The United States, at its highest leadership level, travelled to the Middle East last week, presumably as a demonstration of its continuing deep interest in the Region as a second-term Obama administration begins. The President himself paid a visit substantially to Israel and, we might say, tangentially to Palestine and its leader Mahmoud Abbas. And new Secretary of State, former long-standing Senator Kerry, visited Iraq, not only to reinforce the US’s position of military withdrawal and departure, but also to express increasing concern in the United States that first, the country is not demonstrating the necessary degree of political stability rapidly enough; and secondly that there is fear that Iraq, led by a Shiite administration, would appear to be facilitating the passage of military supplies from Shiite Iran to the besieged Alawite-led regime in Syria.
As commentaries have not failed to observe, Kerry’s trip to Iraq was, perhaps naturally, overshadowed by Obama’s determination to spend time in Israel mending fences with Prime Minister Netanyahu. The President was in a good position to do this since he won a substantial victory over Mitt Romney, whom the Israeli Prime Minister showed little hesitation in publicly backing; and secondly because Netanyahu has not won the kind of victory that he sought in the recent parliamentary elections, and has been forced to compromise with his new coalition allies on a number of issues.
But Obama’s remarks during his visit to Palestine suggest that there remains enough hard-line sentiment in the new Israeli Cabinet on the issue of continued Israeli settlements in the lands claimed by the Palestinians. So he was able only to reiterate that yes, “Palestinians deserve an independent, viable and contiguous state” as their homeland, while insisting that a prior condition of talks between the two parties should not be a ceasing of settlement activity by the Israelis. As he put it, “the settlement issue cannot be solved overnight”.
So for the Palestinians, the status quo ante remains, while the US administration has satisfied itself that the pressures from Israel that that country exerted prior to the presidential elections will cease. And this position has been reinforced by the apparent diplomatic victory that Obama obtained by persuading Netanyahu to apologise to the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan for the Israeli killing of nine Turks on a flotilla bound for Gaza.
The Palestinians, and the Middle Eastern states in general, will now be in no doubt that Obama’s well-received statement, on his first visit to the area in June 2009, after his election in 2008, that the United States was committed to achieving “an independent, viable and contiguous Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state of Israel”, is highly unlikely to be attained during the period of his current administration. And the implication must be that they must begin to replan their diplomacy for the period after the President leaves office in 2016.
Yet the one pattern that contemporary Middle Eastern political relationships and diplomacy continues to demonstrate is their unpredictability. It must be a certainty that President Obama will have felt that his decision to withdraw the majority of American troops from Iraq after the George W Bush’s administration overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, would have brought him more political credit than it has. And even though the President may well have felt that the withdrawal of troops was one of the guarantors of the scale of his re-election victory, he must surely have hoped for a greater degree of stability, and the neutralization of Iraq as a political problem, for most of his second term.
But clearly, the ethnic and religious rivalries that have become more prominent in recent years in the Middle East, have drawn in Iraq. Its Shia leadership has now been adding to these rivalries as allies of the United States perceived main opponent in the area, the Shia leadership of Iran. And to make matters worse, the United States has found that this apparent new alliance has induced the Iraqi leadership to accept a request from Iran for passage of military weapons and facilities through their territory to the beleaguered minority Alawite leadership in Syria, now under increasingly fierce attack from a Sunni majority-led military leadership.
The main objectives of Secretary of State Kerry’s mission to Iraq have therefore been, first to persuade the Shia leadership in Iraq not to seek to so forcefully dominate the leadership of the country, but instead to recognise the necessity for Sunni participation in the government. For secondly, the US clearly sees the connection between the dominant role of Saudi Arabia’s Sunni leadership in exerting pressure against the Alawite regime in Syria, and therefore its own anxiety to inhibit Iranian support, facilitated by Iraq, to Assad in Syria. Thirdly, the US fears that incessant pressure on Syria, may well induce the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon (previously supported by Syria) to open a distracting front of dissension in that country.
So the US sees current Iraqi pro-Shiite activity in Syria as complicating its wider relations in the Middle East, the possibility from a US perspective, being of Iran being drawn into the Syrian domestic conflict. Similarly, the Turkish Government perceives the current Iraqi leadership as not doing enough to facilitate a normalization of relations between the Kurds in Iraq and the Turkish government, with its substantial Kurdish population, and historic conflicts between Turkey and Kurdish populations in Iraq.
Kerry’s diplomacy, simultaneously conducted with Obama’s visit to Israel, has seemed therefore intended to persuade the Iraqis to lessen pressures and instabilities in Iraq that can only complicate its diplomacy in the Middle East. For the main objective in American diplomacy today is not to play a necessarily dominant, interventionist, role in a resolution of the civil war in the Syria (that it hopes to be facilitated by European diplomacy, with its help under NATO cover). Rather it hopes to pressure the Iranian government on the nuclear weapons production issue, with collective efforts that include the forcing of economic deprivation on the Iranian regime and its people.
In that connection, an additional effect of Obama’s diplomacy in Israel last week, and indirectly on the Syrian issue, has been to persuade the Turkish government (of Sunni origin) to do nothing to complicate the problem in Syria which the Turkish government sees as complicating its own domestic and regional responsibilities, given the massive Syrian migration into, and on the borders of, Turkey at this time. And in that regard, Obama has done the Turkish Prime Minister a favour by forcing an apology out of Benjamin Netanyahu on the shooting issue, at which much umbrage has been taken in Turkey.
One good turn will deserve another. And Obama will satisfy himself that his Israeli trip was beneficial.
