As the Obama administration struggles to walk a fine policy line on Egypt that takes appropriate account of the diverse U.S. interests at stake, one subject that is often mentioned, but shouldn’t be, as a reason to go easy on the head-cracking Egyptian [...]]]>
As the Obama administration struggles to walk a fine policy line on Egypt that takes appropriate account of the diverse U.S. interests at stake, one subject that is often mentioned, but shouldn’t be, as a reason to go easy on the head-cracking Egyptian generals is to maintain the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. This is not to say that Egyptian-Israeli peace is not still quite important to regional security as well as to U.S. interests; indeed it is. But the reason this topic should not be shaping U.S. policy toward the political drama today in Egypt is that the peace is simply not in danger. No Egyptian regime would see any advantage in breaching it.
That is so because not just the generals but also any Egyptian leader with at least half a brain would realize that in any new round of fighting the Egyptians would get clobbered by a vastly more capable Israeli force. Getting clobbered would mean not just military defeat but also the humiliation and political costs that would go with it.
The last time the Egyptians were able to hold their own militarily against Israel was in the opening days of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Anwar Sadat used the advantage of surprise to score just enough success on the battlefield to atone for the humiliation of the war six years earlier and make it politically possible for him to undertake the initiative that led to the peace treaty. Even that military success did not last long. By the time of the cease-fire Israeli forces had successfully counterattacked, had surrounded the Egyptian Third Army, and were rolling toward Cairo.
So as Israel lobbies western governments to keep supporting General el-Sisi and his colleagues, let us not act as if the Egyptian-Israeli peace is at stake when it really isn’t. We might reflect instead on other possible and actual Israeli motives for taking that position. There is the understandable concern, which any country in Israel’s geographic position would have, of violent militants operating in, and out of, the Sinai. But recent history lends little support to the idea that this problem is likely to diminish rather than to grow if the generals are left in charge and unpressured from outside the country. The opposite is more likely true, given the prospect their harsh policies will provoke increased violent militancy from battered Islamists. In any case, cross-border violence by militants is the sort of thing the Israelis have repeatedly shown themselves quick to address with their own means, regardless of what any government on the other side of the border may think.
Because the Egyptian generals’ policies are most conspicuously a form of Islamist-bashing, the Israeli government naturally and reflexively smiles on those policies. Here again, however, the connection between political outcomes in Cairo and the effects that most interest the Israelis is not clear-cut. During his tenuous one year in office, Mohamed Morsi did not prove to be as steadfast a friend as Hamas—the Islamists Israel works hardest at bashing—had hoped he would be.
Some in the Israeli government may be thinking of a possible downside for them of emphasizing the idea that the peace treaty is endangered. This idea may bring to mind how the U.S.-Egyptian aid relationship is rooted in the bargains struck by Jimmy Carter at Camp David, in which voluminous U.S. assistance to Egypt was part of the price the United States paid to get Sadat to assume the costs and risks of making a separate peace with Israel. That in turn may bring to mind how Israel did not fulfill its part of the bargains, which was to make a peace with the Palestinians within five years and withdraw Israeli troops from Palestinian territory.
This subject leads to what may be the strongest motive for the Netanyahu government to oppose squeezing the flow of aid to Egypt, although it would not openly acknowledge it as a motive. The Israeli Right has to be discomfited by any thought of the United States using leverage based on a major aid relationship in that part of the world to get the recipient to change destructive policies. It is the failure of the United States to use the even greater leverage it could exert on Israel that permits Netanyahu’s government to continue the occupation and colonization of conquered territory and, 35 years after Camp David, to deny the Palestinians self-determination.
Photo: US President Jimmy Carter shaking hands with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty on the grounds of the White House on 26 March 1979
]]>The article is a look into the possible reasons that Israel has pushed back the nuclear timeline for Iran. I quote Tony Karon at length (which appears at TB) and list my own thoughts (some via Jim):
That notion — [...]]]>
The article is a look into the possible reasons that Israel has pushed back the nuclear timeline for Iran. I quote Tony Karon at length (which appears at TB) and list my own thoughts (some via Jim):
That notion — that you can’t whip up your own population into a fearful frenzy, then not do anything — tracks with comments made in the past by top Israeli officials casting aside the “existential threat” meme. Along with Barak, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy sounded a confident note in late 2009: “It is not within the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel — at best it can cause Israel grievous damage. Israel is indestructible.”
