EU’s foreign chief in Gaza visit
The EU’s foreign policy chief arrives in the Gaza Strip as militants there fire a rocket into Israel, killing one person.
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The EU’s foreign policy chief arrives in the Gaza Strip as militants there fire a rocket into Israel, killing one person.
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All illustrations on this post are actual Iranian postage stamps.On some level, the debate over sanctioning Iran appears to boil down to what China’s position will be — another sign of what one might call the slow but steady multi-polarization of Middle Eastern geopolitics.
From Ben Simpfendorder’s New Silk Road blog:
China’s foreign policy is at an inflexion point. The country is emerging as a major power, but that will require tough choices.The toughest choices are usually found in the Middle East. The region doesn’t like major powers sitting on the fence, and it’s only time before China will be forced to climb down.It is Iran that will likely force a decision. China has so far maintained its policy of non-intervention?as one Beijing-based policy advisor said to me, “if we intervene in Iran, it would set a bad precedent for our relations with other countries”.Fair enough. But so would a failure to intervene. It would suggest that China isn’t concerned about its other regional partners, especially Saudi Arabia. Let’s not forget. Iran might supply 13% of China’s oil supply, but Saudi Arabia supplies an even larger 20%.
Hillary Clinton was on Capitol Hill today, telling US lawmakers that,
However, there has all along been considerable doubt whether China will go along with such measures, at the U.N. Then, there’s Russia…
Until today, U.S. spinmeisters had been expressing some confidence that Russia would join the “twist the screws tighter” policy. But today, Xinhua reported from Moscow that,
And yesterday, China itself reiterated its calls that the Iranian nuclear-program crisis be addressed through stepped-up diplomacy, not confrontation.
Clinton probably feels herself under some pressure from the success that AIPAC, the very powerful America Israel Public Affairs Committee, has had in its massive, well-funded campaign to get legislators to adopt resolutions mandating unilateral U.S. sanctions on Iran in the event Iran refuses to dance immediately to Uncle Sam’s tune on the nuclear issue.
These resolutions have two harmful effects. They would unilaterally penalize U.S. businesses at a time that businesses elsewhere continue to trade with Iran. And they restrict the administration’s ability to commit fully to the pursuit of foreign policy, which is, of course, a responsibility reserved to the administration under the U.S. Constitution.
But hey, why should AIPAC care about mere inconveniences like that!



There’s been quite a bit of talk in the conference here about the way that George Mitchell has either been sidelined or has for other reasons faded from the scene. Of course, it’s not just Mitchell that has been sidelined, it’s the whole justice-based and vigorous U.S. pursuit of peace that his appointment back in January 2009 seemed to promise.
So today the NYT tells us that Sec. Clinton and three of her top aides are fanning out to the Middle East in a concerted campaign to–
…make a push for Palestinian-Israeli peace? No!
Rather, they’re trekking out to try to line regional leaders up behind the latest step in the (AIPAC- and Likud-driven) campaign to ratchet the pressure up inexorably against Iran.
And who are these envoys?
Well, there’s Hillary herself, who’s going to Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Then, there’s her Under-Secretary for political affairs, Bill Burns, who’s going to Syria.
And there are her two Deputy Secretaries, for Policy and Administration… James Steinberg (Policy) will be going to Israel, and Jacob Lew (Administration) will be going to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan.
And when was the last time we heard any major news about George Mitchell? (Yawn.)

Judah Grunstein in WPR/ here
” … 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.”
Good piece on Saudi rehab center, and the story of what Gitmo produces.
Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar Zuabi.
Details on the MB’s new leaders.
Review of Shahid Alam’s “Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism”.
When elected American officials are more loyal to Israel than America.
Good op-ed from a member of Le Journal’s staff.
Inanities, reliably funny as always. The linked Tim Sebastian op-ed is just bizarre.
Seymour Hersh’s memo from his interview with Bashar al-Assad.
Interesting post on the Whitaker, Massad and now Ibish debate on the notion of gay rights in the Arab world.
On setting a minimum wage in Egypt.
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?
On a new biography of Egyptian-French-Jewish communist Henri Curiel.
State Dept. on Facebook. Ask them about why Obama lets Bibi humiliate America.
New antiquities law passed after controversy over its restrictions.
Q: Are you disappointed with Barack Obama?A: I have been disappointed by Obama in a number of respects. First of all I think it’s worth saying that Obama is still a significant improvement over [George] Bush. There’s been a very notable improvement in presidential rhetoric but a failure to apply that rhetoric in many cases. Obama has given a series of quite inspiring speeches but then has not built a policy around those speeches. In Accra, for example, he distinguished himself from [Bill] Clinton’s policy of embracing the so-called new generation of African leaders that turned out to be authoritarian dictators: Paul Kagame [in Rwanda] or Meles Zenawi [in Ethiopia]. Obama said Africa doesn’t need strong leaders, it needs strong institutions and spoke about the rule of law, free press, independent civil society and the like. That was an excellent message, well-tailored to the audience. But the Obama administration has put very little pressure on Meles or Kagame to reverse their authoritarian trends. Similarly, in Cairo, he talked about the importance of democracy and made clear that, unlike Bush, who promoted democracy until the wrong person won, until Hamas won in the Palestinian territories or until the Muslim Brotherhood did better than expected in the Egyptian parliamentary elections, Obama was going to respect whoever was the victor. It was suggested that he would even respect the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. A very important message but he then did not follow up by pressing [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak to democratise. Mubarak visited the White House and there was no public mention of democracy. There’s been no pressure on the Saudi royal family, no pressure on other autocratic U.S. allies in the Middle East to democratise.
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.
Turkey is starting to flex its muscles in relation to its approach to foreign policy.
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