Injured being rushed into Shifaa hospital, Gaza on Nov. 20, 2012. Credit: Gigi Ibrahim/cc by 2.0

By Mitchell Plitnick and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 20 2012 (IPS)

Amidst reports of an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, U.S. President Barack Obama sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the region Tuesday in apparent hopes of gaining some credit for sealing the deal.

Until Tuesday, Obama, whose four-day swing through Southeast Asia was designed in part to underline his administration’s “pivot” from the Middle East to the Asia Pacific, had confined his involvement in the past week’s violence to telephone calls to regional leaders, public statements of support for Israel softened by concern for civilian casualties, and hopes for de-escalation.

The staunch backing Washington has given Israel for its latest assault on the Gaza Strip has seemed to be business as usual, not so very different from the position taken by the George W. Bush administration during Israel’s three-week 2008-9 “Operation Cast Lead”, which ended with more than 1,400 dead, all but 13 of them Palestinians.

At the time, Obama had just been elected president. Part of his campaign had been a promise to mend relationships internationally that had been badly damaged by Bush, especially in the Muslim world.

Almost exactly four years later, Israel launched a new assault – more than 130 Palestinians have been killed so far, while the Israeli death toll was five as of Tuesday morning – and Obama has been unwavering in his support for “Israel’s right to defend itself”.

However, the administration has also made known its preference that Israel not introduce ground forces that have been massed along the Gaza border over the last several days.

Congress, as might be expected, has been even more extreme, with both houses issuing nearly identical statements in full support of Israel’s actions without either urging an end to hostilities or, unlike Obama, expressing concern for civilians on either side.

Those omissions stood in stark contrast to the resolutions passed by both houses four years ago during Cast Lead, a reflection of the degree to which Congress has reflexively taken Israel’s side over that period.

“Some might suggest that these omissions weren’t deliberate,” said Lara Friedman, a veteran Middle East specialist and director of policy and government relations for Americans for Peace Now. “This suggestion hits a wall, however, given that much of the … text appears to be drawn directly from (the resolutions four years ago).

“This pared-down version …sends the message that the Senate isn’t concerned about harm to civilians, and that the Senate is in no hurry to see a ceasefire…Such a message seems both politically shortsighted and morally dubious,” she told IPS.
A poll conducted by CNN over the weekend found that 57 percent of respondents considered Israel’s actions justified, a small decline from the 63-percent support Israel’s actions enjoyed four years ago. The poll, however, also disclosed sharp partisan differences compared to 2008.

Only 40 percent of Democrats said they believe Israel’s actions this past week were justified, a 12-percent drop from the Cast Lead poll, a finding made potentially more significant given the so far much lower casualty toll compiled so far in the latest operation.

Republican support – about 75 percent – remained about the same.

Despite the lack of support from voters within his own party, it is not surprising that Obama has so far stood behind Israel. Even a second-term president, while theoretically freer to act since he need not worry about running for re-election, is still concerned about his congressional allies and his need to work with Congress on key initiatives.

And in this case, Obama has some more immediate concerns that would make him averse to taking on the powerful pro-Israel lobby at this time, despite his well-known personal dislike for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

With the Dec. 31 deadline for reaching a budget agreement with Congressional Republicans on averting the so-called “fiscal cliff”, the last thing Obama wants to do is get into a major partisan battle – and risk splitting his own party’s Congressional delegation given its strong support for Israel – over an unrelated matter. The same considerations may well carry over into the New Year when a new Congress is seated.

Obama has thus seemed to have preferred to leave most of the work to mediate a ceasefire to Egypt in what might be a test of the new Muslim Brotherhood-led government’s intentions to preserve the 1979 Camp David Accords.

Both Israel and Hamas have discussed a ceasefire with Egypt, just as they did in the past when Egypt was ruled by Hosni Mubarak, an ally of the United States, whose strict adherence to the Accords and seeming indifference to Gaza and the Palestinians were always unpopular in Egypt.

The big question many analysts are asking now is what the government of President Mohammed el-Morsi will do if it fails to reach a cease-fire accord, thus ensuring a continuation of hostilities and the very real possibility that Israel will send ground forces into Gaza.

Some U.S. lawmakers have expressed scepticism about Morsi’s intentions, with Sen. Lindsay Graham, an influential Republican, suggesting that the more than 1.6 billion dollars in U.S. bilateral aid to Egypt will be on the chopping block if his efforts fail to achieve a result satisfactory both to Congress and to Israel.

