed in their comments; Livni said 

“… the peace process is not and should not be affected by any kind of settlement activities. I mean, at the end of the day, we are talking about the future borders of the Palestinian state, considering more than 40 years we are talking, plus minus, about the same blocks of settlements, and this is part of the negotiations. And as I suggested also to my co-partners on the Palestinian side, to try — and I understand that sometimes (inaudible) and sometimes how does it affect on different parts of Palestinian society. But at the end of the day, the role of leaders is to try and find a way to live in peace in the future, and to avoid any kind of — not to let any kind of noises that relate to the situation on the ground these days to enter the negotiations room. I mean, it could have been easier also for me to use some excuses, and to say that this affects my ability to negotiate. But I decided not to do so, even in harder days of terror. So I would like to suggest my co-partners not to use it as an excuse. And I know that they are not using it as an excuse, but I understand the frustration sometimes.”

Abbas, later on the same day, made the following comments:

We have focused also on the settlement activities that continue, that are ongoing, and that are undoubtedly an obstacle, a main obstacle in the road of the peace process. And as you all know, we reject all the settlement activities in principle because they contradict with the agreements and the Roadmap plan and the objectives of Annapolis that have started one year ago – almost one year ago.

So, Rice has got her work cut out for her. As Fareed Zakaria said, no one has ever lost money betting against the peace process. There is one interesting new development, though – Rice has appointed Lt. Gen. Will Fraser to oversee the progress of the Roadmap. He’s established a system for quantifying the impact of each of the roadblocks up in the West Bank/Gaza and East Jerusalem, ostensibly so that the most disruptive roadblocks can be removed first. Sean McCormack discusses this in greater depth at DipNote, the State Dept’s blog.

This is from October, but it is still interesting.  Congressional testimony about Iran, from Karim Sadjapour (.pdf file).    The piece is nuanced and fair, with interesting reccomendations on how the US should deal with Iran, specifically how we can influence the people, rather than the government. 

Vanity Fair has an excellent article by David Rose about the Bush Administration almost forcing Gaza into a Civil War.  I am not positive I agree with the thesis- I tend to think that a battle would have happened eventually- but the capriciousness, stubbornness, and willingness to work with very shady people simply because they were on “our” side makes this a maddening read.   The outcome of the Gaza debacle is that the hand of the US was weakened while strengthening Iran, not to mention further hurting any chance at an Israeli/Palestinian settlement, and bringing more misery and death to people on both sides of that blighted divide.  

The article talks a bit about how this fit into Condoleeza Rice’s broader goals of an anti-Shi’ite coalition made up of cooperating Sunni states, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.  For a good background on this read David Samuels’ June 2007 Atlantic piece, “Grand Illusions.” 

Helping Lebanon free itself from the Syria/Hezbollah axis is a worthy goal.  Helping the only party in Palestine that has even a decent shot at reform, Fatah, is somewhat more ambiguous, but still a decent goal.   But the policy of gathering allies behind the scenes and aiding the enemies of our enemies is short-sighted and only helps to fuel the idea of America as a conspiracy-mongering, entirely self-interested war machine. 

(Of course, one could point to the success of arming former insurgents in al-Anbar against al-Qaeda.   And that is true- they have hurt Islamic militants.  But I still think it is a desperately short-sighted plan.  It is putting out one fire, which is good, but pouring fuel into another.)

Sabrina Tavernise has a brutal and harrowing piece in today’s New York Times about how the cleric-driven violence in Iraq has led many to question their faith, which they have seen as bringing them nothing but misery and blood.

“In the beginning, they gave their eyes and minds to the clerics; they trusted them,” said Abu Mahmoud, a moderate Sunni cleric in Baghdad, who now works deprogramming religious extremists in American detention. “It’s painful to admit, but it’s changed. People have lost too much. They say to the clerics and the parties: You cost us this.”

“When they behead someone, they say ‘Allahu akbar,’ they read Koranic verse,” said a moderate Shiite sheik from Baghdad, using the phrase for “God is great.”

“The young people, they think that is Islam,” he said. “So Islam is a failure, not only in the students’ minds, but also in the community.”

Now, Tavernese has said she interviewed forty people over five cities, which isn’t nothing, but isn’t a huge sample-size, either.   Still, her conclusions stand to reason.  In the post-Saddam vacuum, religion was a way to make sense of the chaos.  Not for everyone: tribalism and family remained strong (one would expect this to be the case after a dominant figure collapses and then the very state is called into question- people fall back into older, more secure identities). 

But those identities didn’t provide security; they unspun into chaos.   As the war got worse and worse, and became more brutal and more criminal, it seems some young Iraqis turned away from the hollow and deadly intonations of the preachers.

