Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: da leggere e meditare

Aaron Miller, uno dei piu' influenti consiglieri della amministrazione
Clinton, ha smesso di credere ad Oslo
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/19/the_false_religion_of_mideast_peace?utm_source=headgrabs&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=20100419
On October 18, 1991, against long odds and in front of an incredulous
press corps, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet
Foreign Minister Boris Pankin announced that Arabs and Israelis were
being invited to attend a peace conference in Madrid.
Standing in the back of the hall at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem
that day, I marveled at what America had accomplished. In 18 months,
roughly the time it took Henry Kissinger to negotiate three Arab-Israeli
disengagement agreements and Jimmy Carter to broker an Egypt-Israel
peace treaty, the United States had fought a short, successful war --
the best kind -- and pushed Iraq's Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And
America was now well-positioned to bring Arabs and Israelis across the
diplomatic finish line.
Or so I thought.
Baker, who lowballed everything, was characteristically cautious.
"Boys," he told a few of us aides in his suite after the news
conference, "if you want to get off the train, now might be a good time
because it could all be downhill from here." But I wasn't listening.
America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use
that power to make peace. I'd become a believer.
I'm not anymore.
Etymologists tell us that the word "religion" may come from the Latin
root religare, meaning to adhere or bind. It's a wonderful derivation.
In both its secular and religious manifestations, faith is alluring and
seductive precisely because it's driven by propositions that bind or
adhere the believer to a compelling set of ideas that satisfy rationally
or spiritually, but always obligate.
And so it has been and remains with America's commitment to Arab-Israeli
peacemaking over the past 40 years, and certainly since the October 1973
war gave birth to serious U.S. diplomacy and the phrase "peace process"
(the honor of authorship likely goes to a brilliant veteran State
Department Middle East hand, Harold Saunders, who saw the term
appropriated by Kissinger early in his shuttles). Since then, the U.S.
approach has come to rest on an almost unbreakable triangle of
assumptions -- articles of faith, really. By the 1990s, these tenets
made up a sort of peace-process religion, a reverential logic chain that
compelled most U.S. presidents to involve themselves seriously in the
Arab-Israeli issue. Barack Obama is the latest convert, and by all
accounts he too became a zealous believer, vowing within days of his
inauguration "to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between
Israel and the Palestinians, as well as Israel and its Arab neighbors."
Like all religions, the peace process has developed a dogmatic creed,
with immutable first principles. Over the last two decades, I wrote them
hundreds of times to my bosses in the upper echelons of the State
Department and the White House; they were a catechism we all could
recite by heart. First, pursuit of a comprehensive peace was a core, if
not the core, U.S. interest in the region, and achieving it offered the
only sure way to protect U.S. interests; second, peace could be
achieved, but only through a serious negotiating process based on
trading land for peace; and third, only America could help the Arabs and
Israelis bring that peace to fruition.
As befitting a religious doctrine, there was little nuance. And while
not everyone became a convert (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush
willfully pursued other Middle East priorities, though each would
succumb at one point, if only with initiatives that reflected, to their
critics, varying degrees of too little, too late), the exceptions have
mostly proved the rule. The iron triangle that drove Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and now
Barack Obama to accord the Arab-Israeli issue such high priority has
turned out to be both durable and bipartisan. Embraced by the high
priests of the national security temple, including State Department
veterans like myself, intelligence analysts, and most U.S.
foreign-policy mandarins outside government, these tenets endured and
prospered even while the realities on which they were based had begun to
change. If this wasn't the definition of real faith, one wonders what was.
That Obama, burdened by two wars elsewhere and the most severe economic
crisis since the Great Depression, came out louder, harder, and faster
on the Arab-Israeli issue than any of his predecessors was a remarkable
testament to just how enduring that faith had become -- a faith he very
publicly proclaimed while personally presiding over the announcement of
George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy in an orchestrated ceremony at
the State Department two days after his swearing-in.
