Scott McLeod: Obama Mideast Watch ... Why Dennis Ross?
Middle East watchers are trying to follow a behind the scenes contest for Barack Obama's ear when it comes to the region. The winner could become the incoming administration's single most influential advisor on the area--perhaps Obama's Middle East czar. Obama has properly emphasized that as president he will set the policy, and his subordinates will be tasked with implementing it. Yet his choice of Middle East guru-- a special envoy, or whatever the title may be-- will be an important signal of his inclinations. And given the complexities of the Middle East, and the complex intersection of those complexities with American politics nowadays, it's hard to exaggerate the influence such a position could have as the question of war and peace hangs in the balance in Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran.
Judging from press reports such as here, here and here, the contest includes among others two Obama campaign advisors with very different perspectives: Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton's Arab-Israeli negotiator, and Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel. Ross and Kurtzer are both Jewish; during the campaign, they sought to rally American Jewish voters wary of indications that Obama was lukewarm toward Israel. Each has influential supporters in the Beltway's foreign policy establishment.
My take is that Ross would be a significant disappointment, Kurtzer an excellent choice. The contest, in fact, is more a tussle between two approaches to Middle East policy making than between individuals. The selection of a Dennis Ross would represent the past, which is to say the failure of U.S. policy in the region; Kurtzer would represent a change--a subtle change perhaps, but change nonetheless--given his frank acknowledgment of what has gone wrong with U.S. policy and a common sense prescription for getting it right.
Ross' s deep personal role in past failed policy ought to be enough to disqualify him from any supremo role. You can read an exhaustive, self-serving account of Ross's statecraft in his 815-page memoir, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace but here's my critical, very abbreviated version. He's already held the job of chief U.S. Middle East envoy for 12 years, through the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations, and wasn't very good at it. After the landmark Madrid peace conference, he and his bosses proved unable to coax Israelis and Palestinians toward an agreement; the Norwegians stepped in and secretly mediated the Oslo Accords between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993. By then, Ross's task was to implement the Oslo framework agreement, which envisioned a comprehensive and final peace deal by 1999. But Ross should take a large part of the responsibility for the mismanagement of the subsequent negotiations, which gradually dissolved into another Palestinian intifada, the worst spasm of violence in the conflict in 50 years, and the rise of the anti-negotiations Islamist Hamas group against Arafat's party.
Certainly, Arafat, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu and Rabin's assassin, as well as Bill Clinton and other U.S. officials, deserve their proportional share of the blame. Yet, Ross's insistence on putting all the fault on Yasser Arafat--blaming himself and the Clinton administration only for trusting the Palestinian too much--is a testimony that is either disingenuous or breathtakingly self-absorbed. His palpable one-sidedness is why he remains completely distrusted by the Arabs he has negotiated with. Arabs always expected an American tilt toward Israel because of the strong U.S.-Israeli relationship; from bitter experience, they regard Ross as far too biased to be acceptable or successful as the "honest broker" for ending the conflict. "For far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel's attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations," Ross's longtime former deupty, Aaron David Miller, wrote in a devastating critique in the Washington Post in 2005.
Ross's past errors could be forgiven if they were not so deeply rooted in the flawed American policy for the Middle East that Ross has so helped perpetuate. Put simply, the failed U.S. approach holds that Israel's military dominance gives it ultimate leverage in negotiations, and that the U.S. should not use its considerable influence to pressure Israel too much on key issues like Israel's occupation of Arab territories, activities of Jewish settlers, rights of Palestinian refugees and future sovereignty over Jerusalem. Locked in this outlook, Ross proved too tolerant of Israeli overreaching, too ambivalent about the rights and legitimate interests of Palestinians and too tone deaf to the impending collapse of the peace process with all its grave consequences. As Aaron David Miller wrote of U.S. diplomacy on Ross's watch: "Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel."
