EFTA01189624.pdf

From: Office of Terje Rod-Larsen ‹ > Subject: November 6 update Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 18:39:10 +0000 Inline-Images: D05717EB-A4EA-4D81-990B-04081228EC I 3.png 6 November, 2013 Article 1. Tablet Magazine The Triangle Connecting the U.S., Israel, and American Jewry May Be Coming Apart Adam Garfinkle Article 2. The Diplomat America's Moment of Truth on Iran Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett Article 3. World Affairs Journal No Exit: Why the US Can't Leave the Middle East Michael J. Totten Article 4. Los Angeles Times Making up with Europe Bruce Ackerman Article 5. The Council on Foreign Relations The Long Reach for Syrian Peace Interview with Leslie H. Gelb Article 6. Foreign Affairs The Future of the U.S.-Egyptian Relationship Is in the Past Robert Springborg Art1c1e 7. The New Yorker An Economic Vision of Peace in Israel Bernard Avishai ArtIcic 1 Tablet Magazine The Triangle Connecting the U.S., Israel, an American JewryV1 lay Be Coming Apart Adam Garfinkle EFTA01189624 November 5, 2013 -- American Jewry is in for a real shock: The "special relationship" between the United States and Israel is fast eroding. The strategic, cultural, and demographic alignments that gave rise to and sustained for more than half a century the special relationship between the United States and Israel are all changing. These changes have independent sources, and the relevant dynamics are playing out in different ways and at different rates. But make no mistake: They are connected to and influence one another. The simple understanding of how the special relationship works is linear: American Jews go to bat in American politics for Israeli interests, as they understand them, because Israeli interests are believed to be inseparable from Jewish interests. This is the "lobby" model, and we recognize its appurtenances: the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and a galaxy of smaller, sometimes explicitly partisan groups, from J Street to the Emergency Committee for Israel. In truth, however, the relationship consists of a metaphorical triangle linking American Jewry with the governments of Israel and the United States. In the natural course of political events, all three actors intermediate between the other two, for good and ill. For example, even as American Jews lobby for Israel in American politics, Israeli governments sometimes get between American Jews and their own government: Jonathan Pollard is one example, and the loan guarantee fight during the George H.W. Bush Administration is another. So is the more contemporary effort of the Israeli government to put AIPAC and other American Jewish groups much further out on their skis in advocating a hawkish policy toward Iran than either the George W. Bush or Barack Obama Administrations have considered wise. But the U.S. government sometimes musses with the relationship between Israel and American Jewry, too, even if only as a side effect of pursuing other objectives. The recent peripeties concerning the Obama Administration's prospective military strike on Syria furnish a case in point: While that awkward dance was stumbling across the floor in its earlier steps, Israel and hence AIPAC kept unusually quiet, lest taking a position in favor of a strike put them both on the wrong side of strongly opposed American public opinion. When the White House asked Israel to voice support for military action, it complied, quickly making AIPAC's soundtrack audible. EFTA01189625 When the president did his 180, dropping his plans to strike in favor of a Russian-brokered chemical-weapons inspection regime, it left both Israel and AIPAC hung out to dry. Israel's detractors in the United States did not miss the opportunity to excoriate the Jews both here and there, deepening the division within American Jewry between those who are comfortable with AIPAC's relationship with a right-of-center Israeli government and those who are not. Over time, the dynamics of the triangular relationship have changed the character of the three actors themselves—most of all American Jewry. Let's take a side-by-side look. 1 t2: American Jewry-Israel In the first three decades of Israel's existence as a modern independent state, there was very little daylight between it and the overwhelming majority of American Jews. The reasons were several, but chief among them was the fact that these were the same people. The majority of the American Jewish community and of the pre-state Yishuv were European Jews, and mostly Central or East European Jews. The movement out of the Russian Empire beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, after the May Laws, flowed both to North America and to Palestine. In the postwar years, religious Jews in North America felt a keen affinity with religious Jews in Israel, just as most progressive, secular, socialist-minded Jews in North America felt an affinity with Labor Zionism. When Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook figured a way to entwine Zionism with Orthodox Judaism, he helped bridge the practical gap between secular and religious, and at the same time he created a kind of stereoscopic resonance between Jews in Eretz Yisrael and Jews in America. The experience of the Shoah dramatically annealed these changes in the context of a radical shift in global Jewish demography. Even for most secular Jews, the Zionist project took on a transhistorical sense of purpose in the ashen shadow of the Holocaust. Never had divisions among Jews in the modern era seemed as insignificant as they did between 1939 and 1959. And American Jews had objective reason to take pride in the heroic history of Zionism, both before and after May 1948. That history, with its narrative of an oppressed people yearning to be free in their own land, seemed to echo many facets of the American civil religion and, in due course, the equally heroic struggle embodied in the Cold War—especially once Israel and the United States began constructing their special strategic relationship in the mid to