At first, it seemed that Obama, the poster president for America's
engagement with the world, had found a cause uniquely suited to his view
of diplomacy, one whose importance had been heightened by his
predecessor's neglect of the issue and the Arab and Muslim attachment to
it. Even before the Gaza war exploded three weeks prior to his
inauguration, Obama had been bombarded by experts sagely urging a
renewed focus on Middle East peace as a way to regain American prestige
and credibility after the trauma of the Bush years. The new president
soon hit the Arab media running as a kind of empathizer-in-chief,
ratcheting up expectations even as Israelis increasingly found him
tone-deaf to their needs.
Obama surrounded himself with key figures, such as chief of staff Rahm
Emanuel and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who believed deeply in
the peace religion. He named as his chief peacemaker Mitchell, a man
with real stature and negotiating experience; and his national security
advisor is James L. Jones, himself a former Middle East envoy who made
the stunning pronouncement last year: "If there was one problem that I
would recommend to the president" to solve, "this would be it."
All these veteran leaders were not only believers, but had extra reason
to encourage a tougher line toward Israel; they had seen the Benjamin
Netanyahu movie before and were determined not to let their chance at
Middle East peace end the same way. In his first turn as prime minister
in the 1990s, the brash hard-liner Netanyahu had driven Bill Clinton
crazy. (I remember being briefed on their first meeting in 1996, after
which the president growled: "Who's the fucking superpower here?")
Confronted with Netanyahu again, Obama and his team needed no
encouragement to talk tough on the growing Israeli settlements in the
West Bank, an issue that experts inside and outside government were
clamoring for Obama to raise as the first step in his renewed push for
peace.
At the time, it looked to be a magical convergence of leader and moment:
The Arab-Israeli issue seemed perfectly suited to Obama's
transformational objectives and his transactional style. If Obama wanted
to begin "remaking America," why not try to remake the troubled politics
of peace, too? After all, this was the engagement president, who
believed deeply in the power of negotiations.
Obama was not alone in his belief, of course. The peace-process creed
has endured so long because to a large degree it has made sense and
accorded with U.S. interests. The question is, does it still? Does the
old thinking about peacemaking apply to new realities? Is the
Arab-Israeli conflict still the core issue? And after two decades of
inflated hopes followed by violence and terror, and now by directionless
stagnation, can we still believe that negotiations will deliver?
Sadly, the answers to these questions seem to be all too obvious these
days. And Obama's first 15 months as a disciple of the old creed tells
you why. In 2009, the president pushed the Israelis, the Arabs, and the
Palestinians to get negotiations going and was rebuffed by all three. He
later told Time magazine ruefully that "we overestimated our ability to
persuade." In March of this year, provoked by the Netanyahu government's
incomprehensible announcement of new housing units in East Jerusalem
smack in the middle of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel,
Obama pushed the Israelis again, harder this time, though it seems
without much of a strategy to put the crisis to good use.
Obama is clearly determined not to take no for an answer. Fresh from his
victory on health care, he's King of the World again and in no mood to
let the King of Israel frustrate his plans. This willfulness is
impressive, and it makes it even more imperative now that he's engaged
in the faith to give that old-time religion a fresh look, based not just
on what's possible but on what's probable. We don't have the right to
abandon hope, but we do have the responsibility to let go of, or at
least temper, our illusions.
I can't tell you how many times in the past 20 years, as an intelligence
analyst, policy planner, and negotiator, I wrote memos to Very Important
People arguing the centrality of the Arab-Israeli issue and why the
United States needed to fix it. Long before I arrived at the State
Department in 1978, my predecessors had made all the same arguments. An
unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict would trigger ruinous war, increase
Soviet influence, weaken Arab moderates, strengthen Arab radicals,
jeopardize access to Middle East oil, and generally undermine U.S.
influence from Rabat to Karachi.
 From the 1940s through the 1980s, the power with which the Palestinian
issue resonated in the Arab world did take a toll on American prestige
and influence. Still, even back then the hand-wringing and dire
predictions in my Cassandra-like memos were overstated. I once warned
ominously -- and incorrectly -- that we'd have nonstop Palestinian
terrorist attacks in the United States if we didn't move on the issue.
