Monthly Archives: February 2024

Trump has consistently defeated Haley, but she has every reason to persist

This op-ed was published by The National on February 26, 2024

The Republican primaries appear to be already over. On Saturday, Donald Trump defeated Nikki Haley by about 20 points in South Carolina, where she had been a popular governor. Ms Haley has vowed to press on into Michigan and the primary bonanza on “Super Tuesday”, on March 5. But her practical chances of winning the nomination seemed done, and the billionaire Koch network has suspended its support.

On paper, her performance is underwhelming. She came in third in Iowa, lost in New Hampshire and now South Carolina, and in a Nevada primary that lacked Mr Trump’s participation “none of the above” beat her by more than 30 points.

Focus group research suggests that Mr. Trump’s voters are angry she’s challenging him and, increasingly, questioning his conduct. Many appear to equate criticism of him with disloyalty to the party and even country. Yet it’s precisely Ms. Haley’s rejection of this personality cult that gives her real significance for the country and party.

Republicans, she insists, “have the right to a real choice, not a Soviet-style election with only one candidate”. Except, they seem to want only one candidate, and are outraged when he’s seriously interrogated. Her mere presence problematises and complicates the widespread impulse to fall into lockstep.

Her policies don’t differ much from his, except on US international leadership and support for Ukraine. She agrees with President Joe Biden and most Democrats on the imperative of supporting Kyiv’s struggle against Russia’s war. That puts her at odds with the effectively pro-Russia policies of Mr Trump and, following his lead, many Republicans in Congress. This extends to Nato, which she strongly supports but he treats like a gangland protection racket rather than one of the most successful military and strategic alliances in history.

Her more forthright criticism of him has been late in coming, and didn’t begin in earnest until her chances of winning the nomination became scant. As long as she had plausible hope, she wasn’t prepared to alienate his followers. Principles, as ever, waited upon ambition.

So, her perseverance has increasingly become less about policies or even winning the nomination, and more about providing a political address for Republican voters highly uncomfortable with Mr Trump. She correctly observed that the 40 per cent of votes she received in South Carolina last Saturday isn’t “a tiny group”, and that “huge numbers” of Republicans don’t support the former president.

Her campaign is exposing and, to some extent even creating, serious divisions in a party that must be united and disciplined if Mr Trump is to dislodge Mr Biden in November. Mr Trump – who cannot abide being boldly challenged, particularly by a non-white woman – has been highly antagonistic to Ms Haley and vows to excommunicate her supporters. It’s not exactly a welcoming “big tent” appeal.

Yet her campaign indeed demonstrates that, to prevail in November, he must win over traditional and moderate conservatives, even if they cannot stop or slow his march towards the Republican nomination.

She’s clearly trying to position herself as the leader of a post-Trump Republican party if he goes down to defeat again in November. Apart from his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, as Ms. Haley frequently notes, Mr. Trump and his faction have had an unbroken losing streak at the polls, including in 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. It just happened again, in a special election in a normally Republican-held seat in Long Island formerly occupied by disgraced Republican congressman and conman George Santos.

Ms Haley is asking Republicans if they are finally “sick of all this winning”, as Mr Trump assured them they would become under his leadership. Without invoking Mr Trump’s alleged criminality, or his legally established responsibility for huge fraud and the sexual abuse and repeated defamation of writer E Jean Carroll, both in New York, she’s asking Republicans to recognise that no matter how much they may love the former president, he really isn’t likely to be an appealing candidate for the suburban and swing voters in a handful of competitive states that decide presidential elections.

Mr Trump has angrily vented his frustration with her, but she insists there’s “no need to kiss the ring” or fear his “retribution”. Still, many prominent Republicans are increasingly pressuring her to drop out and endorse him so Mr Trump can lead an apparently united party into its convention. Her point, though, is that there is a significant subset of Republicans that truly do not like Mr Trump and may or may not reconcile themselves to voting for him in the fall.

She’s positioning herself to take over should anything dramatic happen to Mr Trump before November or if he loses to Mr Biden, so it’s wise to offer herself as an alternative as loudly and long as possible. Since her very presence and perseverance provoke Mr Trump to lash out at her and her supporters as irrelevant, undeserving and non-Republican, he is consistently making her points.

When the primary is technically over, to protect her chances of future party leadership, she’ll likely offer him a pro forma endorsement. Her ambitions may not survive Mr Trump’s re-election. But the case she’s making now will echo resoundingly if he loses again in November.

