Israel Matzav

Why Israel, the Kurds and Afghanistan aren't giving Obama what he wants

This is an interesting take on why Israel, the Kurds and Afghanistan have all rebuffed President Obama. Lefty Spencer Ackerman claims that all three rebuffs have nothing to do with the results of the midterm elections (Hat Tip: Ben Smith).

Except that the roots of both recent setbacks extend long before the elections, and stem back to something more fundamental. The Obama team came in operating from a sensible-enough presumption: the U.S. has built up enough goodwill and sacrificed enough resources, financial and human, into allied or proxy countries that those allies will be willing to make concessions when the U.S. requires. In each of these cases, Obama figured he asking for things these allies consider fundamental. He needed Iraqi Kurds to make a little institutional room for Iraqi Sunnis; for Israelis to hold off on settlement construction so a two-state solution wouldn’t be stillborn; for, say, Hamid Karzai not to steal an election.

From my perspective, a robust case can be made for each of these courses of action. But what Obama (and favorably-inclined people like myself) didn’t sufficiently appreciate is that each of these allies thinks the U.S. is always on the verge of selling it out. For a new president to start off with the medicine and not the sugar — by figuring he could pocket the gains of his predecessors — is clear in retrospect to have been the wrong move. From there, reluctance by the client gets met with insistence by the patron, and then all of a sudden a dynamic sets in that casts a pall over the whole relationship. We asked for sex before dinner.

Maybe. But there are two issues here: Why did the US 'ask for sex before dinner'? In Israel's case it's because Obama and some members of his administration felt a fierce moral urgency to solve the 'Palestinian problem' that almost no one here feels anymore.

And second, why didn't Obama or his advisers (hence their picture at the top) recognize that they were asking for the diplomatic equivalent of 'sex before dinner'?

And yes we do think Obama is on the verge of - and trying very hard to - sell us out.

Labels: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, fierce moral urgency, Kurdistan, Palestinian state

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:52 AM