Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

WASHINGTON — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday walked back statements made during campaigning rejecting the possibility of a two-state solution, telling NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, “I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution.”

Netanyahu’s first post-elections interview was delivered to the US news TV station, indicating a focus on calming tensions with Washington, which have risen steeply following a sharp right turn by Netanyahu in the final days of his campaign.

“I haven’t changed my policy,” Netanyahu insisted. “I never retracted my speech at Bar-Ilan University six years ago calling for a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes a Jewish state.”

“What has changed is the reality,” he continued. “[Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] the Palestinian leader refuses to recognize the Jewish state and has made a pact with Hamas that calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, and every territory that is vacated today in the Middle East is taken up by Islamist forces. We want that to change so that we can realize a vision of real, sustained peace. I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change.”

lol dude will say anything

to Andrea Mitchell

I thought your position was he hadn't said anything different, anyway?

(You will hear anything)

"I will continue negotiating in bad faith like I have been from day 1. I dont understand what the big deal is"

my "position"? i thought he had said weeks before the election that he was against the two state solution and that he was reaffirming that the day of the election. it seems that he wants to emphasize the nuance that he is against a two state solution /now/ bc of current circumstances but not eternally. idk if this counts as a total reversal or not. i believe bibi will say whatever he needs to to whomever he needs to. but i do think this pseudo walkback suggests he won't be giving bennett the freedom to push the annexation idea - which counts a reversal in terms of my expectations for his future administration.

Matty Y vox piece from last year about public support (or lack thereof) for 2ss:
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/16/5897921/one-thing-israelis-and-palestinians-agree-on-they-dont-like-the-two

Strikingly, this conclusion that 27 percent of Palestinians and 35 percent of Israelis favor a two-state solution is likely an overstatement of the actual level of popular support.

so IS hates the Houthis too eh. no surprise there but yet another instance where US non-involvement seems best, as neither side really shares our interests

houthi is iranian backed

yeah no mystery

when are they gonna get tired of this sunni/shia thing

clown columnist Tom Friedman has the answer on how to stop Iran:

Now I despise ISIS as much as anyone, but let me just toss out a different question: Should we be arming ISIS? Or let me ask that differently: Why are we, for the third time since 9/11, fighting a war on behalf of Iran?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/opinion/go-ahead-ruin-my-day.html?ref=opinion&assetType=opinion&_r=0

Oniony

"Why are we, for the third time since 9/11, fighting a war on behalf of Iran?"

Excellent question.

the frenemy of my frenemy is my frenemy

Answer: Iran is much smarter than us.

eh that's a bit of an overstatement

Apparently he thinks US should have somehow stopped Al Queda but not tried to stop the Taliban because the Sunni Taliban anger the Shia Iranians...

Iran has smarly taken advantage of a non-local bunch of ignoramuses interfering in local politics, I don't think that makes them geniuses (the Dubya admin were total idiots obviously, Obama is more pragmatic I think, and has been loathe to commit the huge amount of resources previous admins were eager to)

this is news to me. were these Jews not paying attention to things he actually said/did before or what? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/21/us/netanyahu-tactics-anger-many-us-jews-deepening-a-divide.html?_r=0

“My greatest thrill is that Netanyahu was able to pull off a feat that in my opinion was not only good for the morale of Israel and the security of Israel, but finally put Obama in his place,” said Rabbi Shoham.

racists be lovin other racists eh

Petraeus interview:

Yet despite that history and the legacy it has left, I think Iraq and the coalition forces are making considerable progress against the Islamic State. In fact, I would argue that the foremost threat to Iraq’s long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias, many backed by — and some guided by — Iran.

These militia returned to the streets of Iraq in response to a fatwa by Shia leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani at a moment of extreme danger. And they prevented the Islamic State from continuing its offensive into Baghdad. Nonetheless, they have, in some cases, cleared not only Sunni extremists but also Sunni civilians and committed atrocities against them. Thus, they have, to a degree, been both part of Iraq's salvation but also the most serious threat to the all-important effort of once again getting the Sunni Arab population in Iraq to feel that it has a stake in the success of Iraq rather than a stake in its failure. Longer term, Iranian-backed Shia militia could emerge as the preeminent power in the country, one that is outside the control of the government and instead answerable to Tehran.

Beyond Iraq, I am also profoundly worried about the continuing meltdown of Syria, which is a geopolitical Chernobyl. Until it is capped, it is going to continue to spew radioactive instability and extremist ideology over the entire region.

Any strategy to stabilize the region thus needs to take into account the challenges in both Iraq and Syria. It is not sufficient to say that we’ll figure them out later.

What went wrong?

The proximate cause of Iraq’s unraveling was the increasing authoritarian, sectarian and corrupt conduct of the Iraqi government and its leader after the departure of the last U.S. combat forces in 2011. The actions of the Iraqi prime minister undid the major accomplishment of the Surge. [They] alienated the Iraqi Sunnis and once again created in the Sunni areas fertile fields for the planting of the seeds of extremism, essentially opening the door to the takeover of the Islamic State. Some may contend that all of this was inevitable. Iraq was bound to fail, they will argue, because of the inherently sectarian character of the Iraqi people. I don’t agree with that assessment.

The tragedy is that political leaders failed so badly at delivering what Iraqis clearly wanted — and for that, a great deal of responsibility lies with Prime Minister Maliki.

As for the U.S. role, could all of this have been averted if we had kept 10,000 troops here? I honestly don't know. I certainly wish we could have tested the proposition and kept a substantial force on the ground.

For that matter, should we have pushed harder for an alternative to PM Maliki during government formation in 2010? Again, it is impossible to know if such a gambit might have succeeded. But certainly, a different personality at the top might have made a big difference, depending, of course, on who that individual might have been.

Where I think a broader comment is perhaps warranted has to do with the way we came to think about Iraq and, to a certain extent, the broader region over the last few years. There was certainly a sense in Washington that Iraq should be put in our rearview mirror, that whatever happened here was somewhat peripheral to our national security and that we could afford to redirect our attention to more important challenges. Much of this sentiment was very understandable given the enormous cost of our efforts in Iraq and the endless frustrations that our endeavor here encountered.

In retrospect, a similar attitude existed with respect to the civil war in Syria — again, a sense that developments in Syria constituted a horrible tragedy to be sure, but a tragedy at the outset, at least, that did not seem to pose a threat to our national security.

But in hindsight, few, I suspect, would contend that our approach was what it might — or should — have been. In fact, if there is one lesson that I hope we’ve learned from the past few years, it is that there is a linkage between the internal conditions of countries in the Middle East and our own vital security interests.

Whether fair or not, those in the region will also offer that our withdrawal from Iraq in late 2011 contributed to a perception that the U.S. was pulling back from the Middle East. This perception has complicated our ability to shape developments in the region and thus to further our interests. These perceptions have also shaken many of our allies and, for a period at least, made it harder to persuade them to support our approaches. This has been all the more frustrating because, of course, in objective terms, we remain deeply engaged across the region and our power here is still very, very significant.

Neither the Iranians nor Daesh are 10 feet tall, but the perception in the region for the past few years has been that of the U.S. on the wane, and our adversaries on the rise. I hope that we can begin to reverse that now.

good interview

Suicide Attacks at Mosques in Yemen Kill More Than 130

x-post--I wanna see a Petraeus interview that asks him-- "we spent x amount of dollars training the Iraqi military, we spend x amount of dollars on CIA and NSA, how did you guys fail so miserably in training their army and in not realizing till too late how Maliki's policies would fail?"

Or is it ok for Petraeus to just put it all on Maliki, and hint that Obama should have somehow forced Maliki and the Iraqi Parlament to let the US army stay long?

Army guys always think the army could have solved everything if only...

Re Yemen, Juan Cole asserts:

The Houthis also fought local Sunni radicals who had joined al-Qaeda. Although conspiracy theorists see the Houthis as Iran-backed, they are in fact largely a local movement with local grievances and their form of Shiite Islam is very different from that in Iran.

and Six southern Yemen provinces have announced that they won’t follow directives from the Houthi government in Sanaa. There is also just in general a strong secessionist movement in south Yemen, which doesn’t want Mansour Hadi or any northerner as president and wants an independent South Yemen (which existed 1967-1990 before unification).

Confusingly to me he also notes that Hadi is a northerner but has now set up his own rump government in the South.

Aso, I know that Mordy has his own issues with blogger Cole.

http://www.juancole.com/2015/03/bombing-shiite-conflict.html

Commenter on Cole's post says:

Just to point out that Hadi is actually a southerner, from Abyan (though that doesn’t necessarily make him popular in the south).

A Lebanonese writer now living elsewhere offers her take:

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentary/564968-resisting-the-iranian-occupation

[/i]...Iran’s militias in Iraq and Syria are not about to leave any time soon. Even if ISIS is defeated in Iraq and the FSA dissolves in Syria, Iran’s militias won’t leave. They are here to stay.

As such, every strategy to defeat ISIS is a bad strategy unless it takes the post-ISIS scenarios into consideration. And a regional strategy that includes Turkey is a must—if Sunni extremists are allowed to fight the Iranian occupation exclusively, the war will only proliferate. Without a long-term plan, extremist groups will find a way to survive—under ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, or whatever banner they find suitable.