late EFTA01189626 1960s. Just as important, Israel's underdog status in the region resonated strongly with the underdog self-image of American Jewry; it was important that American Jews believe Israel needed them, and, in fact, it did. Finally, for first- and second-generation American Jews, intermarriage rates were vastly more modest and Jewish-educational attainments were superior on average to what they have become today, when a record percentage of self-identifying American Jews receive no religious education at all. The gossamer thread of Jewish memory that binds the generations one to another, while always thin and vulnerable, was much stronger 40 years ago than it is today. Much else has also changed. The horrors of the Holocaust and the unalloyed heroic phase of Zionist history are fading into history, as is the sense of common kindred ties between American Jews and Jewish Israelis. As a state with a strong economy and a strong military, Israel no longer needs American Jews as it once did, even as American Jews need Israel a lot more than they once did. It has already been three and a half decades since some prominent Israelis, notably Yossi Beilin, told American Jews to stop buying Israel bonds—because the cost of processing the things exceeded the value of the money being borrowed—and to use the money instead to seriously educate their children as Jews and Zionists. American Jews eventually got the "Birthright" program out of that tete-a-tete, which has been a great success, but little else. Older American Jews still have problems getting used to the idea that Israel no longer needs their ministrations and money. Meanwhile, young American Jews are increasingly alienated from Israel in rough proportion to their lack of Jewish education and affiliation, and particularly so if they hold left-wing views that increasingly depict Israel in a negative light. The argument, however, that anti-Semitism is the main cause of assimilation is nonsense; to the contrary, the relative absence of anti-Semitism in America, certainly compared to a half century ago, removes a thick layer of in-group loyalty glue that is actually accelerating the assimilationist and intermarriage trends. Israel's domestic politics has contributed to the growing divide, too, by allowing the Orthodox rabbinate to dominate the issue of conversion to Judaism—and in increasingly ahistorical, extreme ways—thus alienating large numbers of American Jewish families with members who were converted according to Jewish law, but not by the "right" kind of rabbis. EFTA01189627  Anyone who is honest about it knows that American Jewish demography is shattering. As the most recent Pew data vividly demonstrate, the overall weight of a numerically shrinking community is shifting to modern- and ultra-Orthodoxy, while the demographic bottom is dropping out of so- called liberal Judaism. Something similar, though not for the same reasons or in the same way, is happening in Israel, and a more visibly religious Israel is not attracting the affinity of nonreligious American Jews as the tanned and taut kova tembel-hatted kibbutzniks of the 1950s and 1960s once did. As Orthodox Jews become Israel's most fervent supporters on the American scene, less religious and less knowledgeable Jews are feeling more awkward taking up the same cause, especially if their closest gentile peers exhibit jaundiced attitudes toward Israel. The emergence of counter- lobbies like J Street, and the growing prominence in intellectual and academic circles of Jews who criticize Israel publicly in the name of a kinder, gentler Zionism, are all symptoms of the general phenomenon. J Street provides room for young liberal Jews to express support for Israel, and that is to the good. But there is no way—even for themselves sometimes—to tell if they are sincere or if they are instead subtle practitioners of what Hannah Arendt once so shrewdly described as the arts of the parvenu. The mere existence of such Jewish voices makes it more acceptable for non-Jews to criticize Israel out of a host of motives, and that in turn raises a cost for rank-and-file American Jews to be vocal supporters of Israel. That's not how it used to be. There is, in short, plenty of daylight between American Jewry and Israel, and the torrid sun is starting to burn us. There's no reason to expect any abatement of the trend. 243: Israel -U.S. The U.S. and Israeli governments under successive administrations in both countries have had a direct strategic relationship that operates on a different plain from American (and Israeli) domestic politics. That relationship between executive branches has always turned more on "hard" geopolitical considerations, while aspects of the special relationship below that level has tended to give pride of place to "soft" aspects of cultural affinity. The "hard" strategic relationship has proceeded in two major phases since 1948, with a transition period in between, but it was born in a classic Jewcentric drama when President Harry Truman rejected the advice and analysis of his Secretary of State, George Marshall, and many other EFTA01189628 senior members of his administration to enthusiastically support the birth of the State of Israel. For Truman, the Jews of America stood for the Jewish people in history as mediated through the prism of Anglo-American Protestantism. Truman actually cried when Chief Ashkenazic Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog told him, during his White House visit on May 11, 1949, what the president had done, in broad meta-historical terms, for the Jewish people. In a private meeting after Truman left the White House, he replied to the thanks offered by the head of the Jewish Theological Seminary by answering his host, "What do you mean `helped' create [Israel]? I am Cyrus; I am Cyrus!" But after Truman left office in January 1953, Israel came to be viewed by official Washington as a strategic liability—a barrier to improving relations with the Arabs and other Muslim-majority countries so as to keep them safe from the designs of