September 30, 2007 2:34

Spin Dr. Rice

A state of denial about the real Middle East? A forced effort to salvage Bush's legacy? A stubborn determination to persist with flawed policies? What to make of Condi Rice's spin (such as here and here) in New York this week, as she rallied support for Bush's proposed international meeting on the Middle East and laid down her narrative of what the administration has accomplished in the region thus far.

Some Middle East musings on a Sunday afternoon:

Rice: "I'd certainly consider it a breakthrough if this meeting, which it must do, takes us from... a pretty strong commitment on the part of the [Israeli and Palestinian] leaders to try and lay a foundation for the two-state solution to a next step toward that two-state solution. I can't tell you right now whether that means that they find some process by which to make further progress on understandings, whether it means that they actually start negotiations."

The dangerous Middle East crisis requires urgent, meaningful and principled attention. Bush's push for an international meeting seems to be turning out to be so belated, half-hearted and lacking vision that Rice's spin sets the bar pretty low for success. Hence, any "meeting" that produces a "next step" can be hailed as a "breakthrough." Such is the administration's effort that two months into the preparations, Rice still isn't sure what the meeting's purpose is--for the parties to achieve vague "progress on understandings," or "actually start negotiations."

Rice: "I was just at the AHLC meeting that Norway chaired, which is the donor coordination mechanism for the Palestinians, and it was quite a remarkable atmosphere of guarded optimism."

Or was that gloom? Rice's spin seeks some positive buzz around a peace effort that is clearly in trouble. The donors attending the meeting are aware of the economic catastrophe that has befallen the Palestinian territories since the breakdown of the peace process and especially since the aid embargo imposed after Hamas won democratic elections. A new World Bank report says that GDP has dropped a third Gaza since 1999 and that a third of Gazans live in poverty.

Rice: The reason for the donors' "guarded optimism" is that "for the first time in a long time, the Palestinian-Israeli track is moving."

Spin, which attempts to downplay the evident lack of actual progress thus far in the Olmert-Abbas talks. Little wonder about that: it's an Israeli prime minister, whose popularity dove into single digits after the 2006 Lebanon war, and now faces a fraud investigation over a home purchase, holding informal chats--even Rice acknowledges that they are not "negotiations" yet--with a Palestinian president who doesn't control any of his territory and whose party lost the last elections. More would be achieved if an American president formulated a blueprint based on past promising negotiations, seized the opportunity provided by the 2002 Arab peace offer, brought the pair together and banged heads. What has Rice's polite coaxing achieved? After meeting Rice two weeks ago, Abbas bluntly complained in her presence that Bush's peace effort still lacked credibility and trust, and that Israel needed to halt Jewish settlements and construction of the separation wall and end the economic closure and invasions of Palestinian areas.

Rice: "Step by step, from where they were, they've come a very, very long way. They are now discussing...these core issues [borders, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem] for the first time since 2000."

More spin, to downplay the actual peace-process backsliding that has occurred during the Bush presidency. Rice's "very, very long way" is progress only by the standards of an administration that until recently didn't try to achieve much. The Israeli-Palestinian talks are still nowhere near the level they were during Clinton's last month in office. Despite difficulties such as the intifadeh, Clinton somehow managed to continue mediation throughout his two terms. Bush, on the other hand, took a conscious policy decision to break off U.S. dialogue with the Palestinian leadership, thus contributing to a political breakdown that was disastrous for Israelis and Palestinians alike. The parties have not "come a very, very long way"; they're making baby steps to pick up where they were before Bush entered the Oval Office.

Rice: "We've had a series of steps, I think starting with the President's declarations in 2002, moving through Sharon's Herzliya speech in 2003 about dividing the land and accepting the Palestinian state, moving through the much maligned roadmap... elections in the Palestinian territories...that brought Hamas to leadership, Hamas' recognition then that it could not govern, Hamas' decision then to launch the coup d'etat in Gaza, which while it has created a difficult situation did then refocus attention on the Palestinians who are prepared to support the two-state solution, a good government in the Palestinian territories then leading to the breakthrough, I think, with Israelis that you're seeing now."

More spin, attempting to depict as progress how Bush's policy to isolate rather than talk with the Palestinians blew up in his face. It is the ensuing chaos in the West Bank and Gaza that compelled Bush to extend America's belated support for a two-state solution and Sharon to abandon the fantasy of perpetual control over Palestinian territories.

Rice: Bush's policies "have led us to a place where you have an Iraq in which you no longer have a dictator who was an avowed enemy of the United States, but yes, a fragile democratic government that actually is going to be friendly to the United States."

