RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST

by Michael Lame, posted February 5, 2010

It’s time for President Obama to bring George Mitchell home. No, Mitchell shouldn’t be fired, nor should he resign, as Stephen Walt recently suggested in Foreign Policy. Rather, I would encourage Obama to reassign the former Senate majority leader to duty in the White House.

I advocate this for two reasons. First, the likelihood of success in his current position is small and getting smaller. Second, he is needed more at home than abroad to help address a matter of national importance which is even more pressing than Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Why Leave

In the last month, George Mitchell and Barack Obama have each made fascinating and revealing statements about the prospects for Palestinian-Israeli peace. President Obama, in an interview with Time magazine on January 15, said the following:

[T]he Middle East peace process has not moved forward. And I think it’s fair to say that for all our efforts at early engagement, it is not where I want it to be. . . This is just really hard. Even for a guy like George Mitchell, who helped bring about the peace in Northern Ireland. This is as intractable a problem as you get…

Both sides — the Israelis and the Palestinians — have found that the political environment, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation. And I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that…

[W]hat we did this year didn’t produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted, and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high. Moving forward, though, we are going to continue to work with both parties to recognize what I think is ultimately their deep-seated interest in a two-state solution in which Israel is secure and the Palestinians have sovereignty…

Let’s parse this a bit. Obama provides a fair analysis of reasons for the continuing gridlock in the non-negotiations. He then claims that, despite the internal dissensions among Israelis and Palestinians, the US can help the two parties recognize what their own “deep-seated interest” really is, which apparently they are too myopic to see clearly on their own. But what he offers is basically more of the same – “to continue to work with both parties”.

The Obama administration did put forward two new ideas in 2009: a total Israeli construction freeze and an opening up by Arab countries to Israel. The freeze idea was embraced by the Palestinian Authority and rejected by the Israeli government, while Arab countries declined to expand commercial or other ties with Israel at this time. The upshot is a temporary partial freeze with no reciprocal moves and no negotiations.

To better understand the US approach,  I recommend watching or reading Charlie Rose’s January 6th interview with George Mitchell. It’s quite revealing of the administration’s strategy and of its blind spots.

Understandably enough, Mitchell’s primary point of reference for how to conduct a tough negotiation is the work he did on Northern Ireland in the 1990s. He speaks several times in the interview of the five years that he labored on it. His take-away from those years of struggle and apparent success is that you keep negotiating and you don’t give up.

I wrote “apparent success” because the ultimate question in dispute for Northern Ireland has not been resolved: Will the six counties of the North join the Republic of Ireland or remain separate from it? The great accomplishment of the negotiations Mitchell chaired was to kick that can down the road while removing violence from the equation.

But is Mitchell correct in considering Northern Ireland an analog of the Middle East? And if so, is the approach he employed with unionists and nationalists – to keep on slogging through the negotiating process with a commitment to eventual success – the most productive way to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The answer to both questions is unclear.

Every analogy reveals as well as conceals. Certainly both conflicts are old and deep, but there are overlapping regional and global dimensions to conflict in “the holy land” that simply are not present in Northern Ireland.

Mitchell hopes for a more permanent result to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute than he found for Northern Ireland. He says he believes that two years or less of intensive negotiations will yield the result that this administration seeks and that the president spoke of: an independent and economically-viable Palestine living in peace alongside a secure and regionally-accepted Israel.

Of course, the two-year clock won’t start ticking until negotiations begin, and even getting to that point seems problematic. The current PA position is that Israel must suspend all building activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem before it will return to talks. But as Mitchell acknowledges in his interview, “The Israelis are not going to stop settlements in, or construction in East Jerusalem. They don’t regard that as a settlement because they think it’s part of Israel.” Supposedly Mitchell is now offering the Palestinians a package of inducements to restart negotiations without a Jerusalem building ban. We shall see if that works.

The Missing Factor

No current conflict in the world has been more studied, written about, and negotiated over than this New Jersey-size stretch of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Perhaps two more years of negotiating will do the trick, but there is no good reason to believe that it will. And, in the absence of an external factor to push the parties towards a breakthrough, negotiation fatigue is likely to set in.

Some fundamental aspects of the political dynamic need to change in order for negotiations to succeed or even to be replaced by a more coercive process. There are several candidates for “the missing factor”: different or additional parties to the negotiation, such as Hamas, Egypt, or Jordan; more carrots and/or sticks offered; a larger frame of reference for the process; a looming threat that frightens parties on both sides; a decisive military victory or defeat; a political or social transformation of one or more parties; a new consensus on either side; a redefinition of issues. But there needs to be something, something big, perhaps something unforeseen that is added to the equation before we can assume that negotiations, no matter how long they last or how effectively they are facilitated, will be more likely to succeed than to fail.

More time, more energy, more trips back and forth won’t do it. In any case, shuttle diplomacy is a young man’s game, or at least a middle-aged man’s (or woman’s) game. In the mid-1970s, Henry Kissinger shuttled back and forth between Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus when he was in his early fifties. Dennis Ross, still in his forties, flew endlessly around the Middle East on behalf of President Clinton. Warren Christopher, who, from all appearances, was born old, shuttled back and forth between Israel and Syria in 1993 in his late sixties. George Mitchell, still spry at 76, cannot keep up the pace forever of hopping back and forth between Jerusalem, Ramallah, Cairo, and DC, especially with so little to show for his efforts.

Come home, George

The new White House job I envision for Mitchell would be that of senior political counselor, a sort of latter-day Clark Clifford. This administration is sorely in need of a seasoned statesman with a pre-Clinton-era pedigree, a venerated pol among all the rambunctious and hard-charging Chicagoans who now surround the president and feed him advice of questionable merit.

Although I stopped being an Obama fan some time ago, still I am concerned that our high-flying president is rapidly losing altitude. Both at home and abroad, Obama’s first year in office has been characterized by too many zigs and zags, too many full-throated but half-hearted calls to arms, too many conflicting messages, too little follow through.

Even if Obama only serves a single term, neither the United States nor the world can afford a weak presidency for the next three years. Something must be done to stop the slide. A president of either party requires some semblance of credibility with the American people as a whole for our democracy to function properly. And around the world, our nation’s friends need to know we can be counted on and our foes – yes, we do still have foes – need to know that the US remains a force to be reckoned with.

So the President needs senior advisors – “wise men” and wise women – who can tell him, respectfully, when he’s off course. He needs at least one person of political sagacity he can turn to, someone beyond ambition and impervious to flattery, someone of independent judgment and strong moral fiber, someone who understands domestic politics as well as the wider world. Few fit that bill as well as George Mitchell.

Of course, more will be required to put the Obama presidency back on track than the sage advice of a Nestor. Yet Mitchell could play a useful cautionary role, especially if he returns with an increased awareness of the dangers as well as the opportunities facing America in the wider Middle East.

2010 will likely be a year of decision regarding the most critical problem-area in the Middle East today, Iran – a year of decision for the Iranian people, the Israeli military, and the U.S. government. From across the political spectrum, America needs the best people with the best ideas available to the President to deal with the tough choices he will have to make this year.