Monthly Archives: January 2024

Is America’s Tower 22 in Jordan ‘ground zero’ for a new battlefront in the Middle East?

 

This op-ed was published by The National on January 29, 2024

The stakes have once again risen for US President Joe Biden’s high-wire balancing act in the Middle East, as three US military personnel were killed and dozens wounded by a drone attack in Jordan that the White House has blamed on Iranian-backed radical groups.

The killings have transformed the third flashpoint in the region, repeated attacks on US troops and facilities in the Middle East, from the least to the most alarming minefield. It now outstrips – at least, for Americans – daily violence on the Israel-Lebanon border and Houthi piracy in the Red Sea. Responding to the attack with firmness, yet also without intensifying a drift towards regional conflict, will be the most challenging spill-over yet of the October 7 crisis for the Biden administration.

The devastating strike hit Tower 22, a US logistics support base, and some claim signals intelligence facility, in a remote part of north-eastern Jordan near the Syrian border. Several Iranian-backed groups operate in the area, both in Syria and Iraq. Their fighters have reportedly been evacuating their bases in expectation of a significant US retaliation. That is extremely likely, although Washington is going to have to carefully weigh how to balance going far enough to restore deterrence but not too far for its own purposes.

The Biden administration’s key goal since the Hamas-Israel war began has been to prevent the conflict from spreading dramatically beyond Gaza. After a tense first month, the policy had appeared to be succeeding, and Washington began turning more attention to restraining Israel inside Gaza itself and preparing for a “day-after” scenario there.

However, in recent weeks, tensions rose dangerously in the Red Sea and on the Lebanon-Israel border. The US has already been drawn into a limited but serious conflict with the Houthis, after the radical Yemeni group began attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. And Israel persists in demanding submission to its ultimatum that Hezbollah withdraw its elite Radwan Force fighters from the south, as far north as the Litani River – a demand Hezbollah has dismissed as totally unreasonable.

Amid these growing threats of escalation, however, the Biden administration had reason to hope that its policy of conflict containment remained viable and even relatively successful. The battle against Houthi piracy could drag on at a low-level for months or even years without degenerating into all-out warfare, as the battle against Somali pirates did between 2000-2017. And both Israel on the one hand and, especially, Hezbollah and Iran on the other have every reason to want to avoid another major war with each other at this stage – which is probably why one has not broken out over the past four months.

Attention had been mainly focused on those two crises, almost to the exclusion of handwringing over an ongoing, and almost daily, set of attacks against US forces and facilities in Syria and Iraq by less potent members of Tehran’s “axis of resistance” network of militia groups. Saturday’s deadly strike against Tower 22 serves as a stark reminder that this third flashpoint always remained potentially the most dangerous for the US, because these attacks were aimed directly at the US presence in the region and at Americans.

Until now, US anti-rocket and missile defences, which were beefed up before Israel’s major offensive into the Gaza Strip, managed to successfully intercept and thwart these attacks. The Pentagon is unlikely to have underestimated the potential for a deadly outcome, but the civilian administration in Washington may have been lulled into a false sense of security and was certainly hit by extremely bad luck as well as a vicious attack on Saturday. It’s also entirely possible that the militia groups responsible are taken aback by their own “good luck”, and the extent of death and destruction they were able to visit upon US forces.

It may have gone too far, as well, for their Iranian backers, who will be in a key position now to help to determine whether any or all of these three smoldering fuses detonate a regional explosion that could engulf all major parties. That certainly won’t suit Tehran’s interests, especially under current circumstances, as Iran is quietly inching towards irreversible nuclear status while the world’s attention is focused on many other Middle Eastern priorities.

Iran has clearly been doing nothing to prompt Hezbollah into a larger conflict with Israel that could cascade eventually into a confrontation between Tehran and Washington, conceivably even producing the US military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities that Israel has long sought but never achieved. This might help to explain the enthusiasm of some Israeli leaders for a “pre-emptive” attack against Hezbollah, and their appetite for a growing list of totally unconvincing pretexts for new levels of bellicosity.

