Sar Shalom
As supporters of Israel, we want to know what sorts of policies the next president will adopt regarding the Middle East. However, questions to the candidates about what approach they would take if elected invariably fail to yield answers that are useful to make such an assessment. Instead, the candidates tend to make anodyne responses to such questions such as, "We have to support Israel" or "We have to support peace." Such answers provide no indication of what how that candidate would evaluate an Israeli response to a Hamas rocket campaign if elected.
There is, however, something which would give a clue to such issues. Instead of asking the candidates what their perceptions of the issue are, ask them who they turn to in order to understand the issues. For instance, someone whose understanding of human rights comes from Paul Berman will likely have a different take on whether or not Israel's response to Hamas rockets is disproportionate than someone whose understanding comes from Ken Roth. Someone whose understanding of Middle East history comes from Bernard Lewis will have a different view of the boundary between Jewish and Arab rights than someone whose understanding comes from Rashid Khalidi. Someone whose ideas of Jewish and Arab interests come from Alan Dershowitz and Khaled Abu Toameh would have a different view of what the obstacles are to a peace agreement than someone whose views come from Jeremy Ben-Ami and Hanan Ashrawi.
The reality is that once someone decides which set of figures would provide the best understanding, the decision has been made as to the frame in which to understand the issue. Once the frame has been decided, the policy to adopt, should one gain the power to implement it, has been decided as well. Is there anyone asking the candidates who fills their understanding of the region?
The Day of the Dhimmi is Done - Michael Lumish, Proprietor
Showing posts with label campaign 2016. Show all posts
Showing posts with label campaign 2016. Show all posts
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Sunday, July 19, 2015
What we should look for in the next president (in general)
Sar Shalom
In previous posts about what to look for in the next president, I have examined issues of particular interest to us as supporters of Israel. In this post I'd like to suggest two traits to look for in the next president that are not particular to any political leanings. The first one is that the next president should be modest enough to recognize that he or she can never know more about a particular policy area than a specialist in that topic. The second trait is how he or she would evaluate whose advice is sound and whose is not.
To illustrate these two points, or the absence of them, I refer to a recent post by Abu Yehuda about Mideast policy by the two most recent administrations. What I would suggest is that the problems in the Middle East are not due to decisions of recent administrations to intervene or not, rather the problem is either one of immodesty or an inability to evaluate competing advice soundly.
Starting where one of the character flaws is at work, Obama acts as a know-it-all when it comes to the Middle East. This should not be surprising given that he previously stated, "I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors." With regards to Iran, the source for Obama's policy can be described as Obama knowing, just knowing, that underneath the facade of Iran's revolutionary regime there is a responsible regional actor that will come out if only the rightcoddling incentives were provided. The result is that when his Director of Central Intelligence, Defense Secretary, Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all called for arming and training the Syrian rebels in Jordan, Obama felt confident in his possession of "The Truth" about Iran and how such an action would undermine the coaxing of the hidden responsible actor out from the revolutionary facade.
While there were know-it-alls involved in Bush's Iraq War policy, Bush was not one of them. (Disclosure: I supported the Iraq War from the beginning, albeit with reservations about Bush's commitment to the establishment of a democratic order in Iraq after Saddam fell. From the time the statue of Saddam fell until the announcement of the "surge," there was little if anything that I supported in the way of decisions made in Washington and then I completely supported the nationalization of the Anbar Awakening embodied in the "surge.") Instead, Bush's problem was that he trusted two know-it-alls, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and mistook their confidence and calls for decisive action for sage advice. Notwithstanding that I think Bush should have followed the script that a team from the Army War College drafted for the Phase IV reconstruction in Iraq, and the fact that events have supported my view, Bush's decision to follow Cheney and Rumsfeld could have been defended at the start. However, as events transpired in Iraq, a principle enunciated by a restaurant chain manager to Atul Gawande about what he would do if running a neurology unit should affected Bush's approach going forward:
Bush eventually did turn around on his approach to Iraq, after receiving a "thumping" at the polls in 2006, in part due to the situation in Iraq. At that time, there were two proposals for how to proceed. One was the Baker-Hamilton report, also known as the Iraq Study Group. The competing proposal was from Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and retired Army Vice Chief of Staff Jack Keane, what later became known as the surge. While the Kagan-Keane report did incorporate the lessons from what did and did not work in Iraq to that point, I cannot rule out the possibility that Bush selected because it was the only one of the two options in front of him that was not an effective surrender in Iraq. Whatever his motives, Bush's selection of the Kagan-Keane report, the leadership of GEN David Petraeus in Baghdad, and Bush's support for GEN Petraeus built on the progress being made at that time in Ramadi by COL Sean MacFarland and brought those successes to the rest of Iraq.