There have also been suggestions that promised debt relief for the struggling Egyptian economy, as well as a pending 4.8-billion-dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), could be at risk.

Israel also apparently wants to see whether Egypt can broker a ceasefire. Netanyahu rejected a French-Qatari ceasefire proposal over the weekend, insisting that negotiations be run through Egypt alone. Only a few hours earlier, the White House reported that President Obama had spoken with Morsi to discuss ways to “de-escalate” the fighting.

Netanyahu is also aware that Egypt, due to its proximity and the close relationship between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, is the best guarantor of any cease-fire.

On the other hand, the longer the intensified fighting with Gaza goes on, the more Israel risks inflaming the populations not only of Egypt, but possibly also of Jordan, whose government, a de facto ally of the Jewish state, has been struggling over the past week to cope with growing economic protests.

Obama, as well as and his European colleagues, clearly want to see this latest flare-up end as soon as possible and that Egypt under Morsi will continue playing the role it served under Mubarak.

Indeed, Clinton’s eleventh-hour mission to Jerusalem, Ramallah and Cairo would likely be designed to seal that outcome, as well as a ceasefire agreement, according to Robert Danin, a Middle East specialist who served in the Bush White House.

Clinton’s presence “will make it much more difficult for the parties to break a cease-fire” if one is concluded, he told a teleconference with journalists from his perch at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

She is also being sent “to impress on President Morsi that Hamas has to be kept in line,” he said, noting that the longer-range rockets used by Hamas during the current hostilities are being smuggled in part through Egyptian territory.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Two recent interviews apparently given by Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak provide evidence that the new wave of reports in the Israeli press about a possible Israeli attack on Iran is a means by which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barak hope to leverage a U.S. shift toward Israel’s red lines on Iran’s nuclear programme.

An interview given by a “senior official in Jerusalem” to Ynet News Wednesday Israeli time makes the first explicit linkage between the unilateral Israeli option and the objective of securing the agreement of President Barack Obama to the Israeli position that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapons “capability”.

In the Ynet News interview, the unnamed official is reported as explicitly offering a deal to the Obama administration: if Obama were to “toughten its stance” with regard to the Iranian nuclear programme, Israel “may rule out a unilateral attack”.

Ynet News reporter Ron Ben Yishai writes that Obama “must repeat publicly (at the U.N. General Assembly, for instance), that the U.S. will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and that Israel has a right to defend itself, independently.”

Obama made both statements, in effect, at the conference of the influential American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but has not repeated them since then.

But the official added a more far-reaching condition for dropping the option of a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran, according to Ben Yishai: Obama must also make it clear that his “red line” is no longer evidence of an intention to enrich to weapons-grade levels but the Israeli red line that Iran must not be allowed to have the enrichment capability to do so if Iran were to make the decision.

In the context of that radical shift in the U.S. red line, the Netanyahu government would view the public statements demanded by the official as “a virtual commitment by the U.S. to act, militarily if needed,” according to Ben Yishai.

“The senior Israeli official estimated that should Washington accept the main demands, Israel would reconsider its unilateral measures and coordinate them with the U.S.,” Ben Yishai writes.

The interview indicates that what Netanyahu and Barak are seeking is a U.S. posture on Iran’s nuclear programme that Israel could use to maximise domestic pressure on Obama to attack Iran if he is reelected.

That Israeli interest in leveraging the threat of a unilateral military option to change the U.S. public posture toward Iran is also suggested in an Aug. 10 interview by Haaretz with an official whom interviewer Ari Shavit calls “the decisionmaker”. The unnamed senior official was described in a way that left little doubt that it was in fact Barak.

The unnamed official explicitly linked the Netanyahu effort to keep the unilateral option in play with the need to influence U.S. policy. “If Israel forgoes the chance to act and it becomes clear that it no longer has the power to act,” he said, “the likelihood of an American action will decrease.”

He also hinted at a debate within the Israeli government – presumably between Netanyahu and Barak themselves – over what could realistically be expected from the Obama administration on Iran. “So we cannot wait a year to find out who was right,” said the official, “the one who said that the likelihood of an American action is high or the one who said the likelihood of an American action is low.”

