Notes from Obama's New State Department

Spoke with a contact at the State Departments Near Eastern Affairs division just recently.  He is someone I deeply respect, has long experience, is an uber-realist, and has no illusions about anyone Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, American, Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian or whatever.  Which also means his upward career path is ultimately limited because he won't pay blind obeisance to the Israelis, insisting on (how novel) representing what he believes is best for American and broader human interests.  Still his work is of such high quality analytically and managerially that nobody can (thankfully) get rid of him.  Nothing in-depth, but a few notes from our conversation as I tried to get a sense of how things are looking at State in these first days of the Obama Administration:

• He felt it was a mistake to send George Mitchell straight to the region before any policy had been formulated just for a "listening tour" as the Palestinians and Arabs generally hate this kind of lip-service which to them is just more of "listening" while the Israelis go ahead establishing facts on the ground.  He felt like a policy should have been formulated first and then you get moving, that this will actually be harmful to building diplomatic momentum.
• So far he doesn't sense any real change from the old standard Washington everything-Israel-wants-it-gets line.  He pointed specifically to Obama's speech when announcing Mitchell as Mideast envoy saying it could have been written by the Bush Administration, with all the key language and buzzwords everyone knows means blind right-wing support for Israel.
• That said, he was cautiously...I wouldn't say optimistic, but perhaps distantly hopeful that at least this Administration aren't raw ideologues like the Bushies were and might actually be capable of learning.  And that at least Mitchell as a Mideast envoy choice is more independent, and in his view established some credibility in his 2001 report on the causes of the Intifada.  In that report, despite everyone telling him that he couldn't say that so-called "natural growth" in settlements had to stop, he did.  In real terms stating that may not amount to a hill of beans that the Israelis would do anything about, but in Washington terms it showed a willingness to cross a Zionist redline and showed a bit of spine.  So my friend hopes that between perhaps Mitchell being more independent and the Obama team being less ideological, that perhaps they'll actually learn lessons for the better instead of just entrenching themselves deeper in failure like the Bushies did.  But he said he feared even if that does happen (far from certain, he pointed to Powell whom everyone there thought would understand that the Palestinian point of view was different and firm from his experiences in Vietnam dealing with the North Vietnamese, but ended up disappointing with his unwillingness to see the other side), it's going to take a good chunk of time.
• He expressed worries about the new generation of Foreign Service Officers who have now spent the better part of their young careers entirely under the Bush Administration and don't understand how abnormal that whole period was.  The Israel-is-always-right mentality he says is more than ever almost wall-to-wall at State as elsewhere in the US government and the new FSOs are a key part of that.  The few realists who've been around longer are more easily than ever dismissed as "Arab lovers" and not taken seriously.
• Dennis Ross shot himself in the foot pre-announcing his supposed new role as Obama's Mideast envoy and now it's not clear if he'll get any major position at all.  My friend did not think Rob Satloff was the one advertising Ross to try and undermine him, he thinks he did it himself.  Still, even if he looks down now, he had a great description of him that made me laugh, calling Ross the "Teflon a**hole." :)  For the record, I've never met anyone at State who thought Ross was anything other than useless at best and usually far less charitable descriptions (see prior sentence).
• My friend also thought that if Ross gets appointed to anything remotely responsible for Iran policy, that would be a clear sign of the Obama Admin taking a "lots of stick, and maybe a few tiny carrots way off in the distance" approach to Iran.  In other words, not a healthy approach.
  

Despite the general pessimism that any realist has to have about US Mideast policy though, my friend's final take was to try and put on a smiley face and say that at least the tone is somewhat different from the Obama team so far (somewhat...see earlier comments about his speech announcing Mitchell), and that's gotta count for something.  We'll see if it does, far from clear.  Obama himself in his writings is the first to say he's not the Messiah and that he's a new enough face on the scene that people often graft their own beliefs onto his image and set themselves up for disappointment.  Given the structural bias in favor of Israeli racism that is built into the US system, it shouldn't be too surprising that Obama is more showing simply a different slightly softer version of it rather than repudiating it.  We'll see if he can make the necessary leap, but I and my friend certainly have our skeptical eyes open.

