Under Obama: Uncle Sam, Honest Broker?

The appointment of veteran peace negotiator George
Mitchell as the Barack Obama administration’s special emissary to the Middle East reflects an unprecedented opportunity of bringing
some balance to American foreign policy in the region.

Mitchell is a fair adjudicator and an inveterate trier for peace against great odds. Apart from his reputation as a skilful facilitator who can extricate conflicting parties from deadlocked positions, what is significant in the context of American policy towards the Middle East is that he is
half Lebanese (from the mother’s side). Even his other half has Arabic roots because his Irish father was adopted by a Lebanese family.

Had President Obama named a hawk like Dennis Ross as his Middle East envoy instead of Mitchell, it would have sent the signal that ‘Change’ had just not come to American Middle East policy. Ross is an Iran-baiter and an old hand at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the flagship organisation for the ‘Israel lobby’ which has captured US foreign policy for decades. When it came to choosing between Mitchell and Ross, Obama seems to have cast his vote for the former. Ross will apparently remain in a lesser capacity as an "adviser" for the Middle East to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Obama specifically addressed the "Muslim world" in his inauguration speech and promised a "new way forward." Speculation is agog whether this is empty rhetoric behind which the old tilt in favour of Israel and its "right to defend itself" at all costs will be continued or if the US will shift to a more even-handed stance. What is working in Obama’s favour is his massive popular mandate and widespread expectation among Americans that a change in stance towards the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is appropriate and long due.

One of the most startling but underreported diplomatic events during Israel’s 22-day offensive on the Gaza Strip was a controversy about the American vote in the UN Security Council on a resolution asking for immediate withdrawal of the Israeli Defence Forces to the pre-December 27 lines. Addressing an audience in a southern Israeli town, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert disclosed that the US abstained from the vote only after he used his influence to pressurise the Bush administration. Alarmed by intelligence that the US was planning to vote in favour of the resolution, Olmert personally rang up President George W Bush to demand a reversal. His account of this phone call and subsequent flip-flop, as reported in the Associated Press, are worth quoting in entirety:

"I said: 'Get me President Bush on the phone. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care: 'I need to talk to him now.' He got off the podium and spoke to me.

Olmert said he argued that the United States should not vote in favor, and the president then called Rice and told her not to do so. ‘She was left pretty embarrassed’ Olmert said."

Although the Bush administration denied this version and asked for an official retraction from Tel Aviv, none came. The Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki confirmed the veracity of Olmert’s account by expressing surprise a day after the vote on January 8th.

"We were told that the Americans were going to vote in favour. What happened in the last 10 or 15 minutes, what kind of pressure she received, from whom, this is really something that maybe we will know about later," he said."

The supreme confidence with which Olmert could boast that he literally ordered Bush to suspend his speech and instruct his Secretary of State to do the needful indicated that the tail was indeed wagging the dog. The choice before Obama is whether he would like to be interrupted from an engagement by a livid Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni or Benjamin Netanyahu (potential successors of Olmert after the February elections) in a similar situation and be harangued to support the Israeli government position regardless of its justness or rationale.

The material circumstances in which AIPAC and other powerful Jewish organisations could put almost the entire American Congress in their pockets are eroding like quicksand. The fact that towering American Jewish institutions and personalities like Lehman Brothers and George Madoff have bit the dust in a cascade of white collar crime scandals weakens the overall pull of the Israel lobby in American politics. The simultaneous defeats of the Christian right wing, the neocon ideologues and the Wall Street moneyspinners have created a unique conjuncture for change in US foreign policy towards the Middle East.

As a consummate organiser and shrewd tactician who understands that the old bases of power are giving way to the new, Obama is capable of carving out a new image for his country that many in theMiddle East wish for- that of an honest broker. The failures of the Oslo Accords, the ‘Roadmap for Peace’ and the Annapolis Conference owed to the reality that Washington was a biased party with no impartiality or regard for long-term peace. The total lack of trust that the US evoked in important players like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria was a roadblock in the disguise of a ‘roadmap’.

Obama’s openness to talk "if you are willing to unclench your fist" is a pragmatic and de-ideologised principle that need not be slammed as sleeping with the enemy. He has the trump cards to correct a deformed history of the United States in the Middle East. In George Mitchell, he has the wisdom and the craft. In Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross, he has the traction with the Jewish lobby to sell some sour lemons. From the majority of American people, the new President has the ultimate green signal- a rejection of militarism as a means of obtaining safety and security.

Sreeram Chaulia is a researcher on international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship in Syracuse, New York.