From Bombs To Potholes

At the National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, Paul Pillar writes that it's time for Israel and the U.S. to reconsider its refusal to talk to Hamas, now preoccupied with the mundane responsibilities of a ruling party:

The Israeli posture and, in lockstep with it, the American posture toward Hamas are stuck in an unhelpful time warp. It is a posture that simply applies the label “terrorist” to the group and assumes that an unchanging refusal to have anything to do with it is the only appropriate implication. A label is no substitute for a policy or for a strategy. And in this case, it is no substitute for understanding the current character and objectives of Hamas, which are not captured by the label.

More Free Advice For Israel

Writing at The National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, Paul Pillar applauds the Muslim Brotherhood's newly balanced stance toward the Palestinian parties and says it's time for Israel get over Hamas' support for terrorism:

In private discussion with the Israelis, the United States should point out that if Israel is genuinely interested in a peace settlement with the Palestinians, what the Egyptian Brotherhood is doing is as good as it gets, especially coming from the biggest political actor in the biggest Arab state. If the Israelis are not genuinely interest in a settlement, a negative posture toward the Egyptian initiative will serve only to underscore to the world Israel's responsibility for the impasse. And if Mr. Netanyahu raises issues of Hamas's past involvement in terrorism, he should be reminded that if the United States applied a once-a-terrorist-always-a-terrorist standard, it never would have had any dealings with some who have occupied the positions he does now of Israeli prime minister and leader of Likud.

Bin There, Done That

At the National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, Paul Pillar discusses documents seized in the Abbottabad raid that reveal Osama bin Laden's Palestine preoccupation:

The Palestinian issue has the power it does not because individual terrorist leaders like bin Laden necessarily make it their first personal priority but instead because it has tremendous resonance among the Muslim populations to which they appeal. The reason that supporters and rank-and-file practitioners of anti-U.S. terrorism cite most frequently for their hatred of the United States is U.S. condoning of Israeli occupation of Palestinian-inhabited land and of other Israeli actions that involve the killing or subjugation of Muslims.

There are many good reasons not to let the Israeli-Palestinian issue fester. Its role as a readily exploitable extremist cause is one of them.

Pillar and others believe this is why Israel and the U.S. should do more. It's probably also one of the reasons the Palestinians keep doing less, because they think the support of fellow Muslims (not that all Palestinians are Muslim) will leverage a better settlement with Israel. But they're wrong. With each passing year, and each Israeli offer Palestinians spurn, the Israelis build more settlements, and the parameters of a future Palestine get smaller. Bin Laden was a tactical and political adviser the Palestinians are infinitely better off without, especially if it increases the chances they'll just say yes.

Nixon's Thorough Thought Process

Writing at The National Interest, which is published by the former Nixon Center, Paul Pillar disputes David Ignatius's suggestion that the most remarkable thing about Richard Nixon's opening to communist China was that it was undertaken by a staunch anti-communist:

Nixon's initiative had its roots in his cogitation while out of power about great power politics and how it could be reshaped to America's advantage. When he entered the White House in 1969 it was with one of the most fully formed strategic outlooks about foreign affairs of any incoming U.S. president. A fundamental aspect of the China initiative that Ignatius does not mention is that it was one leg of triangular diplomacy in which Nixon intended to use the relationship with Beijing to gain leverage in his dealings with the Soviet Union. On the China part of his strategy, Nixon was even ahead of his geostrategic partner Henry Kissinger.

Nixon personally planned the negotiating approach toward China, inventorying on his yellow legal pad the objectives of each state and where they might find common ground. It was a thorough thought process that—especially in taking account of the perspectives and interests of the other side—is sorely missing from much of what passes for public debate about foreign policy today. Nixon and Kissinger's super-close-hold manner of handling the initiative, in which even Secretary of State William Rogers was kept in the dark, had its disadvantages. Some signals from the Chinese were missed, and there were some avoidable stumbles in the drafting of what became known as the Shanghai Communiqué. But to the extent the result was a positive accomplishment, which it was, the credit was all Nixon's.

TNI's new editor, Robert W. Merry, missed an opportunity to devote the January-February 2012 print edition to a look back and forward at Sino-U.S. relations through the prism of the Nixon initiative. I was glad to learn that the center itself has some programming planned.