American policy has also more or less held that holding peace negotiations is effectively conditional on the cessation of violence and threats of violence against Israel. Accordingly, Ross seems to suggest in his recent writings that the U.S. confront and defeat Iran's growing power and ambitions in the Middle East--including Tehran's support for Hamas and Hizballah--before seriously tackling the vexing core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute again. Ross's thinking echoes the failed neo-conservative logic that says reforming the Middle East will bring peace instead of the other way around. That's an approach sure to keep professional peace negotiators like Ross in business for ever--endlessly negotiating rather than actually achieving peace. When it comes to Iran, the U.S. has fought yet failed to extinguish the Islamic revolution in a winner-take-all strategy for 30 years, with the result that Iran has repeatedly won strategic gains all over the Middle East-- at the expense of both Israel and the U.S.
Kurtzer, in contrast, has recognized and written about the failure of U.S. policy over the years. He understands that brokering Arab-Israeli peace should be a signal priority, that U.S. peacemaking is not solely to assist allies but is the pursuit of America's own national strategic interests, that peace is a key to achieving other crucial goals like defeating Islamic radicalism, that Israel's strategic advantage doesn't remove the necessity of fulfilling Palestinian needs and that ultimately to be successful the U.S. must engage in demonstrably even-handed diplomacy.
In their 2008 book, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East, Kurtzer and co-author Scott Lasensky cite America's "alarming pattern of mismanaged diplomacy" in the region since the end of the Cold War. "Flaws in U.S. diplomacy stretching back to the Clinton administration have contributed to the worst crisis in Arab-Israeli relations in a generation," they write. "This devastating failure has hurt U.S. interests and damaged our ability to gain cooperation from allies and key regional players. At the popular level, it has weakened the U.S. position in the region and on the world stage. It has also jeopardized our long-term investment in Arab-Israeli peace."
Make no mistake, Kurtzer-Lasensky warn, "Arab-Israeli peacemaking is crucial to our own national security interests." They argue that the lack of peace has undermined the U.S. effort to combat Islamic radicalism and terrorism and to promote democracy and stability in the Arab world. At the same time, they say, America's commitment to Israel's security and well-being "is best served by moving toward, rather than away from, a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement."
Kurtzer-Lasensky are particularly dismissive of the Bush administration's tragic neglect of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. But they are nonetheless damning of the Clinton administration's Ross-managed approach to Israeli-Palestinian talks, which they say was "hands off" for two years even after Oslo. "Early inaction by the president and his team, together with the administration's failure to hold Israelis and Palestinians accountable to the agreements they signed, were to have far-reaching consequences for the peace process and U.S. policy."
As for the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit that Ross blames on Arafat, Kurtzer-Lasensky find fault all around. They say that Clinton's summit was "ill-conceived" and constituted the "most glaring failure" of Clinton's last-ditch diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. They describe a policy-making process that was "too insular and inhibited the development of U.S. positions on the core issues... the United States was unprepared, and our negotiators scrambled at the last minute to put together U.S. positions on complex issues such as Jerusalem and borders."
Kurtzer-Lasensky write that their Institute of Peace study group was repeatedly told that, at the Camp David summit, "the United States gave the Palestinians proposals that originated with Israel. In the words of a senior U.S. policymaker, the Clinton team allowed itself to be manipulated and relinquished too much control over U.S. policy." The book quotes a former Clinton official saying, "when it came to dealing with Jerusalem, there's some very embarrassing episodes that betrayed our lack of knowledge or bias." After the talks collapsed, Kurtzer-Lasensky write, "Clinton acceded to Barak's request to blame Arafat publicly...because of Barak's domestic political needs."
A problem with such a reflexively pro-Israel approach, as Kurtzer-Lasensky indicate elsewhere, is that a strong third-party mediating role is essential in order to overcome the Israeli strategic superiority that puts Palestinians at a negotiating disadvantage and therefore makes them warier of deal making. "Power dynamics in the Israeli-Palestininan conflict are deeply unbalanced," they explain. "Israel is an established sovereign state with a robust, thriving economy and a world-class military; Palestinians remain under occupation, bereft of effective public institutions, highly dependent on international economic assistance, lacking basic security, and incapable of providing the full measure of security to which Israelis are entitled... Left on their own, the parties cannot address the deep, structural impediments to peace."
