Has Obama done more harm than good - and does it matter?

This post is about some little details of international politics. For our understanding of the current situation we must rely on the media, which does not always get things right. And in any case, the media does not provide the nuances of private conversations, body language meant to decrease or increase the impact of what is said. Perhaps one can rely on the media's portrayal of events, without assuming that it is the whole truth.

The story begins with the Obama administration's efforts to jump-start a peace process between Israel and Palestine. Among the demands made of Israel, both by Secretary of State Clinton and Special Envoy Mitchell, was a total freeze on construction in settlements over the 1967 borders, including the new neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
 
There followed a series of meetings between Israelis and Americans, and turmoil within Israel. What emerged was an offer by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's government to freeze new construction for several months, not including Jerusalem, housing units already authorized or under construction, or public facilities in settlement areas.
 
Currently it seems the Americans recognize that this is the most they can get from Israel, and Clinton is saying that the US never demanded a total freeze as a precondition to negotiation.
 
Maybe yes, maybe no. We should not expect individuals with the kind of ego that goes with high office to admit failure.
 
Now Secretary Clinton is saying that the prime minister has offered a landmark concession.
 
But the Palestinians stopped listening at "full settlement freeze."

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Jewish vitality

The latest sources of Jewish panic are claims that Israel has gone crazy in an alleged concern for its defense, and that the American Jewish Left is threatening what had been united support for Israel's essential concerns.
 
The Left is sickened by indications of bloodshed and destruction in Gaza. The Right is frightened by the emergence of the Leftist J Street and signs of its alignment with the White House. Either this new Left is provoking the White House to threaten Israel, or the White House is using the Jewish Left as leverage against Israel.
 
So what else is new?
 
Remember that Moses had his hands full with Hebrew rebels. Ezra struggled unsuccessfully with men attracted to shiksas (non-Jewish women). Josephus described full scale civil war. Since then Jews have produced, followed and been disappointed by no end of spiritual and political messiahs.
 
J Street is the American expression of what Israelis knew as Brit Shalom in the 1920s, and Peace Now from the 1970s onward.
 
If the greatest threat comes from an article in The Nation, then God's people can relax.

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Obama's Middle East record to date: unimpressive to embarrassing

Since the country went back to work after Rosh Hashana, the airwaves were filled with competing speculation about the upcoming meeting in New York of Barack Obama, Benyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. The central question: What, if anything, would Obama wring from Netanyahu and Abbas? Perhaps Bibi would agree to more of a settlement freeze than previously, and Abu Mazan would agree to negotiate with him.
 
Once the leaders had met, and the American president spoke, the commentary shifted to new terrain, where it will likely stay for awhile.

Neither Bibi nor Abbas gave Obama what he wanted. The president came close to admitting defeat when he spoke of "restraining" building in the settlements rather than "freezing" it, and did not mention east Jerusalem. The process will continue. Secretary of State Clinton and special envoy Mitchell will return to the region, and press Israelis and Palestinians to be reasonable.
 
Some commentators are saying that Israel will eventually pay a heavy price for refusing to bend under the pressure of the American president. Others are ridiculing Obama. How could he have invested his time and prestige so heavily and achieve nothing?
 
Actually, he achieved less than nothing. He made things worse.
 
Earlier, the Palestinians negotiated while construction in the settlements continued. Obama hardened their position by his insistence on a freeze. And he may have spurred a greater rate of construction by Israelis enraged by his demand to freeze construction for Jews in neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
 
Skeptics will say that Obama's efforts have had no impact. The gaps between what the most generous of the major Israeli parties are willing to offer and what the Palestinians demand are so great as to make agreement unlikely.
 
So what is the future?
 
Most likely more of the same.

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Big egos, good intentions and failed policies

Seventy years ago, a distinguished scholar documented one of the keystones of politics: politicians have abnormally large egos. (Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics)
 
His finding is worth remembering today - policy failures continue to hurt because people with big egos have trouble admitting mistakes.
 
American history, wealth and military power may serve to magnify the phenomenon, in a field where even the leaders of small and pathetic states think of themselves in grand terms. It is certain that the mistakes of American leaders touch directly more people than the mistakes of national leaders elsewhere. The world-wide reach of American aspirations means that poor judgment in the White House has greater impact than errors coming out of other national capitals.
 
There is no shortage of examples.

We're not finished with Saddam yet

This part of the Middle East has long been a place of exciting ideas. Chosen People, Promised Land, and Holy City have motivated Jews for more than two millennia. Nakba has served Palestinians for 60 years. Settlements arouse both Israelis and anti-Israelis. Some see them as part of salvation, others as the essence of sin.
 