Mr Trump’s legal woes are rapidly intensifying. Regarding his 91 criminal charges, his strategy appears to be delaying trials and securing re-election more than securing acquittals. He’s counting on the electorate as an ultimate de facto jury, and then claiming that everything has been adjudicated by his re-election which supersedes mere trials.

Yet he now owes New York over $454 million, plus $112,000 daily extra that’s accumulating in interest. He must pay another $83.3 million to the writer he sexually abused and repeatedly defamed. Securing enough cash to cover a bond for these debts will badly stretch his liquid finances (most of his wealth being tied up in real estate).

Meanwhile, Mr. Biden has $132 million already raised for the election, with Mr. Trump at just $36.6 million. He recently installed his daughter-in-law, Lara, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, and she’s already insisting that voters want the party to divert campaign funds pay his legal bills. Ms. Haley might want to comment on that, repeatedly, before she’s through.

Ms. Haley has every reason to persist despite her consistent defeats, since she’s gambling that Mr. Trump won’t win in November. And Mr. Biden must be delighted that he’ll be facing Mr. Trump rather than her.

What Iran wants — and fears

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/13/opinions/how-about-iran-us-middle-east-wider-war-ibish/index.html

The crises wracking the Middle East are simultaneously independent flashpoints and also a relatively integrated regionwide offensive by Iranian-backed armed gangs.

It’s sometimes unclear how much control Iran has over these militias in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen and elsewhere.

Although Iran’s influence operates just beneath the earthquakes and tremors shaking the region, much like the Biden administration, Iran is serious about wanting to avoid a broader war.

Both are like Goldilocks, needing just enough but not too much. 

But there are key differences. The United States is a status quo power — upholding security and stability is its regional brand. The 2003 invasion of Iraq devastated US credibility partly because it was such an irrational deviation from a traditional commitment to order. 

Iran, conversely, is a quintessential revisionist actor, opposing the regional and global balance of power.

The United States and Saudi Arabia, also a regional status quo power, are strongly drawn together, while Iran consistently partners with other revisionist powers such as Russia and China.

This puts Washington at a tactical disadvantage since its partners have to behave with relative caution or put US interests at risk — as with the Saudi-led Arab intervention in Yemen that began in 2015 and Israel’s ongoing war of vengeance in Gaza. 

That’s why the Biden administration is trying to quietly contain and restrain Israel in Gaza and prevent it from acting on its threats against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Conversely, Iran typically isn’t threatened when its clients sow chaos. For Iran, even the Hamas-led killing spree on October 7 has been useful by bleeding Israel in a battle against its on-again, off-again Hamas allies.

Yet Iran must be careful about what its proxies do. When one of Iran’s collection of Iraqi Shiite militias, Kataib Hezbollah, earlier this year launched a drone attack on a US logistics center in Jordan, killing three US soldiers, it had gone too far. Iranian leaders rushed to insist they don’t want a broader war, especially with the United States. Kataib Hezbollah announced that it was suspending all military operations while complaining Iran ”does not know the nature of our jihad,” meaning it was standing down on Iranian orders.

Iran has backed Hezbollah’s efforts to avoid an all-out war with Israel despite consistent Israeli escalation and threats. When Israel assassinated a key Hamas leader, Saleh Al-Arouri, this year with a drone strike in Hezbollah’s primary area of Beirut, Hezbollah responded with a largely symbolic rocket attack on an Israeli radar station that caused no injuries and little damage.

Israel responded by assassinating the deputy commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, Wissam Tawil, which has essentially gone unavenged, though intense skirmishing near the border persists.

Israel is now demanding Hezbollah remove its forces 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from the border or face an all-out attack, with some 80,000 Israelis and 70,000 Lebanese evacuated on either side. Hezbollah refuses, and Washington’s negotiator, Amos Hochstein, has proposed a 7-kilometer (4.3-mile) Hezbollah pullback. Hezbollah doesn’t want a war with Israel and Iran agrees.

Tehran is loath to waste a trump card — Hezbollah’s 150,000, often precision-guided, missile and rocket arsenal on Gaza or Hamas. Hezbollah, arguably the most powerful nonstate military in history, is meant to deter Israeli or American attacks against Iran, especially its nuclear facilities.

