Author: Caroline Glick

Caroline Glick is an American-born Israeli journalist, newspaper editor, and writer. She writes for Makor Rishon and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.[2] She is also the Senior Fellow for Middle East Affairs of the Washington, DC-based Center for Security Policy.
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ISRAEL’S LEARNING DISABLED RIGHT

Why abandoning Netanyahu will not end well for the Israeli Right.

It is an iron rule of Israeli politics regularly disregarded by the political Right that left-wing parties govern from the Left, not the Right; center-left parties govern from the Left, not from the Center.

Despite the axiomatic nature of this rule, time after time, politicians and public figures on the Right have ignored it. Periodically, they make light of the distinction between governments run by their political camp and governments run by their leftist opponents.

To their credit, the converse is never true. Leftist politicians and activists never delude themselves that they are better off in the opposition. They always prefer governments led by their own camp to governments led by the Right.
For several years, this pathology unique to the political Right laid dormant – never entirely gone, but out of sight. Today, the Right’s pathological refusal to recognize that it is better off in charge than in the opposition is making a political comeback.

For the past month, a rapidly growing chorus of columnists and politicians – all of whom dwell on either the right-wing or left-wing margins of the nationalist camp – have decided to join the Left in its assault against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and call either directly or indirectly from his ouster from office.

The Left – like its rightist followers – characterizes its anti-Netanyahu campaign as an anti-corruption campaign.

For the past several months, Netanyahu has been the subject of two dubious criminal probes. The first involves allegations that he received too many cigars as gifts from his personal friends. To date, investigators have found no evidence that Netanyahu provided special favors to his friends in exchange for the cigars. We know no evidence indicating the cigars were bribes has been found, because if any had been found, it would have been leaked to reporters just as every shred of even mildly incriminating findings from the probe has been leaked to the media in real-time.

The second investigation is arguably even less substantive. Netanyahu is being investigated for conversations he held in 2014 with his political nemesis Yediot Aharonot publisher Arnon Mozes. Netanyahu recorded the conversations and they were found on the cellphone of his former chief of staff Ari Harow in the course of a separate criminal probe against Harow for alleged influence peddling. In the recordings, Netanyahu and Mozes discuss the possibility that in exchange for Mozes tamping down his incendiary coverage of Netanyahu at Yediot, Netanyahu’s ally, Sheldon Adelson, would decrease circulation of Israel Hayom, the free daily Adelson owns.

We know that the two men never made a deal because in late 2014, Netanyahu disbanded his own government after his coalition partners voted in favor of a bill drafted by Yediot’s lawyers, that was aimed at shutting down Israel Hayom.

Moreover, during the 2015 election and since, Yediot has led the 24/7 media campaign for Netanyahu’s political destruction.

Given the flimsy nature of the probes, it isn’t surprising that Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit isn’t thrilled with them.

Mandelblit’s reported lack of enthusiasm over the probes led leftist political strategist Eldad Yaniv to launch a massive political campaign against him earlier this year.

Several months ago, Yaniv began organizing anti-Netanyahu demonstrations outside Mandelblit’s apartment building in Petah Tikva every Saturday night, demanding that he indict the prime minister.

Not surprisingly, the Netanyahu-obsessed media have given massive and sympathetic coverage to the rallies. Reporters have airbrushed out the protesters’ anti-Zionism while massively exaggerating the number of participants. And while the protests are self-evidently anti-government protests, the media have played along with Yaniv’s conceit that they are apolitical protests by people who simply want to ensure that Netanyahu is indicted because he has to be guilty because they hate him.

The story of Netanyahu’s alleged corruption has led nightly newscasts countless times as breathless reporters present the public with details of investigations that are supposed to be secret. The open bias of police investigators, some of whom have openly called for the public to participate in political rallies against Netanyahu, is ignored.

Recently, the protesters decamped from Petah Tikva to the tony Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. And although most right-wing commentators and politicians acknowledge the leftist agenda of the protesters, last week Yaniv scored a significant victory. Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, one of the rabbinical leaders of the National Religious community, participated in his rally.

Cherlow wasn’t the first public personality on the Right who chose to turn against Netanyahu. Last month rightist attorney and newspaper columnist Nadav Haetzni wrote in Maariv that Netanyahu has become a burden to his political camp and must resign. Last week, Haetzni’s niece Sarah Haetzni Cohen, a columnist at Makor Rishon, and Yehuda Yifrach, Makor Rishon’s legal affairs editor, wrote side-by-side columns arguing that the nationalist camp mustn’t allow the Left to monopolize the fight against public corruption and must support the criminal probes against Netanyahu.

Yoaz Hendel is a columnist at Yediot identified with the soft Right. Ahead of the 2015 election, Tzipi Livni offered soft-rightist Hendel a spot on her leftist Knesset list.

Hendel announced this week that he is organizing an “anti-corruption” rally for members of the nationalist camp at Zion Square in Jerusalem this Saturday night. Since members of the nationalist camp don’t feel comfortable standing with protesters holding massive pro-BDS signs on Rothschild, Hendel said he decided they needed a place of their own to go to show that they don’t like corruption, (or Netanyahu).