By contrast, Iran has almost certainly relished Houthi piracy in the Red Sea, as it repeats long-standing Iranian messages about the right of Tehran and its regional allies to be included in any de-facto maritime security arrangements and that if Iran cannot freely export its oil due to sanctions, no one else can be assured of buying and selling anything unmolested either. But, with a series of US and UK military strikes inside Yemen, Tehran may begin acting as a restraining force on the Houthis as well, because, having made their point, the last thing Iran needs is for Yemeni militants to drag the region into uncontrolled conflict.

Iran will also have to be cognisant that Republicans in Congress and the party’s likely presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, will loudly blame the Biden administration for the growing crisis and attacks on Americans, pressuring Mr Biden into tougher responses. The attack in Jordan also brings Iran and its network into direct conflict with yet another US partner in the Middle East.

So, restraint is not going to only be up to the US. Iran must move quickly to get a grip on its regional network of armed gangs, or, eventually, face the wrath of the most potent possible enemy with powerful regional partners. If it’s still the case that none of the main actors want a broader regional war that would be devastating to them all, then careful deliberation and relative forbearance becomes a shared responsibility. Otherwise, one, two, or even all three of these smoldering fuses will sooner or later explode with devastating consequences.

Is US-Israel disagreement on a two-state solution unresolvable?

 

This op-ed was published by The National on January 22, 2024

Last week, the penny finally dropped between the US and Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu owned up that he’s been dissemblingfor decades, at least in English and in public, about being open to a two-state solution. He flatly ruled out any form of Palestinian statehood without offering an alternative addressing basicPalestinian human rights like citizenship. This has effectively been Israel’s consistent policy, with a few notable hiccups, since the assassination in 1995 of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist.

Since at least 1990 implicitly, and explicitly once George W Bush formally endorsed in 2002, Palestinian statehood has been a US foreign policy goal. Even Donald Trump framed his 2020 proposal as a two-state solution, even as it envisaged Israel annexing 30 per cent of the occupied West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, which would have rendered Palestinian statehood effectively nominal. The plan’s titular architect, Jared Kushner, now says it was only meant as “a starting point” for negotiations intended to produce much smaller annexations.

As President, Joe Biden moved quickly to repair US policy by reaffirming Washington’s commitment to a meaningful Palestinian state and opposition to annexation and settlement expansion. More recently, Mr Biden tried to use both the triangular negotiations with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and the post-October 7 crisis to put eventual Palestinian statehood back on the international and, especially, Israeli agenda.

Mr. Netanyahu’s declaration is both ideologically pure and cynically political. Israel is under significant pressure both in public and, especially, private, including from Washington and its potential normalization partner Saudi Arabia, that any day-after scenario to the Israel-Gaza war would, rationally, have to involve forming an alternative, post-Hamas Palestinian government in Gaza (albeit, perhaps, with Hamas’s acquiescence) and, more importantly, the restoration of the peace process but this time as a starting point with Israel explicitly acknowledging the Palestinian right to a state.

I’m always struck by how few people realise that Israel has not just never recognised a Palestinian state, but has never even acknowledged the Palestinian right to a state. To the contrary, all Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy to date has been based on a 1993 exchange of “letters of mutual recognition”, which kicked off the Oslo process. That quickly led to the prevailing status quo in the occupied territories, but ground to a halt as soon as Rabin was murdered.

In a letter to Rabin on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which is universally recognised as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people diplomatically (even by Hamas), chairman Yasser Arafat recognised Israel and its right to peace and security. In reply, on behalf of Israel, prime minister Rabin recognised the PLO as a legitimate interlocutor and undertook to negotiate with it. That’s all.

Many argue Israel implicitly recognized the Palestinian right to a state throughout its negotiations with the PLO, but that is simply not true. Israel never brought itself to acknowledge this Palestinian right, and, in that tradition, Mr. Netanyahu has now categorically rejected it. The world knew that he and the Israeli right were merely pretending to be at all interested in peace while sabotaging a two-state solution diplomatically and strategically developing settlements to make it politically impossible.

His Likud party has Jewish control “from the river to the sea” – a geographical formulation routinely labelled as “genocidal” when Americans declare that “Palestine will be free” in the same area – as a key part of its founding document. At this year’s UN General Assembly, during his address Mr Netanyahu brandished a map that included all the occupied territories in “Israel”.

