This week is Middle East week for President Obama. He is visiting the Middle East and will spend time with our good friends in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He will deliver an eloquent speech to the Arab world aiming to assure them of our friendship and esteem for their culture and religion, a religion of peace. It is uncertain,but likely, that he will apologize for America's past insults to Islam and the Arab world, none of which have anything to do with him.
It is likely that the President has a number of primary goals for his trip.
1) President Obama hopes to decrease the ideological appeal of radical Islam and thereby decrease the risks of a future 9/11 on his watch. To do so he needs to convince the Saudis that it is in their interest to minimize the vitriol expressed toward America. It will be interesting to see if there is any indication of his wishes being realized by our oil-rich friends.
2) The President is likely also looking for ways to enable a continuing draw-down of American troops from Iraq, which requires a decrease in Saudi support for exporting Sunni radicalism.
3) He needs the Saudis to manage a slow increase in the cost of oil and to keep buying American debt to finance his domestic plans. Recall that during the campaign he suggested the major problem with the price of oil was the speed of its increase. The environmentalist left believes that the use of oil is evil in and of itself and that anything that decreases it use, either by price or fiat, is a good.
4) He has bought into the neo-realist view that stability in the Middle East trumps the destabilizing effects of democratization or a focus on human rights. President Bush destabilized the Middle East and for a time there was a trend toward more openness and democracy promotion. That is over and the new mantra is stability.
Much of this dovetails nicely with the aims of the Arab elites. They are primarily concerned with their own comfort and survival. They have always calculated that their survival rests with their ability to create and sustain a foreign enemy to accept their hatred and blame. This is externalization on a national scale. This defensively posits that the Arab world's problems are not caused by any internal faults but rather are caused by the modern day colonialism of the oppressive Israelis (Zionists and Jews, when their careful attention to nuance slips) and the machinations of the Jewish controlled Americans. Bush briefly re-focused the Arab world upon their own shortcomings, but President Obama is thus far quite comfortable buying into the Walt-Mearsheimer-Carter construct that the Jews are at the root of all of our problems with the Arabs (which is the corollary of the Arab belief that the Jews are at the core of all their problems in the Middle East.)
If our goal is to show the Arab world that we are their friends and have no wish for a clash of civilizations, that is all to the good. However, if the Arabs, as has been reported by many sources, desire (demand) American deeds rather than just Obama-rhetoric, there are problems at hand.
First, Arab elites understand that for the tribal Honor-Shame societies in which they live, Muslim solidarity always trumps every other issue. No Arab government will long survive if they openly support infidels against their coreligionists (even when they consider other Muslims to be deviant or apostate; Sunni vs Shia, for example.) This has the effect of allowing the most virulent and extreme to dictate the terms of the debate. While the Saudis, with their faux peace plan, may use more temperate language, they are incapable of actually acting in ways openly supportive of the recognition of an Israeli state. A non-negotiable aspect of the Saudi plan is the "right of return" which is a plan for the demographic destruction of Israel.
In 1967, the Arab's issued their infamous Three Nos:
The Khartoum Resolution of 1967
1. NO peace with Israel
2. NO recognition of Israel
3. NO negotiations with Israel
There is no evidence that the current iteration of the Palestinian Authority has actually moved beyond the Three NOs. Fatah's primary current goal is an agreement with Hamas, which offers a truce (in order to re-arm and prepare for the next phase of the war) but NoPeace. Abbas will not agree to call Israel a Jewsih state, ie NO recognition, and has decided he will eschew negotiations (which no one expects to actually resolve anything) until he gets whatever he wants, ie NO negotiations. And he is the moderate Palestinian!
The West keeps trying to see moderation in Arab intransigence in the absence of any concrete moves toward reconciliation from the Arabs, while at the same time having no trouble discerning an Israeli hard line even in the presence of a demonstrated willingness to give up land for nothing more than unkept promises.
The BBC has a report on its site today that would be humorous if the West were not so blinded by their own wishful fantasies. In an interview with a Hezbollah fighter, the BBC interviewer raises the question of the UK government discerning a distinction between the political and military wings of Hezbollah in order to justify engagement; the Hezbollah fighter refuses to oblige the inanity of his Western interviewer and clarifies:
Inside Lebanese Hezbollah militia
But more recently, the United Kingdom government decided to distinguish between the two faces of Hezbollah - by talking to its politicians while keeping the military wing on the terrorist list.
But Mahmoud, the fighter, says the UK is fooling itself by making this distinction.
"We have two arms, but we belong to one body. There is no such things as the military wing or the political wing of Hezbollah - we are all part of one resistance," he said.
"Hezbollah will become a purely political party only when Israel ceases to exist," he said.
This is the Gordian Knot at the center of the Arab-Israeli dispute. The most radical of the Arabs cannot countenance a Jewish state in their midst and the less radical cannot countenance opposing their brethren. President Obama, who likely has not really thought through the implications of his positions (not yet a policy), is ultimately unwilling to allow Israel to be destroyed (though there are those on the left who treat such a possibility with insouciance.)
Worse yet, for the Arab world, the Israelis seem disinclined to commit national suicide any time soon.
And so the stalemate will continue.
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