Former MK Aryeh Eldad of the National Union Party, and Kulanu MK and coalition member Rahel Azariya, are scheduled to participate at Hendel’s protest.

The members of the nationalist camp insisting Netanyahu is bad for the Right ignore the weak foundations of the probes against him and the political bias of police investigators. They ignore as well the probable consequences for their political camp if Netanyahu is ousted from office due to these investigations.

Some of Netanyahu’s homegrown opponents like Hendel and Azariya are motivated by the belief that Netanyahu is too opposed to the leftist establishment that controls Israel’s legal system. They attack him for not stopping his party members from criticizing Israel’s activist, post-Zionist Supreme Court justices and for calling out police investigators and journalists for their bias against him.

Others, including Yifrach and Eldad, argue that Netanyahu isn’t much of a rightist since he hasn’t actively expanded construction in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and has not enacted significant court reform.

We’ve been here before.

The same groups from the soft and hard Right joined together twice before to overthrow right-wing governments and hand the Left the keys to the realm.

In 1992, the far-right Tehiya party brought down the government of Yitzhak Shamir. Tehiya leaders Geula Cohen and Hanan Porat on the one hand justified their behavior by pointing to the Left’s allegations that Shamir and his Likud colleagues were corrupt. On the other hand, they claimed that Shamir’s agreement to participate in then-US president George H.W. Bush’s “peace conference” in Madrid meant that he was no better than the Left.

Their action facilitated convinced enough right-wing voters that there was no difference between the Likud and Labor to bring about the Labor Party’s electoral victory in the 1992 election. A year later, then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin recognized the PLO and initiated the Oslo peace process.

In 1999, the Likud’s soft-right and hard-right establishment bolted Netanyahu’s first government and formed new parties. Dan Meridor, Yitzhak Mordechai and Roni Milo left Likud and joined with leftist politicians to form the “Center Party.”

Bennie Begin abandoned his father Menachem Begin’s party to form the National Union party with far-right ideologues.

Neither of the two parties fared well in the 1999 election.

But together, they brought down Netanyahu’s government and facilitated the Left’s electoral victory and Ehud Barak’s replacement of Netanyahu as premier.

In other words, the soft Right and the hard Right paved the way for the Camp David summit and the Palestinian terrorist war that followed, as well as Israel’s surrender of south Lebanon to Hezbollah. Those events in turn brought about Israel’s surrender of Gaza and northern Samaria to the Palestinians.

Both in 1992 and 1999, the Left based its electoral campaigns on opposition to corruption and tough talk on terrorism. Rabin pledged in 1992 never to recognize the PLO or withdraw from the Golan Heights. The next year he recognized the PLO and the year after that he offered Syrian dictator Hafez Assad the Golan Heights.

In 1999 Barak assured voters that there was no possibility of reaching a permanent peace with the PLO. A year later, he offered Yasser Arafat the Temple Mount and half of Jerusalem.

We can see the same situation forming today. As prejudicial leaks from the investigation of Netanyahu’s cigars multiplied, and Yaniv received more and more air time for his anti-Netanyahu rallies, Labor leader Avi Gabbay made a series of centrist statements to the media. Last month he said he doesn’t support uprooting Israeli communities in the framework of a peace treaty. This month he said that the Left made a mistake by embracing atheism.

Yair Lapid, head of the center-left Yesh Atid party, for his part has been going out of his way to court the Right for more than a year.

In other words, like Rabin and Barak in 1992 and 1999, the Left’s two contenders for premiership are going out of their way to make members of today’s nationalist camp feel comfortable overthrowing Netanyahu while protesting their ideological purity and commitment to clean politics.

The willingness of ostensibly right-wing intellectuals and politicians to make the same mistake for a third time is stunning. If Netanyahu is forced from office for receiving lots of cigars from his friends, the Likud won’t be stronger without him. An ugly battle for succession in Likud among equally uncompelling politicians will immediately ensue.

The Likud will enter the early election frayed, with a weak leader, under the pall of Netanyahu’s forced resignation.

For their part, the leftist parties, with the full support of the media that will hide their radical Knesset candidates list, will present themselves as incorruptible, moderate centrists who are tough on security and nice to poor people.

And they will win.

Yaniv, Gabbay, Lapid and the media all know that they cannot overthrow the government. They know the government will only fall if its members bring it down.

And that’s where the right-wing intellectuals come in handy. By falling yet again for the Left’s Three-card Monte corruption trick, right-wing media personalities are leading a campaign that if successful, will lead to only one outcome: the rise of the Left. And again, once it is in power, the Left never ever governs from the Right.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 
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A CREDIBLE PEACE PLAN, AT LAST

But will the Palestinians agree to it?