During those same years, the United States managed to advance all of its
core interests in the Middle East: It contained the Soviets;
strengthened ties to Israel and such key Arab states as Egypt, Jordan,
and Saudi Arabia; maintained access to Arab oil; and yes, even emerged
in the years after the October 1973 war as the key broker in
Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
Today, I couldn't write those same memos or anything like them with a
clear conscience or a straight face. Although many experts' beliefs
haven't changed, the region has, and dramatically, becoming nastier and
more complex. U.S. priorities and interests, too, have changed. The
notion that there's a single or simple fix to protecting those
interests, let alone that Arab-Israeli peace would, like some magic
potion, bullet, or elixir, make it all better, is just flat wrong. In a
broken, angry region with so many problems -- from stagnant, inequitable
economies to extractive and authoritarian governments that abuse human
rights and deny rule of law, to a popular culture mired in conspiracy
and denial -- it stretches the bounds of credulity to the breaking point
to argue that settling the Arab-Israeli conflict is the most critical
issue, or that its resolution would somehow guarantee Middle East stability.
The unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict is still a big problem for America
and its friends: It stokes a white-hot anger toward the United States,
has already demonstrated the danger of confrontation and war (see
Lebanon, 2006; Gaza, 2008), and confronts Israel with a demographic
nightmare. But three other issues, at least, have emerged to compete for
center stage, and they might prove far more telling about the fate of
U.S. influence, power, and security than the ongoing story of what I've
come to call the much-too-promised land.
First, there are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where tens of
thousands of Americans are in harm's way and are likely to be for some
time to come. Add to the mix the dangerous situation in Pakistan, and
you see volatility, threat, and consequences that go well beyond
Palestine. Second, though U.S. foreign policy can't be held hostage to
the war on terror (or whatever it's now called), the 9/11 attacks were a
fundamental turning point for an America that had always felt secure
within its borders. And finally there's Iran, whose nuclear aspirations
are clearly a more urgent U.S. priority than Palestine. Should sanctions
and/or diplomacy fail, the default position -- military action by Israel
or even the United States -- can't be ruled out, with galactic
consequences for the region and the world. In any event, it's hard to
imagine Netanyahu making any big decisions on the peace process until
there's much more clarity on what he and most Israelis regard as the
existential threat of an Iran with a bomb.
As Obama surely reckoned, moving fast on Arab-Israeli peacemaking would
help the United States deal with these issues. But that linkage wasn't
compelling when Bush used it to suggest that victory in Iraq would make
the Arab-Israeli conflict easier to resolve; it's not compelling now as
an exit strategy from Iraq either, as if engaging in Arab-Israeli
diplomacy will make the potential mess we could leave behind in Iraq
easier for the Arabs to swallow. Nor can the Arab-Israeli issue be used
effectively to mobilize Arabs against Iran, because the United States
could never do enough diplomatically (or soon enough) to have it make
much of a difference. Finally, linking the United States' willingness to
help the Israelis with Iran to their willingness to make concessions on
Jerusalem and borders isn't much of a policy either. If anything, it
risks the United States losing its leverage with Israel on the Iranian
issue and raising the odds that Israel would act alone.
Surely the United States can do more than one thing at once, the
foreign-policy equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time.
But America must also do multiple things well. Obama can't have an
inch-deep and mile-wide approach in which he commits to everything
without a cruel and unforgiving assessment of what's really possible and
what's not. Nor can the United States afford another high-profile
failure based on what a brilliant and committed Clinton told us shortly
before we went to Camp David: "Guys, trying and failing is a lot better
than not trying at all." This is an appropriate slogan for a high school
football team; it's not a substitute for a well-thought-out strategy for
the world's greatest power. Obama already has made a commitment to the
American people to end two wars, keep them safe from attack at home, and
stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, not to mention tackling the
challenges of a severe recession and growing deficit.
Governing is about choosing; it's about setting priorities, managing
your politics, thinking strategically, picking your spots, and looking
for genuine opportunities that can be exploited -- not tilting at
windmills. And these days, Arab-Israeli peacemaking is a pretty big
windmill.