Unfortunately, by the time Bush came to realize that the approach of Cheney and Rumsfeld was not working, Iran had embedded itself in Iraq's political structure. While the Kagan-Keane plan did address the security threats plaguing Iraq at the end of 2006, it did not address the political structure in Iraq. It is Iran's continued control over Iraqi politics that plagues us today, control which evolved over four years of Bush refusing to address the security situation in Iraq in any manner that challenged Cheney's and Rumsfeld's "Truth."
Returning to the issue of evaluating the candidates, Abu Yehuda wrote, "Bush did not understand the complexity of the situation or the intentions of the various players." In actuality, we should not expect the president to understand the complexity of the situation. However, there is something we should expect from the president that would prevent situations both like what arose from Bush's waging of war in Iraq and Obama's withdrawal from that war. The first expectation should be for president to have the humility to recognize the limits of his or her understanding. The second expectation should be for the president to have some means of weighing competing offers of advice other than simply favoring what jives with his or her pre-existing views. While it would be ideal to be able to do so a priori, at a minimum this should mean being able to follow the consequences of natural experiments with an eye towards evaluating competing theories on how they performed rather than by their conformance to preconceived notions.
In previous posts about what to look for in the next president, I have examined issues of particular interest to us as supporters of Israel. In this post I'd like to suggest two traits to look for in the next president that are not particular to any political leanings. The first one is that the next president should be modest enough to recognize that he or she can never know more about a particular policy area than a specialist in that topic. The second trait is how he or she would evaluate whose advice is sound and whose is not.
To illustrate these two points, or the absence of them, I refer to a recent post by Abu Yehuda about Mideast policy by the two most recent administrations. What I would suggest is that the problems in the Middle East are not due to decisions of recent administrations to intervene or not, rather the problem is either one of immodesty or an inability to evaluate competing advice soundly.
Starting where one of the character flaws is at work, Obama acts as a know-it-all when it comes to the Middle East. This should not be surprising given that he previously stated, "I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors." With regards to Iran, the source for Obama's policy can be described as Obama knowing, just knowing, that underneath the facade of Iran's revolutionary regime there is a responsible regional actor that will come out if only the right
While there were know-it-alls involved in Bush's Iraq War policy, Bush was not one of them. (Disclosure: I supported the Iraq War from the beginning, albeit with reservations about Bush's commitment to the establishment of a democratic order in Iraq after Saddam fell. From the time the statue of Saddam fell until the announcement of the "surge," there was little if anything that I supported in the way of decisions made in Washington and then I completely supported the nationalization of the Anbar Awakening embodied in the "surge.") Instead, Bush's problem was that he trusted two know-it-alls, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and mistook their confidence and calls for decisive action for sage advice. Notwithstanding that I think Bush should have followed the script that a team from the Army War College drafted for the Phase IV reconstruction in Iraq, and the fact that events have supported my view, Bush's decision to follow Cheney and Rumsfeld could have been defended at the start. However, as events transpired in Iraq, a principle enunciated by a restaurant chain manager to Atul Gawande about what he would do if running a neurology unit should affected Bush's approach going forward:
This is pretty obvious. I’m sure you already do it. But I’d study what the best people are doing, figure out how to standardize it, and then bring it to everyone to execute.In Iraq, this would have meant looking at the record of MAJ James Gavrilis in Ar-Rutbah, MG David Petraeus in Ninewah Province, MG Peter Chiarelli in Sadr City, and COL H. R. McMaster in Tal Afar. In each of those cases, the Bush administration was happy to pocket the results of those operations, even citing McMaster's success in Tal Afar as reason to believe that the Iraq War was not hopeless. However, for Cheney and Rumsfeld, those officers committed the unpardonable sin of straying from The Truth about how wars are to fought and Bush trusted Cheney's and Rumsfeld's assurances about The Truth about how to fight wars rather than the experiences of the aforementioned officers.
