03/03/10 – Jim Lobe – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our first guest on the show today is Jim Lowe.
He is Washington Bureau Chief for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
We feature virtually everything he writes at Antiwar.com on the blog, as well as in regular article format.
You'll find Jim's blog at LoweBlog.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Okay.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining me today.
Okay, so my question for you is this.
Most presidents, and, you know, this is overly broad, but it seems like, you know, if you look at Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr. here, well, maybe that doesn't count.
They basically put off trying to do anything about a two-state solution or working out a peace deal in Palestine until the last minute, and then they fail, you know, like Annapolis and all that.
But Barack Obama took office, put his foot right on the third rail, and said, let's do this.
I mean it.
We're going to have a two-state solution.
We're going to work something out, and as proof that I mean it, I'm sending in George Mitchell, and we're going to do this.
And yet, it seems like everything's all falling apart.
You even quote James Baker III here, former Secretary of State, accusing Barack Obama of caving in to Benjamin Netanyahu.
What's happened?
How did this all fall apart in just a year, Jim?
Well, I don't know the specific mechanics of why Obama's not been more aggressive in following through on his early pledges, but I think it's consistent with a lot of the way he's handled any number of issues.
He states very ambitious targets, particularly during the campaign, but subsequent to it as well, and then tends to back down when it proves very, very difficult indeed.
I think with respect to Israel-Palestine, I think he and his administration made a number of assumptions that weren't really well-founded.
I think one of the key ones was that certain Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia, would be willing to make certain kinds of offers to Israel that would take them in the general direction of normalization in return for Israel's agreement to truly freeze settlements, as it's actually been obliged to do under the Quartet's roadmap for some years now.
Whereas I think that was a fundamental misunderstanding.
I think the Arab position had been pretty clear that it felt that the onus, especially since the roadmap was published in 2003, was on Israel to simply stop settlements, and I think the Arabs were encouraged in that by Obama's own indications that he believed Israel should stop settlements, and when Netanyahu called his bluff and said, I'm sorry, we're not stopping settlements, particularly in the absence of any significant moves by the Arabs toward normalization or toward some acceptance of Israel beyond what they've done in the past, the administration decided it was too costly to insist on that fundamental demand of stopping settlements.
It was politically too costly.
And I think they also underestimated the degree of resistance within Congress and the strength of what's been called the Israel lobby, that is the more right-wing leadership of those organizations which make up what's called the Israel lobby.
Well, of all the things to be naive about, what an uphill battle it might be to really try to force a settlement in Palestine.
It seems like anybody would assume that this is going to be the toughest thing of all.
I mean, that's why he really laid down the gauntlet in Cairo and said, we're really doing this.
I wonder if you think that Hillary Clinton made this more difficult.
I remember reading something in Haaretz, I guess maybe a month or two ago, about how the Obama administration, I guess the White House, was beside itself because Hillary Clinton had overstated Obama's position in such a way that Netanyahu had to say no way, and then Obama would be in a position of having to accept that, and the whole thing would be sabotaged.
Do you think that that's even right, or whether that was purposeful or not?
You mean when Hillary said about six months in that we mean an absolute freeze in settlements?
Yeah, I think that's what it was.
And then they said that Obama had to then come out and say, yeah, that's right, but that's not what he was really pushing.
But it was, I guess it could be construed as her making a demand on Netanyahu that she would know that he would absolutely buck, and then Obama would be in the position of just having to back down from there on.
I don't think it was deliberate.
I don't think Clinton is tougher on Israel than Obama is, but I think it was just that, what you described.
I think it was an overstatement, but I don't think it was necessarily deliberate.
But did it create much difficulty?
I mean, that was really a problem, right?
She created the perception that the United States was insisting on a complete freeze in settlements, and then Mahmoud Abbas clearly used her statement as a way of endorsing it entirely as the Palestinian position, and thus he found it much more difficult to, and still finds it much more difficult to back down from that, even since Obama himself effectively backed down on it, as did Clinton when she said that Netanyahu's commitment not to approve any new settlements over a 10-month period was kind of unprecedented and a major victory, all of which was pretty much nonsense.
So I think it did create a lot of problems, but I don't think it was deliberate on Clinton's part.
Now, in this piece at the Lobo...
Clinton tends to like to talk tough, and I think that was basically the problem.
She was talking tough.
