Twenty-four hours ago, everything was A-OK in the Obama Administration: “Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton [were] coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan.” OK, maybe “President Obama remain[ed] unsatisfied with answers he has gotten about how vigorously the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan would help execute a new strategy,” but each of the four options on the table provided for some increase in the US military presence. The issues were “how much of Afghanistan the troops would seek to control and different time frames and expectations for the training of Afghan security forces”.
The tripartite meeting between Israeli, Palestinian, and American delegations took place in New York on Tuesday, with the leaders of the three groups participating. This was the picture which signals a shift in the US apparoach towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict , from a step-by-step Road Map to an edited Washington version of a 2002 Saudi initiative based on wider issues and a regional context.
Yet Washington’s “middle way” between the demands of Palestinians and Israelis is not new. The steps taken in the Obama Administration’s Middle East foreign policy since last January were supposed to be clearer when the leaders of Israelis and Palestinians shook hands on Tuesday. But even this picture is incomplete, since the failure to include regional actors such as Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Iraq will undermine any effort on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
According to Washington, the final status agreement must come with continuing negotiations on other issues, especially on the Israeli halt of settlements in the West Bank. The formula is clear: the reassurance of the Palestinian side with the promised withdrawal of Israelis to pre-1967 war borders while reducing pressure on the Israeli side by moving the discourse of “total settlement freeze” to that of “restraining settlements activity” as the Israeli concede a nine-month freeze.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Let me begin, though, by echoing the President’s statement yesterday concerning his approval of the recommendations not only of the Pentagon, but of his entire national security team to deploy a stronger and more comprehensive missile defense system in Europe. This decision came after a lengthy and in-depth review of our assessment of the threats posed, particularly the threat posed by Iran’s ballistic missile program, and the technology that we have today, and what might be available in the future to confront it. We believe this is a decision that will leave America stronger, and more capable of defending our troops, our interests, and our allies. Read the rest of this entry »
And no, that is not too dramatic a headline.
The tripartite meeting between Israeli, Palestinian, and American delegations took place in New York on Tuesday, with the leaders of the three groups participating. This was the picture which signals a shift in the US apparoach towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict , from a step-by-step Road Map to an edited Washington version of a 2002 Saudi initiative based on wider issues and a regional context.
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