In Kurtzer-Lasensky's conclusion, they emphasize the importance of being seen as an honest broker if the U.S. is to achieve success in the Middle East. "The next president will need to ensure that the manner in which we conduct our diplomacy results in the peoples of the region sharing this perception." That's Statecraft 101, but it's been tragically lacking in the U.S.'s Middle East diplomacy.
Read entire article at Time (blog)
Judging from press reports such as here, here and here, the contest includes among others two Obama campaign advisors with very different perspectives: Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton's Arab-Israeli negotiator, and Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel. Ross and Kurtzer are both Jewish; during the campaign, they sought to rally American Jewish voters wary of indications that Obama was lukewarm toward Israel. Each has influential supporters in the Beltway's foreign policy establishment.
My take is that Ross would be a significant disappointment, Kurtzer an excellent choice. The contest, in fact, is more a tussle between two approaches to Middle East policy making than between individuals. The selection of a Dennis Ross would represent the past, which is to say the failure of U.S. policy in the region; Kurtzer would represent a change--a subtle change perhaps, but change nonetheless--given his frank acknowledgment of what has gone wrong with U.S. policy and a common sense prescription for getting it right.
Ross' s deep personal role in past failed policy ought to be enough to disqualify him from any supremo role. You can read an exhaustive, self-serving account of Ross's statecraft in his 815-page memoir, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace but here's my critical, very abbreviated version. He's already held the job of chief U.S. Middle East envoy for 12 years, through the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations, and wasn't very good at it. After the landmark Madrid peace conference, he and his bosses proved unable to coax Israelis and Palestinians toward an agreement; the Norwegians stepped in and secretly mediated the Oslo Accords between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993. By then, Ross's task was to implement the Oslo framework agreement, which envisioned a comprehensive and final peace deal by 1999. But Ross should take a large part of the responsibility for the mismanagement of the subsequent negotiations, which gradually dissolved into another Palestinian intifada, the worst spasm of violence in the conflict in 50 years, and the rise of the anti-negotiations Islamist Hamas group against Arafat's party.
Certainly, Arafat, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu and Rabin's assassin, as well as Bill Clinton and other U.S. officials, deserve their proportional share of the blame. Yet, Ross's insistence on putting all the fault on Yasser Arafat--blaming himself and the Clinton administration only for trusting the Palestinian too much--is a testimony that is either disingenuous or breathtakingly self-absorbed. His palpable one-sidedness is why he remains completely distrusted by the Arabs he has negotiated with. Arabs always expected an American tilt toward Israel because of the strong U.S.-Israeli relationship; from bitter experience, they regard Ross as far too biased to be acceptable or successful as the "honest broker" for ending the conflict. "For far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel's attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations," Ross's longtime former deupty, Aaron David Miller, wrote in a devastating critique in the Washington Post in 2005.
Ross's past errors could be forgiven if they were not so deeply rooted in the flawed American policy for the Middle East that Ross has so helped perpetuate. Put simply, the failed U.S. approach holds that Israel's military dominance gives it ultimate leverage in negotiations, and that the U.S. should not use its considerable influence to pressure Israel too much on key issues like Israel's occupation of Arab territories, activities of Jewish settlers, rights of Palestinian refugees and future sovereignty over Jerusalem. Locked in this outlook, Ross proved too tolerant of Israeli overreaching, too ambivalent about the rights and legitimate interests of Palestinians and too tone deaf to the impending collapse of the peace process with all its grave consequences. As Aaron David Miller wrote of U.S. diplomacy on Ross's watch: "Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel."
American policy has also more or less held that holding peace negotiations is effectively conditional on the cessation of violence and threats of violence against Israel. Accordingly, Ross seems to suggest in his recent writings that the U.S. confront and defeat Iran's growing power and ambitions in the Middle East--including Tehran's support for Hamas and Hizballah--before seriously tackling the vexing core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute again. Ross's thinking echoes the failed neo-conservative logic that says reforming the Middle East will bring peace instead of the other way around. That's an approach sure to keep professional peace negotiators like Ross in business for ever--endlessly negotiating rather than actually achieving peace. When it comes to Iran, the U.S. has fought yet failed to extinguish the Islamic revolution in a winner-take-all strategy for 30 years, with the result that Iran has repeatedly won strategic gains all over the Middle East-- at the expense of both Israel and the U.S.
