Arab News Blog

“Whenever I ponder some of the challenges U.S. foreign policy faces today in Afghanistan, Somalia, or Yemen, I inevitably return to a passage in Bob Woodward’s “Veil,” describing how Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, after an attempt to assassinate him had failed, was persuaded to restrain his followers in Lebanon from launching attacks on U.S. interests:

The Saudis approached him and asked whether . . . he would act as their early-warning system for terrorist attacks on Saudi and American facilities. They would pay $2 million cash. Fadlallah accepted, but said he wanted the payment in food, medicine and education expenses for some of his people. This would enhance his status among his followers. The Saudis agreed. There were no more Fadlallah-sponsored terrorist attacks against Americans.

…. This is not only a possible strategy for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. The principles can be applied to other foreign policy problems as well. We don’t want Russia to deliver the S-300 anti-aircraft system to Iran? Moral pressure on Moscow is likely to fail, because it is a business decision. If another buyer came forward to buy out the contract, however, the Russians might very well play ball.

There’s already precedent for this kind of approach. In the late 1990s, the United States did not want Cyprus to deploy a similar system on the island, because Turkey was concerned about the threat these missiles might pose to control of its airspace over southern Turkey. The contract ultimately went through, but the missiles were deployed elsewhere — in Greece. Russia didn’t lose any money on the deal, and the strategic goals of the United States were achieved. Along these lines, there have already been rumors that the Saudis are now considering tempting Moscow with a massive purchase of Russian weaponry as a way to compensate Russian businesses that would lose out should the Kremlin block the sale of sensitive military components to Iran.

The same logic holds if we want China and India….

We have no line item for “bribery” in the foreign operations budget bill (which is perhaps one reason we have traditionally turned to the Saudi monarchy to engage in such activities on our behalf)……

Certainly payments are not a long-term solution. Allies brought under your banner through bribery are less reliable than those who align with you out of sincere belief and commitment. But such payments are a necessary tool of statecraft — especially in getting solutions in the short term. They represent a first step, usually to get a pause in fighting — after which they need to be followed up with effective policy. The epitaph of the Sunni awakening in Iraq may end up being “What was achieved with the dinar was lost by the politicians,” as the temporary calm it produced did not lead to major political breakthroughs.

Vladimir Putin once famously stated that he was not going to treat foreign policy as a bargaining session in the bazaar. But in reality, that’s often how coalitions are forged and compromises reached. It’s time to think about foreign affairs as a marketplace again, not all of the time, but at least when nothing else will work. That means being prepared to spend what currency is needed to make the sale. And sometimes nothing works as well as cold, hard cash.

” … None of this represents a failure of the Obama administration’s policy of engagement, which was complicated by an Iranian political crisis that continues to limit Tehran’s ability to take yes for an answer. Absent an opportunistic — but also revealing — Green movement attack on the deal, it might have gone through (although that’s impossible to say for sure).

Given some of the dramatically incoherent declarations coming out of Tehran over the past few weeks, it’s also still possible that a last-minute deal is in the works. There’s even a diplomatic trail for backchannel negotiations, with a Qatari crown prince making a Tehran-Paris shuttle run last week, followed by an announced trip by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Qatar this weekend.

In the meantime, the case for sanctions, both at the U.N. and unilaterally, has been enormously strengthened ….. Will sanctions prove effective? Probably not, although the sanctions being described — which target the Revolutionary Guard in order to reinforce the faultlines in the Iranian regime — seem to be more thoughtfully conceived than previous rounds.

Is a nuclear — or a latent-nuclear — Iran the end of the world? Probably not, although it would come with great many consequences, many of them unpredictable and most of them unwelcome.

It could very well be that we can no longer — and could never — do anything to stop that from happening. But sometimes diplomacy is as much about second-order effects as immediate results. The inability to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions reveals the limits of American power when it is not supported by other poles of influence in the increasingly diffuse global balance of pwoer. But by positioning the U.S. to be not only right, but reasonable, the Obama policy will enhance our subsequent ability to mobilize regional and global pressure in similar situations.”

• They Tried to Make Mohammed al-Awfi Go to Rehab | Foreign Policy

  Good piece on Saudi rehab center, and the story of what Gitmo produces.

• Video: Theatre in the shadow of the Palestinian Nakba | Stage | guardian.co.uk

  Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar Zuabi.

• Al-Ahram Weekly | Egypt | Changing Brotherhood faces

  Details on the MB’s new leaders.

• Kathleen Christison: Zionism Laid Bare

  Review of Shahid Alam’s “Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism”.

• Rep. Mike Pence: Israel should dictate U.S. policy – The Majlis

  When elected American officials are more loyal to Israel than America.