Even if you could make the case for the centrality of the Arab-Israeli
conflict, could you make peace?
Americans are optimists. Our idealism, pragmatism, and belief in the
primacy of the individual convince us that the world can be made a
better place. Unlike many countries that grapple with existential
questions of political identity and physical survival, Americans today
don't live on the knife's edge or hold (whatever our Puritan or
Calvinist beginnings) a dark deterministic view of human nature.
All this drives our conviction that talking is better than shooting.
Rodney King-like, we believe that if people would only sit down and
discuss their differences rationally and compromise, a way might be
found to accommodate conflicting views. After all, America is the big
tent under which so many religious, political, and ethnic groups have
managed to coexist, remarkably amicably. Perhaps this spirit is best
embodied by Obama's Mideast envoy George Mitchell, who once told me that
any conflict created by human beings could be resolved by them. Mitchell
is truly convinced that solutions can be found and that serious
diplomacy is what you do until that time comes. But he ended his first
foray into Arab-Israeli diplomacy with three emphatic no's: from Israel
on a comprehensive settlement freeze, from Saudi Arabia on partial
normalization, and from the Palestinians on returning to negotiations.
Much of our earlier experience in the tough world of Arab-Israeli
peacemaking seemed to bear out Mitchell's initial conviction. In the
time from the 1973 war to 1991, two Republican secretaries of state
(Kissinger and Baker) and one Democratic president (Carter) succeeded in
hammering out a series of Arab-Israeli agreements that established
America's reputation as an effective, even honest, broker -- seeming to
validate the simple proposition that negotiations can work.
If there was anyone who represented the faith in that proposition, it
was me. I recall giving a talk in Jerusalem in the fall of 1998, after
Clinton had brokered the Wye River accords (never implemented), in which
I argued that Arab-Israeli negotiations and the move toward peace were
now irreversible. That remark, one of the great howlers of the decade,
prompted a note from Efraim Halevy, then Israel's deputy Mossad chief,
rightly questioning my logic, and though Halevy was too polite to say it
in his note, my judgment as well. Still I believed.
And I continued to do so, all the way through the 1990s, the only decade
in the last half of the 20th century in which there was no major
Arab-Israeli war. Instead, this was the decade of the Madrid conference,
the Oslo accords, the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, regional accords on
economic issues, and a historic bid in the final year of the Clinton
administration to negotiate peace agreements between Israel, Syria, and
the Palestinians. But for a variety of reasons, not the least of which
was the Arab, Palestinian, Israeli (and American) unwillingness to
recognize what price each side would have to pay to achieve those
agreements, the decade ended badly, leaving the pursuit of peace bloody,
battered, and broken. Perhaps the most serious casualty was the loss of
hope that negotiations could actually get the Arabs and Israelis what
they wanted.
And that has been the story line ever since: more process than peace.
Looking ahead, that process looks much, much tougher -- and peace more
and more elusive -- for three reasons.
First, Arab-Israeli peacemaking is politically risky and
life-threatening. Consider the murders of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat
and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At Camp David, I heard
Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat say at least three times, "You Americans
will not walk behind my coffin." Leaders take risks only when prospects
of pain and gain compel them to do so. Today's Middle East leaders --
Israel's Netanyahu, Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and Palestine's Mahmoud
Abbas -- aren't suicidal. It was Netanyahu, after all, who once told me:
"You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."
Second, big decisions require strong leaders -- think Jordan's King
Hussein or Israel's Menachem Begin -- because the issues on the table
cut to the core of their political and religious identity and physical
survival. This requires leaders with the legitimacy, authority, and
command of their politics to make a deal stick. But the current crop are
more prisoners of their constituencies than masters of them: Netanyahu
presides over a divided coalition and a country without consensus on
what price Israel will pay for agreements with Palestinians and Syria;
Abbas is part of a broken Palestinian national movement and shares
control over Palestine's guns, authority, and legitimacy with Hamas.
It's hard to see how either can marshal the will and authority to make
big decisions.