Well, and I think there are a couple other examples of that, where she kind of went off the cuff and sort of changed policy accidentally out loud.
Yeah, I mean, on China and human rights and so on.
I mean, she has a tendency to do that, and I don't know why that is, but I think it may have to do with the fact that she was the first credible, a really credible woman candidate who had the shot at the presidency and wanted to reassure everybody during her campaign how tough she was.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it goes to me.
It's just another example of how she's not qualified to be the Secretary of State, much less the president, when she can't...
You know, her job is to transmute the policies of the boss, not whatever she wants to say off the cuff, but I guess that's a different thing.
Let me ask you about James Baker here.
In your piece at the Low Blog, where Baker accused Obama of caving in on Israel-Palestine, he points out at the end here that the Palestinians, or I guess this means Mahmoud Abbas's PA in the West Bank, they're talking more and more now about a one-state solution rather than a two-state solution.
Is that going to really change things, you think, Jim?
Well, I think whenever the Israelis, Jewish Israelis, that is, are confronted with one state, it gets their attention, because I think that's something that is unacceptable to the vast majority of Jewish Israelis.
And I think the point that Baker was making, as indeed Barack has made in the last month, the defense minister, as has Jimmy Carter made, as even did the former Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, is that if you don't go for a two-state solution, you're going to have a one-state solution, and if you're going to try to enforce continued supremacy of the Jewish supremacy in a one state, it's going to be an apartheid state.
And that kind of logic, I think, freaks out most Israelis.
So I think it's true, Palestinians are talking more and more about a one-state solution, but I think it's primarily designed to get attention on the part of Jewish Israelis who are absolutely dead set against such a solution, because obviously a democratic state would lead eventually, and quite soon, to an Arab majority, and that's something they absolutely oppose, and the alternative would be an apartheid state, and an apartheid state is probably not going to be supported for very long by the West.
Is it clear what Benjamin Netanyahu wants?
It's not particularly clear to me.
I don't know anybody to whom it's particularly clear.
I mean, I think Netanyahu is out for Netanyahu, and I think he would like to be a historical figure, but at the same time, I think he's deeply, deeply conflicted, even more conflicted than somebody like Olmert, who came from the same strong right-wing position, but by the time he became Prime Minister, it was very clear that Israel is going to have to make major compromises in order to avoid precisely the result that we were just talking about.
And Olmert made virtually no progress in the direction, but at least he was willing to say that truth.
Netanyahu, I think, is just more ingrained into that right-wing ideology, and so he won't even say it, in part to keep his coalition intact, but I think if he thought there was a way that he could come out on top and be regarded as a great historic figure, he would probably be willing to drop some of his more extreme coalition partners and join with Zippy Livni and move, if he felt that there was sufficient pressure that could justify such an action, and I think he might, it's possible, it's conceivable, he would move in the direction that Olmert pointed to, but I think it's a very long shot at this point, simply because the right seems so strong in Israel, and I think he's really, really wary of doing anything that would alienate it, but that's just my personal opinion, I don't have any specific expertise.
Well, I remember reading back in the days of Ariel Sharon, I guess when he was first coming back to power, and they said that most Israelis wanted, Jewish Israelis wanted a two-state solution, they wanted to do land for peace, but the way they looked at it was, if the Americans are not insisting on it, then that means we know the government's not going to do it, in which case we want Likud, because they will provide some good right-wing security, and so unless we're going to have a peace deal, we want the right-wingers in here, and I wonder whether you think that dynamic still plays, where if America really was serious, the people of Israel would be much more serious about supporting peace policies there.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's what Baker is saying, certainly people like Scowcroft and Brzezinski and Henry Siegman, and many other foreign policy realists have been saying this for quite a long time, and I think Sharon was a very, very canny politician who understood this quite well, in the absence of outside pressure, and particularly American pressure, and in the absence of some kind of catastrophic development, or near-catastrophic development, like, say, the 1973 war, Israelis just basically take things day by day, and to the extent that they feel they're secure, they'll harken to the right in the country.
Jim, you're a hell of a great reporter, thank you.
Sure, my pleasure.
Everybody, that's Jim Loeb, he's Washington Bureau Chief for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net, and he keeps the great blog, Loeblog, at loeblog.com.
You can also find him all over the place at antiwar.com, and we'll be right back after this.
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