Despite Bush's untruths about WMD and Al Qaeda links, the spin to justify the Iraq invasion will never cease. Here, Rice employs the Arab bogeyman approach--whoever opposes American policies, Saddam, bin Laden, Arafat, whoever, is simplistically cast as a sworn enemy--that has led to confused thinking and calamity in the past. (Historical note: We'll grant Rice that bin Laden is an avowed enemy of the United States. Saddam, for all his criminal behavior, was not. The Reagan administration resumed diplomatic relations with Baghdad, signaling its appreciation of Saddam's war against Khomeini's Iran. One Donald Rumsfeld was part of that scene and shook hands with Saddam himself in Baghdad. When Saddam was threatening Kuwait on the eve of his 1990 invasion, Bush 41's ambassador told Saddam the U.S. does not take sides in intra-Arab squabbles. When Saddam attacked, Bush changed his mind, drove Saddam out of Kuwait and launched sanctions that drove Iraqis backwards toward the pre-industrial era.)

Rice: "I think that what you are beginning to see is a fairly wide recognition that whatever you think about how the United States got into Iraq, that an American commitment to Iraq--not at the levels that we are now, but an American commitment to Iraq for some significant period of time is going to be critical not just to stabilizing Iraq, but to stabilizing the Middle East."

Rice spins the "wide recognition" as a ringing endorsement of Bush's current strategy for Iraq, but it's more like Colin Powell's famous Pottery Barn rule, "You break it, you own it." Now that Bush's invasion and bungled follow-up caused a political tsunami, yes, even many war critics realize that it will be a problem if we just pull our finger out of the dike.

Rice: "There is a narrative that says that the Middle East was perfectly stable and then we decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein, we decided... that Yasser Arafat was not a man of peace and so we wouldn't deal with him, and so we didn't - decided not to pursue a Palestinian state and by the way, we introduced all this notion about democracy and that destabilized things and why can't we just go back to the Middle East as it was."

The spin tries to show that the Middle East isn't any more of a mess than it was when Bush came to office. However, it is indisputable that Bush's decisions to isolate Arafat and overthrow Saddam--whether you are for or against them--have been followed by a palpable rise in violence, death and political instability. (By the way, whose "narrative" said the Middle East was "perfectly stable"? Hasn't the Middle East always been a synonym for volatiity?)

Rice: "I would just remind people what the Middle East was. The Middle East was a place in which in 2001, we inherited a situation in which the Camp David process had collapsed, Arafat had declared the second Intifada, Ariel Sharon had been brought to power not to make peace with the Palestinians, but to defeat them."

If Rice's spin expresses her true understanding of recent Middle East history, she should save everybody the plane fare and cancel Bush's international meeting now. The Camp David process did not collapse until Bush arrived in office. Clinton came close to negotiating an agreement and was still trying to do so in his last weeks as president. When Bush arrived, he immediately abandoned Clinton's active mediation to close the remaining gap, snubbed Arafat and embraced an Israeli prime minister who had spent a career trying to destroy Palestinian leadership and settle the Palestinian territories with Jews. It might have saved Israelis and Palestinians considerable grief had Bush possessed the statesmanship to persuade Sharon that trying to "defeat" rather than deal with the Palestinians was a recipe for another Middle East disaster.

Rice: If you look at where we are now, you would not have guessed that in 2007, we would be talking about an international conference to perhaps move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Why not? Bush could very well have done what his father, in fact, did in 1991 and organize an international peace conference in 2001. Palestinians and Israelis--not Sharon's party, agreed--had come tantalizingly close to a historical settlement at Camp David. Trust broke down, and then the talks collapsed completely when Bush withdrew U.S. mediation, but the ideas remain in play even today. What a difference it might have made if Bush had sought to use America's powerful influence and moral authority to sustain the peace process, instead of encouraging Israel's right-wing government to unilaterally impose its policies on the Palestinians and the region.

Rice: "In 2001...you had a Middle East which had a kind of little secret, which was that these authoritarian regimes in the Middle East were providing no potential outlet for legitimate, healthy political competition. But there was plenty of political competition; it was just taking place in a radical mosque."

Rice's spin implies that thanks to Bush, democracy is on the way. Actually, the Arab authoritarian regimes haven't budged much on freedoms. Lately, they are clamping down as much as ever. See the State Department's Human Rights report for 2006. And, guess what? Bush's coziness with "these authoritarian regimes," thanks to the rise of the Islamists and Bush's problems with Iraq and Iran, is improving by the day.

Rice: "In 2001, you had Syrian forces occupying Lebanon for decades, Hizballah in complete control of the south. That gave way to a Lebanese war and you now have, admittedly, a fragile government in Lebanon, but Lebanese forces throughout the country, Syrian forces out, et cetera."

