Middle East Inside Line: "Warm" Turkish-Israeli Relations; Latest on Israel-Palestine Talks

Ankara's "Friendly Face" to Israel: Weeks after reports alleging that Ankara had been threatened by the US with a cut-off of military transfers unless ties with West Jerusalem improved, senior Turkish officials currently visiting Washington announced their commitment to preserving warm relations with Israel.

The Latest from Israel-Palestine-Washington: Haaretz reports that the Palestinian Authority submitted a paper, prepared by Israeli jurists, saying that --- contrary to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claim --- Israel has the authority to freeze construction on private land. The PA demanded that the Obama Administration press for an extension of the freeze to East Jerusalem fr.

However, Haaretz reports,  from sources "close to the Obama Administration", that Washington will be urge Palestinians to soften their stance on Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor's proposal offering the continuation of construction in large settlement blocs but not in isolated settlements. In response to this "concession", land from Area C, which is both governed and controlled by Israel, will be transferred to Area B which is controlled by Israelis but governed by Palestinians.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has proposed the continuation of settlement constructions in parallel with the "natural growth rate", stated on Wednesday that the de facto freeze in East Jerusalem cannot continue after 26 September:

Presently there are 1,000 housing units on the table in Ramot, another 600 housing units in neighborhoods like Gilo, east Talpiot, Har Homa and Pisgat Ze’ev. What, does someone expect that we will continue to freeze 1,600 housing units that went through all the [bureaucratic] procedures?

Pressure on Netanyahu Inside Israel: Speaking at a conference on Tuesday, Kadima Chairwoman Tzipi Livni accused Netanyahu of not being able to prevent the discrediting and delegitimising of Israel at the international level. She welcomed Netanyahu's decision to enter direct talks but warned him: "I hope the prime minister won't enter the talks as a favor to the Palestinians, or to the US, but rather that he will understand that this is in our best interest."

Ministers from the Labor Party are reportedly applying pressure on party chairman Ehud Barak to leave the coalition if Netanyahu turns toward the extreme right and clashes with Obama next month.

Iran-Israel-US: Goldberg Journalism "If You Build This War, It Will Come"

I have read the "analysis" that may well dominate US-based chatter today: Jeffrey Goldberg's lengthy projection of high-level Israeli opinion on a aerial attack on Iran.

Here's Goldberg's hook-line:

What is [most] likely...is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran --- possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft.

Let's call this for what it is. Jeffrey Goldberg is not functioning as an analyst here. He is not even carrying out the fundamental task of a reporter. He is serving as a spokesman for the Israeli Government in its attempt to put psychological pressure on Iran, to block any resumption of talks on uranium enrichment, and possibly to push Washington into acceptance of, if not support for, Israel's military action.

Goldberg's piece has no substance as a critique of the political, diplomatic, and military situation, for it is void of any information of --- as opposed to rhetoric about --- the state of Iran's nuclear programme and its international strategy. It is void of any information about Washington's perspective and approach, including the option --- very much "on the table", to use the cliche invoked for military action --- of discussions with Tehran.

"The Arabs" do appear for a couple of sentences, but only to have their perspectives simplified and twisted into support of an Israeli attack.



Goldberg's sole attention is to pass on and elevate the rhetoric of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his advisors. (The author claims authority from 40+ interviews with Israelis inside and outside the government, but they are merely murmurs amidst the loud declarations of Netanyahu and equally loud projection by Goldberg.)

It may well be that Israel has decided on military action by next spring, but we don't know that and neither does Goldberg. All we really know --- and I hope, for the sake of some integrity, so does he --- is that the Israeli leadership want him to think that.

And they want him to write that --- in an "intellectual" US periodical, where the New York-Washington political corridor will pick this us as received wisdom, rather than a slick propaganda operation.

I don't write this note as a rejection of the military option. However, if a writer is going to advocate that option, it should be done so openly and honestly, not disguised as "reportage". It should be done so on the basis of information from a range of sources, locations, and perspectives, not as a conduit for the manoeuvres of one actor in the political drama.

If Goldberg's piece receives undeserved attention as a considered definition of the state of the Iran-Israel-US relationship, then I will post a detailed dissection of its artifices and distortions.

But not now. Because for me, if one is concerned with news and, indeed, issues of justice and humanity, there are matters far more important --- yes, more important than boys-and-toys posturing on aerial warfare --- to attend to today, tomorrow, and the day after that.

UPDATED Iran-US Special: The 4-Step Collapse of Obama's "Engagement" Into Confusion

UPDATE 7 August: Stephen Walt jumps in with this analysis....

Right now, Washington simply assumes that Iran won't negotiate unless it is coerced into doing so by outside pressure. At the same time, Tehran has made it clear that it wants to negotiate but refuses to do so under pressure. The predictable result is the current stalemate. You'd think the U.S. government could come up with something creative to try to overcome this impasse, instead of just hoping for a miracle.

UPDATE 0940 GMT: An interesting clue that, amidst the confusion, the discussion of US-Iran talks is very much alive. Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the head of the Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, has said that dialogue with Washington requires the permission of the Supreme Leader.

