The Wonk Room

Livni Promises To ‘Maintain Maximum Settlers’

Tzipi Livni and Binyamin Netanyahu, partners for peace:

Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said he would not be bound by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s commitments to evacuate West Bank settlements and withdraw from the territories.

“I will not keep Olmert’s commitments to withdraw and I won’t evacuate settlements. Those understandings are invalid and unimportant,” Netanyahu said.[...]

After Netanyahu and senior Likud officials blasted Olmert and Livni’s “promises” and accused Livni of agreeing to divide Jerusalem, she was forced to disassociate herself from the understandings.

“I will advance only an agreement that represents our interests. Maintaining maximum settlers and places that we hold dear such as Jerusalem — not a single refugee will enter,” Livni said. [...]

[Netanyahu] said he would invite Kadima and all the Zionist parties to join his coalition providing they agree to his guidelines — no division of Jerusalem, no return to 1967 borders.

When leaders of competing Palestinian factions make maximalist claims to appeal to hardline constituencies, it’s extremism. But when Israeli leaders do it, it’s politics. If the goal of the U.S. and Israel is to strengthen Palestinian moderates like Abu Mazen against Hamas — and people keep telling me that’s the goal — it’s hard to see how this helps.

Tomorrow’s Democratic Test In Iraq

Reporting on the atmosphere in Iraq before tomorrow’s important provincial elections — “perhaps the most competitive election in the country’s history” — Anthony Shadid cautions that they “are by no means a panacea.”

In some ways, they have revealed a landscape perhaps more precarious than the one the United States inherited in 2003. Tribes, with archaic traditions, have become kingmakers, and Islamist parties, despite their unpopularity, have proved a singular ability to mobilize resources and followers. Some worry about the onset of warlords. Others worry about the Kurdish-Arab frontier, where borders with an autonomous Kurdish region have yet to be drawn. In the province around the disputed city of Kirkuk, the vote has been postponed indefinitely.

As Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch and Peter Juul wrote in Iraq’s Political Transition After the Surge, Iraq’s political factions remain at loggerheads over key aspects of the Iraqi state, centralism vs. federalism, sectarianism vs. secularism. We should not expect tomorrow’s elections to provide answers as much as clarify the questions.

The International Crisis Group also has a typically excellent report examining the major issues at play. While recognizing that “the elections inevitably will have severe shortcomings,” ICG notes that they “mark a remarkable transition.”

In the past four years, politics have evolved from a violent conflict focused largely on the capital to an essentially democratic contest over positions and institutions, including at the local level. Former confessional blocs are fraying, as sectarianism is increasingly challenged by more nationalist sentiment and promises of better governance by political actors seeking to capture the public mood. Competition between communities is joined by competition within them. Violence persists in Baghdad and elsewhere, often fierce and ruthless; the past few weeks alone have witnessed incidents -– targeted killings, bombings and intimidation –- that in one way or another are designed to influence the vote. But, for now at least, virtually all major players, including those that boycotted the polls in 2005, have accepted the principle of elections and fully thrown themselves into electoral battle.

In our recent report, The Fractured Shia of Iraq, Peter Juul and I described some of the fault lines within Iraq’s Shia religious community, and how, as with Iraq’s various factions more generally, the elections could significantly redraw these lines.

While it’s important not to grant any credence to the conservative argument that the improved security conditions in Iraq represent a vindication of George W. Bush’s Iraq policy — there is no remotely plausible moral or political calculus by which the costs, human and otherwise, of this war do not far outweigh its benefits — it’s also important to recognize the significance of Iraq’s new politics, both for Iraqis themselves and potentially for the future of the United States’ relationship with the region. The Obama administration faces serious challenges in the Middle East, many of them created or exacerbated by the Iraq war, but helping to facilitate the emergence of a stable and democratic Iraq is key to meeting those challenges.

Ajami Pouts Over Failed Bush Doctrine

Pointing to the absence of “soaring poetry” in Barack Obama’s inaugural address and the President’s shocking statement to Al Arabiya that “we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect” with the Muslim world, Fouad Ajami laments the “return to realpolitik and business as usual in America’s encounter with that Greater Middle East.”

Say what you will about the style — and practice — of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush’s presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress.