But there are other possibilities to consider, most of them speculative. Perhaps Israel was merely gloating about its covert actions against Iran. Many mainstream commentators suggest Israel is behind the Stuxnet computer worm that damaged Iranian centrifuges as well as a campaign of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Maybe, as Jim Lobe suggested to me in a conversation, there was some kind of quid pro quo between the U.S. and Israel over the public extension of Israel’s nuclear clock.
There are certainly many pawns on the board to trade between Israel and the U.S. at the moment: an Israeli settlement freeze (whether including East Jerusalem or not), the fate of imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. offer of an Israeli wish list of military hardware (as discussed in earlier failed talks on a freeze), or maybe even some sort of agreement for Israel to drop mounting preconditions for yet another round of direct talks. All are possibilities, though some quite unlikely.
It’s worth noting, that as a source close to high-ranking Israelis put it to LobeLog, Israel has shifted its focus from the threat of Iran to the threat of “delegitimizers.” The latter is an amorphous and misleading catchall phrase that the Israeli right and their Stateside defenders use to indict the motives of anyone who even comes near the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
I also add that Paul Pillar, writing on the website of the National Interest, has an interesting post listing some possibilities:
One is that they are more or less straightforward reflections of careful, straightforward analysis by Israeli experts of the actual state of the Iranian program. Not every statement by a public official needs to be a disingenuous manipulation of the facts in pursuit of a policy objective. Sometimes we need to resist the tendency to overanalyze someone else’s motives.
Given Israel’s track record, I’m skeptical of this lack of skepticism. But some of Pillar’s other possibilities track with the ones I enumerated, and all are well worth reading.
Matt Duss at The Wonk Room, meanwhile, picks up on an interesting Der Spiegel interview with new IAEA chief Yukiya Amano. Duss notes that Amano told the German daily, “Despite all unanswered questions, we cannot say that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.”
You’ll recall, of course, that Amano told U.S. officials that “he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision” — including Iran — according to U.S. diplomatic cables. As Duss points out, this aligns perfectly with the view Amano espoused in his Der Spiegel interview — because the “U.S. court” on this particular “key strategic issue” corresponds with a public acknowledgment by the CIA (PDF) that the U.S. does “not know whether Tehran will eventually decide to produce nuclear weapons.”
On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal‘s neoconservative editorial board recently declared (falsely) that Iran had already “announced its intention to build a nuclear bomb.”
As I wrote on Tehran Bureau, none of the recent developments seem to have had much impact on U.S.-based Iran hawks, who are perfectly content to keep beating the war drums. No matter what Iran does or how its nuclear program advances (if at all), the hawks want to attack it. No matter how effective sanctions are, they will never be enough.
]]>Innocent writes (my emphasis):
According to the Brookings Institution’s 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll, 77 percent regard Israel as the biggest threat, 80 percent regard the United States as the biggest threat, and only 10 percent regard Iran as the biggest threat. Fifty-seven percent think the region will be better off if Iran had nuclear weapons. Despite those remarkably high numbers, it is the opinion of brutal Arab dictators who want America to bomb Iran that has dominated news stories. Meanwhile, the opinions of other Arab leaders in Oman, Qatar, Syria, Kuwait, and Jordan,who have expressed concern about the repercussions of an attack on Iran, have all but been ignored. Of course, it’s not a coincidence that the same news organizations overselling U.S.-Arab solidarity against Iran were the same ones that overhyped Iranian involvement during the Iraq War.
Innocent makes a valuable point that WikiLeaks cables offer far from conclusive evidence that the Arab world would support a U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. Inter Press Service‘s Gareth Porter addressed this very issue and took a critical look at the New York Times‘s reporting on the WikiLeaks cables.
In fact, the cables show that most Gulf Arab regimes – including Saudi Arabia itself – have been seriously concerned about the consequences of a strike against Iran for their own security, in sharp contrast to Israel’s open advocacy of such a strike. They also show the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait expressing that concern with greater urgency in the past two years than previously.
Those facts were completely ignored, however, in the Times’ account.
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