In large part these preachers turned out to be nothing more than criminals, barely concealing their venal motives with a translucent mask of piety.   The scared became unwashably profane, and the youth of Iraq- hardened, no one’s fools- could see through it.   This kind of fake-jihadist is not uncommon; Mark Bowden has an excellent Atlantic articleabout one in the Philippines.

 Issac Choitner in The New Republic thinks this is a hopeful article, and I agree with him to a point.   It is good that this veneer is being ripped away, but I can’t get too excited that many people had to be tortured and killed, blown-apart, for us to get here.  Still, if it shows anything, it shows what one commenter, teplukhin, succinctly described.

I think it offers hope in that it’s now very clear that the jihadist “pitch” to prospective recruits is almost totally about material or at least non-religious, apolitical incentives– the same pitch, more or less, that a drug dealer makes to prospective mules.

If there’s ever a surge that would work, it’s a massive civil effort to get money and jobs to young unemployed Iraqi men in neighborhoods where the jihad does most of its recruiting. This isn’t rocket science.

That is what the US has to do in Iraq.  The surge has helped quell some violence, but, as noted, it hasn’t helped much in the way of political progress.  But even if it did help that, it wouldn’t much change conditions on the ground for young Iraqis, especially young Iraqi men.  It is the same from Liberia to Serbia to American inner-cities: bored young men with nothing to do and no prospects for employment are easily turned to violence.  If the US doesn’t recognize that it has an opening, a way to slow down the allure of criminal activities, then its presence there will be indefinite or a complete failure.

From CNN…

Iran’s president: No one likes Americans

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, heading home after a two-day visit to Iraq, again touted his country’s closer relations with Iraq and reiterated his criticism of the United States.

“No one likes them,” Ahmadinejad told reporters prior to returning to Iran, referring to the predominantly U.S. makeup of coalition forces in Iraq.

This kind of rhetoric can only be balanced out by a strategic “I’m rubber; you’re glue” counter-offensive. 

No no no- not my solution, which I am keeping close to my vest until I get a lucrative government job (or until I get smart enough to come up with one- neither option seems close to the horizon). 

 This solution comes from Thomas Pickering, William Leurs, and Jim Walsh, and it is published in The New York Review of Books.   They think that now is the time to strike.

 The NIE and the improvement in US–Iranian relations over Iraq policy are part of it. Moreover, Iran’s upcoming parliamentary elections in mid-March seem likely to show a weakening of support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his allies. This, in turn, will put intense pressure on him to raise his political status before the 2009 presidential elections. Without a noticeable improvement in the economy, Ahmadinejad can move in one of two directions. First, he can pick a fight with the United States, hoping that confrontation will boost his ratings. This has been his tendency until now, but it is a tactic that appears less effective each time it is used and has probably contributed to his declining popularity.

These strike me as true, and the lack of outcry or even sustained noise over Ahmadinejad’s trip to Iraq, even with his spouting the same boilerplate rhetoric, is a good sign.   And it seems both countries are recognizing, their own rivalries aside, that an unstable Iraq is in no one’s interest.

(Let’s not go nuts, though: the New York Times today is reporting that “For more than two hours, representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency were riveted by documents, sketches and even a video that appeared to have come from Iran’s own military laboratories. The inspector said they showed work ‘not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon,’ according to notes taken by diplomats.”  Obviously, this is a fluid and shifting relationship.)

Anyway, the article lays out a good, and I think important program (its workability is questionable, but that can be said with any plan).  The nut of it is that it is in our interests to convince Iran that working with the US on this is in theirinterests.  And they stress that choosing the second-best option (perhaps an Iranian nuclear program under strict multilateral control) is better than the worst option.  I believe this- not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and all that.  

Again, there is no perfect solution to this problem.  But we need to work on “less-bad” solutions, as morally and grammatically ugly as that sounds.    Until, of course, I reveal my perfect solution to this. 

Vali Nasr, one of the world’s leading experts on Shi’ism, and Ray Takeyh, author of the excellent Hidden Iran, have co-authored a piece in the latest Foreign Affairs about the dangers of Washington’s Iran containment strategy. 

 This is a grand strategy, which basically involves rallying all the Sunni Arab states against the growing Persian threat, and, in doing so, bringing stability to the region.  Nasr and Takeyh do not believe this to be a viable strategy, and think it will only further fissure the Levant.   Here is a long excerpt.