Number 1 And Number 1.5

Paul Pillar at The National Interest:

In a portion of the [NBC] interview about the danger of Israel touching off a war with Iran, the president said, “My number one priority continues to be the security of the United States, but also the security of Israel.” Wait a minute—shouldn't the security of the United States be the number one priority of the president of the United States? Rather than merely sharing the top spot on the priority list with some foreign country's security? This comment was part of an unscripted interview, and perhaps the language of a prepared speech would have come out differently. But the president said what he said.

Does She Have To Wait Five More Years?

Dismissing half-measures proposed by longtime Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, Paul Pillar at The National Interest says it will take a president with nothing to lose to make a Palestinian state a reality, which is to say a reelected president:

The slim hope for [a fundamentally changed U.S. approach] would require a president winning a second term and thus having four more years knowing he will never run for office again. The alternative election result in the United States certainly gives no hope for an end to the stalemate. Front-runner Mitt Romney, with his stand-with-Israel-no-matter-what approach, almost sounds like the moderate on this issue compared to his principal opponents, Newt (“We have invented the Palestinian people”) Gingrich and Rick (“All the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis”) Santorum.

Hamas On The Horizon

Even if Israel refuses to deal with Hamas, the U.S. should be open to the possibility, Paul Pillar writes at "The National Interest":

As the United States confronts any Israeli foolishness, whether long-term or short-term, it needs to overcome not only the business about Hamas recognizing Israel but also understandable queasiness about dealing with a group that has the blood of innocents on its hands. Two observations are pertinent to this. One is that we have been through this all before, not only in other conflicts such as Northern Ireland but also in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, with the acceptance of the PLO as a legitimate interlocutor at the start of the Oslo process. The other observation is that if one is to follow the “once a terrorist, always a terrorist” posture that is so often taken toward Hamas, then the United States ought not to have any dealings with Likud, some of whose earlier leaders—notably Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir—had also been heavily involved in the killing of innocents through terrorism.

Death To Al-Qaeda?

If all goes well -- and that's mighty big if; it's still the bottom of the second inning, and the law of unintended consequences is on deck -- the Middle East revolutions could mean freedom from tyranny for Arab peoples and freedom from fear for us. This New York Times analysis quotes Paul Pillar, who blogs at the Nixon Center's "National Interest":

[F]or Al Qaeda — and perhaps no less for the American policies that have been built around the threat it poses — the democratic revolutions that have gripped the world’s attention present a crossroads. Will the terrorist network shrivel slowly to irrelevance? Or will it find a way to exploit the chaos produced by political upheaval and the disappointment that will inevitably follow hopes now raised so high?

For many specialists on terrorism and the Middle East, though not all, the past few weeks have the makings of an epochal disaster for Al Qaeda, making the jihadists look like ineffectual bystanders to history while offering young Muslims an appealing alternative to terrorism.

“So far — and I emphasize so far — the score card looks pretty terrible for Al Qaeda,” said Paul R. Pillar, who studied terrorism and the Middle East for nearly three decades at the C.I.A. and is now at Georgetown University. “Democracy is bad news for terrorists. The more peaceful channels people have to express grievances and pursue their goals, the less likely they are to turn to violence.”

A Watched Tinpot Never Boils

Intelligence community veteran, Egypt hand, and "National Interest" blogger Paul Pillar on the bum rap of intelligence failure in Egypt:

[N]o matter how complete is our information about a situation in a foreign country and how astutely we may analyze that situation, it is impossible for anyone to predict the sort of happenings taking place in Egypt today. Those happenings are not the result of some secret conspiracy, detectable with sufficiently energetic collection of information. They are a spontaneous, leaderless eruption. The responsible government agencies should be expected to understand and to convey the potential for such eruptions, but they cannot predict the timing. Although Mubarak's regime has become increasingly sclerotic and repressive over the past decade or so, the potential for an eruption something like the current one has been present ever since I was responsible for the subject in the 1980s. One cannot expect the five U.S. administrations since then to have been in some kind of alert status or to make a series of fresh decisions about Egypt in response to that potential.