Third, even with strong leaders, you still need a project that doesn't
exceed the carrying capacity of either side. In the past, U.S. diplomacy
succeeded because the post-1973-war disengagement agreements, a separate
Egypt-Israel accord, and a three-day peace conference at Madrid aligned
with each side's capabilities. Today, issues such as Jerusalem (as a
capital of two states), borders (based on June 1967 lines), and refugees
(rights, return, and compensation) present gigantic political and
security challenges for Arabs and Israelis. One accord will be hard
enough. The prospect of negotiating a comprehensive peace; concluding
three agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, between Israel and
Syria, and between Israel and Lebanon; dismantling settlements in the
Golan Heights and West Bank; and withdrawing to borders based on June
1967 lines seems even more fantastical.
Bottom line: Negotiations can work, but both Arabs and Israelis (and
American leaders) need to be willing and able to pay the price. And they
are not.
Under these circumstances, the refrain from many quarters is that
America must save the day. If the Arabs and Israelis are too weak or
recalcitrant, then the United States must support and/or push them to
make the deal.
Such forceful U.S. diplomacy succeeded in the past. Indeed, it's a
stunning paradox that with the exception of the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace
treaty, every other successful accord came not out of direct
negotiations, but as a result of U.S. mediation. The Oslo accords, often
touted as the miracle produced by direct talks between Israelis and
Palestinians, proved to be a spectacular failure. All that's missing
now, the argument goes, is the absence of American will.
I understand the logic of this view, and having spent more than 20 years
in frustrating talks with the Arabs and Israelis, I can also see how it
can be emotionally satisfying. But because I know a thing or two about
failure and don't want to see the United States fail (yet again), I
simply don't buy the argument. If I genuinely believed America could
impose and deliver a solution through tough forceful diplomacy, I'd be
more sympathetic -- but I don't. And here's why:
Ownership: Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, said it best:
In the history of the world, no one ever washed a rental car. We care
only about what we own. Unless the Arabs and Israelis want political
agreements and peace and can invest enough in them to give them a chance
to succeed, we certainly can't. The broader Middle East is littered with
the remains of great powers that wrongly believed they could impose
their will on small tribes. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran … need I continue?
Small tribes will always be meaner, tougher, and longer-winded than U.S.
diplomats because it's their neighborhood and their survival; they will
always have a greater stake in the outcome of their struggle than the
great power thousands of miles away with many other things to do. You
want to see failure? Take a whack at trying to force Israelis and
Palestinians to accept an American solution on Jerusalem.
The negotiator's mystique: It's gone, at least for now. When Americans
succeeded in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, it was because they were respected,
admired, even feared. U.S. power and influence were taken seriously.
Today, much of the magic is gone: We are overextended, diminished,
bogged down. Again Summers: Can the world's biggest borrower continue to
be the world's greatest power? Our friends worry about our reliability;
our adversaries, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, believe they can
outwait and outmaneuver us. Nor does there appear much cost or
consequence to saying no to the superpower. After Obama and Mitchell's
fruitless first year, I worry that the mediator's mystique of a
Kissinger or a Baker, or the willfulness and driving force of a Carter,
won't return easily.
Domestic politics: The pro-Israel community in the United States has a
powerful voice, primarily in influencing congressional sentiment and
initiatives (assistance to Israel in particular), but it does not have a
veto over U.S. foreign policy. Lobbies lobby; that's the American way,
for better or worse. Presidents are supposed to lead. And when they do,
with a real strategy that's in America's national interests, they trump
domestic politics. Still, domestic politics constrain, particularly when
a president is perceived to be weak or otherwise occupied. This
president has been battered of late, and his party is likely to face
significant losses in the 2010 midterm elections. Should there be a
serious chance for a breakthrough in the peace process, he'll go for it.
But is it smart to risk trying to manufacture one? The last thing Obama
needs now is an ongoing fight with the Israelis and their supporters, or
worse, a major foreign-policy failure.