Containing Iran is not a novel idea, of course, but the benefits Washington expects from it are new. Since the inception of the Islamic Republic, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have devised various policies, doctrines, and schemes to temper the rash theocracy. For the Bush administration, however, containing Iran is the solution to the Middle East’s various problems. In its narrative, Sunni Arab states will rally to assist in the reconstruction of a viable government in Iraq for fear that state collapse in Baghdad would only consolidate Iran’s influence there. The specter of Shiite primacy in the region will persuade Saudi Arabia and Egypt to actively help declaw Hezbollah. And, the theory goes, now that Israel and its longtime Arab nemeses suddenly have a common interest in deflating Tehran’s power and stopping the ascendance of its protégé, Hamas, they will come to terms on an Israeli-Palestinian accord. This, in turn, will (rightly) shift the Middle East’s focus away from the corrosive Palestinian issue to the more pressing Persian menace. Far from worrying that the Middle East is now in flames, Bush administration officials seem to feel that in the midst of disorder and chaos lies an unprecedented opportunity for reshaping the region so that it is finally at ease with U.S. dominance and Israeli prowess.

But there is a problem: Washington’s containment strategy is unsound, it cannot be implemented effectively, and it will probably make matters worse. The ingredients needed for a successful containment effort simply do not exist. Under these circumstances, Washington’s insistence that Arab states array against Iran could further destabilize an already volatile region

The summation of the article is basically that rifts that exist within the Sunni Arab states are far too deep and old to be suddenly healed by a new threat, and that the US will make things far worse by establishing what is essentially a Cold War strategy.   The authors think that constructive dialogue with Iran, which is not as messianic or as expansionist as some believe, would be far more fruitful (they also do not downplay the serious problems and threats the US and region face regarding Iran). 

 Where the authors lose me a bit is comparing Iran to Russia or China- merely a country who wants to throw its weight around a little bit.   This is true, but it also masks the trouble in dealing with the theocracy.   Russia and China both have power essentially in one spot- the Party with China and the oligarchy that surrounds Putin, in Russia.   This makes them theoretically far more simple countries with which to deal.  You go right to the source.

 The problem is that in Iran there is no source- or, rather, there are many.  Iran, with its chaotic simulacrum of democracy, is inflicted with constantly-shifting alliances and multiple bases of power.  Yes, Khamaeni sits at the center, and the hard-core mullahs control the army and the judiciary, but Iranian government is not a monolith (interestingly, Takeyh’s book is one of the more useful reads on Iran’s hydra-headed system).  

This is not to say that their basic premise is wrong- it isn’t.  The containment theory, beside the reasons the authors listed, is flawed in that it is enabling other US enemies, much in the same way that the US is arming Sunni insurgents to fight al-Qaeda.  Governments who help us are all doing so in their own interest, which is not guaranteed to redound favorably upon us.   We would be creating the illusion of a combined Sunni front, but one fissuring and boiling with older rivalries. 

But Nasr and Takeyh underestimate the difficulty of letting Iran see it is in their best interest to work with the system.  They are ultimately correct that it is possible, but readers of the article need to be aware that it is far from a magic bullet solution.

In the current Yemen Times, Hassan al-Haifi has a short editorial on the need for change in the Arab World.   I link to it for a couple of reasons.  One, basically, is that it is always interesting to read critical articles in the mainstream Arab press.  We tend to think that no one is allowed to speak their mind, that the press marches in lockstep with the ruler- and, by and large, this can be true, depending on the country.  There are ways to work around that, though, and Yemen for one actually has a lively and active opposition press.   It is still verbotento criticize President Ali Abdullah Saleh directly, but there are ways to work around that. 

Now, then: Hassan al-Haifi.   When I lived in Yemen, I used to make fun of him, both verbally and in print .  More than a bit purplish, I described him as ” important to read because he captures all of the flop-sweated conspiratorial nightmare gibberish of the old Arab nationalist myths in each of his columns, refusing to believe anything that doesn’t fit his original thesis.”  And to a large extent this is still true, though (a little older, now) I might describe it a little differently.  Rare is a column of his that doesn’t blame something- anything- on the Zionists. 

 So what makes him interesting?  Well, he is an ardent anti-Zionist, but also fiercely hates the stagnant Arab regimes and Islamic terrorism.   So he really doesn’t fit into any easy category.  It is fair to think that most people in the Arab world are more or less like him- no great fan of America, but no great fan of its enemies either.  Of course, the major actors in the Arab/Muslim world are not like this, but it is important to realize that the people America needs to win over don’t fall into simple categories.

 Al-Haifi’s column begins with a fascinating paragraph, which I will quote at length, which I think helps illustrate the complexities and contradictions that America faces in its efforts to win the fabled hearts and minds.