True, Mr. Bush’s diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared.[...]

Where Mr. Bush had seen the connection between the autocratic ways in Muslim lands and the culture of terror that infected the young foot soldiers of radicalism, Mr. Obama seems ready to split the difference with their rulers.

Yes, maybe Bush’s policies were an abject failure, and Middle East autocracies strengthened as a result, but hey, for a minute there Bush put those autocracies on notice (Here’s Bush putting Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah on notice back in April 2005, holding hands as they stroll around the ranch.) This is all delusive nonsense, but its unsurprising delusive nonsense. After all, Ajami was bemoaning the heartless realpolitik of the Obama administration even before the Obama administration had begun. Even though Obama’s inaugural address contained an explicit attack on authoritarianism, Ajami has chosen to interpret the new president’s lack of enthusiasm for invading more Arab countries and killing vast numbers of their inhabitants in the name of democracy as evidence of a troubling “realism.”

Like most of his neoconservatives comrades, realism is clearly not, in any sense, something Fouad Ajami is troubled by, as evidenced by his continuing inability to grasp that, while Bush’s words about the need for democracy in the Middle East may have been nice to listen to, his actual plans for promoting democracy the Middle East were staggeringly dumb. Bush’s “freedom agenda” proved hollow because that agenda also included kidnapping, torture, indefinite detention, invading and occupying foreign countries, enabling a sectarian civil war in which hundreds of thousands were killed and maimed and several millions displaced, all of which contributed to previously unseen levels of anti-Americanism while further empowering some of the most conservative, undemocratic forces in the region. It was not out of a loss of nerve, but out of a need to contain those forces that Bush unceremoniously discarded the freedom agenda. But expect Ajami to continue arguing that neoconservatism didn’t fail, it’s just never been tried.

As for Obama’s foreign policy, there’s no evidence thus far that President Obama plans anything like the global withdrawal that Ajami projects. As the ThinkProgress team showed in yesterday’s Progress Report, every indication is that Obama intends to strengthen America’s global leadership role, though with greater emphasis on responsible governance and less emphasis on invading and occupying foreign countries.

In light of Ajami’s disdain for the pragmatic new direction of U.S. foreign policy, however, I think it’s useful to consider — again — something Ajami wrote in his most popular work, 1998’s Dream Palace of the Arabs, his critical examination of the worldview of modern Arab intellectual elites:

In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could and could not be done. The political culture of nationalism reserved its approval for those who led ruinous campaigns in pursuit of impossible quests.

What a difference a decade makes.

Tensions Within Iraq’s Shia Majority

Anticipating Iraq’s provincial elections this Saturday, the Center for American Progress has released a report by Peter Juul and me, The Fractured Shia of Iraq. This report examines the ongoing competition among Iraq’s dominant Shia religious factions.

As they have done since 2005, religious Shia political parties are likely to shape Iraqi politics at all levels in central and southern Iraq. It remains to be seen which, if any, of these factions will dominate. The end of Saddam Hussein’s regime, followed by the 2005 election of a transitional government, opened a new political space for Iraq’s Shia, bringing Shia Arabs into power for the first time in the Arab world. This power shift represented a significant change for a Middle East previously neatly divided between the mostly Persian Shia of Iran and Sunni Arab-led states, unsettling regional politics, especially among those Sunni Arab nations with significant Shia minorities, including the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon.

As Juul and I argue in the report, exploring the history of Iraqi Shia political-religious trends is necessary for understanding Iraq’s political future. Whether and how the points of contention among Iraq’s Shia parties, which mirror the divisions within Iraq more broadly, are resolved will significantly affect the Obama administration’s Middle East policy as it seeks to shift greater attention and resources eastward to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. troop surge in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 was intended to provide the political space for reconciliation among the Kurds and Sunni and Shia Arabs, but this remains elusive.

These elections are the first in a series of elections Iraq will have later this year, and may serve as a barometer of what’s to come. There are concerns about low voter turnout given that these elections fall close to a major Shia holiday. Early voting is going smoothly.

But Iraq faces a long road ahead in its political transition. Importantly, it may well be the struggle for power within the Shia community that determines how the United States exits Iraq. Importantly, it may well be the struggle for power within the Shia community that determines how the United States exits Iraq.