Monday, The New York Times published the Palestinian response to an alleged Saudi peace plan. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly presented it to PLO chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas last month.
According to the Times’ report, Mohammed told Abbas he has two months to either accept the Saudi proposal or leave office to make way for a new Palestinian leader who will accept it.
The Palestinians and their European supporters are up in arms about the content of Mohammed’s plan. It reportedly proposes the establishment of limited Palestinian sovereignty over small portions of Judea and Samaria. The Gaza Strip, over which the Palestinians have had full sovereignty since Israel pulled its military forces and civilians out in 2005, would be expanded into the northern Sinai, thus providing economic and territorial viability to the envisioned Palestinian state. While the Palestinians would not receive sovereignty over Jerusalem, they would be able to establish their capital in the Jerusalem suburb of Abu Dis.
There are several aspects of the alleged Saudi peace plan that are notable. First, the Palestinians and their many allies insist that it is a nonstarter. No Palestinian leader could ever accept the offer and survive in power, they told the Times. The same Palestinian leaders from Hamas and Fatah, and their allies, also noted that the Saudi plan as reported strongly resembles past Israeli proposals.
Another aspect of the report that is notable is that the Saudis did not acknowledge that Mohammed presented the plan to Abbas.
Unlike the situation in 2002 when Times columnist Thomas Friedman presented what he claimed was then Saudi king Abdullah’s peace plan, the Saudi regime has not admitted that the characterization of their peace plan by the Times reflects their thinking.
It makes sense that the Palestinians and their Lebanese and European allies are upset at the alleged contents of the new Saudi plan. It is also reasonable that the Saudis are not willing today to publicly present the plan laid out in the Times.
The fact is that the alleged Saudi peace plan represents a radical break with the all the peace plans presented by the Arabs, the Europeans and the US for the past 40 years.
Unlike all of the previous plans, the contours of the plan reported by the  Times guarantee that Israel will remain a strong, viable state in an era of peace with the Palestinians. All the previous plans required Israel to accept indefensible borders that would have invited aggression both from the Palestinians and from its Arab neighbors east of the Jordan River.
The purported Saudi plan is the first peace plan that foresees two viable states living in peace. All the other plans were based on transforming Israel into a non-viable state with a non-viable Palestinian state in its heartland.
While the Times report cites Western sources claiming that Egypt has rejected the prospect of merging Gaza with the northern Sinai under Palestinian sovereignty, there is no reason to assume that the option is dead. To the contrary, in the aftermath of last week’s massacre of 305 Muslim worshipers in a mosque in the northern Sinai, it is arguably more relevant now than at any previous time.
The mosque massacre makes clear that the Egyptian regime is incapable of defeating the Islamic State (ISIS) insurgency in Sinai on its own. Egypt’s incapacity is as much a function of economic priorities as military capabilities. With Egypt constantly on the brink of economic collapse and in need of constant support from the World Bank, the US and the Gulf States, it is hard to make the argument for preferring economic investment in Sinai to economic investment west of the Suez Canal. And in the absence of significant economic support for developing the Sinai, it is hard to see an end to the ISIS insurgency.
If the Europeans, Americans and Arab League member states chose to develop the northern Sinai for a Palestinian state with half the enthusiasm they have devoted to building a non-viable Palestinian state in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria that would render Israel indefensible and enfeebled, the Palestinians would have a viable, developed state in short order.
And the Egyptians in turn would have the international support they need both economically and militarily to defeat ISIS completely and to rebuild their national economy. Indeed, as advocates of the plan note, by yielding control over the northern Sinai to the Palestinians, and so enabling a viable Palestinian state to form, Egypt would become again the indisputable leader of the Arab world. With the good will of the Europeans and Americans, Sisi would secure Egypt’s position indefinitely.
This then brings us to the third notable aspect of the purported Saudi plan. The backlash against the plan, like the backlash against Mohammed, has been furious. Abbas has reportedly been calling every international leader he can think of to oppose the deal. The Europeans reportedly also oppose it. French President Emmanuel Macron’s adviser reportedly contacted the Americans to make clear that the French are not on board with the proposal.
And whereas the opposition to Mohammed’s purported proposal has been largely behind the scenes, since Mohammed did not make it public, the Palestinians and their international supporters have been grabbing every available microphone to condemn US President Donald Trump’s reported plan to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and perhaps begin taking concrete steps to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.
With or without a public announcement of his alleged peace plan, Mohammed has become a hated figure in wide circles of the foreign policy establishment in the West due to his trenchant opposition to Iran’s rise as a hegemonic power in the region. The Times portrayed him as a serial bungler in its article about his alleged peace plan.
As Lee Smith revealed in a recent article in Tablet magazine, the voices leading the charge against Mohammed are the same ones that developed the media echo chamber in pursuit of then president Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
As Smith explained, the onslaught against Mohammed is “an information campaign designed to protect the pro-Iran policies of the Obama administration.”
As these operatives see it, Smith argues, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran is the foundation of Obama’s foreign policy legacy in the Middle East. “If Trump pulls the plug, then Obama’s ‘legacy’ in the Middle East collapses.”
Trump’s visits to Israel and Saudi Arabia in May made clear that renewing US alliances with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and using them as a means to scale back Iranian power in the region, is in fact the central plank of his Middle East policy. Trump’s subsequent moves in support of Mohammed and Israel have reinforced this conclusion.
And so the backlash against Mohammed by the likes of former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro and Robert Malley, Obama’s former adviser for the Middle East on his national security council makes sense. If they can discredit him, and pretend that an Iranian-controlled Lebanon and Syria are better than the alternatives, then they can force Trump to maintain faith with Obama’s policies.
It’s a hard sell though. Mohammed’s peace plan is the first peace plan that has ever offered the Palestinians a chance at a real state. It’s the first plan that ever envisioned a situation where the Palestinians have a state that doesn’t imperil Israel. People who actually care about the Palestinians and Israel should welcome and support his position.
People who oppose it have to explain why they insist on remaining faithful to a peace paradigm that has brought only war and instability. Why do they prefer to retain Abbas’s authoritarian regime over a non-sovereign kleptocracy in Judea and Samaria with a Hamas terrorist state in Gaza to an alternative without either? Why doesn’t Abbas support it if his chief aspiration is the establishment of a viable Palestinian state and actually wants peace with Israel?
The New York Times article may or may not be an accurate portrayal of a real plan presented by the actual crown prince of Saudi Arabia. But if it isn’t his plan, it should be. Or it should be Trump’s plan.
Because it is the first peace plan anyone has ever put forward that makes sense. Not only does it secure the future of both Israel and the Palestinians, it enables Arab states like Saudi Arabia to work openly with Israel to defeat their joint Iranian enemy, while ensuring that Israel can survive and remain a credible ally to its Arab neighbors for decades to come.
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 
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Portents of quagmires in Syria

Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan are right that, as of now, they are the victors in Syria. But let us not empower them by believing them invincible.

Is the war in Syria won? The images broadcast this week from Sochi, the Russian vacation town on the Black Sea coast, were pictures of victory – for the bad guys.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood beside his Syrian client, President Bashar Assad, who licked Putin’s boots, as well he should have.

Assad owes his regime and his life to Putin.

The next day, Putin was joined by his allies – the presidents of Iran and Turkey.

Hassan Rouhani and Recep Tayyip Erdogan made the pilgrimage to Sochi to stand at Putin’s side and declare victory in the war and dedicate themselves to the cause of “peace and reconciliation” in post-war Syria.

To achieve their lofty goals of peace and reconciliation, Putin and his partners declared that, in the near future, Sochi will be the sight of a peace conference where all the relevant factions in Syria will be represented. The parley they described is set to take place parallel to – and one assumes at the expense of – the sixth round of Syrian reconciliation talks scheduled to take place under UN auspices next week in Geneva.

Several Israeli commentators viewed Putin’s Sochi talks precisely as he wished them to.

Ehud Yaari, Reshet/Keshet’s veteran Arab affairs commentator declared: The US is finished in the Middle East! The capital of the Middle East is now located in Sochi, he proclaimed in back-to-back newscasts.

In certain respects, Yaari is right. Things are looking good these days for the axis of evil.

Wednesday was a particularly good day for Iran. Not only did Rouhani do his victory dance with Putin and Erdogan, but as they were showering themselves in triumph in Sochi, Iran’s Lebanese puppet, Saad Hariri, was returning to Beirut after his misadventures in Saudi Arabia.

As expected, Hariri canceled the resignation he announced dramatically a week-and-a-half earlier in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after accusing Iran and its Hezbollah army of controlling Lebanon.

On the surface, Hariri’s return is a boon for Iran. If he had remained in Saudi Arabia, Iran would have lost its fig leaf.

Hariri’s duty as prime minister is to snow the West into believing that his government and the Lebanese Armed Forces are a counterweight to Iran and Hezbollah, even though they are controlled by Iran and Hezbollah.

Until his trip to Riyadh, Hariri had been doing a good job.

Hariri’s lobbying efforts won Lebanon billions of dollars in US military and civilian aid. Congress would never have agreed to appropriate the assistance if Hariri hadn’t been so persuasive.

But it is far from clear that Hariri will be much of a fig leaf after he let the Iranian/Hezbollah cat out of the bag in Riyadh.

A rising chorus of US lawmakers are demanding an immediate end to US assistance to the LAF. And Hariri’s return to Beirut didn’t dim those voices.

In August, Hariri visited President Donald Trump at the White House. Trump praised Lebanon as “an ally” in the war on terrorism. He increased US aid to the LAF and deployed US special forces to Lebanon where they fought at the side of the LAF under effective Hezbollah command.

It’s hard to imagine Trump welcoming Hariri back to the White House anytime soon.

As for Erdogan, he arrived in Sochi a spent force.

Erdogan is perhaps the biggest loser of the war in Syria. He was the principal sponsor of the anti-Assad opposition that morphed into Islamic State. Erdogan’s cooperation owes mainly to his lack of better options. The US stopped supporting his campaign in Syria two years ago.