U.S.-Israeli relations: America is Israel's best friend and must
continue to be. Shared values are at the core of the relationship, and
our intimacy with Israel gives us leverage and credibility in
peacemaking when we use it correctly. But this special relationship with
the Israelis, which can serve U.S. interests, has become an exclusive
one that does not. We've lost the capacity to be independent of Israel,
to be honest with it when it does things we don't like, to impose
accountability, and to adopt positions in a negotiation that might
depart from Israel's. It's tough to be a credible mediator with such
handicaps.
Fighting with Israel is an occupational reality. It's part of the
mediator's job description. Every U.S. president or secretary of state
who succeeded (and some who didn't) had dust-ups, some serious, with
Israel. (Remember how Bush 41 and Baker used housing loan guarantees? In
1991, the United States denied Israel billions in credit to borrow at
reduced interest rates because of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's
determination to build settlements.) But the fight must produce
something of value -- like the Madrid conference -- that not only makes
the United States look good but significantly advances the negotiations.
In short, we need a strategy that stands a chance of working. Otherwise,
why would any U.S. president want to hammer a close ally with a strong
domestic constituency?
And this was the problem with Obama's tough talk to Israel on
settlements. Not only was the goal he laid out -- a settlements freeze
including natural growth -- unattainable, but it wasn't part of a
broader strategy whose dividends would have made the fight worthwhile.
Going after the Israelis piecemeal on settlements to please the Arabs or
to make ourselves feel better won't work unless we have a way of
achieving a breakthrough. That a tough-talking Obama ended up backing
down last year when Netanyahu said no to a comprehensive freeze tells
you why.
And that remains the president's challenge after the Biden brouhaha over
housing units in East Jerusalem. In the spring of 2010 we're nowhere
near a breakthough, and yet we're in the middle of a major rift with the
Israelis. Unless we achieve a big concession, we will be perceived to
have backed down again. And even if the president manages to extract
something on Jerusalem, the chances that Netanyahu will be able to make
a far greater move on a core issue, such as borders, will be much
reduced. Unless the president is trying to get rid of Netanyahu (and
produce a new coalition), he'll have no choice but to find a way to
cooperate with him.
So now Obama faces a conundrum. A brilliant, empathetic president, with
a Nobel Peace Prize to boot, has embraced the iron triangle and made
America the focal point of action and responsibility for the
Arab-Israeli issue at a time when the country may be least able to do
much about it.
Trying to compensate for the absence of urgency, will, and leadership
among Arabs and Israelis by inserting your own has always been a tough
assignment. The painful truth is that faith in America's capacity to fix
the Arab-Israeli issue has always been overrated. It's certainly no
coincidence that every breakthrough from the Egypt-Israel treaty to the
Oslo accords to the Israel-Jordan peace agreement came initially as a
consequence of secret meetings about which the United States was the
last to know. Only then, once there was local ownership or some regional
crisis that the United States could exploit, were we able to move things
forward.
Right now, America has neither the opportunity nor frankly the balls to
do truly big things on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Fortuna might still
rescue the president. The mullahcracy in Tehran might implode. The
Syrians and Israelis might reach out to one another secretly, or perhaps
a violent confrontation will flare up to break the impasse.
But without a tectonic plate shifting somewhere, it's going to be tough
to re-create the good old days when bold and heroic Arab and Israeli
leaders strode the stage of history, together with Americans, willing
and able to do serious peacemaking.
I remember attending Rabin's funeral in 1995 in Jerusalem and trying to
convince myself that America must and could save the peace process that
had been so badly undermined by his assassination. I'm not a declinist.
I still believe in the power of American diplomacy when it's tough,
smart, and fair. But the enthusiasm, fervor, and passion have given way
to a much more sober view of what's possible. Failure can do that.
The believers need to re-examine their faith, especially at a moment
when America is so stretched and overextended. The United States needs
to do what it can, including working with Israelis and Palestinians on
negotiating core final-status issues (particularly on borders, where the
gaps are narrowest), helping Palestinians develop their institutions,
getting the Israelis to assist by allowing Palestinians to breathe
economically and expand their authority, and keeping Gaza calm, even as
it tries to relieve the desperation and sense of siege through economic
assistance. But America should also be aware of what it cannot do, as
much as what it can.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who probably didn't know much about the Middle
East, said it best: "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me,
then in half the creeds." And maybe, if that leads to more realistic
thinking when it comes to America's view of Arab-Israeli peacemaking,
that's not such a bad thing.