Rice is still trying to spin Lebanon as a Bush success story, but Lebanon is rather a case study in what has been too often wrong with American policy. Syria's troops invaded Lebanon in 1976 with an American green light to stop a civil war; it became an "occupation." Hizballah was created by Iran in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that was at least amber-lighted by Washington. Olmert with Rice's ill-advised backing launched another Lebanese war in 2006 that brought few results and has jeopardized the "fragile government" that Rice claims to support. Lebanese forces are stationed throughout the country now, but Hizballah remains the powerhouse. Syrian troops are out, but that's primarily due to a mass uprising to protest Hariri's assassination, and Syria's influence remains pervasive. There has been no successful outcome in Lebanon, and won't be until the broader Arab-Israeli conflict is properly addressed and resolved. Yet, the fact is that Bush has done nothing to promote an Israeli-Syrian deal over the Golan Heights in seven years.

Rice: "Perhaps most importantly, in 2001, you had Saddam Hussein in power taking shots at our aircraft as we patrolled no-fly zones and I remember one of the earliest discussions that we had was, what if he got lucky and brought one of them down. You had Saddam Hussein making a mockery of the sanctions that had been put to him through the oil-for-food program, malnutrition rates rising in Iraq because of the sanctions, and Saddam Hussein still threatening his neighbors and with an insatiable appetite to one day restart his weapons of mass destruction programs. Yeah, now it's a fragile government in Iraq, but he's gone."

More spin to justify Iraq, but the administration's contradictions are as evident as ever. We invaded because Saddam was "taking shots" at U.S. warplanes and Bush was afraid he might get "lucky"? Most Americans would take a downed pilot or two rather than nearly 4,000--and counting-- U.S. troops deaths. Because Saddam was making a mockery of sanctions that were strangling his economy and making America look inhumane? Bush certainly taught Saddam a lesson he'll never forget. Because he had an insatiable appetite (those insatiable Arabs!) to restart WMD programs? Wait a minute, Bush said he already had done that.

Rice: "I think that the decisions that were taken in 2001, 2002, 2003 have actually created new opportunities. We just have a few months to try and seize them."

More spin to shore up Bush's legacy, a stretch that deserves to be in the Spin Hall of Fame. In canceling America's mediation of the peace process, refusing to talk to elected Palestinian governments (whether Arafat or Hamas), invading Iraq and sparking a civil war there, Bush was actually creating "new opportunities" for the U.S. to bring peace to the Israelis and Palestinians? (Hmmm, arsonists create new opportunities for fire fighters, too.

Rice: "There are some reasons to believe that there might be some ways to make progress there, largely having to do with the emergence of a Palestinian leadership in Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad that really does accept the two-state solution, accepts Israel's right to exist, accepts the renunciation of violence, and seems to be very devoted to weeding out corruption and fighting terrorism... President Bush... over the last several years has really changed the terms of the debate about the Palestinian-Israeli issue to one about fighting terrorism, to one about the creation of Palestinian institutions that are democratic and clean and can govern for the Palestinian people, not accepting, for instance, Yasser Arafat, who both had a foot in terrorism and a big foot in corruption."

Rice's spin that American can finally mediate the peace process again because Bush found a Palestinian worthy of his efforts reflects the mindset that has led to so many past failures. To paraphrase Israeli statesman Yitzak Rabin, who did make a peace deal, you don't make peace with friends, you make it with enemies. For decades, neither Israel nor the U.S. deemed Arafat a "partner" for peace. After the 1987 intifadeh threatened Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, Rabin decided Arafat was a partner, after all. When his successors didn't get the deal they demanded, they cast Arafat out as unworthy of being a partner. The question of whether to seek a deal with Palestinians has little to do with whether this or that leader renounces violence, weeds out corruption or fights terrorism. Rather, you seek peace because it is in your interests to do so, and if the Palestinian leadership has the willingness to make a deal, too, and the political support to back it up.

Rice: "It is also a time when the Arab states are really concerned about Iran... It has caused the Arab states to reach out in ways that they haven't for a long time to think about how they might move - how we might move an Israeli-Arab track as well as the Israeli-Palestinian track forward."

In spinning that the Arabs are finally wising up and seeing things Bush's way, Rice is revealing the mindset problem again. Rice is implying that the U.S. can leverage Arab fears about an ascendant Iran in getting them to do things--like pressuring the Palestinians to accept a dubious deal--that they weren't willing to do before. But a Middle East settlement that has the wide popular support needed to make it lasting will only come about through addressing the legitimate interests as well as rights of all the parties--not by getting "these authoritarian regimes," as Rice herself derisively calls them, to strong-arm their Palestinians and Syrian brothers into making a quick deal.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo