Is Israel Trying to Curb America's Deal-Making in Middle East?

[ProSense]

July 15, 2006

Some Questions Regarding Israel's Objectives: Is Israel Trying to Curb America's Deal-Making in Middle East?

When I visited Israel in March, one of the more interesting dinner discussions I had was with former Mossad Director Danny Yatom, now a Labor Party member of the Knesset.

As head of the Mossad, Yatom gave orders to have the head of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, assassinated by poison. The effort was botched, and the failed attempt became globally embarrassing news for Yatom and then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Why is Israel pounding most of Lebanon rather than just the South and rather than pinpointing its attack against Hezbollah assets? Why the dramatic bombing of explosive fuel centers? The attacks both in Gaza and in Beirut seem made for Fox News, CNN and the next Schwarzenegger movie.

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But that doesn't explain it all. The Israeli response to the Hezbollah incursion is exactly what Hezbollah wanted. Adversaries rarely give each other the behaviors the other actually desires unless there are other objectives involved.

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Some in Israel viewed all three of these potential policy courses for the U.S. -- a broad deal with the Arab Middle East, a new push on final status negotiations with the Palestinians, and a deal to actually negotiate directly with Iran -- as negative for Israel.

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Israel is constraining American foreign policy in amazing and troubling ways by its actions. And a former senior CIA official and another senior Marine who are well-versed in both Israeli and broad Middle East affairs, agreed that serious strategists in Israel are more concerned about America tilting towards new bargains in the region than they are either about the challenge from Hamas or Hezbollah or showing that Olmert knows how to pull the trigger.

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001538.php

[ProSense]

1. A World on Fire... And the Failure of Bush's War on Terror

A World on Fire... And the Failure of Bush's War on Terror

by Matt Stoller, Sat Jul 15, 2006 at 07:18:11 PM EST

I've noticed some clucking in the right-wing wrongosphere about silence from the major left-wing blogs on the situation in the Middle East. There hasn't been silence, but there has been humility in the face of a fast-moving situation that is difficult to understand. I know I believed awhile back that the foreign policy course Bush pursued was disastrous, but I didn't know how that disaster would unfold. In other words, we may be watching an unfolding new war in its initial stages, or perhaps cooler heads will prevail, but either way I have no special insight on which direction this crisis will roll. I do know that the Friedman's and right-wing pundits who talked of freedom on the march are idiots, and shouldn't be listened to, and those who recognized that Bush's war on terror was always a fraud and based on a disastrous strategy were right.

It's quite stunning how pathetic Bush is. Right now, the State Department he runs is http://cunningrealist.blogspot.com/2006/07/socked-in-at-foggy-bottom_15.html">so demoralized and incompetent that it cannot even give information to Americans trapped in Lebanon. And Bush's weakness now means that American citizens are being bombed by Israel, and the military is unable to provide a safe exit. American citizens are in this war zone, and Bush can do nothing. That is weakness.

For progressives, the strategic problems here are worth understanding, especially as they apply to our domestic political arguments about foreign policy. Steve Clemons has http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001538.php">an extraordarily interesting post on the unfolding situation, and how there is ample reason to believe that Israel's outsized response is aimed at America, not Hezbollah.

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Bush's impotence has never been on clearer display than it is right now. When you unleash grand forces of mechanized warfare in unstable and strategically critical regions, it's impossible to predict what will happen. And that means that there's no obvious path forward policy-wise, except that realists like Condoleeza Rice need to get an upper hand within the Bush administration over lunatics like Bolton and Cheney. Politically, though, the path forward is to get rid of Bush and his enablers like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Lieberman, etc.

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http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/7/15/191811/094

[ProSense]

2. Really interesting points! n/t