Kurtzer, in contrast, has recognized and written about the failure of U.S. policy over the years. He understands that brokering Arab-Israeli peace should be a signal priority, that U.S. peacemaking is not solely to assist allies but is the pursuit of America's own national strategic interests, that peace is a key to achieving other crucial goals like defeating Islamic radicalism, that Israel's strategic advantage doesn't remove the necessity of fulfilling Palestinian needs and that ultimately to be successful the U.S. must engage in demonstrably even-handed diplomacy.
In their 2008 book, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East, Kurtzer and co-author Scott Lasensky cite America's "alarming pattern of mismanaged diplomacy" in the region since the end of the Cold War. "Flaws in U.S. diplomacy stretching back to the Clinton administration have contributed to the worst crisis in Arab-Israeli relations in a generation," they write. "This devastating failure has hurt U.S. interests and damaged our ability to gain cooperation from allies and key regional players. At the popular level, it has weakened the U.S. position in the region and on the world stage. It has also jeopardized our long-term investment in Arab-Israeli peace."
Make no mistake, Kurtzer-Lasensky warn, "Arab-Israeli peacemaking is crucial to our own national security interests." They argue that the lack of peace has undermined the U.S. effort to combat Islamic radicalism and terrorism and to promote democracy and stability in the Arab world. At the same time, they say, America's commitment to Israel's security and well-being "is best served by moving toward, rather than away from, a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace settlement."
Kurtzer-Lasensky are particularly dismissive of the Bush administration's tragic neglect of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. But they are nonetheless damning of the Clinton administration's Ross-managed approach to Israeli-Palestinian talks, which they say was "hands off" for two years even after Oslo. "Early inaction by the president and his team, together with the administration's failure to hold Israelis and Palestinians accountable to the agreements they signed, were to have far-reaching consequences for the peace process and U.S. policy."
As for the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit that Ross blames on Arafat, Kurtzer-Lasensky find fault all around. They say that Clinton's summit was "ill-conceived" and constituted the "most glaring failure" of Clinton's last-ditch diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. They describe a policy-making process that was "too insular and inhibited the development of U.S. positions on the core issues... the United States was unprepared, and our negotiators scrambled at the last minute to put together U.S. positions on complex issues such as Jerusalem and borders."
Kurtzer-Lasensky write that their Institute of Peace study group was repeatedly told that, at the Camp David summit, "the United States gave the Palestinians proposals that originated with Israel. In the words of a senior U.S. policymaker, the Clinton team allowed itself to be manipulated and relinquished too much control over U.S. policy." The book quotes a former Clinton official saying, "when it came to dealing with Jerusalem, there's some very embarrassing episodes that betrayed our lack of knowledge or bias." After the talks collapsed, Kurtzer-Lasensky write, "Clinton acceded to Barak's request to blame Arafat publicly...because of Barak's domestic political needs."
A problem with such a reflexively pro-Israel approach, as Kurtzer-Lasensky indicate elsewhere, is that a strong third-party mediating role is essential in order to overcome the Israeli strategic superiority that puts Palestinians at a negotiating disadvantage and therefore makes them warier of deal making. "Power dynamics in the Israeli-Palestininan conflict are deeply unbalanced," they explain. "Israel is an established sovereign state with a robust, thriving economy and a world-class military; Palestinians remain under occupation, bereft of effective public institutions, highly dependent on international economic assistance, lacking basic security, and incapable of providing the full measure of security to which Israelis are entitled... Left on their own, the parties cannot address the deep, structural impediments to peace."
In Kurtzer-Lasensky's conclusion, they emphasize the importance of being seen as an honest broker if the U.S. is to achieve success in the Middle East. "The next president will need to ensure that the manner in which we conduct our diplomacy results in the peoples of the region sharing this perception." That's Statecraft 101, but it's been tragically lacking in the U.S.'s Middle East diplomacy.