Missing Mubarak

At the Nixon Center's "National Interest" blog, Paul Pillar imagines how the U.S. and Israel might diverge over Egypt:

It is easy to envision political change in Egypt that would be in the direction of greater democracy, would be consistent with principles that President Obama laid out in his speech in Cairo in June 2009, would present no threat to Israeli security (especially given the state of the Egyptian military), and would be consistent with U.S. interests as long as Washington accepted the change rather than trying to reject and undermine it, but that would be very distasteful to Israel. Such a new Egyptian political order might involve a major role for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which recently joined the protests in the streets. Israel would not like the change because of a reflexive distaste for Islamists and because the new Egyptian rulers would depart from such policies of Mubarak as cooperating in Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. An acid test for the Obama administration would be whether to embrace change consistent with long-term U.S. interests or to bow in the customary way to short-term political interests growing out of Israeli displeasures.

Will The U.S. Begin To Turn Away From Israel?

At the Nixon Center's "National Interest," Jacob Heilbrunn thinks it unlikely that the Obama administration will take the political risk of trying to impose a peace settlement on Israel and the Palestinians, as suggested by his blogging colleague Paul Pillar. Instead, Heilbrunn predicts that Obama will adopt the posture of all too many of his predecessors when it comes to the world's most intractable dispute -- benign neglect:

In the Middle East the Israeli government may think that it's holding the upper hand over Obama. Paradoxically, however, I think that Benjamin Netanyahu is miscalculating. The Obama administration will pull back from the conflict, in essence washing its hands of Israel. But this can't be good for Israel. 2011 may mark the year when he United States began to turn away from Israel, not in anger but simply resignation.

Would Middle East Peace Perturb Iran?

At the Nixon Center's "National Interest" blog, Paul Pillar joins those who urge President Obama to impose a peace between Israel and the Palestinians. For one thing, there's Iran:

[T]he most important point to make about the peace process and Iran is that an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, far from being a diversion from efforts to contain any dangers from Iran, would instead give a boost to those efforts. Given how much Iranian hardliners exploit politically and diplomatically the Israeli occupation and festering Palestinian problem, a peace settlement would take wind out of this Iranian sail and reduce Iranian appeal and influence in the region.

In The Beginning, There Was Evil

Paul Pillar is a former high-ranking CIA analyst who believes "the more that religion is infused into public life, the more that mankind suffers." Newly provoked by the State of Kentucky's financial support for a Bible-based theme park and the latest trendsetting comments by Sarah Palin, Pillar, blogging at "The National Interest," writes:

Religious beliefs inherently contain the seeds of intolerance, and thus of conflict and extremism, in ways that most secular belief systems do not. If one believes one's dogma comes from divine will and providence, it can less readily be compromised in good conscience than beliefs of more mundane origin. And those on the other side of a conflict can be seen not just as in opposition but as evil.

Religious belief, because it deals with the unknown and unknowable, must quite literally be a matter of faith. And questions of faith, because they cannot be resolved through public debate, appropriately dwell in the realm of the personal and the private. Once injected into the public realm and more specifically into matters of state, then they become one more form of the tyranny over the mind of man against which the deist Thomas Jefferson swore eternal hostility upon the altar of God.

Well, except for the secular belief systems of communism and National Socialism, which mass-produced intolerance and extremism in a magnitude of which al-Qaeda and the Taliban can only dream. Closer to home, just this week, the secular left seems pretty intolerant of President Obama's idea that rich people should be allowed to keep a little more of their own money so they can goose the economy for the next two years. Their rage is palpable, and while I don't hear them saying those who disagree with them are necessarily evil, I sometimes hear them coming pretty close.

It seems to me that intolerance and extremism are inescapable expressions of human nature, the natural byproducts of pain, fear, pride, or, usually, some mixture of the three. Far from being the root cause of these inclinations, faith practice at its best helps people notice and control them. If instead religion reinforces or encourages what is worst about people, it means that religious leaders and institutions aren't doing their jobs. They've let their own pride and certitude (or fear and pain) prevent them from appreciating the awe and humility with which any sane person approaches the altar of the Almighty.

Around the world, there are all too many such religionists. That religion must do better is an axiom that many of its practitioners readily accept. But the idea that humanity is safe when it ignores the Creator's judgement perished in the death camps and gulag, in Cambodia and Rwanda. Of course that prideful idea has perished many times in the many thousands of years of human history that preceded all those modern savageries, but the idea keeps being resurrected. Even when people betray God by wreaking havoc and pretending it's for his glory instead of their own, there's a certain deviousness involved in saying that the crime was committed by God or even by religion, when the blame really belongs to the human creature acting as it has since before anyone could even mouth God's name.