Barack Obama is not even President yet and he has already begun his spin to the middle. This suggeststhat even if he is the ideologue many fear him to be, he is also smart enough to know that left wing economics has failed wherever it has been tired and if his goal is to have a successful Presidency, getting the economy moving is his first order of business. In the current circumstances, pragmatism is another word for non-ideological. As someone who believes that recessions are an unfortunately necessary part of the business cycle, and that economic laws have not recently been repealed (despite the ubiquitous cries that accompany every bubble that this time is different) my hope is that the new Administrationwill do minimal damage to the economy while trying to save it. Obama's appointments thus far, though top heavy with Goldman-Sachs cronies, does suggest some disinclination to tamper with the underlying fundamentals of the economic. Time will tell.
Where I think Obama will truly have his mettle tested is in the realm of foreign affairs and in this area, what has traditionally passed for pragmatism and careful attention to the fundamentals, may well be a trap.
Yesterday I described the difficulty in understanding extremely complex structures (our biology, climate) even when using our best tools, ie science. In the field of foreign affairs the problems are exponentially more difficult, since finding a rational path depends not only on curbing one's own irrationalities but the rationalities and irrationalitiesof multiple friends, competitors, and enemies. NO where is this complexity more insidious than in the Middle east. Atthe moment Barack Obama appears to be bringing in a number of former "Middle East Experts" who have famously failed to advance the quest for Peace on the Middle East to try again. Apparently, they will pursue the tried and true methods of working toward Peace in the Middle East, ie, they will pressure Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.
This actually makes a great deal of sense if done properly, but will more likely end up in more Israeli innocents dead and Peace in the Middle East as elusive as ever. That is because it is based on a fantasy about the Middle East that is shared by most of the extant "MEEs*."
Barry Rubin makes some points that should be obvious during the 61st year of the ArabWar against Israel but seem to escape the attention of the MEEs who have been pressing the Peace Process for the last ~40 years. First he points out that even the Arab moderates who are tired of war and would settle for peace are not foolish enough to openly support such an outcome:
The Region: Don't flatter your enemies, protect your friends
In explaining why he was too fearful to vote in Jerusalem's mayoral election, an east JerusalemPalestinian shopkeeper, Issam Abu Rmaileh, said, "I would have liked to vote because it's in our interest, but who's going to protect me and myfamily afterwards?"
Let's call it the Abu Rmaileh principle; it is extraordinarily important in the Middle East. Why should someone support you if you cannot protect them? If they cannot depend on you to be tough, they might as well play it safe by doing nothing or make their own deal through appeasement and shout radical slogans.
It does not take away form Barry Rubin's intelligence to note that this is a conclusion that couldbe reached even by those with very limited IQs. In fact, it takes the very high IQs typically foundin MEEs to ignore the nature of those who do not, and never will, countenancea Jewsih state in the midst of their neighborhood. Barry Rubin goes on to explain the nature of our enemies in ways which shouldbe understandable to the MEEs but are unlikely to sink in any time soon:
THE DEBATE in Washington is far away from the debate in the MiddleEast. In America's capital, the talk is of how the radicals are more moderate than thought, how they will be won over by Obama's charisma and changed American policies. The disconnect between the region and the rationalizers is frightening. There is no policy change in Washington that will appease the radicals. And there are no concessions that will make an American president popular in a meaningful way among Middle Easterners. Even more worrisome, such steps are not going to make moderates feel more secure. Here the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri gets it just right. He tells Obama: "It appears that you don't know anything about the Muslim world and its history... You are neither facing individuals nor organizations, but are facing a jihadi awakening and renaissance which is shaking the pillars of the entire Islamic world; and this is the fact which you and your government and country refuse to recognize and pretend not to see." Zawahiri even invokes the Abu Rmaileh principle: "It appears that you don't know anything about... the fate of the traitors who cooperated with the invaders against it." In other words, anyone who cooperates with the United Statesor fights the Islamists will die.
Al-Qaida is not a very important group nowadays. But the rise of Islamist forces is clear, even though some of them are hostile to each other. It is Iran, not Ayman, who is the main beneficiary of this phenomenon, though Muslim Brotherhood groups - most notably Hamas - are also advancing.
IN WHICH way are President George Bush and his successor identical? Both believe that being liked in the MiddleEast will bring victory. Bush thought that by gifting the locals with a non-dictatorial Iraq and democracy they would come to love him. The opposite happened. Obama's strategy of being a nice guy and making concessions is likely to be less costly in direct terms for the United States but will also be used by the radicals for their own benefit.
Jimmy Carter never learned that the Arab rejectionists could never be reasoned with. Ronald Reagan imagined there were moderate Iranians who could be dealt with. Bill Clintonbelatedly, after the failures of Camp David, finally got a glimpse of the evil beneath the smile of Yasser Arafat, a man upon whom he relished more attention than any other foreign leader, but who could not at the end abide a Jewish State. George W. Bush saw clearly who he was dealing with, attempted to change the equilibrium in the Middle east and at some point we may look back and say that the beginnings of a rational and free Middle east grew form the seeds that George W. Bush planted, but more likely history will record that despite our valiant efforts, the Middle East remained the home of passionateirrationality that it has traditionally been. So now it is Barack Obama's turn.
Earlier I had suggested a policy of pressure on the Israelis couldwork, though I would hasten to add that it will not bring Peace to the Middle East. What carefully calibrated, public pressure on Israel coulddo would be to supply our Arab allies with evidence they can use to convince their people that we are attempting to be more balanced in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. That might, to a minor extent, defuse some of the anger that has been used to foster Islamic radicalismand its attendant anti-Americanism (and anti-Semitism.) A balancing act that allows minimal change on the ground, the slow development of a functioning Palestinian society on the West bank with a slowly decreasing Israeli (overt) presence could in time allow the Palestiniansto form the nidus of a functioning state. The odds of the Palestinians allowing rationality to emerge victorious over their irrational desires would have to be considered very slim, but almost any other approach will be worse. Great pressure on Israelwill force it to lower its defenses; at that point it would be only a matter of time before the Palestinians attack in such a way that Israel will be forced to respond in kind. The "cycle of violence" will resume and the "Peace Process" will again die. Increased pressure on the Palestinians is a fiction which can not be expected to pertain for long and is not considered an option by any of the players in the area. (Gaza's markets are filled with food and consumer goods, gasis cheaper in Gaza than in neighboring Egypt, the Gazans and West Bank Palestinians have higher standard of living than the Egyptians, yet the worlds press insists they are facing imminent catastrophe, as they have for the last nth number of years; go figure.)
Governments always want to appear to respond to crises with action, even when the most likelyoutcome of any action is to worsen the problem. The pressure on BarackObama to "do something" for the economy and for the great foreign policy problem of our times, the Middle East, will be insurmountable. My hope is that he does as little as possible while appearing to do a great deal. His campaign was quite expert at just that; lets hope he can carry it over into his administration.
*Any suggestion that MEEs are partially fueled by the desire for narcissistic self-aggrandizement and are limited by their inability to appreciate that others do not always think the way they do, is a coincidence, a function of a perhaps unfortunate acronym.
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