That’s the ideological part.

Cynically, Mr Netanyahu knows that he’s in big trouble because of the security meltdown on October 7, among other failings. So now he’s been saying, bluntly: “The world is pushing us on Palestinian statehood, even in theory. Re-elect me and I will block this forever.” He’s similarly been claiming “credit” for sabotaging the Oslo agreements, which is no idle boast.

Washington should make important aspects of bilateral relations with Israel contingent on, at a minimum, a formal Israeli declaration recognising the Palestinian right to a state

The Palestinian issue was once a marginal matter in Israeli-American relations, but recent decades have shown howfalse that istime and again. So, now, at least with Mr Netanyahu in charge, and probably almost any other plausible Israeli prime minister as well, the US and Israel are at categorical odds on a two-state solution, and therefore peace.

Mr Netanyahu’s position is simply not tenable for Washington, because – since he’s certainly not willing to offer Palestinians citizenship in Israel – he’s making it virtually impossible to rebut accusations that Israel maintains an apartheid-like political system in the occupied territories. Even in the medium term, Washington cannot be associated with that, particularly under the Democrats, including the over-35s like Mr Biden who, unlike younger liberals, are inclined to give Israel every benefit of the doubt.

Mr. Biden tried to shrug this crisis off by saying: “We’ll be able to work out something.” He tried claiming that Mr. Netanyahu might be prepared to accept a non-militarized Palestinian state, but was immediately and flatly contradicted by Mr. Netanyahu’s spokespeople.

After decades of US and Israeli leaders dancing around the issue and performing extraordinary rhetorical and logical contortions to obscure the fact that their policies on this most central of issues are totally at odds, the jig is up. In a bid to be re-elected, Mr Netanyahu has put extremism on the table and on the ballot.

Even if he loses, unless his successor flatly contradicts these proclamations – which is extremely unlikely since this really is and has long been the Israeli position – then Washington must also stop pretending. The US is either going to have to give up on peace and the Palestinians altogether, which could prove fatal to sustaining its regional leadership, or break with Israel over this dramatically.

Within the next 24 months at the latest, Washington should make important aspects of bilateral relations with Israel contingent on, at a minimum, a formal Israeli declaration recognising the Palestinian right to a state in the normative Westphalian and UN meanings, which still leaves much to be negotiated. Almost 25 years after the disastrous 2000 Camp David summit – when some Arab leaders first began questioning Washington’s post-Cold War leadership – a failure to confront Israel over peace could form part of a historic inflection point marking a potentially fatal crisis of US leadership in this vital region.

Washington must be clear that the “special relationship” is only sustainable with an Israel that’s genuinely open to peace.

Republican leaders are not seeing the dangers of defending Trump

This op-ed was published by The National on January 16, 2024

The past fortnight marked the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, amid new signs that most Republican Party leaders are following former president Donald Trump down a dark and dangerous rabbit hole of radicalism. Key figures in the House of Representatives spent the weekend championing perpetrators of political violence and telegraphing strategies to overturn election results.

Mr. Trump’s worst demagoguery is thus no longer limited to a radical fringe but is rapidly becoming Republican orthodoxy.

Since Mr. Trump’s rise in 2016, political scientists have tracked the intensifying extremism of Republicans even compared with their European analogues. Even given overtly racist governments in Hungary and the Netherlands, and quasi-fascist parties in power in Italy and opposition in France and Germany, Trump-inflected Maga Republicans are strikingly radical.

Mr. Trump has long celebrated the January 6 riot and the rioters as “heroes” and “patriots” filled with “love” and “unity”. He now calls the about 1,200 Americans convicted or facing charges over the mayhem – primarily for attacking police – “hostages”, undoubtedly inspired by widespread concern over Israelis held in Gaza.

This goes far beyond championing violent insurrectionists. It rejects the legitimacy of the US judicial and law enforcement systems, portraying courts and police as hoodlums and criminals as their victims. This is especially absurd coming from a party that indignantly portrays itself as staunchly pro-police and “law and order”.