Soviet Communism. John Foster Dulles' delusions notwithstanding, American Jewry was virtually powerless back then to deflect that narrative from the high offices in which it had gained pride of place; it was reinforced at the time by the oil lobby, which partly explains U.S. policy during the 1956 Suez crisis. Things began to change even before the Eisenhower Administration ended and then accelerated during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Again the reasons were several. By the mid-1960s the mirage of creating close relations between the United States and the "progressive" regimes of the region, especially Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt, had dissipated, while Israel's development successes and its Western liberal aura under successive social-democratic Labor governments aligned nicely with the ethos of the New Frontier and the Great Society. The second phase of the relationship, in which Israel came to be considered a strategic asset, crystallized after the June 1967 war, in which Israel defeated two Middle Eastern clients of the Soviet Union and tarnished the Red star in Arab eyes. That is when the Johnson Administration first supplied Israel with major military platforms, notably its air power, after the French government cut Israel off. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger subsequently reasoned that the United States must not allow the Soviet Union to aid its clients at Israel's expense, and so from 1969-70 onward the United States expanded military aid to Israel in most every form. The rationale was that no peace negotiation between the Jews and the Arabs EFTA01189629 could succeed so long as the Arabs believed they had a potentially successful military option courtesy of the USSR. U.S. support for Israel, then, would defeat Soviet regional strategy and create the preconditions for peace, and peace would in turn serve U.S. interests by stabilizing the region to general Western advantage in the Cold War. The shift in U.S. strategy led first to Anwar Sadat booting the Soviet presence out of Egypt in July 1972. When the United States and Israel failed to respond to Sadat's shift, it set in motion what became the October 1973 war. But U.S. policy led ultimately to the March 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty. From then until the end of the Cold War, the strong U.S. position in the region validated the Nixon-Kissinger strategic narrative. Despite some prominent but highly ahistorical claims to the contrary made after 9/11, and despite several neuralgic but usually brief episodes of U.S.-Israeli friction, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East between 1967 and 1991 was a rousing success by any reasonable measure. With no Cold War, however, is Israel still a strategic asset to the United States? Just look around at the spate of post-1991 "greater" Middle Eastern "episodes"—Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria, Egypt and, prospectively, Iran. In which of these cases could Israel be aptly characterized on balance as a useful ally of the United States? It is true that Israel helps out in several general ways—intelligence sharing, joint maneuvers, weapons and tactics testing, porting—but in crises it is reduced to bystander status for the most part. In most of the episodes listed above Israel has been either irrelevant or somewhere between a complication and an inadvertent nuisance. The general lack of fit between American interests in the region and Israel's utility as an ally in the post-Cold War era helps explain why we hear so many general remonstrations about a shared interest in democracy and in fighting terrorism and countering the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons, especially Iranian ones. It all happens to be true, but it only needs to be articulated so publicly and so often because the opportunities for actionable strategic alignment where it counts most—at specific sparking points of geopolitical engagement—are so meager. This also accounts for the traction the "Israel lobby" thesis has gotten recently. The argument is not remotely new. The same arguments Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer hauled out in 2008 had been rehearsed many EFTA01189630 times before, including by George Ball, one of the most prominent American diplomats of the postwar era, in a 1992 book titled The Passionate Attachment. But none of the earlier efforts had much clout. More than a decade removed from the end of the Cold War, however, the most recent visitation of this old argument has had a tangible impact, not least in the bowels of the American military and intelligence communities. Again, whether one credits the arguments or not, the point is that they have gained traction for a reason: the tectonic shift of the strategic landscape with the end of the Cold War. 3 A, 1: U.S.-American Jewry The decay of the first two sides of the triangle that constitutes the special relationship is no revelation. Honest observers know most or all of this to one degree or another. But the deterioration of the third side is less well understood or acknowledged. The relationship between American Jews— and through them Israel—and American society at large is also changing. As with Harry Truman—and Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush after him—large numbers of Americans, from the very beginning of the European settlement of North America, came from a branch of Anglo- Protestant stock that made them sensitive to the narrative of Jewish election and the unique, divinely ordained role of the Jews in history. The Christian Zionism and generic Judeophilia of Anglo-American Protestantism is well documented. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the Christian Zionism advocated by Lord Shaftesbury, John Nelson Darby, Laurence Oliphant, William Eugene Blackstone, and many others preceded the advent of modern Jewish Zionism. We see a reflection of this thinking today, of course, in the American Evangelical community. There has been anti-Semitism in America's past, to be sure, but there has been less of it than in any other Euro-Christian-based culture. And when it was at its most virulent in the post-mass immigration period of the 1920s and 1930s, its most notable vanguard was no Protestant but rather the Irish Catholic priest Father Coughlin. To one degree or another, all of David Hackett Fisher's hearth cultures, so brilliantly laid out in his Albion's Seed, were Judeophilic—and that habit of the heart also came down in large part to black Americans through the African-Methodist and other churches. This cultural inheritance goes far to explain the affinity of most Americans today with Israel. Ironically enough, intermarriage constitutes a new factor EFTA01189631 pointed in the same direction, as ever more non-Jews acquire Jewish relatives and, accurately or not, presume their attachment to Israel. It also explains why politicians are reluctant to take anti-Israel positions: They are not just covetous of Jewish support; they know that there are far more Christian voters with strong feelings on the subject than there are Jews. But this, too, is gradually but ineluctably changing. Just as the affinity between Jews and typical Americans will decline as American Jewry's public face becomes more religious, so that affinity will lessen from the other direction as American society becomes less Anglo, less avowedly religious, and especially less Protestant. Both non-Christians and non- Protestant Christians lack traditions of Judeophilia comparable to that of most Protestants, whose Abrahamic, Scripturalist focus makes them more familiar with the Hebrew Bible and more sympathetic with the rhythms and lessons of Jewish history. The percentage of Americans who identify as Protestants fell from 53 percent in 2007 to 48 percent in 2012; sometime during those years the majority of Americans ceased being Protestant for the first time since the birth of the Republic. Given immigration statistics and birthrates, that trend will not only not be reversed, it will accelerate. The data show too that the United States as a whole is fast approaching the point where non-"white" minorities will collectively outnumber "whites," as is already the case in some states and in many large cities and counties. Political consultants for both major parties are keenly aware of these trends, of course, and are plotting strategies accordingly. It may not be fair or justifiable, but a lot of minority people think that Jews are "white" but Palestinians and Arabs are "people of color." The latter are also depicted frequently as oppressed and downtrodden at the hands of "white" Jews in Israel and "white" imperialists elsewhere. As American demography shifts away from "white" Protestants, the narrative of American electoral politics with regard to the Middle East is certain to reflect that change. Even in the Democratic Party, the political home of the vast majority of American Jews since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, rising tones of anti- Israel sentiment can be discerned. Famously, when some delegates to the 2012 Democratic National Convention raised the idea of putting a move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on the party platform, a cascade of boos and hisses erupted from the assembled delegate crowd. Meanwhile, Jews, like most Americans, are increasingly likely to identify EFTA01189632 as independents, and Jews have become increasingly visible in the Republican Party—a fact liable to dilute Jewish political clout as much as or more than the overall shrinking of the size of the community. *** Not all these changes will be bad. The strategic side of the triangle that connects Israel and the United States is a case in point. A little more normalcy in the U.S.-Israel relationship could have several benign effects. Israel has other potential partners in the world, and spreading out Israel's diplomatic-strategic portfolio is probably a good thing in the long term. But some of those new relationships cannot mature because Israel's ties to the United States constrain their possibilities-sales of military technology spring to mind as a case in point. The March 2002 cancellations of Israel's Phalcon AWACs deal with China is the best-known example, but there are plenty of others. Certainly, too, as far as U.S.-Israel relations go, these changes are hardly likely to be catastrophic. There will be no complete flip from a specially intimate relationship to an especially horrendous one. Adjustments will be incremental and hardly pandemonic in character. The special relationship of the past four to five decades has been highly anomalous, and nothing that anomalous lasts for long in human affairs. But many American Jews, who read history in very broad and emotional brushstrokes, tend not to think that way. They are often "flippists," oscillating sharply between exaltation and the darkest pessimism—which aligns with a tendency to believe that anyone who does not agree entirely with their version of Middle Eastern realities must be an enemy, whether an anti-Semite or a "self-hating" Jew. They are not so inclined, as Jews have mostly been in other places and other ages, to say, "This too shall pass." They are instead afflicted by a "gevalt complex" and so are often to be found playing Chicken Little, claiming that the sky is falling or that it fell yesterday but you are too dense to have noticed. There is a reason for the "gevalt complex": That mode of thinking tells us that what amount to religious beliefs are at stake, but not the ones you may think. Since the 1967 War, if not before, non-halakhic Jews in America (and not a few halakhic ones as well) have created, mostly without realizing it or meaning to, a shallow politicized version of Judaism that has made Israel into a substitute deity and the Holocaust that deity's liturgy. EFTA01189633 This explains the most recent Pew poll's finding that vastly more self- identifying Jews than before feel Jewish but are not religious and don't believe in God: Their identity ensemble has