That allusion to different assessments of U.S. action by the Obama administration suggests that Barak may have been arguing that the threat of a unilateral Israeli attack could be used to leverage a shift in U.S. declaratory policy short of an outright U.S. threat to attack Iran. Barak has generally characterised the policy of the Obama administration as tougher toward Iran than has Netanyahu, who has described it in perjorative terms.

Invoking a “genuine built-in gap” between differing U.S. and Israeli “red lines”, the senior official said, “Ostensibly the Americans could easily bridge this gap. They could say clearly that if by next spring the Iranians still have a nuclear programme, they will destroy it.”

But he suggested that such a simple U.S. threat is not realistic. “Americans are not making this simple statement because countries don’t make these kinds of statements to each other,” said the official, adding, “The American president cannot commit now to a decision that he will or will not make six months from now.” The implication was that someone else had been insisting on such an Obama commitment.

The conditions for a deal outlined in the Ynet New interview may represent the more indirect stance Barak was hoping would be a more realistic possibility. But there is no reason to believe that Obama, who has resisted pressure from his own administration to shift his red line in the direction of Israel’s position, would accept such a deal.

The evidence from these two interviews that Israel is eager, if not desperate, for a deal with the Obama administration on Iran suggests that the new wave of reports in the Israeli press in the first two weeks of August about the unilateral Israeli option cannot be taken at face value.

The New York Times reported on Aug. 12 a “frenzy of newspaper articles and television reports over the weekend…suggesting Netanyahu has all but made the decision to attack Iran unilaterally this fall.” But Netanyahu and Barak have always been careful to distinguish between consideration of a unilateral military option and a commitment to carrying it out.

A central objective of the recent press reports – and of the larger Netanyahu-Barak campaign that began earlier this year – has been to make the idea of a unilateral Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites credible, despite all evidence to the contrary.

On Aug. 10, for exampIe, Israel’s television Channel 2 reported that Netanyahu and Barak had been saying in recent conversations that there is “relatively slight chance” that an attack on Iran would “result in a full-scale regional war in the circumstances that have emerged in the Middle East in last few weeks or months.” The report said the “working assumption” is that, although Hezbollah and Hamas would retaliate, “it is assessed that Syria will not react.”

It is neither Syria nor Hezbollah, however, but Iran itself that that worries Israeli military and intelligence officials the most. When challenged by Haaretz’s Shavit on the likely serious consequences of war with Iran, given the hundreds of Iranian missiles capable of hitting Israeli cities, “the decision-maker” argued, “(W)hat characterizes the Iranians all along is caution and patience.”

That argument, aimed at making the threatened attack seem reasonable, involves an obvious contradiction: on one hand, Iran is too cautious to retaliate against an Israeli attack, but on the other hand, it is too irrational to refrain from going nuclear, despite the obvious risks.

The Barak argument on Iran contradicted Netanyahu’s assertion, most recently reported in an Aug. 5 Channel 2 report, that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is “an irrational leader”.

Barak also argued in the Haaretz interview that Israel could delay the Iranian nuclear programme for eight to 10 years – enough time, he suggested, for regime change to take place. Top Israeli military and intelligence officials have been reported as believing, however, that an attack on Iran would ensure and accelerate Iran’s move toward a nuclear weapon rather than delay it.

In fact, Barak declared on Sep. 17, 2009, “I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel.” And in a Nov. 17, 2011 interview with Charlie Rose, he even denied that the Iranian nuclear programme was aimed at Israel.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Despite continuous assurances that the United States favours democratic rule during the 18-month-old “Arab Spring”, majorities or pluralities in six predominantly Muslim countries see Washington as an obstacle to their democratic aspirations, according to a new survey released here Tuesday.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia is generally seen as a stronger advocate of democracy than the U.S. in all six nations, although not as strong as Turkey, according to the poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

The survey, which covered Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Tunisia and Turkey, also found a strong desire in all six countries not only for democratic government, but also for specific concepts associated with democratic governance, including free elections, freedom of religion, free speech, and equal rights for women.

At the same time, majorities of respondents in Pakistan (82 percent), Jordan (72 percent), and Egypt (60 percent) said said they believed their nations’ laws “should strictly follow the teachings of the Quran”.

In Tunisia and Turkey, on the other hand, majorities and pluralities said the law “should follow the values and principles of Islam”, while in Lebanon, the country with the largest percentage of Christians, a 42 percent plurality, said laws “should not be influenced by the Quran”.