ISIS will probably be defeated, but the militants will morph into something new. It doesn’t matter: ongoing sectarian rifts will continue to make extremism tenable. So, the choice now is between Sunni militants aggressively trying to liberate Syria and Iraq from the Iranian occupation; and a regional, unified army structured by regional states with a clear and comprehensive strategy.

Iran’s strategy is to dominate by destroying state institutions and intensifying sectarian bloodshed. This domination, however, will have no capacity or will to rebuild, because it does not take into consideration the demography and historic sensitivities of the region.

Hezbollah was once described as a state within the Lebanese state. Today, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen have become small states within the Iranian empire. This isn’t just a choice of words used to make a point: this is reality, and it will get worse when Iran’s economic troubles are alleviated.

A deal that gives Iran such power will result in the following:

First, the perception of the US in the region is changing. The majority of Sunnis now see the US as taking sides in a sectarian fight; an Iranian ally. Obama, in this sense, is perceived as interventionist.

Secondly, democracies like Lebanon, or potential democracies in the region, will slowly deteriorate because Iran will not acknowledge state institutions or tolerate freedom of speech. This has been confirmed many times in Lebanon and in Iran itself.

Third, liberal and civil groups or individuals will lose legitimacy in the region and civil society will crumble amidst sectarian bloodshed.

Is this what the US really wants the region to look like? If the nuclear deal is really worth so much blood, death and madness, then all the values we thought we shared with the US are now inexplicable.

See, the question now is not whether there will be a deal to stop Iran’s nuclear program. The problem is more fundamental: values are being shattered and people are being betrayed.[/i]


Iran is influential now with no nuclear deal. How does she propose removing Assad and pushing back Iran? She blames Obama for all of the mideast woes in another article too: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189809/obamas-harvest-of-violence?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=3bee7913d2-Tuesday_March_24_20153_24_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-3bee7913d2-207197409

a regional, unified army structured by regional states with a clear and comprehensive strategy.

Getting this created would not be easy, nor would its mission

The majority of Sunnis now see the US as taking sides in a sectarian fight; an Iranian ally. Obama, in this sense, is perceived as interventionist.

what i've been going on about for a while

But again, what is your option instead? right-wing columnist Krauthammer and neo-cons want more sanctions against Iran, this Lebanon writer above upset by what Hezbullah & Iran has done to her country wants a magical regional army to roll back Iran supported leaders and governments, and I guess Netanyahu wants US military strikes against Iran to stop their nuclear program. If you want Obama not to be an Iran ally and he does that by just not negotiating, then Iran can develop nuclear capability albeit slowly and still intervene in Lebanon, Syria etc anyway.

i want a nuclear agreement w/ iran to include iran concessions about withdrawing support for iranian surrogates in yemen, lebanon, syria, gaza, etc. that's like a very easy beginning but i'm sure i could think of a dozen other solutions too, esp while we still have the leverage of sanctions of iran. we don't even need new sanctions, just to use the sanctions we have.

maybe i'm wrong and the obama deal will come out and be awesome but every leak suggests that he's not planning on holding iran to much of anything really, + i personally believe that's bc he is a moron who really believes he's about to establish some kind of iranian/american alliance in the middle east.

I don't think Iran would agree to a deal with all those conditions. But as with the Grand Bargain domestic negotiations, Obama seems willing to take steps that infuriate others (cutting Social Security benefits in the grand bargain, and here--not adding conditions) just to reach a deal. But maybe analogizing a domestic US deal with this one is too broad and not on target...Ha. I think he just wants a nuclear deal and I think he has no illusions re any Iranian/American alliance.

http://www.avclub.com/article/star-wars-tatooine-set-has-become-way-station-isis-217063 :(

'Iranian empire'... Christ. How does this bullshit get published? Do we think it's funded by the Sauds or by the UAE this time?

I love the line about 'potential democracies in the region'. Like, what does that mean? Which parts of the region aren't 'potential democracies'? Also, ten bucks the writer includes Saudi Arabia in that bunch, that famous supporter of liberties and free speech and all that.

I think one of the weirdest things about this, for me, as a Dane, is the fact that one of the leaders of the opposition in Bahrain used to live in Denmark, his family is in Denmark, and he is now imprisoned indefinitely. And his story is in the media quite a lot. And the West does nothing to stop the supressions of the populace in Bahrain, because it's close to Saudi Arabia, the leaders are Sunni, the populace is Shia, and we're scared of Iran. If the Sunni fanatics think that Obama is siding with the Shia, they are insane crybabies. We are still pretty clearly supporting Sunni over Shia.