 Clinton, ha smesso di credere ad Oslo
[cut]
Grazie. Non così stringente e approfondita come un'analisi di Persio, ma 
   molto interessante <g>

 Clinton, ha smesso di credere ad Oslo
dove sarebbe la meditazione? Te la canti e te la suoni come sempre.
Darsi ragione da soli è l'esatto opposto della meditazione

 molto interessante <g>
Una vera cagata, complimenti.
99% dell'articolo � concepito come un'introduzione, cio� quello che di 
solito si chiama esposizione dei fatti.
Dopo di che, di solito, arriva un'analisi e una conclusione. Nulla di tutto 
ci�.
Dopo una infinita pappardella, arivo finalmente alla frase "we need a 
strategy". Ma non dirmi.
Meno male.
E qual'� questa strategy?
Non � dato sapere.
Ci � solo dato sapere cosa ha fatto male Obama, cosa far� male, cosa non 
deve fare, cosa non dovr� fare.
L'idea � che non dovrebbe fare un cazzo, se capisco bene, perch�:
Right now, America has neither the opportunity nor frankly the balls to
do truly big things on Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
Bene, allora cosa propone il signore?
Ma una beata fava, ovviamente.
Una lunga, lagnosa sequela su quanto sbagliano, hanno sbagliato e 
sbaglieranno gli USA.
E basta. Suca.
Ah beh, s� beh, come diceva la famosa canzone di Fo.
Non c'era bisogno di uno dei pi� influenti consiglieri di Clinton per 
sparare questa sequela di patetiche banalit�: se gli USA non sono mai 
riusciti n� stanno riuscendo a combinare nulla in MO � *sicuramente* perch� 
hanno sbagliato. Di solito succede cos�: quando non si riesce a raggiungere 
un obiettivo, non � per colpa della maga mag�, ma perch� c'� qualcosa di 
sbagliato o nell'obbiettivo o nel modo di perseguirlo.
Oltre a Lapalisse, lo diceva anche il mitico Maestro Catalano.
Signora mia, non ci sono pi� le mezze stagioni....
PS mi scuso per la lunghezza, ma essersi dovuti sorbire una simile 
stucchevole prosa fa venir voglia di vendicarsi.

 stucchevole prosa fa venir voglia di vendicarsi.
Prego. Io perï¿œ non l'ho capita esattamente cosï¿œ, probabilmente anche 
perchï¿œ capisco l'inglese molto peggio di te. A me pareva che il succo 
del discorso fosse che ï¿œ inutile fare del "peace process" in Israele una 
questione di vita o di morte per ogni amministrazione americana che si 
avvicendi alla Casa Bianca: ci sono momenti favorevoli, con leaders che 
hanno sufficiente credibilitï¿œ e carisma per poter fare la pace (e Camp 
David fu uno di questi) e momenti in cui semplicemente non ci sono le 
condizioni per perseguire questo processo di pace, amen. Questo momento, 
nello specifico, appare particolarmente poco propizio: nessuna delle 
parti in causa ha intenzione, ma soprattutto ha il *peso politico 
sufficiente* (per ragioni diverse), di fare un passo indietro e favorire 
il processo di pace, per cui ï¿œ inutile per gli Usa tentare di forzare la 
situazione quando ci sono in MO questioni probabilmente piï¿œ importanti 
come la exit strategy dall'Iraq e soprattutto la spinosissima questione 
iraniana.
Io almeno l'ho capita cosï¿œ...

 Io almeno l'ho capita cos�...
benissimo, anch'io l'ho in parte capita cos�.
Ma, dopo di che?
Cio�, mi spiaghi che cazzo dovrebbe fare quel disgraziato di Obama?