Israel Matzav

Contingency plans?

Mark Heller suggests that the Obama administration needs a contingency plan for the likely event that the 'direct talks' don't bring peace in the next year.

Of course, it is not inconceivable that the gamble will pay off. The United States will closely chaperone the process and there is at least a theoretical possibility that within one year, Israelis and Palestinians will overcome their ingrained suspicions, work out practical solutions to the immensely complicated issues on the agenda, and agree on a formula to resolve the century-old conflict. Still, that doesn’t appear to be the most likely outcome, and even if the negotiations don’t explode in mutual acrimony, the administration ought to be preparing for the possibility that they will be deadlocked when the allotted year has expired.

Moreover, a year from now, Iran is likely to be at, or even past, the threshold of nuclear military capability. And a year from now, the United States is scheduled to begin the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan, which means that unless a stable peace in that country will have meanwhile been achieved, Obama will either have to withdraw in defeat or else postpone the withdrawal and explain to an increasingly war-weary public why he couldn’t meet his stated objective.

To ensure that a failed Israeli-Palestinian peace process (with potentially incendiary results) is not added to this list of travails, the administration should already be thinking now about contingency plans in case comprehensive agreement remains out of reach. Such plans might include some interim arrangement (renamed something else to accommodate Palestinian sensitivities), perhaps based on the still-unimplemented second stage of the Road Map, which calls for a Palestinian state with provisional borders, in order to preserve the possibility of future momentum. Otherwise, the only alternative to total success will be total failure. And combined with the other circumstances likely to prevail in mid-2011, total failure could jeopardize not only the viability of Obama’s presidency but also America’s standing as a serious superpower on the world stage.

Of course, we've already seen that the teleprompter president doesn't really do contingency plans.

What could go wrong?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:30 AM