Paying for Obama’s political education

Recently, in an interview with Time magazine on the first anniversary of his taking office, President Barack Obama was asked about how the United States was faring in its mediation efforts between Israelis and Palestinians. His answer was remarkably disingenuous.

“I'll be honest with you,” Obama said, “[t]his is just really hard. Even for a guy like [US envoy] George Mitchell, who helped bring about the peace in Northern Ireland. This is as intractable a problem as you get … [a]nd I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade [the parties] to do so when their politics ran contrary to that.” With this in mind, the president declared, “[I]f we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.”

Of course, that was sheer nonsense. It was always apparent during the election campaign that a resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians would be monumentally difficult. Even then we knew 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,” as Obama told Time.

However, the US president today is in the uncomfortable position of having to excuse his once hefty dose of hubris. It was convenient during the campaign to blame everything on the diplomatic idleness of the Bush administration, if only to demonstrate why Barack Obama would be better. Yet in retrospect, as dubious commentators explained at the time, among them your humble servant, the obstacles to a settlement were systemic, explaining why George W. Bush actually did so little. No president likes to tie his wagon to a losing cause, and we should reconcile ourselves with the fact that Obama may soon apply that lesson.

This is a mid-term election year, and the US president will be more reluctant, and less able, to push hard toward any kind of a settlement. Mitchell’s latest visit to the Middle East did little to brighten faces. The envoy was unable (albeit perhaps only momentarily) to convince Palestinians to resume peace negotiations before a halt in Israeli settlement building, while the Israelis see little reason to concede much to a weak Palestinian Authority – and perhaps more important, to a Barack Obama who so unwisely implied that he had overestimated his capacities.

Adding to the ambient skepticism is a widespread belief in the region that Obama will not anger the pro-Israel lobby in an election year by pressuring Israel on negotiations. That’s partly true, since after the Senate election debacle in Massachusetts last week, the president cannot afford to alienate an important Democratic voting bloc.

However, things are also more complicated. A year into his term, Obama has come under criticism for his foreign policy shortcomings, particularly in the Middle East. America may be liked more, but this hasn’t helped it any in the nuclear standoff with Iran, in Afghanistan, and on the Palestinian-Israeli track; and it hasn’t made Americans feel more secure when it comes to terrorism. Obama may conclude that he has no interest in wasting valuable political capital in the coming months by pushing for an impossible reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, and his admission to Time may have been a forewarning of that mood.

Mediators come and go in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations knowing that their chances of success are almost nil; yet no one ever seriously contemplates calling the diplomatic efforts off. When George W. Bush took office, he sought to do just that, in reaction to what was perceived as Bill Clinton’s over-indulgence in regional peace-making.

Very soon, however, Bush was obliged to reverse course, particularly after 9/11 and the Israeli reconquest of the West Bank following a bomb attack against an Israeli hotel in Netanya in March 2002. The president erred in trying to isolate Yasser Arafat and in recognizing that part of the Arab territories occupied in June 1967 would remain Israeli, but he also made a historical statement declaring, for the first time, that the United States was favorable to Palestinian statehood. Palestine was never a priority of his administration, but nor was it something he could ignore, or be perceived of as ignoring, despite the improbability of a solution.

What is Obama’s next step? If one must guess, he will likely pull a Bush on us. Mitchell will continue to try peddling the latest peace plan, but he will not enjoy the requisite presidential backing to knock heads together and induce Israelis and Palestinians to make fundamental compromises. The problem, as Obama so rightly put it, is that there are domestic impediments to a solution on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli divide – impediments that Washington has only narrow latitude to remove.

So, Barack Obama has now learned how easily the Middle East grinds down high expectations. Anyone could have told him that years ago. It’s striking, though, how many “specialists” did not do so, allowing the president to let his self-confidence get the better of him on a settlement. Now, once more, we pay the price for his ongoing political education.