become political. Jacob Neusner and others started warning many decades ago that this faux- Judaism is incapable of transmitting genuine Jewish memory to future generations, and they have been proven correct by all the data we now have on assimilation and intermarriage. The reasons are not hard to identify. Of God there are many mysteries, but of any and every political entity, including Israel as a real country rather than as a beatified idol, there are many misanthropies. And what healthy child wants to associate with a community seemingly obsessed with mass murder and eternal victimhood? If indeed the majority of Jews in America need Israel for purposes of their own communal coherence and individual self-esteem far more than Israel needs them, and if their corporate sense of place within American society depends to some degree on that connection, then the decay of the two sides of the triangle to which American Jewry is connected presages a tragedy of that community's own making. Less American Jewish support for a more religious, right-of-center Israel will abet a diminishing affinity between Jewish and American sensibilities that are growing apart from both ends. The erosion of these affinities falls into a strategic context in which "hard" strategic factors no longer parallel and reinforce "soft" cultural ones as they once did. The diminution of strategic closeness between the United States and Israel is doubling back to widen internal American-Jewish and American Jewry-Israel divisions, as well. We may be witnessing the intermediate stages of a death spiral, where the tighter that community wants to hold on to its image of the State of Israel, and to the state's historical prolegomenon in the Holocaust, the more damage it does to itself. That's the way, it would seem, the triangle crumbles. Dr Adam Garfinkle is editor of The American Interest and author of Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed and Used to Explain Nearly Everything. Article 2. The Diplomat EFTA01189634 Am ri a • th on Iran Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett November 4, 2013 -- America's Iran policy is at a crossroads. Washington can abandon its counterproductive insistence on Middle Eastern hegemony, negotiate a nuclear deal grounded in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and get serious about working with Tehran to broker a settlement to the Syrian conflict. In the process, the United States would greatly improve its ability to shape important outcomes there. Alternatively, America can continue on its present path, leading ultimately to strategic irrelevance in one of the world's most vital regions—with negative implications for its standing in Asia as well. U.S. policy is at this juncture because the costs of Washington's post-Cold War drive to dominate the Middle East have risen perilously high. President Obama's self-inflicted debacle over his plan to attack Syria after chemical weapons were used there in August showed that America can no longer credibly threaten the effective use of force to impose its preferences in the region. While Obama still insists "all options are on the table" for Iran, the reality is that, if Washington is to deal efficaciously with the nuclear issue, it will be through diplomacy. In this context, last month's Geneva meeting between Iran and the P5+1 brought America's political class to a strategic and political moment of truth. Can American elites turn away from a self-damaging quest for Middle Eastern hegemony by coming to terms with an independent regional power? Or are they so enthralled with an increasingly surreal notion of America as hegemon that, to preserve U.S. "leadership," they will pursue a course further eviscerating its strategic position? The proposal for resolving the nuclear issue that Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, presented in Geneva seeks answers to these questions. It operationalizes the approach advocated by Hassan Rohani and other Iranian leaders for over a decade: greater transparency on Iran's nuclear activities in return for recognizing its rights as a sovereign NPT signatory —especially to enrich uranium under international safeguards—and removal of sanctions. For years, the Bush and Obama administrations rejected this approach. Now Obama must at least consider it. EFTA01189635 The Iranian package provides greater transparency on Tehran's nuclear activities in two crucial respects. First, it gives greater visibility on the conduct of Iran's nuclear program. Iran has reportedly offered to comply voluntarily for some months with the Additional Protocol (AP) to the NPT —which it has signed but not yet ratified and which authorizes more proactive and intrusive inspections—to encourage diplomatic progress. Tehran would ratify the AP—thereby committing to its permanent implementation—as part of a final deal. Second, the package aims to validate Iran's declarations that its enrichment infrastructure is not meant to produce weapons-grade fissile material. Iran would stop enriching at the near-20 percent level of fissile-isotope purity needed to fuel the Tehran Research Reactor and cap enrichment at levels suitable for fueling power reactors. Similarly, Iran is open to capping the number of centrifuges it would install—at least for some years—at its enrichment sites in Natanz and Fordo. Based on conversations with Iranian officials and political figures in New York in September (during Rohani and Zarif's visit to the UN General Assembly) and in Tehran last month, it is also possible to identify items that the Iranian proposal almost certainly does not include. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has reportedly given President Rohani and his diplomats flexibility in negotiating a settlement—but he has also directed that they not compromise Iran's sovereignty. Thus, the Islamic Republic will not acquiesce to American (and Israeli) demands to suspend enrichment, shut its enrichment site at Fordo, stop a heavy-water reactor under construction at Arak, and ship its current enriched uranium stockpile abroad. On one level, the Iranian package is crafted to resolve the nuclear issue based on the NPT, within a year. Iran's nuclear rights would be respected; transparency measures would reduce the proliferation risks of its enrichment activities below what Washington tolerates elsewhere. On another level, though, the package means to test America's willingness and capability to resolve the issue on this basis. It tests this not just for Tehran's edification, but also for that of other P5+1 states, especially China and Russia, and of rising powers like India and South Korea. America can fail the Iranian test in two ways. First, the Obama administration—reflecting America's political class more broadly—may EFTA01189636 prove unwilling to acknowledge Iran's nuclear rights in a straightforward way, insisting on terms for a deal that effectively suborn these rights and violate Iranian sovereignty. There are powerful constituencies—e.g., the Israel lobby, neoconservative Republicans, their Democratic "fellow travelers," and U.S.-based Iran "xperts"—that oppose any deal recognizing Iran's nuclear rights. They understand that acknowledging these rights would also mean accepting the Islamic Republic as an enduring entity representing legitimate national interests; to do so, America would have to abandon its post-Cold War pretensions to Middle Eastern hegemony. Those pretensions have proven dangerously corrosive of America's ability to accomplish important objectives in the Middle East, and of its global standing. Just witness the profoundly self-damaging consequences of America's invasion and occupation of Iraq, and how badly the "global war on terror" has eviscerated the perceived legitimacy of American purposes in the Muslim world. But, as the drama over Obama's call for military action against Syria indicates, America's political class remains deeply attached to imperial pretense—even as the American public turns away from it. If Washington could accept the Islamic Republic as a legitimate regional power, it could work with Tehran and others on a political solution to the Syrian conflict. Instead, Washington reiterates hubristic demands that President Bashar al-Assad step down before a political process starts, and relies on a Saudi-funded "Syrian opposition" increasingly dominated by al-Qa'ida-like extremists. If Obama does not conclude a deal recognizing Iran's nuclear rights, it will confirm suspicions already held by many Iranian elites—including Ayatollah Khamenei—and in Beijing and Moscow about America's real agenda vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic. It will become undeniably clear that U.S. opposition to indigenous Iranian enrichment is not motivated by proliferation concerns, but by determination to preserve American hegemony—and Israeli military dominance—in the Middle East. If this is so, why should China, Russia, or rising Asian powers continue trying to help Washington—e.g., by accommodating U.S. demands to limit their own commercial interactions with Iran—obtain an outcome it does not actually want? EFTA01189637 America can also fail Iran's test if it is unable to provide comprehensive sanctions relief as part of a negotiated nuclear settlement. The Obama administration now acknowledges what we have noted for some time— that, beyond transitory executive branch initiatives, lifting or even substantially modifying U.S. sanctions to support diplomatic progress will take congressional action. During Obama's presidency, many U.S. sanctions initially imposed by executive order have been written into law. These bills—signed, with little heed to their long-term consequences, by Obama himself—have also greatly expanded U.S. secondary sanctions, which threaten to punish third- country entities not for anything they've done in America, but for perfectly lawful business they conduct in or with Iran. The bills contain conditions for removing sanctions stipulating not just the dismantling of Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but also termination of Tehran's ties to movements like Hizballah that Washington (foolishly) designates as terrorists and the Islamic Republic's effective transformation into a secular liberal republic. The Obama administration may have managed to delay passage of yet another sanctions bill for a few weeks—but Congressional Democrats no less than congressional Republicans have made publicly clear that they will not relax conditions for removing existing sanctions to help Obama conclude and implement a nuclear deal. If their obstinacy holds, why should others respect Washington's high-handed demands for compliance with its extraterritorial (hence, illegal) sanctions against Iran? Going into the next round of nuclear talks in Geneva on Thursday, it is unambiguously plain that Obama will have to spend enormous political capital to realign relations with Iran. America's future standing as a great power depends significantly on his readiness to do so. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett are authors of Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran (New York: Metropolitan, 2013) and teach international relations, he at Penn State, she at American University. Anicic 3. World Affairs Journal EFTA01189638 No Exit: Why the US Can't Leave the Middle East Michael J. Totten America is in a bad mood. In the midst of the worst economy since the 1970s, we're on the verge of losing the war in Afghanistan, the longest we've ever fought, against stupefyingly primitive foes. We sort of won the war in Iraq, but it cost billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and Baghdad is still a violent, dysfunctional mess. The overhyped Arab Spring has been cancelled in Egypt. Liberating Libya led to the assassination of our ambassador. Syria is disintegrating into total war with bad guys on both sides and the US dithering on the sidelines, worried more about saving face at this point than having any significant effect on the facts on the ground. A majority of American voters in both parties have