• Aida Alami: Morocco’s Leading Independent Magazine Is Shut Down

  Good op-ed from a member of Le Journal’s staff.

• Inanities: Guide to writing about Egypt

  Inanities, reliably funny as always. The linked Tim Sebastian op-ed is just bizarre.

• Direct Quotes: Bashar Assad: News Desk : The New Yorker

  Seymour Hersh’s memo from his interview with Bashar al-Assad.

• Arabs, gay rights and modernity

  Interesting post on the Whitaker, Massad and now Ibish debate on the notion of gay rights in the Arab world.

• EGYPT: Minimum Wage Not Enough – IPS ipsnews.net

  On setting a minimum wage in Egypt.

• Egypt: 2 editors punished for dealing with Israel – Yahoo! News

  More tokenism from Egypt’s anti-normalizers — why don’t they join the BDS campaign instead and start harassing Salah Diab and Naguib Sawiris, who do business with Israel?

• La Princesse de Clèves: Identité improbable

  On a new biography of Egyptian-French-Jewish communist Henri Curiel.

• Facebook | U.S. Department of State: Engaging the Community on Foreign Affairs

  State Dept. on Facebook. Ask them about why Obama lets Bibi humiliate America.

• Middle East Online | Egypt tightens penalties for relics robbers, smugglers

  New antiquities law passed after controversy over its restrictions.

HRW’s Ken Roth, in an IPS interview:

The rest of the interview is interesting too.

I know everybody is disappointed with Obama right now — it’s hardly an original position. I have to say although I was not an Obama supporter (i.e. I expected him to disappoint, and notably to show a lack of backbone from his behavior during the campaign) I find myself surprised at the extent to which, well, he doesn’t seem very good. A more appropriate question to ask of him, rather than whether he’s sold out or misled people about his policies, is that he may simply be not very competent. Whether you agree with him or not about policies, if you take him on his own terms, it’s hard to come away distinctly unimpressed.

Anyway, this brings me to this op-ed by my friend Ezzedine Choukri in the al-Ahram Weekly, titled “See you later, Mr. President!”"

For someone who made a new approach to the Middle East such an integral part of his foreign policy platform, the outcome of a year in power is strikingly meagre. If anything, President Obama’s first year has been marked by a surprising lack of leadership on the Middle East. The expectations Obama created about a “new beginning” for America in the region are fast dissipating. While the frustration of the peoples of the Middle East could be of little political significance for the American president, the policy ramifications of missing leadership are not.

On the crown jewel of the region’s problems, the protracted Arab- Israeli conflict, Obama’s administration failed to come up with a meaningful policy. Unable or unwilling to spend political capital on a showdown with the Israeli rightist government, the administration adopted a hackneyed, stopgap policy. The sterility of its stated goal — getting Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table — is plain for all to see. Palestinians and Israelis have been sitting at that table for years; we are all familiar with their endless arguments, complaining and manipulations. Everyone knows that returning them to that table is not going to bring peace or security to either of them, or to the region. But it is a goal that the administration thought attainable and serving to its image at an affordable political price. To add insult to injury, a year has passed without achieving this modest, useless goal. The sense of historic mission of the Cairo speech about reconciling Arab and Jewish narratives has faded, leaving behind a real life-sized political president admitting his earlier miscalculation.

He concludes:

Is this but another complaint by a disappointed Middle Easterner who hoped that Obama would be fair to his region? Not in the least. I don’t think that the peoples of the Middle East are politically relevant in this story. They don’t vote or fundraise in American elections, they don’t take initiative or even help when asked, and they always complain about US policies anyway. What is politically relevant, though, is the consequence of Obama’s Middle Eastern choices on the region and on the US standing in it. Inaction and lack of leadership are not a recommended policy for the indispensable superpower. It means passing the initiative to local actors who either advance their own interests regardless of regional stability as a whole, or create crises in order to draw the US back in. In either case, the US administration would be setting itself up for ad hoc reactions. Presidents who choose not to invest in the Middle Eastern quagmire were eventually sucked into it unprepared. This could take the form of another “unexpected” eruption in the Arab-Israeli saga, a “surprise” collapse of a friendly regime, or a major terrorist attack. In a nutshell, every American president who gave the Middle East low priority lived to regret it.

Here I partly disagree, or would go further. The US has an opportunity to redeem itself and re-adjust its involvement in the region by encouraging the emergence of a stable regional order that does not need US initiative to prevent or solve crises. In the long term, this would be the best thing for the region and for the US (in terms of its heavier than necessary footprint in the region and the economic, political and security costs that brings) while still guaranteeing key interests (which should include stable flow of oil and safety of sea traffic, not supporting Israeli expansionism). Obama could have been the president to start this, but instead we see him be half-Carter, half-Bush. What a disappointment.