The potential for such US or Israeli airstrikes is among the most significant reasons Iran wants to avoid a broader conflict. As global attention is focused on the immediate crises spawned by the October 7 attack, Tehran has been making stealthy but significant progress toward nuclear weapons power status by enriching ever-more near-weapons grade uranium. 

The last thing Iran needs is anything that could reverse this progress and threaten other core national interests.

The wild card for Iran is the Yemeni Houthi militants and their Red Sea piracy. This piracy has reiterated and emphasized two long-standing Iranian diplomatic points: that Iran and its “axis of resistance” network must be included in any de facto maritime security arrangement, and that if Iran cannot freely ship its oil due to sanctions, no one can be assured of unmolested maritime commerce either.

Since three of the eight major global maritime chokepoints — the Suez Canal, Strait of Hormuz and Bab Al-Mandab Strait — encircle the Arabian Peninsula and are vulnerable to attacks from Iran and the “axis,” this global economic vulnerability provides Iran compelling international leverage.

Yet the Houthis may well prove the most troublesome “axis” member for Iran. Like Hamas, but unlike almost all other axis groups, neither are creations of Iran but clients. Both have shown a capability and willingness to act alone, as Hamas almost certainly did on October 7. 

So, Iran has a great deal at stake in a set of conflicts that have to be carefully contained and controlled if it is going to avoid paying a significant, and possibly huge, price.

Tehran has already restrained its Iraqi proxies, and is working to help Hezbollah climb down and avoid a devastating Israeli attack. They may even both, either formally or informally, accept the American proposal for a more modest pullback from the border with Israel. And Iran is probably urging the Houthis to take great care not to kill Americans or otherwise go too far.

It’s not just Washington that must play a careful balancing game in the Middle East morass. Despite Iran’s hostility to the status quo and gains from the current conflict at virtually no cost to itself, it clearly recognizes intensifying significant potential risks. 

Tehran surely realizes it must get better control of its Arab proxies or they could end up dragging it into a conflict that’s disastrous for Iranian national interests — and possibly even the future of the regime.

Both US parties have been hit hard by recent setbacks

This op-ed was published by The National on February 12, 2024

Last week was dreadful for both parties in Washington. Republicans suffered their worst meltdown yet in Congress, this time including the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, underscoring the extent to which the party has become so deeply ideological and extreme it cannot govern or even take “yes” for an answer.

The de facto Republican leader, former president Donald Trump, appears poised for a victory from the Supreme Court probably allowing him to remain on all ballots despite a Colorado Supreme Court ruling citing the constitutional ban on insurrectionists returning to public office.

But he suffered a far more serious defeat when an appellate court held, contrary to his claims, that presidents don’t have permanent immunity for crimes they committed while in office. For Democrats, fresh concerns emerged over President Joe Biden’s age, even as he was cleared of criminal wrongdoing in his own classified documents investigation.

Almost no one was left unscathed.

Republicans’ congressional clown-car crash antics sunk to an astounding nadir. They had been bemoaning the crisis at the US-Mexico border due to unprecedented unauthorised crossings and the immigration system in near-total collapse, and angrily demanding highly restrictive measures to stem the flow of unauthorised crossings which they were sure Democrats could never accept.

Democrats have sought to pair border security with pathways to citizenship, especially those brought to the country as undocumented young children and who have lived exemplary lives. But immigration is Mr. Trump’s key election weapon, so Mr. Biden persuaded most Democrats to move dramatically to the center on border security in order to blunt Republican attacks.

Democrats therefore supported legislation with harsh restrictions and enhanced presidential powers to restrict entry and automatically remove would-be migrants and asylum seekers, without any new citizenship pathway. This far-reaching Republican immigration wishlist was instead paired with military aid for Israel and Ukraine.

Ukraine aid is especially crucial because of adamant opposition of many Trump supporters in Congress who are unsympathetic to Kyiv. Democrats considered military support for Ukraine so vital, and the immigration issue so dangerous, they voted for legislation filled with provisions they would normally flatly reject.

Yet being presented with most of what they were aggressively demanding on a supposedly existential crisis, Republicans suddenly said “absolutely not”. Mr. Trump aggressively insisted that immigration mustn’t be seriously addressed under Mr. Biden, because it would be “a gift” to the Democrats who, he claimed, “don’t care about the issue” but “need it politically”.

The raw electioneering, not to mention psychological projection, was neither subtle nor disguised.

