After meeting with Obama, what's next?

I had the opportunity to meet with President Barack Obama at the White House on July 13, along with fifteen other representatives of Jewish organizations. Afterwards, everyone wanted to know whether I now felt reassured about the state of US-Israel relations.
  
I start off with the premise that pro-Israeli attitudes in this country are so deeply embedded and multi-layered that no particular policy approach can easily change that. On top of that, the President said a number of things that reminded me of the bi-partisan character of support for Israel which has been the hallmark of the relationship.

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Seeing the glass half full - for now

Perspective is everything.  The glass can be half full or half empty.

These unoriginal thoughts came to mind after two significant events in the life of the state of Israel and the Jewish people - the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Israel and the meeting between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

The tendency in the Israeli press was to focus on the negative. The Pope was widely criticized for the things he failed to say or said in an infelicitous way. And the Washington summit meeting was picked apart for the alleged lack of warmth between the leaders and for the pressure points and disagreements.

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Preventing the weapons flow to Hamas

In a media world which features images of destruction of human beings and property, the words "cease fire" have an understandable allure. Israel itself succumbed to that allure six months ago to bring respite to Sderot.
    
Whether a cease-fire is a good thing or instead an event that makes the next conflict inevitable at a higher level of violence depends almost entirely on whether it will provide mechanisms to ensure its reliable implementation.
     
Look at Lebanon and UN resolution 1701 which generated the cease-fire there. Its two most important components were barring Hizbullah from entering territory south of the Litani river and from getting weapons from Syria and Iran.

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'Neutral' on Israel's security

Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey's visit to Teheran was billed as an opportunity to deliver a stern message about the need for Iran to end its human rights violations and its threats to destroy Israel. This was according to the government's official announcement of her March 17 diplomatic visit.

As a secondary matter, the announcement noted, Calmy-Rey would attend the signing of a gas deal between Iran and a Swiss energy company.

But Calmy-Rey herself inadvertently exposed the flimsy human rights pretext when she acknowledged on the day of her departure that she was traveling to Teheran in response to Iran's invitation.

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Why the US and moderate Arabs need each other

Relating American interests in the larger Middle East to the US role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a necessary and sometimes controversial element of US policy making.

During the Cold War, two predominant models emerged.  Zbignew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, postulated the concept that protection of key American interests -- limiting Soviet influence and retaining access to Mideast oil -- required achieving as soon as possible a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.  Brzezinski and Carter saw obstacles to American interests in the continuing conflict and saw great advantages for the US in the larger region if the conflict were resolved.

The problems with this approach were many and were so evident to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who sought progress toward peace, that he decided to go it alone with Israel, much to the initial dismay of the Carter Administration.  First, it was unreal to expect all the Arabs, including the radicals, to reach peace with Israel.  Second, it put an unreasonable weight on the Israeli-Arab conflict to influence the many other conflicts and challenges in the region. And third, it was a process that would inevitably lead to undue pressure on Israel, the logic being that if this was the key to all America's problems in the region, and if as anyone could see the Arabs weren't ready, then advocates of such an approach would invariably play the mind game of telling themselves "If only Israel would make the appropriate concessions."

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After the NIE: where do we go from here?

There are many caveats to the screaming headlines that the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has declared that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The caveats not only reinforce the fact that the medium-term threat from a nuclear Iran is still very much before us, but also should call into question the conclusion of many that any immediate sense of urgency should be removed from the discussion.

The caveats involve both the language of the NIE report itself and interpretations of the meaning of some of the NIE statements and conclusions.

First, despite the implication of the headlines that Iran stopped its nuclear program in 2003 until the current time, in fact there is ambiguity in the NIE as to whether Iran has continued to halt the program. Carefully using words like "high confidence" meaning quite sure based on confirmed quality sources, and "moderate confidence" which suggests plausible sources but not fully corroborated, the NIE attributes "high confidence" to its judgment that Iran halted its weapons program in 2003; and "high confidence" that this "halt lasted at least several years"; but only "moderate confidence" that Iran had not restarted its nuclear program as of mid-2007.

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