Since the failed military coup against him in July 2016, Erdogan has become ever more hostile to the US. This hostility informed his recently concluded deal with Putin to purchase Russia’s S-400 anti-aircraft system. The S-400 threatens every fighter craft in the US arsenal. US officials have responded to his move by seriously considering the possibility of canceling the sale of 100 F-35s to Turkey.

Turkish expulsion from NATO – once a taboo subject – is now regularly discussed in Washington policy circles.

The main reason Erdogan has sided with Putin in Syria is because the US has sided with Syria’s Kurds. Erdogan views the Syrian Kurds as a threat to the stability of his regime. He expects Putin to support his determination to destroy Kurdish autonomy in Syria.

If Putin fails to meet his expectations, Erdogan may abandon his new friends. Or he may stick with them and just become ever more dependent on Putin.

Whatever the case, he won’t be empowered by his membership in Pax Putin.

And this brings us to Putin and Russia.

Certainly it is true that the Sochi summitry has cemented Putin’s position as savior of Mother Russia.

A mere generation ago, Russia was a washed up, fifth-rate power. At the end of the Cold War, the world belonged to America. Today, world leaders beat a path to Putin’s door.

But not everything is roses and sunshine.

Russia’s alliance with Iran and Turkey is predicated on Russia remaining in Syria – come what may.

And what is coming is not likely to be pretty.

While Putin, Erdogan and Rouhani were congratulating themselves in Sochi, another conference was happening in Riyadh. There, leaders of the anti-Assad militia were meeting to discuss their next moves ahead of the UN-sponsored talks next week in Geneva.

True, the forces represented in Saudi Arabia aren’t as powerful as the Iranians, Hezbollah and Russia. But they have guns. And they are disgruntled. And if any number of governments want to give them more guns, they will have more guns and bullets. And they will shoot them at the people keeping Assad in power.

Commentators declaring the dawn of a Russian-controlled Middle East where the US is dead to rites ignore another basic fact. There are a lot of US forces in Syria.

In late October, US Major General James Jarrard, commander of the US’s anti-ISIS task force in Iraq and Syria, “accidentally” told reporters that there are 4,000 US troops in Syria. When reporters pounced on his statement, Jarrard quickly backtracked and said he made a mistake.

There are only 500 US forces in Syria.

Whoopsie daisy.

On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the administration does not intend to withdraw US forces from Syria now that the mission against ISIS is largely complete.

US forces in Syria are concentrated in Syrian Kurdistan. If the US protects the Kurdish autonomous areas along the border with Iraq, Erdogan will again lose a big bet in Syria. His alliance with Putin will have brought him nothing but a deterioration of his ties with the US and instability at home as Turkish Kurds expand their ties to the autonomous Syrian brethren.

Angry, unreconciled, well-armed rebel forces and autonomous Kurds are far from the biggest threat to Putin’s victory in Syria. The biggest threat to his triumph is Syria itself.

Thanks in large part to Putin and his allies, Syria, today, is one vast ruin.

According to UN assessments, reconstruction costs for the country will run anywhere from $200 billion-$350b.

Does Putin intend to finance Syrian reconstruction? How about Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or Erdogan or China? Of course not.

And, if Syria remains a ruin, Syria will not be pacified; and, if Syria isn’t pacified, it will continue to bleed.

The media made a big deal about Putin’s phone call to Trump after his meeting with Assad. Some commentators viewed the call as proof Putin is calling the shots in the Middle East. Others saw the opposite – that Putin doesn’t dare move too far ahead of the Americans.

But those views are likely both wrong.

Putin’s record indicates that he cares about two things: reasserting Russia’s great power status and money. For his victory in Syria to avoid becoming a Pyrrhic one, he needs lots of American money to finance Syrian reconstruction.

This brings us to the US, and what Washington wants to do in Syria and the wider Middle East.

So far, the Americans have made every possible mistake in Syria and Iraq.

Then president Barack Obama allowed Assad to commit a genocide of Syria’s Sunnis and foment the refugee crisis in Europe. He allowed Iran and Hezbollah to take over Syria and Iraq. He allowed Erdogan to organize an anti-Assad rebel force dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, which over time morphed into ISIS. He allowed the Russians to use the war as a means to reassert their position in the Middle East 33 years after the Soviets were humiliated and expelled from the Levant.

For his part, Trump has maintained Obama’s Syria policies in relation to Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Assad. He expanded US military assistance to the LAF. He permitted Iranian militias controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to cooperate with US-trained Iraqi forces in seizing Kirkuk from Kurdish forces. In so doing, Trump betrayed the Kurds, the US’s only reliable allies in Iraq.

If the Americans wish to maintain their record of failure, they have many options for doing so. They can abandon the Syrian Kurds. They can help Putin by underwriting Syrian reconstruction.

They can continue to arm the Hezbollah-controlled LAF. But the Americans do have an option to succeed, as well.

