Two years ago I served 12 months in Iraq as a Foreign Service Officer, leading a Provincial Reconstruction Team. I had been with the State Department for some 21 years at that point, serving mostly in Asia, but after what I saw in the desert — the waste, the lack of guidance, the failure to really do anything positive for the country we had invaded in 2003 — I started writing a book. One year ago I followed the required procedures with State for preclearance (no classified documents, that sort of thing), received clearance, and found a publisher. Six months ago the publisher asked me to start a blog to support the book.
And then, toward the end of the summer, the wrath of Mesopotamia fell on me.
U.S. President Barack Obama is piling up foreign policy disasters. In at least three areas, crucial for world peace and American interests — Arab-Israel, Afghanistan-Pakistan and Yemen-Somalia — he is pursuing a course which can only be described as foolhardy. The anger and hate towards the United States which he is generating could take a generation to dispel.
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Is it not time to enquire whether U.S. policy has not created more terrorists than the CIA has managed to kill? Would it not be better if the United States were simply to declare victory in Afghanistan — and indeed in all the other places where its Special Forces operate — bring its troops home as soon as possible and turn its attention to tending the wounds in its own broken society?
Phi Beta Iota: The assumption that US foreign policy is somehow focused on peace or prosperity is evidently not correct. The people who make policy and give orders are not stupid–they are achieving the outcomes they desire. What is different is that a much greater percentage of the public than ever before can now use public intelligence to determine that these policies are not in the public interest, and therefore, are much more likely to be associated with treason–high crimes and misdemeanors that yield personal profit and public pain.
President Obama's craven performance at the UN has both humiliated the United States and made a mockery of what little remains of America's pretensions to the principles of freedom, democracy, fair play, and simple human decency. Like Colin Powell, he made the wrong turn at the “to be” or “to do” fork in the road; he put career and short-term ambition ahead of common sense and personal honor; and ironically, he made the same faustian bargain publicly on the same world stage for all to see. For a men of such great promise to stumble so miserably is not only a personal tragedy of Shakespearian proportions: their pusillanimity under pressure opens the door to unpredictable grand strategic* ramifications that menace the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people at home and abroad.
Below is one thoughtful observer's exploration of some of these ramifications; there will be other assessments … and very few of them will be pretty.
At least LBJ, who tried to do some things, recognized when his time was over, and left gracefully. But in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac at the dawn of the 21st Century, that won't happen again, and Mr. Obama's ultimate disgrace will be to prove that the easy being was far more important than the hard doing when engineering the moral and material decline of a nation.
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* The criteria underpinning a sensible grand strategy are explained here.
[CS Note: I reformatted this insightful essay to highlight important points, but did not change any text or the order of presentation]
BOSTON — It remains to be seen what actually changes on the ground in the months ahead following the Palestinian initiative to ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 Israeli-occupied territories as a UN member or observer state. The move could be a substantive gain for the Palestinian people, a symbolic victory only, or a measurable setback if the United States and Israel translate their vindictive rhetoric into hard policies. While we wait for the impact of the UN move to become clearer, we should acknowledge nevertheless that this has been a historic week in several ways.
I.The most important new development that future historians will record is that this last week in September represented the moment when the Arab-Israeli conflict structurally transformed into the Arab-Israeli/American conflict, because of the profound and explicit manner in which the U.S. government has come down on the side of Israel. The United States historically has tried, without much success but with visible endeavor nevertheless, to express its support for Israel’s survival and security while also trying to mediate a resolution of the conflict that sees the birth of a Palestinian state in much of the 1967 occupied lands. That balancing act, unconvincing as it was, is formally dead for now — repeatedly shot in the heart by a firing squad of American politicians who have unleashed volleys of shotguns at the weak and doomed phenomenon that was once called “American mediation”.
In this very important essay, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East explains the tectonic shifts taking place that are clearly leaving the United States and Israel on the wrong side of history.
The Arab Spring is not the only revolution in town. The toppling of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya; the mounting death toll in Syria and Yemen, where the outcome is still undecided; the revival of long-suppressed Islamic movements demanding a share of power; the struggle by young revolutionaries to re-invent the Arab state — all these dramatic developments have distracted attention from another revolution of equal significance.
It is the challenge being mounted by the region’s heavyweights — Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran — against the hegemony which the United States and Israel have sought to exercise over them for more than half a century.
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America’s most grievous mistake, however — the source of great harm to itself, to Israel, and to peace and stability in the Middle East — has been to tolerate Israel’s continued occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians. These policies have aroused intense hate of Israel in the Arab and Muslim world and great anger at its superpower protector.
We are now witnessing a rebellion against these policies by the region’s heavyweights — in effect a rebellion against American and Israeli hegemony as spectacular as the Arab Spring itself. The message these regional powers are conveying is that the Palestine question can no longer be neglected. Israel’s land grab on the West Bank and its siege of Gaza must be ended. The Palestinians must at last be given a chance to create their own state. Their plight weighs heavily on the conscience of the world.
