Soccer Dad

Abrams on the middle east

One of the big problems with how foreign policy (and politics generally) gets reported is that it's reduced to turf battles.
A says this.
B says that.
A has the President's ear.
B says that A is an ideologue.

By reducing policy differences to this level, the inner workings of the government look petty. At least if the reporter wants them to. The larger implications of what and A and B are usually reduced to some neat little catchphrase. By reporting like this, reporters can say they stick to facts. (A said this.) And also by a careful choice of words the reporters can show his own preference between the two competing factions.

The problem with this is that serious people with serious ideas get reduced to caricatures. Debates are undermined by ridicule. So when you read an interview with Elliott Abrams, you get a much different impression of the Bush Administration than you would from the Washington Post or New York Times. (h/t Israel Matzav) Obviously Abrams is restricted about what he can and can't say. And just as obviously he's going to present himself well. Still it's a fascinating interview. There are three points that are especially important.

1) Disengagement was an Israeli initiative.

Disengagement was not an American initiative. The US did not say to the Israeli government: "You need to get out of Gaza." Discussions of this sort had been going on for years, not only during Bush's tenure, but also during the Clinton administration. For example, there was a question of whether Israel would go back to the September 28, 2000 lines in the West Bank, and whether the Palestinian security forces could cope with terrorism there if Israel withdrew. The answer from the IDF was no. The Israelis told us that it would be very dangerous, both physically - in the sense that more terrorism might ensue - and politically, because if the risk were taken and a significant act of terrorism did ensue, it would blow up any negotiations that were then taking place.

The same question was asked about whether there could be some kind of withdrawal from Gaza. The Israeli government said no - such a withdrawal would be bargained for at some point in the future. Then came disengagement.

Sharon's decision to pull out of Gaza, therefore, was not a surprise to us in the sense that doing so was something that had been talked about for years. But the timing certainly was a surprise.

2) Annapolis was an Israeli initiative.

So I was the resident skeptic. We were hearing, both from secretary Rice and from prime minister Olmert that there was a very good chance of concluding a final-status agreement. I never believed this, neither before Annapolis nor after. So I was always like a little black cloud in all these meetings, saying, "I don't think this is going to happen."

3) They're not that close to peace in the Middle East

Because others said that the solution here, the eventual deal, was pretty well understood on both sides - that there weren't a million possibilities for where the border between Israel and the Palestinian state would be. The same with regard to Jerusalem. Therefore, they said, it won't take all that much negotiating to get there. That was the conventional wisdom. But it seemed to me that the opposite view was right: that if everybody knows what a deal has to look like, and year after year and decade after decade, it is not possible to reach it, isn't it obvious that it's because neither side wants that deal? Now, the reasons for not wanting it can vary, and they can also change over time, but it does seem to me that if everybody knows what the options are, and the most Israel can offer is less than the least the Palestinians can accept, the solution is not close at hand.

The interview is a very interesting read and gives some perspective on the the past eight years. One last observation from Abrams is worth mentioning:

When we came in, in 2001, the intifada was going on. It seemed to us pretty clear - and we were right - that there could be no negotiations in the middle of a giant, ongoing terrorist attack. Then came 9/11. And we really did not come back to the question of how to move forward on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict until the spring of 2002. Then, on June 24 of that year, the president gave a remarkable speech in which he declared Yasser Arafat a terrorist and completely broke with him. The essence of that speech was that though the president was in favor of a two-state solution, the borders of the Palestinian state didn't matter nearly as much as the character of the state within those borders - and that there had to be new Palestinian leadership.

Consider that in contrast to today's Washington Post editorial.

At the same time, the Obama administration should not adopt the Bush administration's practice of accepting Israeli positions as givens.

There were then and still are very good reason for preferring the Israeli positions over the Palestinian ones. President Bush was correct about Arafat; less so about Abbas.

The interview with Abrams is an excellent way to see the Bush administration, at least as it saw itself.

Crossposted on Yourish.