 IIt is becoming indeed that after almost eight years of sloppy governance in the United States, the American people are relying on their genuinely democratic institutions to come out of the abyss brought on by the incompetence and sheer arrogance of the Bush Administration (and the Zionist machine behind it). Yes the word “change” is having strong resonance in the pre-election primaries by which the leading American political parties are choosing their favored candidates for the office of the Presidency in the United States. It is imperative that we just do not recognize this as a significant development for the United States, but an important lesson by which to learn that unless the people have the final say in the adjudication of their leaders there is no sense in believing that indeed governance is meaningful otherwise. The significance of the current American political exercise is that the word “change” is the dominating influence in creating the choice of the electors. Even the candidates from the party of the incumbent President in the White House are unfailing in detecting the widespread desire for a change for the better, and they are quick to also adopt the platform of “change” to respond to this broad based desire. 
This- this is oddly inspiring, isn’t it?  Al-Haifi praises America and is almost awed at the idea of change, that despite what he sees as the nightmare of the last 8 years, the country can re-invent itself for the better.   This is the message America needs to promote, this message of constant improvement, if it wants to improve its image in the Middle East.   It isn’t enough to promote people like the brave Saad Ibrahim or Kanan Makiya- we need to support them, but true western-style democrats are in the minority.   US policy needs to be geared toward people who have a grudging, reluctant respect for the country, tempered by years of disilusionement both justified and not, but who have yet to turn completely away.  Anything else is just a pipe dream. 
 

The President is concluding the Israel/Palestinian portion of his Middle East trip, before moving on the Gulf to deal with Iran.   Bush feels confident that there will be a Palestinian state and a peace treaty before he leaves office in slightly more than a year, saying “‘there’s going to be a signed peace treaty by the time I leave office,’ stressing that Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will ‘make tough choices in order for there to be lasting peace.’” (Middle East Times)

To this author, this kind of rhetoric seems typically worrisome, infused with the idea that merely believing something is enough to make it happen.   And, as a New York Times story says , the Palestinians don’t much believe it either.  “‘He has destroyed everything, and now he is coming to see the results,” said Moussa Al Hilou, 63, a clothing store owner. ‘What Palestinian state is he talking about? What he says is nonsense, even our leadership knows that.’”

Bush, as the Israeli paper Haaretz reports, is not happy with Bush being there, for reason ranging from the grand- they believe he is the most Israeli-biased President in history- to the prosaic: his arrival has prompted massive (justified) security measures.

“Ala, who lives nearby, said Preventive Security personnel had been moving from house to house for the past few days and taking down residents’ names.
‘We were asked not to go out onto the balconies or the roofs. We are not allowed to go into the street, either,’ he said. ‘That criminal, George Bush, has put us under curfew. The Israelis are not enough - now him, too. He is destroying the world and he will yet be tried for his crimes,’ he added.” 

I don’t see much coming out of this, other than an attempt at a legacy.  Bush is too unpopular and hard-feelings are too ingrained for anything to happen here (with everything else that has happened, it is somewhat incredible to realize that George W. Bush has been the President thoughout almost all of the events starting with the second intifada). 

 What he did do though was call for an end to the occupation, and said that “a Palestinian state had to be contiguous. ‘Swiss cheese isn’t going to work when it comes to the territory of a state.’   This is probably not the single most eloquent framing of this issue I have ever read, but it is still meaningful for a US President to acknowledge it.   Whomever the next President is, he or she will have to pick up where Bush falteringly and belatedly began.

(As Bush moves into the Gulf, we will be doing an in-depth look at Gulf issues, especially regarding Iran.  Excited?  You bet you are!)

An editorial in today’s Middle East Times nails it:

And if indeed the president’s concern is the Arab-Israeli dispute, then why the stops in four Gulf countries? Why the visits to Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE and Saudi Arabia? It is interesting to note that those four countries share the same concerns over Iran’s rising influence in the region.

…Bush’s visit to the region — the Gulf region, that is — might well have more to do with Iran than with the question of Palestine.

Iran has become the single-biggest issue for policy-makers in the region- possibly even more than Iraq.  Bush would love an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal to his legacy, but the real interest is Iran.    The maneuvering between the Gulf States- along with the broader Arab world- and Iran changes on a day-to-day basis.  My guess is Bush wants to shore up support and make some kind of cohesive policy.   He must not like the new willingness to at least partially co-operate with the Iranian government. 

This is especially true in light of the confrontation between the US Navy and the speedboats of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp.  According to the US Navy “as the Iranian boats neared the American vessels, a radio threat was issued that the American ships would explode. The verbal warnings broadcast over the internationally recognized bridge-to-bridge radio channel said, “I am coming at you, and you will explode in a few minutes.”

 The Iranian government has denied this.

“What happened between the Guards and foreign vessels was an ordinary identification,” Ali Reza Tangsiri, commander of the Guards naval forces in the region, told the Mehr news agency.

“No special engagement took place between the Guards and the foreign side,” he said, adding that the Guards naval forces had a right to control and identify “any vessel entering Persian Gulf waters” to the northwest.  (AFP)

Tensions are rising in anticipation of Bush’s visit.  Iran is now, and will remain for at least the rest of his term, at the front of the President’s mind.