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Turkey, Iran and Egypt, heirs to ancient civilizations, are thus asserting themselves against what they see as an Israeli upstart. Saudi Arabia, the region’s oil and financial giant, guardian of Islam’s holiest sites, is breaking free from the constraints of the American alliance.
Israel stands accused. Will it heed the message or shoot the messenger? If true to its past form, it might well try to fight its way out of the box in which it now finds itself, further destabilising the region and attracting to itself further opprobrium.
Below is an excellent perspective on Turkish – Israeli relations and the irresponsible Israeli-neocon effort to smear Turkey with the phony charge of islamo-fascisim (itself a logically absurd term). While Hadar thinks, in my view correctly, Ataturk would back Erdogan's policies, one thing he does address is how Ataturk might have reacted to Israel's provocations, especially the murder of Turkish nationals in raid on the Gaza Peace Flotilla, followed by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's incredibly stupid threat to give aid to the PKK. Based on my limited knowledge of the man, I think Ataturk's reaction to such ham-fisted tactics would have made Prime Minister Erdogan's reaction look downright lovable.
Even before the crisis in the relationship between Israel and Turkey over the raid on the Gaza “Peace Flotilla” had erupted last December, right-wing Israelis and American neoconservatives were promoting a new Grand Narrative: Turkey was joining forces with Iran and Syria in an anti-American and anti-Israeli Islamofascist Axis of Evil, seeking to destroy the Jewish State as part of a long-term strategy of re-establishing the Ottoman Empire and a Global Caliphate. Turkey was becoming the New Iran.
Phi Beta Iota: The “narrative” that both the USG and Israel keep trying to float is totally divorced from reality and also unconstitutional in two ways: fostering foreign wars without cause, and pointing covert action (media influence) as the US public using US taxpayer funds.
… My Cairo speech may have felt good, but I urge patience. Please remember, I ‘lead from behind,' and so the steering wheel of my ship of state is not connected to its rudder. There is nothing I can or will do to change its course. Hopefully, if the ship of state stays its own course, I might pass through a hole in the line of shoals in front of me (i.e., BiBi, Hillary, Congress, AIPAC, Rick Perry, the House Republicans, etc.), and then I will be able to lead from behind until 2016.
Could we see a great leap forward next week on the Palestinian’s long quest for statehood? Not quite. The Palestinian Authority (PA) says it will ask the United Nations General Assembly to upgrade from being a non-voting “observer entity” to an “observer state.” This bureaucratic-sounding change hardly seems earthshaking. The Vatican is an “observer state.”
But the earth is shaking. A majority of the world’s nations are fed up by the endless suffering of the stateless Palestinians and support creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza.
Turkey’s increasingly influential premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, went to Cairo last week and spoke for the world: “Let’s raise the Palestinian flag and let that flag be the symbol of peace and justice in the Middle East.”
The United States is desperately scrambling to head off a favorable vote in the UN. Washington threatens to veto any pro-Palestine vote in the Security Council – that alone can grant statehood status to a new state. The US is exerting huge pressure on allies and dependant states to vote against any resolution in the General Assembly.
Phi Beta Iota: US “policy” on Israel (can do no wrong) and Palestine (let them eat dirt) is the single most compelling example of corrupt ideological idiocy, treason against the public interest both at home and abroad. We all want Israel to be safe and prosperous–most us, the rabid and the corrupt not-withstanding–also want Palestine to be safe and prosperous, a contiguous state free from Israeli genocide and other atrocities. As Chuck Spinney has noted in the past, the Middle East is a nuanced complex problem that demands intelligence and integrity applied in a holistic manner–the Israelis for example, are single-handedly stealing most of the water from the Arab aquifers for an agricultural “miracle” that produces 4%, at best, of the Israeli GDP. This is nuts. In Washington, “nuts” is policy.
Paul Jones arrived in a Chevy pickup, dust clouds billowing as he crossed the desert. He had set out soon after first light from his base in southern Afghanistan, an encampment that, thanks to his employer’s logistics savvy, had an ample supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Almost everything there had been sent by sea from California or Oregon, and then trucked up from Pakistan.
The 63-year-old, khaki-clad engineer came that February morning to observe a massive development project aimed at transforming the valley along the Helmand River into a modern society.
Irrigation canals would feed farms that would produce so much food that the country would export the surplus for profit. New schools, modern hospitals and recreation centers would rise from the sand. So, too, would factories, fed by electricity from a generator at a dam upriver. Jones had seen a similar transformation near his home on the outskirts of Sacramento, and he was certain it would materialize here, too. In the desert expanse, he saw “the beginning of a new civilization — a new way of life abounding in the riches of worthy endeavor.”
Two years ago I served 12 months in Iraq as a Foreign Service Officer, leading a Provincial Reconstruction Team. I had been with the State Department for some 21 years at that point, serving mostly in Asia, but after what I saw in the desert — the waste, the lack of guidance, the failure to really do anything positive for the country we had invaded in 2003 — I started writing a book. One year ago I followed the required procedures with State for preclearance (no classified documents, that sort of thing), received clearance, and found a publisher. Six months ago the publisher asked me to start a blog to support the book.