House Republicans naturally hopped to attention and rejected the very measures they had been furiously demanding when they were sure Democrats would oppose them. But, crucially, so did many Senate Republicans, including some of the legislation’s key architects.

Mr Trump’s domination is now essentially total. Senate holdouts caved while looking ridiculous by denouncing legislation they had been demanding as imperative and indispensable and claiming this “existential crisis” is best addressed by the election more than 10 months away. They managed to stumble backwards into the trap they laid for their adversaries.

Worse, their effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas collapsed when Representative Mike Gallagher said he wouldn’t support impeaching a senior official over policy disagreements rather than, as the Constitution dictates, “high crimes and misdemeanors”. None were alleged, though Republicans disdain his performance. Another vote is scheduled for next week, and, if past is prologue, the holdouts may well cave and agree to the first US impeachment over policy differences alone.

With Republicans strongly reinforcing the impression they are incapable of anything meaningful, or even taking “yes” for an answer from themselves, Mr Biden suffered his own significant political hit. The special counsel in his classified documents case, a Republican, announced no criminal charges could be sustained, but claimed that in depositions Mr Biden presented himself as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

These strikingly inappropriate claims in any prosecutorial document, especially one announcing no charges, will certainly reinforce the sense among many Americans that Mr Biden may be too old and deteriorated for a second presidential term.

The subsequent uproar underscores that Mr Biden’s age and perceived deteriorating mental competence are, perhaps, his greatest liabilities. Luckily for him, Mr Trump suffers from many similar lapses in public and is only three years younger. Yet it’s going to be essential for Mr Biden, if he remains committed to re-election, take significant steps to offset this impression.

He should release much more detailed health information, and engage more with the press and public in sustained impromptu exchanges. Those who have had extensive and substantive private interactions with him insist that he is well-informed, insightful and clear-headed. It’s essential to show that to a public that has serious doubts.

If he can’t do that, then he should urgently step aside for one of several young Democratic governors who would make very formidable candidates against a seemingly increasingly unhinged Mr Trump. Either way, the burden is now squarely on Mr Biden.

Mr Trump had a mixed week in the courtrooms that appear to be his latest primary residence. He seems likely to appear on all state ballots but, more importantly, also to face one of his most serious criminal trials before the election. His cynical and toxic claim of “absolute immunity” was demolished by a brilliant Washington DC appellate court ruling that appears carefully constructed to give the Supreme Court no plausible basis to overturn it.

Moreover, it would require an unlikely five Supreme Court justices to issue a stay preventing Washington federal Judge Tanya Chutkan from rapidly moving forward with Mr Trump’s trial, now scheduled for March, on his attempts to reverse the 2020 election. If that trial indeed takes place any time before October, Mr Trump could easily become the first major presidential candidate to run as a convicted felon, which will probably prove devastating to his chances. A conviction before the election is also possible in other cases.

Americans have many legitimate doubts about Democrats, but at least they vote for their own legislation. They have doubts about Mr Biden’s age and cognition, but he certainly won’t be convicted of major felonies, found liable for massive fraud and sexual abuse, or facing 91 felony charges. Besides, Mr Trump isn’t exactly an eloquently lucid spring chicken. Despite their growing anxieties, very few Democrats would trade places with Republicans going forward into this crucial election year.

Going after UNRWA is a charade the world must reject

This op-ed was published by The National on February 5, 2024

Ten days ago, Israel began circulating accusations that 12 employees of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza had involvement in the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7. This led to a crisis of indispensable, largely western, funding for this crucial humanitarian services provider for Palestinian refugees, especially in Gaza, where a large majority are refugees from what has become southern Israel.

But this latest campaign is just part of a decades-long attack on the agency by Israel, which is itself just a subset of the broader campaign to eliminate the Palestinian refugee issue by eliminating Palestinian refugees as an internationally monitored and protected group.

On January 18, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini attended his monthly meeting with Israeli officials. He was presented with allegations that 12 of the 13,000 Palestinian employees of UNRWA in Gaza were directly linked to the October 7 attacks. The UN itself publicly revealed the claims by announcing that it had dismissed nine of the 12 accused employees (two were dead).

The news provoked a cascade of demands for UNRWA’s dissolution and defunding, particularly since it broke on the same day that the International Court of Justice issued a favorable initial finding for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.