Iran-US Special: Obama Extends His Hand “Engagement, Not Conflict”

This time yesterday I was confidently declaring that President Obama had renewed his approach for engagement with Iran. David Ignatius of The Washington Post was putting out the message, from a specially-arranged briefing of selected journalists: "President Obama put the issue of negotiating with Iran firmly back on the table Wednesday in an unusual White House session with journalists. His message was that even as U.N. sanctions squeeze Tehran, he is leaving open a 'pathway' for a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue."

Ignatius' narrative fit a pattern which, while interrupted by the breakdown in nuclear discussions last October between Washington, Tehran, and other countries, was far from obsolete. Noting the recent US escalation in Afghanistan and Iran's role in any attempt at a resolution, I assessed, "While the nuclear issue was the first one to be addressed --- given its symbolic position, it had to be resolved before other matters could be tackled --- engagement with Tehran would also pay dividends for US policy in the Middle East, including Iraq, and Afghanistan as well as removing a troublesome issue in relations with Russia and China."

All very logical. Yet, within 24 hours, Obama's initiative has become a tangle of conflicting reports and political counter-attacks, taking us not towards engagement but towards the challenges I identified at the end of yesterday's analysis: "The conflict inside the Administration has taken its toll...The pressure from the US Congress [and opponents outside the Congress] — as well as the war chatter — will not evaporate."

Four Steps to Collapse:

1. THE CONFUSED MESSAGE

If, as Ignatius claims, the President was re-presenting the strategy of negotiating with Iran, others in the room failed to hear this. Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic opens his account: "The session, as envisioned by his aides, was designed to convince his audience that Obama's policy of engagement joined with sanctions is having the desired effect of isolating Iran from the international community even as the country's pursuit of a bomb has not abated."

So pressure, pressure, and only pressure, as Ambinder features Administration optimism that Russia is now on Washington's side. There is not a single word in his report about negotiations.

Robert Kagan recounts, "[Obama] did make clear that the door was, of course, open to the Iranians to change their minds, that sanctions did not preclude diplomacy and engagement, and that if the Iranians ever decide they wanted to 'behave responsibly' by complying with the demands of the international community, then the United States was prepared to welcome them." This, however, is only an annex to the Pressure message: "The 'news' out of this briefing was that the administration wanted everyone to know how tough it was being on Iran."

Peter David of The Economist has perhaps the fullest account of the discussion. Like Ambinder and Kagan, he notes the Administration line that sanctions are pinching Tehran. His presentation on negotiations is not that Obama advocated them but that he pointed to the possibility:

it was important to set out for the Iranians a clear set of steps that America would accept as proof that the regime was not pursuing a bomb: they needed "a pathway". With hard work, America and Iran could thaw a 30-year period of antagonism—provided Iran began to act responsibly.

Mr Obama said that the United States had received no direct contacts from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, though high-level officials in Iran had investigated the possibility of re-engaging with the P5-plus-one (the permanent members of
the Security Council plus Germany). America would be willing to talk bilaterally to Iran "in the context" of a P5 process that was moving forward. There should meanwhile be a "separate track" on which America could co-operate with Iran on other issues, such as Afghanistan and drugs, for example.

2. THE ANTI-ENGAGEMENT COUNTER-ATTACK

Ambinder and David have not been amongst those beating the drum for confrontation with Tehran and, while Kagan has been a staunch advocate of an aggressive US foreign policy, including the 2003 Iraq war, he has been supportive of Obama's approach on sanctions.

For another journalist at the meeting, however, the agenda was how to stoke the fire of a showdown with Iran. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic omitted any reference to negotiations, whether Obama advocated them or merely saw the possibility of discussions. Instead, he fit the confusion of journalists' accounts into this pre-determined conclusion:

I am skeptical, though, about the possibilities of a diplomatic breakthrough, for two reasons, one structural, and one related to the state of Iran's opposition: The structural reason is simple; one of the pillars of Islamic Republic theology is anti-Americanism, and it would take an ideological earthquake to upend that pillar. And then there's the problem of the Green Movement. If the Iranian opposition were vibrant and strong, the regime might have good reason to be sensitive to the economic impact of the new sanctions package. But the opposition is weak and divided. The regime has shown itself to be fully capable of suppressing dissent through terror. So I'm not sure how much pressure the regime feels to negotiate with the West.

This is more than enough ammunition for those wanting to shoot down engagement. Max Boot soon wrote for Commentary: "What’s scary is that the illusions about 'outreach' in the upper reaches of this administration have still not been dispelled, despite a year and a half of experience (to say nothing of the previous 30 years of experience), which would suggest that the mullahs aren’t misunderstood moderates who are committed to “peaceful co-existence.”

3. THE FACTIONS INSIDE THE ADMINISTRATION

So what exactly did happen in the Obama briefing to scramble his message? Different journalists, from their own positions or just human nature, will hear --- and even try to produce --- different messages. Kagan, without naming Ignatius, writes:

Some of the journalists present, upon hearing the president's last point about the door still being open to Iran, decided that he was signaling a brand-new diplomatic initiative. They started peppering Obama with questions to ferret out exactly what 'new' diplomatic actions he was talking about.