Bush eventually did turn around on his approach to Iraq, after receiving a "thumping" at the polls in 2006, in part due to the situation in Iraq. At that time, there were two proposals for how to proceed. One was the Baker-Hamilton report, also known as the Iraq Study Group. The competing proposal was from Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and retired Army Vice Chief of Staff Jack Keane, what later became known as the surge. While the Kagan-Keane report did incorporate the lessons from what did and did not work in Iraq to that point, I cannot rule out the possibility that Bush selected because it was the only one of the two options in front of him that was not an effective surrender in Iraq. Whatever his motives, Bush's selection of the Kagan-Keane report, the leadership of GEN David Petraeus in Baghdad, and Bush's support for GEN Petraeus built on the progress being made at that time in Ramadi by COL Sean MacFarland and brought those successes to the rest of Iraq.
Unfortunately, by the time Bush came to realize that the approach of Cheney and Rumsfeld was not working, Iran had embedded itself in Iraq's political structure. While the Kagan-Keane plan did address the security threats plaguing Iraq at the end of 2006, it did not address the political structure in Iraq. It is Iran's continued control over Iraqi politics that plagues us today, control which evolved over four years of Bush refusing to address the security situation in Iraq in any manner that challenged Cheney's and Rumsfeld's "Truth."
Returning to the issue of evaluating the candidates, Abu Yehuda wrote, "Bush did not understand the complexity of the situation or the intentions of the various players." In actuality, we should not expect the president to understand the complexity of the situation. However, there is something we should expect from the president that would prevent situations both like what arose from Bush's waging of war in Iraq and Obama's withdrawal from that war. The first expectation should be for president to have the humility to recognize the limits of his or her understanding. The second expectation should be for the president to have some means of weighing competing offers of advice other than simply favoring what jives with his or her pre-existing views. While it would be ideal to be able to do so a priori, at a minimum this should mean being able to follow the consequences of natural experiments with an eye towards evaluating competing theories on how they performed rather than by their conformance to preconceived notions.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
What to look for from the candidates (cont.)
Sar Shalom
In my previous post about the presidential race, I wrote about what messages the presidential candidates should promote irrespective of what policies they would implement if elected. This post will look at what we can expect in the way of policy from whoever get elected. However, looking directly at what any candidate would do if elected is unlikely to be feasible because the candidates are unlikely to say anything more than that they would support Israel and may or may not include work towards a two-state solution. This type of pledge is so banal in checking off key constituencies that it tells us nothing about what any candidate would do if elected.
Yet, even without specifying exact policies or how hard they would push for a peace process, there is something which would provide a clue to the parameters bounding their potential policy: their narrative. For instance, if a candidate's justification for Israel's existence starts at Wannsee and ends at V-E Day, that candidate's sympathy for Jewish connection to any part of Jordan's 1949-conquest would probably be different than if the justification stems from 13 centuries of the Islamic equivalent of Jim Crow. Similarly, if the plight of the Palestinians is compared to that of the Kurds today or of the Jews until 1948, it would create more justification to push for their maximalist aims than if their plight is compared to that of the Hutus in post-genocide Rwanda.
While the candidates are unlikely to address the issue in such terms on their own, they would also have less reason to evade questions about the narrative than they would questions like, "Under what circumstances would you withhold your Security Council veto in protection of Israel?" Any chance of the Jewish media prodding in that direction?
In my previous post about the presidential race, I wrote about what messages the presidential candidates should promote irrespective of what policies they would implement if elected. This post will look at what we can expect in the way of policy from whoever get elected. However, looking directly at what any candidate would do if elected is unlikely to be feasible because the candidates are unlikely to say anything more than that they would support Israel and may or may not include work towards a two-state solution. This type of pledge is so banal in checking off key constituencies that it tells us nothing about what any candidate would do if elected.