If Trump keeps US forces in Syrian Kurdistan, and if he refuses to help pay for Syrian reconstruction so long as Assad remains in power and Iranian and Hezbollah forces remain on the ground and if the US ends its civilian and military assistance to Lebanon, the US and its allies will be strengthened, and Russia and its allies will be weakened.

If the Americans do not interfere as Syrian “freedom fighters” defend against Iranian or Russian “aggression,” it won’t matter what terms the Iranians give Putin for gas, or oil or nuclear deals. He will seek a way out of Syria.

On May 1, 2003, then president George W. Bush landed a S-3 Viking fighter craft on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln dressed in a flight suit. Before an audience of cheering troops and against the backdrop of a banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” Bush declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

A month later, the real Iraq war started.

In the years that followed, probably not a day went by when Bush didn’t regret his victory dance on the USS Lincoln.

Putin, Rouhani and (to a much smaller degree) Erdogan are right that, as of now, they are the victors in Syria. But let us not empower them by believing them invincible. Their victory against ISIS – achieved with massive US assistance – is certainly an achievement. But it isn’t the end of the story. If the Americans do not save them, the situation on the ground augers quagmire, not triumph, for their axis and for their separate regimes.

Originally Posted on the Jerusalem Post.

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PINING FOR FIG LEAVES

Obama partisans fret as Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US confront reality on Iran.

Friday, long-time US diplomats and Middle East experts Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky published an article in Foreign Policy expressing “buyers’ remorse” over Saudi Arabia’s newfound willingness to take the lead in regional affairs.

Titled, “Donald Trump has unleashed the Saudi Arabia we always wanted – and feared,” Miller and Sokolsky note that for generations, US policymakers wanted the Saudis to take a lead in determining the future of the region.

In their words, “During decades of service at the State Department, we longed for the day when riskaverse Saudi leaders would take greater ownership in solving their domestic and regional security problems and reduce their dependence on the United States.”

But now, they argue, under the leadership of King Salman and his son, 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudis are going too far.

Domestically, Miller and Sokolsky accuse Salman and Mohammed of upsetting the traditional power sharing arrangements among the various princes in order to concentrate unprecedented power in Mohammed’s hands. This, they insist, harms the status of human rights in the kingdom, although they acknowledge that Mohammed has taken steps to liberalize the practice of Islam in the kingdom to the benefit of women and others.

While upset at the purge of princes, ministers and businessmen, Miller and Sokolsky are much more concerned about the foreign policy initiatives Mohammed and Salman have undertaken with everything related to countering Iran’s rise as a regional hegemon.

In their words, “Abroad, the Saudis are engaged in a cold war with an opportunistic Iran that’s exploiting their missteps in Yemen and Qatar.”

Miller and Sokolsky note that Mohammed’s campaign to defeat the Iranian-backed Houthi regime in Yemen has been bogged down. His effort – backed by US President Donald Trump – to force Qatar to abandon its policy of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran has similarly come up short.

They continue, “The latest Saudi gambit – pressuring the Sunni Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign in an effort to expose an Iranian- and Hezbollah- dominated Lebanon – is perhaps too clever by half. What are the Saudis going to do, given their Shiite adversaries’ advantages in Syria and Lebanon, when the Lebanese find themselves plunged into domestic crisis or a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah?” The veteran diplomats conclude their missive by urging Trump to implement his predecessor Barack Obama’s Saudi policy. In their words, Trump needs to place heavy pressure “on the king and his son to de-escalate this conflict and restore equilibrium to America’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran.”

“Because make no mistake,” they warn, “Saudi independence is illusory. Riyadh desperately wants us to back them – and bail them out when they get in over their heads with Iran. If Washington is not careful, the Saudis will sandbag America into standing up to Tehran while the Saudis hide behind its skirt.”

As if synchronized, Robert Malley, Obama’s former Middle East adviser, makes a similar argument in an article in The Atlantic. Malley took a lead role in expanding the US’s ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah during the Obama years.

There are several problems with these policymakers’ claims. The first is that in criticizing the Saudis they deliberately ignore the Obama administration’s central role in engendering the current situation in which the Saudi regime feels compelled to take the actions it is taking.

To be clear, noting the role of the previous administration in causing the rapidly escalating instability of the Middle East is not an exercise in deflecting criticism away from the current administration. The simple fact is that it is impossible for the US to chart a rational course for dealing with the present dangers and opportunities without understanding how they arose in the first place.

For eight years, the Obama administration deliberately alienated and willingly endangered Saudi Arabia and Israel by implementing a policy of appeasing Iran. Despite repeated warnings, the US refused to recognize that as far as Iran is concerned, it cannot have its cake and eat it too.

Iran is at war with Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies and with Israel.

Consequently, Miller and Sokolsky’s claim that there can be an “equilibrium to America’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran” which doesn’t involve the US siding with one side against the other is an illusion. On the ground in the Middle East, as events in Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, Gaza and Egypt have made clear, Obama’s strategy of appeasing Iran weakened America’s traditional regional allies and strengthened Iran and its proxies.

The change in the balance of forces that the Obama administration’s policy caused forced the US’s spurned allies to reassess their strategic dependence on the US. Contrary to Miller and Sokolsky’s claims, the Saudis didn’t abandon their past passivity because Mohammed is brash, young and inexperienced.

Mohammed was appointed because Salman needed a successor willing and able to fight for the survival of the kingdom after Obama placed it in jeopardy through his appeasement of Iran. Mohammed is the flipside of the nuclear deal.

Malley noted blandly that like the Saudis, Israel has also been sounding alarms at an ever escalating rate.

It isn’t hard to understand why. In 2009, Israel’s borders and territory were far more secure than they are today. Sunday night three former senior missile developers at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems – Israel’s premier missile and missile defense developer – went on television to warn that Haifa’s oil refineries and plans to use surrounding areas as a fuel depot will force the evacuation not only of the population of Haifa, but of all the surrounding satellite cities when war breaks out next with Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, they warned, now has the precision missile capability to destroy these vital national infrastructures and render the Gulf of Haifa uninhabitable.

Then there is Syria.

Israel has repeatedly insisted that Iran and its proxies must not be permitted to develop a permanent presence in Syria. Russia and the US ignored Israel’s warnings not only during the Obama years, but, in a sign of the continued power of Obama partisans in the US foreign policy community, during the past year of the Trump administration as well. Over the summer the US and Russia concluded a cease-fire deal for Syria that permitted Iran and its proxies to operate in Syria.

Last week, the BBC reported that Iran is now building a military base 50 kilometers from the border with Israel. On Saturday, the IDF shot down a Russian- made intelligence drone launched against it by forces controlled by Iran’s chief Syrian proxy, Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Sunday, following threats from Iranian-controlled Islamic Jihad terrorist forces in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that Israel will not accept assaults against it across any of its borders.

Netanyahu said that he holds the Iranian-supported Hamas regime in Gaza responsible for any attacks against Israel emanating from its territory.

Netanyahu’s statement was notable since just last week Hamas and Fatah began implementing their power sharing arrangement in Gaza. Fatah forces, controlled by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, supposedly took responsibility for border crossings between Gaza and Israel.

By insisting that Hamas is responsible rather than Fatah, despite the agreement, Netanyahu signaled that as far as Israel is concerned, through its power- sharing deal with Fatah Hamas has succeeded in becoming the Palestinian version of Hezbollah. Just as Hezbollah pretends to be a faction in Lebanese politics, when in fact it controls all aspects of the Lebanese state, so Hamas remains in charge of all aspects of governance in Gaza while using the PA as a fig leaf.

This brings us back to Miller, Sokolsky and Malley and their pining for a reset button.

It is hard to view their positions as the basis for forging constructive US policies for the region, transformed by eight years of US appeasement of Iran at the expense of its allies and interests.

Insisting that Mohammed abandon the steps he has taken to expand the prospects of Saudi survival in favor of a policy of pretending that a stable equilibrium can be struck between Iran and Saudi Arabia (and Israel) is not a policy for restoring equilibrium.

Putting Hariri back in office in Beirut so he can continue to serve as a fig leaf for Hezbollah and Iran is not a policy for restoring equilibrium. They are both means for pretending reality away while enabling Iran to wage a continuous war against America’s allies with ever greater power and capacity.

It makes sense that Obama partisans are unhappy with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed. It makes sense that they are unhappy with Netanyahu and with Trump. All four of these leaders are impudently insisting on basing their policies on recognizing the reality Obama spent his two terms ignoring: Iran is not appeasable.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
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SAUDI PURGES AND DUTY TO ACT

What the recent political shakeup in Saudi Arabia means for global terrorism funding.

For 70 years, Saudi Arabia served as the largest and most significant incubator of Sunni jihad. Its Wahhabist Islamic establishment funded radical mosques throughout the world. Saudi princes have supported radical Islamic clerics who have indoctrinated their followers to pursue jihad against the non-Islamic world. Saudi money stands behind most of the radical Islamic groups in the non-Islamic world that have in turn financed terrorist groups like Hamas and al-Qaida and have insulated radical Islam from scrutiny by Western governments and academics. Indeed, Saudi money stands behind the silence of critics of jihadist Islam in universities throughout the Western world.

As Mitchell Bard documented in his 2011 book, The Arab Lobby, any power pro-Israel forces in Washington, DC, have developed pales in comparison to the power of Arab forces, led by the Saudi government. Saudi government spending on lobbyists in Washington far outstrips that of any other nation. According to Justice Department disclosures from earlier this year, since 2015, Saudi Arabia vastly increased its spending on influence peddling. According to a report by The Intercept, “Since 2015, the Kingdom has expanded the number of foreign agents on retainer to 145, up from 25 registered agents during the previous two-year period.”