Israel added, without evidence, that 10 per cent of UNRWA’s Gaza workforce is linked to Hamas. That was likely intended to offset the obvious observation that if UNRWA could keep Hamas supporters or even members to a mere 12 out of 13,000 staffers in Gaza, that’s an outstanding performance. UNRWA is not a government and it has no investigative or intelligence wing that would allow it to carefully vet thousands of workers – and it routinely shares its employment rolls with Israel.

But the useful immediate distraction is part of a larger and longer campaign that is even more insidious than it initially appears. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to paint Israeli anger as partly motivated by UNRWA-related testimony regarding Israeli abuses in Gaza cited in South Africa’s ICJ case. But even that is a relatively minor detail in Israel’s animus against UNRWA.

The real offence by the organization, for which Israel has labored mightily for decades to discredit and eliminate it, is that its very existence reflects the persistence of the Palestinian refugee problem and issue. This simultaneously points both backward to the past, to the origin of Israel’s founding, as well as forward to the future and to the need to resolve the refugee question as a key part of any agreed-upon final status arrangement. Both are utterly unacceptable to not merely the Israeli political far-right, but deeply threatening to most Jewish Israelis.

Israel never tires of complaining that UNRWA is a unique refugee agency, dedicated to one particular people, as if that were somehow unfair to Israel. But, crucially, this is because when the agency was founded in 1949, the same year as the armistice agreements that formed Israel’s de facto international borders, and Israel’s membership in the UN General Assembly, the international community was well aware that for the first and only time, it played a direct role in creating a major refugee crisis that otherwise probably would never have existed.

The UN’s predecessor organization, the League of Nations, after the First World War issued a self-contradictory mandate to Britain over Palestine. As with all the other mandates, Britain was instructed to prepare the (almost entirely Arab) population for self-government and independence without altering the local society, and simultaneously repeated verbatim Britain’s commitment to transform that society into a Jewish “homeland” as expressed in the earlier Balfour Declaration.

After the Second World War, the new UN itself had voted to partition Palestine between its overwhelming Arab majority and the Jewish settlers who were still less than 30 per cent of the population but were to receive 56 per cent of the territory.

In the subsequent war, between 1947-49, about 700,000-800,000 Palestinians, or 80 per cent of the Arabs in what became Israel, were displaced and forbidden to return. Thus, almost overnight, an Arab society vanished and was indeed replaced by a Jewish one. The creation of UNRWA was a clear recognition of the international community’s direct hand in this tragedy of the dispossession and displacement of one people to make way for another.

Many Israelis would regard all of that as the Palestinian national narrative at best, and Arab propaganda at worst. But not only is it true, but it is the truth as the rest of the world understood it at the time. Yet this history of dispossession as the indispensable foundational necessity for Israel is the subject of intense and systematic repression at home and suppression abroad. The mere existence of UNRWA threatens both.

In the present day, it isn’t merely that seeking to deny UNRWA’s relief services to the Palestinians in Gaza is part of Israel’s war of vengeance, though the agency could shut down by the end of February if funding isn’t restored. Israel has long viewed the refugee issue and the “right of return” as a potent bargaining chip, one that is on par, and often paired with, Jerusalem, and a powerful form of Palestinian leverage in negotiations and international public diplomacy.

UNRWA’s work requires it to carefully tally Palestinian refugees, providing accurate numbers and crucial legal status. Israel therefore sees the existence and work of UNRWA as the decisive obstacle to redefining the Palestinian refugees out of existence, and maintains that only those who themselves were physically displaced nearly 80 years ago deserve that status. Hence the astonishing spectacle that the country that created and refuses to resolve one of the world’s great refugee crises blames the agency that cares for those refugees, because they are and remain refugees.

It’s so simple: no refugees, no issue.

The cynical and cruel campaign against UNRWA operates at nearly every level of Israel’s relentless conflict with the Palestinians: as part of the collective war in Gaza; key to suppressing historical realities and memories dangerous to Israel’s self-serving national mythology (and, conversely, central to Palestinian mythologies); and crucial to eliminating a potent source of Palestinian leverage at the bargaining table and on the global stage.

The international community needs to see this charade for what it is and, while demanding reasonable reforms and accountability, redouble the commitment to the humanitarian services that UNRWA provides, what it stands for, and the role it must continue to play unless and until the displacement and dispossession of the 1940s is, at last, redressed.