Obama’s first year in the Mideast

With the first year of the Obama administration about to draw to a close, George Mitchell, the administration’s special envoy for Middle East peace, told PBS’ Charlie Rose that comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace remains the administration’s goal for the region, and that it can be accomplished in two years — or less (read the transcript of the interview here).

But, as Aaron David Miller notes in a piece in Foreign Policy, this has been a year of hard lessons for the young administration:

Almost a year into his presidency, Barack Obama has begun to sober up. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the administration’s policy on the Arab-Israeli issue, where a series of tactical mistakes (none fatal) have left the president and his team battered but wiser when it comes to what’s possible and what’s not.

… in his first year, the president came out harder, faster, and louder on the Israeli-Palestinian issue than any of his predecessors. Appointing the talented and tenacious George Mitchell as special envoy and talking tough against Israeli settlements, and in a very determined manner about a two-state solution, won him great praise initially.

Unfortunately all of this was played out without much regard for an overall strategy or much sensibility to the political needs of either the Israelis or the Palestinians. The misreading of the Israeli scene was particularly inept. By publicly calling for a comprehensive settlements freeze including natural growth, a position no Israeli prime minister — even one with the most pro-peace credentials — could ever agree to, the administration undermined the freeze it eventually did get (minus Jerusalem of course). The president then had to back down and was left with no freeze acceptable to the Arabs and no negotiations.

By year’s end, the administration was left with three big "Nos": the first from Israel on settlements; the second from the Arab states on partial normalization with Israel, and the third from the Palestinians about returning to the negotiations. President Mahmoud Abbas was particularly hurt by administration pressure to distance himself from the Goldstone report and by the looming prospect of a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. All of this, of course made America seem weak and feckless — never a good place if you want to be a credible mediator.

In the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl warns that Mitchell’s two-year timetable for peace is overly ambitious.

One way of interpreting this is that Mitchell and his boss have refused to be deterred by the resistance they’ve run into. Another is that they have learned nothing from their mistake-ridden first year. Either way, the administration has once again publicly set for itself a hugely ambitious goal in a part of the world where diplomatic failure is punished harshly.

It’s not clear whether Mitchell’s comments on "Charlie Rose" presage a new U.S. push for Mideast peace or if it’s just reflective of the thinking of a man whose job it is to focus on Mideast peace. As Miller points out, the president has a lot on his plate (Afghanistan, homeland security, the economy and health-care reform, to name just a few), and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may not be a top priority.

It’s also worth pointing out that the administration’s approach to Israeli-Arab peacemaking changed halfway through Obama’s first year. In his first six months, Obama delivered a major speech in Cairo directed at the Arab world, pressed Israel hard for a settlement freeze and pushed Arab states to take steps toward normalizing ties with Israel. As each effort failed — Israel announced a partial, temporary freeze, the Arabs didn’t budge and the Palestinians refused to return to the negotiating table — the Obama administration essentially has toned down its efforts (at least publicly).

In Israel, years of failed peace efforts, multiple wars and the takeover of Gaza by Hamas had left Israelis deeply skeptical about the possibilities of a quick peace deal, and Obama’s early ambitiousness was seen as alarming. The change of tone in Washington over the last few months, however, has been seen in Israel as a sign that the White House has a new appreciation for the difficult realities of Middle East peacemaking.

How that will translate when it comes to Mitchell’s efforts in 2010 remain to be seen.