'Iranian empire'... Christ. How does this bullshit get published? Do we think it's funded by the Sauds or by the UAE this time?

By the Iranians, obviously.

3rd Dimension Chess?

I think it's more that US strategy in the Middle East is very unfocused + not strategically developed. In some places we're pro Sunni and in some we're pro Shia. I think that much of that is probably old US policy (pro Sunni) giving way to new Obama-set US policy (pro Shia). In the biggest arena - direct relationship w/ Iran - we are assuming a fairly pro Iran policy. We are no longer pressuring Assad to step down, we are [supposedly] crafting a fairly pro-Iran treaty to lift sanctions, we are bombing IS and coordinating w/ Shia forces, etc. I think in some other places (Egypt support of Muslim Brotherhood, Bahrain) it's more muddled

it could very well be obama is thinking globally that winning Iran away from Putin would be a big coup for the West, but i think it's obv we're pursuing - at the very least - a conciliatory relationship w/ Iran and to the annoyance of many of our traditional Sunni allies in the region (and YES frederik also Israel)

lol "pro-Iran policy" slow yr roll there

practically speaking we are bombing the biggest regional threat to Iran a few years after toppling Iran's historical rival - whether intentional or not our policy has been very pro iran

i agree that it's probably not intentional and just hilarious US incompetence but maybe that's a good heuristic for whether a foreign deal is a good one or not - is the actor left happiest the one that - during nuke negotiations - says death to america?

man you are really around the bend here I don't even know where to begin

for one thing breaking US policy down along Sunni/Shi'a lines is completely irrelevant, US policy has never been based on such distinctions and it still isn't

also it's pretty clear the biggest regional threat to Iran from Iran's POV is not ISIS, it's the US/Israel, especially in the context of nuclear negotiations/deals. they aren't going to use nukes as deterrents against ISIS. Iran knows they can contain ISIS with proxies, as is their long-established practice when it comes to regional threats and goals.

Well, we also tried to topple Assad and pressured al Maliki into changing his anti-sunni policy, so...

Also, Iran is not at all the only ones saying death to america. And many of the rest get funding and inspiration from 'our sunni allies'.

And anti-Iran has def morphed into anti-shia quite often, for example in Bahrain. US and west might not see it like that, but Saudi Arabia def does.

and in this case if the US is willing to stand in as a proxy since it serves both our interests, obviously both the US and Iran are going to try to exploit that area of mutual interest. who it serves more in the long-run is debatable. For what it's worth I agree that it's more in Iran's interest than ours - I don't consider ISIS much of a threat to anything I care about as a US citizen - but US gov't goals here are not mine and they are pretty tangled: a more stable Iraq, fewer terrorist acts directed at US interests, a general wish to stop genocidal fanatics etc. But even so, just because Iran gets more out of the arrangement than we do does not mean that it is by it's nature a pro-Iranian policy; the US isn't entering into it explicitly to service Iran, the US is entering into it to further it's own agenda. I'm sure Obama is thinking that if this buys some goodwill from the Iranians than that's a positive. That may be naive by some calculations, but this is how relations between traditional enemies are repaired, by finding common ground.

xxp

new Obama-set US policy (pro Shia)

I do not buy this pro-Shia spin thing. Gawwd Mordy, you sound like Tom Friedman. Not wanting to get in the mess of trying to take down Assad is just Obama's longtime interest in not wanting to put US boots on the ground. Plus the pro-Saudi and pro-Egypt military aspects as you acknowledge don't fit into a Shia or Sunni dynamic.

A number of conservative writers are talking "Iranian empire" but they don't offer much proof for Yemen being part of that.

breaking news: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2015/03/26/GCC-states-to-repel-Houthi-aggression-in-Yemen-statement-.html

Warplanes of the Royal Saudi Air Force bombed the positions of Yemen’s Houthi militia and destroyed most of their air defenses, Al Arabiya News Channel reported early on Thursday.

Arab Gulf states had announced that they have decided to “repel Houthi aggression” in neighboring Yemen, following a request from the country’s President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.

In their joint statement Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait said they "decided to repel Houthi militias, al-Qaeda and ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] in the country.”

The Gulf states warned that the Houthi coup in Yemen represented a “major threat” to the region’s stability.

It also accused the Iranian-backed militia of conducting military drills on the border of Saudi Arabia, a leading member of the GCC, with “heavy weapons.”

In an apparent reference to Iran, the statement said the “Houthi militia is backed by regional powers in order for it be their base of influence.”