There's an even more important factor here, however, one that Kagan points to --- but does not fully appreciate, at least in his column --- in his next sentences:

After the president left, they continued probing the senior officials. This put the officials in an awkward position: They didn't want to say flat out that the administration was not pursuing a new diplomatic initiative because this might suggest that the administration was not interested in diplomacy at all. But they made perfectly clear -- in a half-dozen artful formulations -- that, no, there was no new diplomatic initiative in the offing.

As one bemused senior official later remarked to me, if the point of the briefing had been diplomacy, then the administration would have brought its top negotiators to the meeting, instead of all the people in charge of putting the squeeze on Iran.

Kagan's point is incomplete. The Obama Administration has been split, perhaps since it came into office, between a faction who want genuine discussions with Iran and one that only thinks of discussions as the set-up, once there is an Iranian "rejection", for tougher economic and diplomatic measures.

So those who are on the "positive" side for discussions give their perspective to Ignatius --- thus the important reference to the US involvement as Afghanistan (which is not any other account of Obama's remarks) as a factor, if not a necessity, for conversations with Iran --- and those on the "negative" side become the "bemused senior official" in Kagan's article.

Joe Klein of Time, who was also present, captures the confusion: "This was a pretty strange meeting. The President's comments were on the record; his team's comments were on background, meaning that the individuals speaking could only be identified as 'senior Administration officials'."

And that's not all. For the spinning of the story was also going on beyond Obama's briefing. As I noted yesterday in the anlaysis, one or more unnamed officials sought out George Jahn of the Associated Press, leaking two letters (or selected extracts from the letters) from Iran to the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The intent --- supported by Jahn's presentation and failure to put quotes into context, let alone present the letters --- was to rule out any possibility of productive dialogue: "Letters by Tehran’s envoys to top international officials and shared with The Associated Press suggest major progress is unlikely, with Tehran combative and unlikely to offer any concessions."

Such manoeuvres  in turn prop up critics of engagement like Ed Morrissey as they put out the gospel: "Time is running out on stopping the mullahs from their doomsday pursuit, and open hands to the regime have hardly been effective over the last several years, including the last eighteen months.  Either we need to get serious about other options or concede that we’re not serious at all."

4. CAN OBAMA RESCUE HIS ENGAGEMENT?

There's even a black-comedy irony in this story. Flynt Leverett, one of the foremost advocates of a US engagement with Iran for a "grand bargain" on bilateral and regional matters, joins others in dismissing the possibility of productive discussions, not because the Administration is too "soft" (as Goldberg and Boot argue) but because of "the Administration’s maladroit handling of its diplomatic exchanges with Tehran, poor grasp of on-the-ground realities in Iran, and mixed messaging....The President feels he must call in Western journalists to signal Tehran is a sad commentary on the Obama Administration’s failure to develop a discreet and reliable channel through which to communicate with Iranian leaders."

I suspect Leverett, because of his entrenched dislike of US foreign policy, goes a bit far with his unsupported assertion of the "failure to develop a discreet and reliable channel". I'm more than a few miles away from Washington, so I can't prove that the channel is operating, but last year's history is instructive. Between July 2009, when the Administration seized on the possibility of a deal in which Iran's uranium would be enriched in a country such as Russia, and October, a channel was established between Washington and Tehran. It was not direct but rather through third parties, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, European parties, and Turkey. And it led to face-to-face talks between US and Iranian representatives at Geneva in the autumn.

Even though that effort at an agreement ran adrift, the channels were not set aside. Ankara and the European Union have been used in recent weeks to pass Washington's thoughts to Tehran (and vice versa). Obama left more than a clue in his briefing: "High-level officials in Iran had investigated the possibility of re-engaging with the P5-plus-one [US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China]." Time's Klein offers further support that the process of 2009 --- contact at working levels --- is being repeated, although he fails to recognise it is two-way:

The President confirmed that "high level" Iranians have reached out to the Obama Administration over the past months, hoping to get a dialogue restarted. The President emphasized that neither the Supreme Leader nor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have attempted to contact us, and his aides later insisted that nothing concrete was in the works.

And in Tehran, once you get past President Ahmadinejad's more outlandish postures in recent weeks, he too has been putting out references to both indirect communication with the US and to direct talks in the near-future.

The problem is not that the channel for engagement does not exist; it is the interference that distorts and even scrambles it. The President and his advisors are putting out signals , not just to Tehran but to the US Congress, to their anti-engagement critics, to Israel, and to other countries. No surprise that those signals often clash, especially when the Obama Administration has the faction within that does not even believe in engagement.

Last November, I fretted, "The US President [may] be back in the cul-de-sac: pressed by some advisors and a lot of Congressmen to pursue sanctions which offer no remedy for — and no exit from — the political dilemma of his failed engagement."

This week, with those sanctions now reality, Obama tried to get out of the cul-de-sac with his high-profile briefing. Initially I thought he had a chance; 24 hours later, I am thinking that his effort --- at least in the context of domestic politics --- never made it around the corner.