Gaza: Whose Side, A Practical Guide

In the latest events in Gaza, the confusion over whose side anyone is on is more confusing than ever as inter-Arab disputes, Israeli electoral politics, regime vs people divisions, and many other factors all seem to have converged. So, here is Non-Arab Arab's attempt at a quick guide to whose side everyone is on. Many have multiple checks reflecting either mixed motives or (in the case of populations) divided views among themselves. Obviously there's some division everywhere, I'm going with where I see overwhelmingly clear majorities. Also, clearly there are parties who would sell their soul and flip sides. This is less meant as a guide to the hearts and deep thoughts of each party as it is meant as a practical guide that will let you interpret comments and sources when you read about what's going on and decide how many grains of salt you should take it with. I started trying to write something descriptive but found myself getting too wordy for a quick guide (the meaning of being for one side or the other or for "themselves" can be a very nuanced tale), so if you disagree, fire away in the comments section. And feel free to ask if you'd like to see others added to the list, these are just the ones I rattled off the top of my head. Oh, and sorry for the ugly formatting, no table feature on blogger and I had to tinker with this numerous ways. Not pretty, but I think readable now at least.

[UPDATE: Was having way too much trouble trying to hand-format text, so I made a table in Excel and uploaded as an image. You can click on it to see in full size if it's too fuzzy. I also added a few more categories.]

Brief Thoughts On Iraq

I was in a meeting today with an old friend who has spent many years in the Gulf and Washington. He is a private citizen, always has been, i.e., not part of the power structures in either place. But he knows and is privy to the thoughts of many of the power brokers. I have respected him as an individual and an analyst for many years, he is far less hot-headed than I am and is always deeply insightful.

He was asked by someone in the meeting his views on current state of Iraq. In a nutshell his view can be summarized as:

• The Saudi-US relationship is badly soured, they have lost respect for the United States as a nation deeply in debt to China (i.e., squandering global influence to the rising new power), and for having deliberately harmed the Palestinians and now the Iraqis with the invasion that the Saudis openly warned them would be a disaster.
• The Saudis want the US out of Iraq, they’re just making a mess of it, but they want the Americans out on their terms.
• The Iranians feel almost exactly the same – they want the US out, but on their terms.
• So the Saudis and Iranians have found common ground and have more or less struck a deal to help calm Iraq so that the Americans can “claim victory” and get out. The Saudis and Iranians are meeting regularly behind the scenes and closely coordinating their efforts.
• So the Saudis are funneling huge support to anti-Al-Qaeda Sunni elements to tamp those hotheads down, and the Iranians have used their influence to calm down Sadr. So each side is calming down their respective sectors.
• They are perfectly happy to let the Americans pretend the “surge” is what has caused the recent calming as it will let Americans feel good about themselves then skidaddle quicker.
• Nobody in Washington has a clue what’s really going on on the ground. He thinks Petraeus and a few others likely do, but of course it serves their interests to pretend and let Washington think that they brought about the success instead of other actors beyond their control.

So, realist power politics in the Gulf, and yet more incompetence in Washington.

سبت حتة من قلبي في مصر

Translation of post title: "I left a piece of my heart in Egypt". Which I genuinely did after spending a lovely piece of my life there. I really love the fact that Egyptian blogging has really taken off as well the last few years, in Arabic and English. And especially now that there is good representation from the younger generation of Muslim Brothers, it's good to say that the Egyptian blogosphere is not merely a reflection of some tiny English-speaking minority but actually does have representatives from a decent cross section of at least the younger generation of the country.

All of which makes it all the more disconcerting that the current Mubarak regime crackdown on all forms of political opposition is being utterly ignored in the Western press. Al-Jazeera has been covering it intensely in Arabic and English, Egyptian bloggers have been covering it intensely, the Egyptian independent press has been covering it intensely. There's no excuse to say there is no info out there for even the laziest of correspondents or bureau chiefs to tap into.

I won't go into the details here, click on some of the links to see in-depth (others are writing in great depth on the topic), but in a nutshell: Mubarak is trying to ammend the Constitution to further entrench the power of his corrupt NDP party by making the registration of other parties totally subject to their whims for approval and not allowing independent candidates (so no Muslim Brothers running anymore despite their impressive electoral performance and subsequent parliamentry performance), limit the independence of the judiciary, entrench draconian security laws, and apparently ease the way for Hosni's son Gamal to be the next President. A "referendum" is supposed to take place in April - yet another fixed referendum by an Arab dictator, whoopee. Virtually every single independent political voice outside of the entrenched cronies of the regime - from leftists to Islamists - is united in opposition, including even many of the generally toothless "official opposition". With the US having completely stopped raising criticism of the Mubarak regime at the top levels of government (Congressionally-mandated annual human rights report don't count, they can be and are ignored both by the White House and the Mubarak regime) because of the Bush regime's decisions to try and inflame Sunni-Shi'a tension in the region and to get an alliance of corrupt regimes to ally with Israel (Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi primarily) against Iran, Mubarak is fully deploying his goons of domestic repression knowing Washington won't say a thing.

Unprecedented numbers of leftists, secularists (including bloggers which has caught a little bit of western press attention), independent opposition voices, and Islamists are being arrested. Indeed, while the Muslim Brothers have by in large continued to try and remain non-confrontational (more so than the Kefaya movement), the regime is cracking down harder than ever arresting large numbers of their members and leaders reaching up to the top levels of their leadership. Torture continues apace at police stations despite all the unprecedent public revelations that have been aired and one of the most notorious torturers - Islam Nabih - has had his trial delayed while the victim he tortured finds himself in jail for 3 months for "resisting authorities".

As Baheyya so elegantly points out in her writing, Egypt has a long, distinguished history of political activism that often gets buried and forgotten by many outside the country. The present period is shaping up as one of the most fateful in a long time. I have high hopes that Egypt has some of the best chances of coming out of this with a government that is more genuinely representative of the people's will (i.e., more genuinely democratic with an independent judiciary and a rejection of American and Israeli schemes for the region). But the entrenched powers that be will fight like lions. I hope at the end of the day they'll just follow Farouk's footsteps and take a free ride out of the country, but I also hope that "revolutionary" convulsions can be avoided. I think people are well aware of the pain of revolution and the need for peaceful change, but the more extreme the current regime is in holding on to power at all costs (and the more extreme the US is in aiding and abetting the regime) and denying genuine democratic change and judicial independence, the more likely they will make the changes unnecessarily painful.

One addition, I've translated an article below from al-Masri al-Youm on the most recent Kefaya calls for a boycott of the constitutional ammendment referendum. I found the comparison to Mauritania (which has likewise been receiving wide coverage in the Arab Press) quite interesting as well: a military coup against a long-entrenched dictator followed by the writing of a widely-accepted Constitution which limits the president to two five year terms, and now a set of elections broadly considered to have been fair and transparent, including an upcoming runoff after the top two presidential candidates each garnered only about a quarter or less of the vote. I won't go into the ins and outs of Mauritanian politics which I'm not really qualified to comment on anyhow, but on the surface at least, a fine example for the Egyptian opposition to point to and undoubtedly one that terrifies both Mubarak and Bush as they know full well that a genuinely representative legislature, executive, and judiciary in Egypt would throw both the bums and their cronies out of power and influence in the country.

*****
[Non-Arab Arab's translation of «كفاية» تدعو إلي «مقاطعة الاستفتاء» ومطالب بتطبيق «التجربة الموريتانية»]

By Magdi Sam'aan and Muhammad Azzam

3/17/2007

"Kefaya" Calls For "Boycotting the Referendum" And Demands Implementation of "The Mauritanian Experiment"

The Egyptian Movement for Change "Kefaya" called for boycotting the referendum on constitutional ammendments which is expected to take place the first week of this coming April on the 2nd. The movement renewed its rejection of the constitutional ammendments and threatened more demonstrations opposing it. They demanded the release of 33 of its members which security forces arrested in a demonstration which the movement organized in downtown Cairo the day before yesterday.

Doctor Abdulwahab al-Maseeri the General Coordinator of the Kefaya Movement accused the security forces of dealing barbarically with him and his wife in the movement's demonstration rejecting the constitutional ammendments. In a press conference Kefaya held yesterday, al-Maseeri said that he had received a phone call from senior officials in the interior ministry warning him against organizing a demonstration the day before yesterday. Al-Maseeri said "The governing regime doesn't get that the country is in need of peaceful change, avoiding a popular explosion which would bring things no one knows or wants".

Security forces pursued a strategy of "drying up the wells" to abort any demonstration the day before yesterday. They prevented any gathering of citizens in Tahrir Square and closed the side streets and some of the coffee shops in which political activists gather. About 20 protestors were able to form a bloc in the sidestreet next to the headquarters of the Tagammua Party and keep on chanting against the constitutional ammendments and poltical reforms in the midst of an intense security siege.

In their chants, the demonstrators drew a connection between what they called the bogus political reforms in Egypt and the democratic changes that are happening in Mauritania. The chants rang out: "Mauritania O Mauritania, Egypt is with you second by second" [note: it rhymes in Arabic - Mauritania ya Mauritania, Masr ma'aki sania bi-sania]. They also got into a verbal altercation with the leaders of the Nasserist Party who were holding their annual conference in the Tagammua Party headquarters [note: both are "official" - i.e., defanged - leftist "opposition" parties] because of their loud chants. Dozens of members of the Labor Party [note: a small Islamist party] organized a demonstration after Friday prayers in Al-Azhar Mosque yesterday protesting the constitutional ammendments, demanding the necessity of implementing the Mauritanian democratic experiment in Egypt.