Yet, even without specifying exact policies or how hard they would push for a peace process, there is something which would provide a clue to the parameters bounding their potential policy: their narrative. For instance, if a candidate's justification for Israel's existence starts at Wannsee and ends at V-E Day, that candidate's sympathy for Jewish connection to any part of Jordan's 1949-conquest would probably be different than if the justification stems from 13 centuries of the Islamic equivalent of Jim Crow. Similarly, if the plight of the Palestinians is compared to that of the Kurds today or of the Jews until 1948, it would create more justification to push for their maximalist aims than if their plight is compared to that of the Hutus in post-genocide Rwanda.
While the candidates are unlikely to address the issue in such terms on their own, they would also have less reason to evade questions about the narrative than they would questions like, "Under what circumstances would you withhold your Security Council veto in protection of Israel?" Any chance of the Jewish media prodding in that direction?
Thursday, July 2, 2015
What to look for from the Presidential candidates
Sar Shalom
With the presidential election cycle gearing up, it is time to ask the question of what we as the pro-Israel community would want from the next president. The most common items would probably revolve around providing materiel support to Israel during conflicts, reliably voting against one-sided resolutions at the UN particularly at the Security Council, and validating some subset of the settlements or at least not making a major todo about them. However, I would like to suggest that if we do not see presidential action until one of those items is relevant, we should not be satisfied. What we really need is someone who will combat the lethal narratives promoted by the Palestinian national movement and parroted by the global media which induce people to believe being on the side of justice requires calling on the president to allow the Security Council to take meaningful action against Israel and all the rest. While the aforementioned items can only be done once elected, the candidates will have as much capacity as the president to combat the lethal during the campaign with the winner of the election only gaining the ability to hold on to the microphone past the election.
Combating the lethal narratives would not mean simply repeating the our narrative. Rather, it would mean discussing inconvenient truths that complicate the Palestinian narrative. Some points I would like to see someone in the presidential field raise, in no particular order:
Define terrorism. Terrorism is violence which targets those who are unconnected to whatever the grievance is. By the same token, causing harm, or even killing, innocents while targeting those responsible to the grievance is not terrorism. If insufficient effort was taken to prevent the harm to those innocents in the course of attacking a legitimate, such an action may be a war crime, but it is not terrorism. Thus, even if resisting occupation is a legitimate activity, families enjoying a meal at a restaurant are not connected to the grievance meaning that targeting them is terrorism. Similarly, any casualties resulting from bombing a rocket launcher are not terrorism because the target, the rocket launcher, is part of the grievance of rockets coming in to one's territory. These rules apply whether one is Muslim, Christian or Jew, or if one's target is Muslim, Christian or Jew. This is particularly important because if you poll the Middle East, you'll find that no one supports "terrorism." Instead what you'll find is that wide sections of the public will define terrorism as based on the cause, in other words, if the cause is just, no action constitutes terrorism.
Abbas' perfidy. In almost every venue, it is taken as a given that Mahmoud Abbas is a partner for peace, if only Israel would yield what is the Palestinian people's due. However, no attention has been paid to Abbas' refusal to yield on demographically destroying Israel through immigration, his denial of any Jewish connection to the Jewish homeland, or of any senior member of his administration declaring that their objective remains to reclaim all of Palestine only that they cannot say so openly to western audiences.
Border status. The armistice line delineating Israel prior to 1967 was a result of Jordan's conquest in 1949. That means that if acquisition of territory through conquest is what makes Israel's possession of Judea and Samaria illegitimate, then it also makes Israel's non-possession illegitimate. Further, today's Very Serious People invoke Resolution 242 to justify calls for complete withdrawal from the territories. The problem is that language for Resolution 242 calling for complete withdraw was rejected. In addition, Resolution calls on the Arabs to end all claims against Israel and for Israel to have secure and recognized borders. Somehow, the international community does not seem to be bothered by Abbas' unwillingness to delineate any conditions under which he would end all claims and giving the Palestinians the ability to import munitions at will while putting them within mortar range of the bulk of Israel's population is not secure.