Asked if “the people who stormed the Capitol should be held responsible to the full extent of the law”, the third-ranking House Republican, Elise Stefanik, replied: “I have concerns about the treatment of the January 6 hostages.” In the rhetoric of many Republican leaders over three years the insurrectionists have steadily morphed from “tourists” in 2021, to “political prisoners” in 2022, and now “hostages”. The hypocrisy and hostility towards the US government and constitutional order this rhetorical degradation evinces is astounding. Anyone holding hostages is, after all, clearly an evildoer.

Even at the height of liberal doubts and left-wing alienation from the American system in the 1960s and 70s, top Democratic Party leaders did not describe arrested Black Panthers or Weather Underground members as “hostages”, or suggest that the authorities were the real criminals. Even an obvious and shocking atrocity like the savage 1969 murder of Panther leader Fred Hampton in Chicago, who was drugged, shot and killed in his bed by the Illinois police, did not provoke an analogous response among top Democrats. The federal government declined to investigate itself, or the state and local police directly responsible for the assassination but was ultimately compelled to pay millions of dollars to Hampton’s family in the largest ever settlement of a civil rights violation lawsuit.

Ms. Stefanik shamelessly refused to commit to accepting the election results next November, saying she would only do so if the election were “constitutional”. She claimed the 2020 election was “unconstitutional” because of how election laws in some states were changed, and cited gerrymandering in her own New York state as legitimate grounds for rejecting the results of an otherwise free and fair election. She’s brazenly and openly auditioning to be Mr. Trump’s vice presidential running mate, even defending his hate speech about immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Gerrymandering is unquestionably a severe and widespread political blight in the US. Democrats in New York, Maryland and elsewhere have abused this power, but Republicans have been, if anything, even worse in states such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Either party could cite gerrymandering to overthrow virtually any election without any real constitutional or other legitimacy.

House Speaker Mike Johnson denied being an election denier while simultaneously echoing Ms Stefanik’s spurious claims that the 2020 election was “unconstitutional”. On several occasions, he has implied that he, too, is prepared to reject the November election results if he’s unhappy with the outcome.

These Republican leaders are not merely parroting Mr. Trump’s ”big lie” about widespread fraud in 2020, they are preparing their party and the public for another effort to overturn a free and fair election in 2024 when, as they seem to fear, he will probably again lose to President Joe Biden.

Mr. Trump has threatened “bedlam” if he’s disqualified from the ballot on plausible constitutional grounds and his supporters have been increasingly threatening prosecutors and his critics, including Republicans, with growing instances of “swatting” (attempting to cause a violent attack on a target by misinformed police).

The normalization of political violence at the top ranks of the Republican Party isn’t just a pressing crisis of the moment. It’s a profoundly toxic historical inflection point, with the first generation of Americans since the Civil War coming-of-age politically in such a contaminated environment. Radicalism in the 1930s and 1960s became powerful fringe movements, but as Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and mentality becomes not merely tolerated and defended by Republican leaders but embraced and mimicked, today’s dangers have few other parallels.

Conservative evangelical columnist David French recently lamented that “in the upside-down world of Maga morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice” as “vice signaling” is how “Trump‘s core supporters … convey their tribal allegiance”. “They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive,” he wrote, and broadly attracted to political violence.

The worst excesses once ascribed to fevered ravings by victims of “Trump derangement syndrome” have long since been fully met and far exceeded.

Eight years under Mr. Trump’s leadership has eviscerated the moral core of the Republican Party and untethered it from virtually all core principles of American democracy. That won’t be easy to reverse, especially since much of the base appears convinced that key national institutions, including law enforcement and the military, are comprehensively corrupted because their leader says so.

The indispensable first step in a long and difficult road back to sanity for the American right in general, and the Republican Party in particular, will be yet another, and presumably the final, defeat for Mr. Trump at the ballot box in November. All Americans desperately need that to happen, but none have more at stake than conservatives.

In the immediate aftermath of Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016, in these pages I observed that “the biggest losers are ideologically traditional conservatives. They now have no party … ” With the Republican Party now unbalanced at the most senior levels, the crisis of the US right has become considerably more dire than anyone imagined eight years ago.