had it. They're just flat- out not interested in spending any more money or lives to help out. Even many foreign policy professionals are fed up. We get blamed for every one of the Middle East's problems, including those it inflicts on itself. How gratifying it would be just to walk away, dust off our hands, and say you're on your own. But we can't. Actually, in Egypt maybe we can. And maybe we should. Hosni Mubarak was a terrible leader and a lukewarm ally at best, but until the Egyptian army arrested him in 2011, Cairo had been part of the American-backed security architecture in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean ever since his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, junked Egypt's alliance with the Soviet Union. The election of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in the wake of the Arab Spring, though, moved Egypt into the "frenemy" column. It's still there under the military rule of General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the new head of state in all but name since the army removed Mohamed Morsi. Sisi is no less hostile to Washington than Morsi was. As Lee Smith put it shortly after the second coup in three years, Egypt's new jefe "sees the United States as little more than a prop, a rag with which he burnishes his EFTA01189639 reputation as a strongman, a village mayor puffing his chest and boasting that he is unafraid to stand up to the Americans." Sisi knows his country and what it takes to appeal to the masses. The whole population—left, right, and center—is as hostile toward the United States as it ever was. Never mind that Americans backed the anti-Mubarak uprising. Never mind that Washington sought good relations with Egypt's first freely elected government in thousands of years. Never mind that the Obama administration refuses to call the army's coup what it plainly was in order to keep Egypt's aid money flowing. None of that matters. The United States and its Zionist sidekick remain at the molten center of Egypt's phantasmagorical demonology. Bribing Egypt with billions of annual aid dollars to maintain its peace treaty with Israel and to keep a lid on radical Islam makes even less sense today than it did when Morsi and the Brotherhood were in charge. Morsi needed that money to prevent Egyptians from starving to death. He had a major incentive to cooperate—or else. But now that the Brothers are out of the picture, partly at the behest of the Saudis, Riyadh says it will happily make up the difference if Washington turns off the aid spigot. Turn it off then, already. Our money buys nothing from Sisi if he can replace it that easily. If he gets the same cash infusion whether or not he listens to the White House, why should he listen to the White House? He isn't our friend. He's only one step away from burning an American flag at a rally. He's plenty motivated for his own reasons to keep radical Islamists in check since they're out to destroy him. And his army is the one Egyptian institution that's not at all interested in armed conflict with Israel because it would suffer more egregiously than anything or anyone else. We're either paying him out of sheer habit or because Washington thinks it might still get something back from its investment. Maybe it will, but it probably won't. Either way, Sisi instantly proved himself more violent and ruthless than Mubarak when he gave the order to gun down hundreds of unarmed civilians. The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood "retaliated" by burning dozens of churches, murdering Christians at random, and shooting policemen does not make what he did okay. He was, for a few days at least, no better than Bashar al-Assad. Giving him money and guns will make us EFTA01189640 no friends but plenty of enemies, especially when his regime proves itself no more capable of halting Egypt's freefall than the last one. Max Boot at the Council on Foreign Relations put it this way in the Los Angeles Times: "It is no coincidence that both Osama bin Laden and [al- Qaeda deputy Ayman al-] Zawahiri hailed from US-allied nations that repressed their own citizens. Both men were drawn to the conclusion that the way to free their homelands was to attack their rulers' patron. It is reasonable to expect that a new generation of Islamists in Egypt, now being taught that the peaceful path to power is no longer open, will turn to violence and that, as long as Washington is seen on the side of the generals, some of their violence will be directed our way." Even if the Egyptian army faces the kind of full-blown Islamist insurgency that ripped through Algeria in the 1990s—which is unlikely, but possible— Cairo will still get all the help it needs from the Gulf, not because the Saudis oppose radical Islam, but because they view the Muslim Brotherhood as the biggest long-term threat to their rule. The case for walking away from Egypt and dusting our hands off is sound. Libya, however, is another matter entirely. Having learned in Iraq that occupying Arab lands is bad for everyone's health, the US helped free Libya of Muammar el-Qaddafi without suffering even one single casualty. We did it all from the skies. The ground was thick with indigenous rebels, so no American ground troops were required. Qaddafi had no friends to come to his rescue and he stood no chance with his feeble and outdated hardware. But then we lost Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others during the long Libyan aftermath, when a terrorist group tied to al-Qaeda attacked the US consulate in Benghazi. It happened on the same day—not coincidentally, on September 11th—that mobs of fanatical Salafists waving al-Qaeda flags rioted and set fires all over the region, using a ludicrous anti-Muhammad video uploaded to YouTube by a crackpot Egyptian "filmmaker" no one had ever heard of before as a pretext. For reasons that still don't make any sense, American officials falsely claimed the Benghazi incident was the result of yet another protest riot gone out of control. But there was no protest or riot in