Barack Obama had worse failures to address in his State of
the Union message on Thursday, but a few days before, he
owned up to the most foolish miscalculation that his
Administration had made in its first year in power.
In an interview with Joe Klein of Time magazine, he confessed
that he had not understood the obstacles to an
Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
"The Middle East peace process has not moved forward . . .
For all our efforts at early engagement, [it] is not where I
want it to be," Mr Obama said.
"If we had anticipated some of these political problems on
both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as
high."
But why didn't he anticipate them? Is there really nobody in
Washington who could have told Mr Obama the truth about the
Middle East? Every non-American commentator who knows
anything about the region has been saying for the past year
that there is absolutely no chance of a breakthrough in the
peace process at the present time.
In fact, it is probably dead for a generation.
The answer, I fear, is that there really is nobody in
Washington who can tell President Obama the truth about the
region.
Nobody, that is, who would be allowed through the cordon of
academic experts, think-tank pundits and State Department and
Pentagon officials who devoutly believe in an orthodoxy that
sounds quite reasonable on the Potomac, even if it makes no
sense whatever in terms of Middle Eastern reality.
For example, Mr Obama wanted the Palestinian president,
Mahmoud Abbas, to enter direct peace talks with the Israeli
Government, even though he knew that Mr Abbas only ruled
about 60% of the Arab population of the occupied territories.
The other 40%, in the Gaza Strip, have for the past several
years been under the control of the radical Islamist movement
Hamas, which rejects a permanent peace settlement with
Israel.
So what was Mr Abbas going to do? Sign a peace treaty with
Israel, and get the Israeli army to impose it on the Gaza
Strip? He certainly hasn't the military forces to do it
himself.
And why would he sign a "separate peace" with Israel and turn
himself into an eternally reviled traitor to the Palestinian
cause - just to serve Mr Obama's agenda? No wonder he has
been saying he wants to resign for the past year.
Similarly, why would even the most pro-peace Israeli
government make a deal with Mr Abbas, who cannot deliver the
assent of all, or at least most, of the Palestinians? Yitzhak
Rabin himself would not have signed a peace treaty with Mr
Abbas under current circumstances, because he would have
understood that it could not last.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli prime minister, does
not bear even a passing resemblance to the martyred Mr Rabin,
and the coalition he leads is not particularly "pro-peace".
It depends on the hard right and the settler parties for its
majority in the Knesset (parliament), and it is not going to
sacrifice its vision of a greater Israel to the whim of some
passing American president.
Mr Netanyahu spent his last term as prime minister in 1996-99
sabotaging the Oslo accords that promised Israeli recognition
of an independent Palestinian state.
He is an adroit politician who knows how to modify his
rhetoric in English to mollify the United States, but he has
not changed his basic position.
Why should he? The US cannot compel Israel to do anything it
doesn't want to.
It is Israel, not the White House, that controls US policy on
Arab-Israeli issues, because of its huge influence in
Congress.
Only one US president in the past generation, George Bush
sen, has successfully defied Israel.
His threat of sanctions brought the Israelis to the
negotiating table after the Gulf War of 1990-91 - but he is
convinced that that is why he lost the 1992 election.
Mr Obama has had to relearn that lesson over the past year.
He began by backing the Palestinian demand that Israel halt
new settlement building in the occupied territories before
the start of peace talks.
After all, the peace talks would be about granting
Palestinians sovereignty over those territories, among other
things.
For 40 years they have watched more and more of their land
disappear under Israeli settlements, and they are a bit
sensitive on the subject.
Mr Netanyahu simply said no.
Then, after six months had passed, he made a tiny concession.
Israel would not start any new building projects in the more
rural parts of the West Bank for 10 months, although it would
continue work on all current projects to expand the
settlements.
It would not accept any limitations on its freedom to build
new Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.
It was virtually meaningless: I promise not to steal from you
on Thursday afternoons.
But Mr Obama had learned his lesson by then.
It gave him an excuse to switch his position and demand that
Mr Abbas drop his preconditions for entering peace talks too,
as if Mr Netanyahu had dropped his.
Blame the Arabs for intransigence, and move on.
The question is: what deluded adviser told Mr Obama that
there was any point in embarking on this foredoomed
enterprise? The answer, unfortunately, is that it could be
almost any of the recognised "experts" on the Middle East in
Washington.
They have been spouting nonsense for so long that it sounds
like sense to them.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