The survey, which was conducted from mid-March to mid-April, was part of Pew’s annual series on global attitudes that has run over the last 12 years. A total of 26,000 respondents in 21 countries were interviewed in the poll whose findings on specific issues, such as attitudes toward Iran’s nuclear programme and the popularity of various international leaders, have been and will continue to be released over a period of months.

Because the polling was done in the spring, the latest release, which is focused on attitudes in the six countries as the “Arab Spring” has evolved, does not take account of various recent events, such as the presidential elections and ongoing power struggle in Egypt; the past week’s elections in Libya; the drift toward civil war in Syria and its government’s increased tensions with Turkey and Lebanon; renewed sectarian tensions in Bahrain; and the latest accord between Pakistan and the U.S. re-opening NATO supply routes to Afghanistan – some or all of which could have an impact on respondents’ answers to some questions.

In terms of respondents’ desire for democratic government, the survey found few changes from similar questions posed in last year’s poll, with the greatest enthusiasm found in Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt.

And while democratic governance remained popular, most respondents in Jordan, Tunisia, and Pakistan said they would rather have a “strong economy” than a “good democracy”. Egyptians were roughly split on the issue, while Turks and Lebanese favoured democracy over a strong economy.

Asked whether respondents would have more confidence in democracy as opposed to a “strong leader”, strong majorities in Lebanon (80 percent), Turkey (68 percent), Egypt and Tunisia (61 percent) opted for democracy, as did a 49-percent plurality in Jordan. By contrast, 61 percent of Pakistanis opted for a “strong leader”.

More respondents in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood won parliamentary and presidential elections in the past year, Pakistan, and Lebanon said that Islam was playing a “major role” in public life compared to a year ago. Two-thirds of Egyptians said it was playing a major role – up from 47 percent last year; similarly, 62 percent of Pakistanis agreed with the proposition – up 16 percentage points from last year.

In Tunisia, where the Islamist Ennahda Party swept elections late last year, 84 percent of respondents said Islam was playing a major role. Tunisia, which had not been polled by Pew before, was a major focus of the latest release.

Led by Egypt (76 percent) and Tunisia (69 percent), solid majorities in the four Arab states expressed optimism that the past year’s uprisings would lead to more democracy in the region. Respondents in the non-Arab states were significantly more doubtful: only 34 percent of Turkish respondents and 21 percent of Pakistanis said they would lead to more democracy.

Asked about specific elements that were important in democracy, Lebanese and Turkish respondents showed the greatest appreciation for such attributes as free elections, freedom of religion, free speech, free press, equal rights for women, and a narrow gap between rich and poor, while Pakistanis and Jordanians were somewhat less supportive in most of those categories.

And, while majorities ranging from 58 percent in Egypt to 93 percent in Lebanon agreed with the proposition that women should have equal rights as men, the survey found substantial gender gaps in all of the countries except Turkey.

The gap was most pronounced in Jordan, where 82 percent of women said they believed in gender equality, while only 44 percent of men agreed.

Moreover, the belief in gender equality broke down when more-specific questions were asked.

Majorities ranging as high as 86 percent (Tunisia) in all six countries except Lebanon (50 percent) said men should have more of a right to jobs when unemployment is high; majorities in Tunisia (75 percent), Pakistan (62 percent), and Turkey (52 percent) said men make better political leaders than women; and majorities in Pakistan (87 percent), Jordan (73 percent), Lebanon (51 percent) said families should have a say over who their daughters marry.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding was the perception that Saudi Arabia, which has been accused by dissidents throughout the Middle East of leading a counter-revolution against the Arab Spring, supported the spread of democracy in the region more than the U.S.

Two-thirds of Egyptians said Riyadh favoured democracy and nearly two-thirds of Jordanians (64 percent) agreed, as did 52 percent of Pakistanis. Lebanese respondents were split on the question, while pluralities in Turkey and Tunisia said Saudi Arabia opposed democracy.

In five of the six countries, on the other hand, pluralities or strong majorities (over 70 percent in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia), Turkey was rated a stronger supporter of democracy.

The U.S., on the other hand, was regarded as an opponent of democracy by pluralities or majorities in all six countries, most notably in Jordan (67 percent).

Israel, however, was rated as the most opposed to democracy in the region: a median of 78 percent of respondents characterised it in that way. Significantly, opinion on that question was strongest in Egypt, where nearly nine out of 10 respondents (88 percent) said Israel was an “opponent” of democracy.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.