Jewish history. Several things need to be pointed out. One, Jews had not abandoned and forgotten the Land of Israel between the Roman exile and the First Aliyah. This means that the justification for the state of Israel does not start with the Holocaust. Two, the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in the Levant did not start with Zionism. Three, the blood libel is a hoax and the Protocols of Zion are a forgery (could someone ask if Obama believes otherwise?).
There are other facts that would be worth adding to the list, feel free to add.
With the presidential election cycle gearing up, it is time to ask the question of what we as the pro-Israel community would want from the next president. The most common items would probably revolve around providing materiel support to Israel during conflicts, reliably voting against one-sided resolutions at the UN particularly at the Security Council, and validating some subset of the settlements or at least not making a major todo about them. However, I would like to suggest that if we do not see presidential action until one of those items is relevant, we should not be satisfied. What we really need is someone who will combat the lethal narratives promoted by the Palestinian national movement and parroted by the global media which induce people to believe being on the side of justice requires calling on the president to allow the Security Council to take meaningful action against Israel and all the rest. While the aforementioned items can only be done once elected, the candidates will have as much capacity as the president to combat the lethal during the campaign with the winner of the election only gaining the ability to hold on to the microphone past the election.
Combating the lethal narratives would not mean simply repeating the our narrative. Rather, it would mean discussing inconvenient truths that complicate the Palestinian narrative. Some points I would like to see someone in the presidential field raise, in no particular order:
Define terrorism. Terrorism is violence which targets those who are unconnected to whatever the grievance is. By the same token, causing harm, or even killing, innocents while targeting those responsible to the grievance is not terrorism. If insufficient effort was taken to prevent the harm to those innocents in the course of attacking a legitimate, such an action may be a war crime, but it is not terrorism. Thus, even if resisting occupation is a legitimate activity, families enjoying a meal at a restaurant are not connected to the grievance meaning that targeting them is terrorism. Similarly, any casualties resulting from bombing a rocket launcher are not terrorism because the target, the rocket launcher, is part of the grievance of rockets coming in to one's territory. These rules apply whether one is Muslim, Christian or Jew, or if one's target is Muslim, Christian or Jew. This is particularly important because if you poll the Middle East, you'll find that no one supports "terrorism." Instead what you'll find is that wide sections of the public will define terrorism as based on the cause, in other words, if the cause is just, no action constitutes terrorism.
Abbas' perfidy. In almost every venue, it is taken as a given that Mahmoud Abbas is a partner for peace, if only Israel would yield what is the Palestinian people's due. However, no attention has been paid to Abbas' refusal to yield on demographically destroying Israel through immigration, his denial of any Jewish connection to the Jewish homeland, or of any senior member of his administration declaring that their objective remains to reclaim all of Palestine only that they cannot say so openly to western audiences.
Border status. The armistice line delineating Israel prior to 1967 was a result of Jordan's conquest in 1949. That means that if acquisition of territory through conquest is what makes Israel's possession of Judea and Samaria illegitimate, then it also makes Israel's non-possession illegitimate. Further, today's Very Serious People invoke Resolution 242 to justify calls for complete withdrawal from the territories. The problem is that language for Resolution 242 calling for complete withdraw was rejected. In addition, Resolution calls on the Arabs to end all claims against Israel and for Israel to have secure and recognized borders. Somehow, the international community does not seem to be bothered by Abbas' unwillingness to delineate any conditions under which he would end all claims and giving the Palestinians the ability to import munitions at will while putting them within mortar range of the bulk of Israel's population is not secure.
Jewish history. Several things need to be pointed out. One, Jews had not abandoned and forgotten the Land of Israel between the Roman exile and the First Aliyah. This means that the justification for the state of Israel does not start with the Holocaust. Two, the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in the Levant did not start with Zionism. Three, the blood libel is a hoax and the Protocols of Zion are a forgery (could someone ask if Obama believes otherwise?).
There are other facts that would be worth adding to the list, feel free to add.
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