Benghazi related to that video, contrary to Washington's initial clumsy and mendacious public statements. EFTA01189641 Unlike in Egypt and even Tunisia, nobody in Libya protested against the United States for "allowing" a so-called blasphemous video to be uploaded to YouTube. The only demonstrations in Libya that week were against radical Islamists, against the terrorists that murdered Ambassador Stevens. The citizen groundswell against Benghazi's Islamist militia was so intense that its members had to flee into the desert. Libya is a traditional and conservative place, but that does not mean it's Islamist. Two out of three Egyptians voted for Islamist parties in the post- Mubarak parliamentary elections, but in Libya, the National Forces Alliance, a moderate centrist party, won the most seats in 2012. The Justice and Construction Party—the political vehicle for Libya's Muslim Brotherhood—only won ten percent of the vote. The Brotherhood isn't quite as irrelevant in Libya as, say, the Green Party is in the United States, but it's close. Libya's people are not just by and large against the Islamists. They are perhaps friendlier to the West in general and the United States in particular than anyone else in the Arab world. It makes sense if you think about it. Under no theory can the United States be held responsible for Qaddafi's crimes and repression. He was a self- declared enemy of America on the day he took power, and M still be tormenting his hapless citizens like a sadistic mad scientist if Americans hadn't provided air support for the rebels. He received no money, no weapons, no training, no diplomatic cover—nothing—from the United States. Every bad thing Libyans ever heard about Americans came from the internal propaganda organs of the man who kicked them in the face every day for forty-two years. At least some of their geopolitical views resemble those of Eastern Europeans under the communists—if the Americans are the enemies of our tyrannical government, how bad can they be? They are as pro-American as we could ever expect Arab Muslims to be. Libya under Qaddafi had far too much government. Now it does not have enough. The previous regime was one of the most repressive on earth, and when it went down, most institutions—including the army—went with it. The state and its security forces are therefore too weak. They're being rebuilt from scratch and won't be finished for years. EFTA01189642 There is no reason in the world for the US not to associate with or help Prime Minister Ali Zeidan and his colleagues. On the contrary, if the government can't establish a monopoly on the use of force in the lawless parts of the country, Libya could end up an incubator of terrorism like Somalia, Yemen, or Mali, despite the fact that most of its people want nothing to do with it. Syria is the last country we can afford to ignore right now, even though large numbers in both parties—for perfectly logical reasons—are averse to doing anything more than shuddering at a distance. But what happens there is our business because it affects us. Syria isn't Belize. It matters who runs that country, and it matters a lot. Bashar al-Assad's regime is the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism in the Arab world, and it's aligned with the Islamic Republic regime in Iran, the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism in the entire world. Obviously, then, it's in our interest to see him defeated. One of his principal enemies on the home front, though, is the al-Qaeda— linked Nusra Front. Obviously it's not in our interest to see these bin Ladenists replace Assad. The Free Syrian Army is disgruntled at the lackluster assistance the United States has provided, but that's partly because it has been fighting against Assad alongside the Nusra Front, and also because many of its own commanders are also Islamists, even if they're moderate compared with al- Qaeda. The tactical alliance between the two groups is fracturing, and it won't outlast Assad by even a week, but it's enough to make Washington reluctant and skeptical. Americans have always been willing to sacrifice money and lives for allies and friends, but allies and friends who are powerful enough inside Syria to affect outcomes are thin on the ground. Early in the game, the administration could have tried to arm, fund, and train a politically moderate fighting force inside Syria, but that will be a lot more difficult now that the Turks and the Gulf Arabs are backing their own proxies who don't share our interests or values. So there are those who say let them kill each other because, as Daniel Pipes argues, it "keeps them focused locally" and "prevents either one from emerging victorious." It brings to mind Henry Kissinger's famous quip about the Iran-Iraq war. "It's too bad they can't both lose." EFTA01189643 The operative word in Kissinger's sentence is "can't." Opposing sides don't zero each other out. That's not how wars work, or end. Wars end when somebody wins. The worst-case scenario from an American point of view is that they both win. That's an actual possibility. Syria could fracture into pieces. In a way, it already has. An Alawite rump state backed by Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia existing alongside a Sunnistan ruled by Islamists could very well emerge as a semi-permanent reality of Middle Eastern geography. At the very least, the United States needs a policy that reduces the likelihood of that most horrible outcome. A few months ago, I asked the Lebanese MP Samy Gemayel what he thought about Washington's confusion in Syria. "Before you can know what to do," he said, "you have to know what you want." One way or another, we should want both Assad and al-Qaeda to lose. But they aren't going to lose simultaneously. They'll need to lose consecutively. One of them first has to win. So fight and defeat Bashar al-Assad, or support someone who will do it instead. Then fight and defeat the Nusra Front, or support someone who will do it instead. Or face the fact that one or both are going to win. If t