Saudi lobbyists shielded the kingdom from serious criticism after 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were shown to be Saudi nationals. They blocked a reconsideration of the US’s strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia after the attacks and in subsequent years, even as it was revealed that Princess Haifa, wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington at the time the September 11 attacks occurred, had financially supported two of the hijackers in the months that preceded the attacks.
The US position on Saudi Arabia cooled demonstrably during the Obama administration. This cooling was not due to a newfound concern over Saudi financial support for radical Islam in the US. To the contrary, the Obama administration was friendlier to Islamists than any previous administration. Consider the Obama administration’s placement of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in key positions in the federal government. For instance, in 2010, then secretary for Homeland Security Janet Napolitano appointed Mohamed Elibiary to the department’s Homeland Security Advisory Board. Elibiary had a long, open record of support both for the Muslim Brotherhood and for the Iranian regime. In his position he was instrumental in purging discussion of Islam and Jihad from instruction materials used by the US military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The Obama administration’s cold relations with the Saudi regime owed to its pronounced desire to ditch the US’s traditional alliance with the Saudis, the Egyptians and the US’s other traditional Sunni allies in favor of an alliance with the Iranian regime.

During the same period, the Muslim Brotherhood’s close ties to the Iranian regime became increasingly obvious. Among other indicators, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated president Mohamed Morsi hosted Iranian leaders in Cairo and was poised to renew Egypt’s diplomatic ties with Iran before he was overthrown by the military in July 2013. Morsi permitted Iranian warships to traverse the Suez Canal for the first time in decades.

Saudi Arabia joined Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group in 2014.

It was also during this period that the Saudis began warming their attitude toward Israel. Through Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and due to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leading role in opposing Iran’s nuclear program and its rising power in the Middle East, the Saudis began changing their positions on Israel.

Netanyahu’s long-time foreign policy adviser, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs president Dr. Dore Gold, who authored the 2003 bestseller Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism which exposed Saudi Arabia’s role in promoting jihadist Islam, spearheaded a process of developing Israel’s security and diplomatic ties with Riyadh. Those ties, which are based on shared opposition to Iran’s regional empowerment, led to the surprising emergence of a working alliance between Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE with Israel during Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas – the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is in the context of Saudi Arabia’s reassessment of its interests and realignment of strategic posture in recent years that the dramatic events of the past few days in the kingdom must be seen.

Saturday’s sudden announcement that a new anti-corruption panel headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the near simultaneous announcement of the arrest of more than two dozen royal family members, cabinet ministers and prominent businessmen is predominantly being presented as a power seizure by the crown prince. Amid widespread rumors that King Salman will soon abdicate the throne to his son, it is reasonable for the 32-year-old crown prince to work to neutralize all power centers that could threaten his ascension to the throne.

But there is clearly also something strategically more significant going on. While many of the officials arrested over the weekend threaten Mohammed’s power, they aren’t the only ones that he has purged. In September Mohammed arrested some 30 senior Wahhabist clerics and intellectuals. And Saturday’s arrest of the princes, cabinet ministers and business leaders was followed up by further arrests of senior Wahhabist clerics.

At the same time, Mohammed has been promoting clerics who espouse tolerance for other religions, including Judaism and Christianity. He has removed the Saudi religious police’s power to conduct arrests and he has taken seemingly credible steps to finally lift the kingdom-wide prohibition on women driving.

At the same time, Mohammed has escalated the kingdom’s operations against Iran’s proxies in Yemen.

And of course, on Saturday, he staged the resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri amid Hariri’s allegations that Hezbollah and Iran were plotting his murder, much as they stood behind the 2005 assassination of his father, prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

There can be little doubt that there was coordination between the Saudi regime and the Trump administration regarding Saturday’s actions. The timing of the administration’s release last week of most of the files US special forces seized during their 2011 raid of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan was likely not a coincidence.

The files, which the Obama administration refused to release, make clear that Obama’s two chief pretensions – that al-Qaida was a spent force by the time US forces killed bin Laden, and that Iran was interested in moderating its behavior were both untrue. The documents showed that al-Qaida’s operations remained a significant worldwide threat to US interests.

And perhaps more significantly, they showed that Iran was al-Qaida’s chief state sponsor. Much of al-Qaida’s leadership, including bin Laden’s sons, operated from Iran. The notion – touted by Obama and his administration – that Shi’ite Iranians and Sunni terrorists from al-Qaida and other groups were incapable of cooperating was demonstrated to be an utter fiction by the documents.

Their publication now, as Saudi Arabia takes more determined steps to slash its support for radical Islamists, and separate itself from Wahhabist Islam, draws a clear distinction between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Given Saudi Arabia’s record, and the kingdom’s 70-year alliance with Wahhabist clerics, it is hard to know whether Mohammed’s move signals an irrevocable breach between the House of Saud and the Wahhabists.

But the direction is clear. With Hariri’s removal from Lebanon, the lines between the forces of jihad and terrorism led by Iran, and the forces that oppose them are clearer than ever before. And the necessity of acting against the former and helping the latter has similarly never been more obvious.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.