Hyperbole may be the regional disease, or at least one of the elements preventing the calm that we envy for Scandinavia and New Zealand.
 
Way down the list from Chosen People, Promised Land, Holy City, or Nakba, but still warm to the touch, is a note distributed by the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies. David Keyes begins his article, entitled "Sadam's Legacy in Amman," with the statement that "Saddam Hussein killed more Arabs and Muslims than any other Middle Eastern leader in recent history."
 
He goes on to write: "True, he [Saddam] imposed order in Iraq.... Prizing stability over liberty is the root of so many of the region's ills." 
 
There is more here than might appear at first glance.

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A slap in the face for Obama?

Has Israel insulted the United States by approving construction on some 500 new dwellings in the West Bank, and indicating that construction will continue on about 2,500 others? This against President Obama's plan for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations based upon a complete construction freeze, including neighborhoods of east Jerusalem.
 
Or is it a reasonable response to a naive American conception that the settlements are a major obstacle preventing agreement between Palestinians and Israel?
 
Perhaps the Israeli response is appropriate, but presented in a way that is insulting. If Netanyahu was working with the Americans on the conception of a freeze, what he has done seems far from that. And was it nice to announce new construction a day before the long Labor Day weekend, when Americans would be away from their desks?

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Maybe I should have been a tailor

This is one of those days when I wish I had taken up a profession other than academic craft of political science. Maybe tailoring or peddling, like my grandfathers.
 
Or maybe I should go back to school, where someone might be able to teach me to understand what I'm reading.
 
Israel's prime minister is saying that he agrees to a limited-time freeze on West Bank settlements, but only to take effect after he signs off on several hundred new building permits, then excludes them from the freeze along with some 2,500 units already under construction, along with schools and other public buildings that might be built in existing settlements. He is also saying that the freeze will not include neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
 
All that sounds good for Likud party activists who used terms like "traitor" when they heard that Netanyahu was agreeing to any freeze at all. However, it also recalls one of Tzipi Livni's slogans in the recent election campaign: "Bibi. I don't believe him."

Obama should leave Israel alone

When I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during 1968-75, I occasionally spoke out against anti-war students and faculty colleagues. I also learned what tear gas smelled like, as it was impossible to avoid the mass demonstrations, or the police and National Guard response.

At the same time, I was lecturing several times a year to junior officers at military bases in the United States and overseas. Numerous students came to class while on leave from Vietnam. One of them had earned a Congressional Medal of Honor. My topic was domestic policy making, in the framework of an MA program in public administration, but there were conversations about other things.
 
I do not recall just when I turned against Vietnam. I still think there was justification, in the context of the time, for making a forceful statement against expanding Communism. I knew it was a confused situation, with corruption in the South and perhaps as much national liberation as Communism per se in the Vietcong and those who supported them. The results, though, were not worth 58,000 American deaths, and many more broken lives.
 
In Vietnam, more than in Korea, we saw a dynamic of war and politics that kept the thing going far beyond the point of utility. I fear the same for Afghanistan. I have no doubt that 9/11 justified a hard blow against the Taliban, but controlling Afghanistan and seeking to reform it? It's one of the least governable places on earth.
 
What the United States has lacked is another Dwight Eisenhower, who knew the costs and limitations of combat, got out of Korea, and stayed out of Vietnam and most other places.

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It's tough being Emperor of the World

I find myself defending Barack Obama, even though I think he's in over his head and on the way to embarrassment or worse in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel-Palestine.
 
The easiest part of the job is ignoring those who think him a Muslim anti-Semite, or a man whose elevation to the presidency depends on a forged birth certificate. They are close cousins of the people convinced Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John F. Kennedy, and descendants of those sure that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the Rothschilds, or the Catholic Church engineered the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
 
The weightier discussions are with those who contend that Obama is naive, and wonder about his actions in countries neither he nor his advisers appear to understand.
 
I agree with the naive part, and try to explain why, regardless, here is another American president heading for trouble: It comes with the job.

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Remember Thomas Hobbs

Current events justify a few words about domestic and international politics.
 
Politics is tough in a democracy with a complex society. Witness the squabbles in the United States over health care that have been prominent at various times since the 1940s, and which are currently testing the capacity of the Obama administration.
 
Compared to international politics, domestic politics are a cakewalk.
 
A line of Thomas Hobbes' is appropriate for international politics: life is nasty, brutish, and short

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