Tag: Israel

TWO GOOD COLUMNS

Two of the best columnists writing in America today have written excellent pieces in recent days that caught my eye. The first was by Tom Friedman in the NYT in the wake of Bibi Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, the second is Eugene Robinson’s piece in today’s Washington Post on the futility of the war in Afghanistan.

Friedman’s point was that the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” is moribund because the respective leaders, Netanyahu and Abbas,  are stuck in the past. Each is recycling tired old demands and preconditions that effectively stall any progress towards a solution. Totally true.  Neither has had an original idea in years and both are playing to their respective constituencies. CYA politics, Mideast-version.

No wonder George Mitchell resigned as Obama’s envoy.  He had the patience to hammer at the Northern Ireland problem for six years until both sides agreed to the Good Friday Accord. But two years of beating his head against the Israeli-Palestinian intransigence was enough.  No surprise.

Eugene Robinson’s column today, “Declare Victory — and Go,” is an eloquent appeal to common sense.  “What on earth are we doing?” in Afghanistan, he asks.  “We have more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan risking life and limb, at a cost of $10 billion a month, to pursue ill-defined goals whose achievement” can only barely be imagined.

“We wanted to depose the Taliban regime, and we did,” he writes. “We wanted to install a new government that answers to its constituents at the polls, and we did.  We wanted to smash al-Qaeda’s infrastructure of training camps and havens, and we did. We wanted to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, and we did.”

“The threat from Afghanistan is gone,” he concludes, “bring the troops home.”

That is so clearly the right course of action that it is strange that the Obama Administration does not adopt it immediately.

EGYPT AT THE CROSSROADS

EGYPTIAN PATIENCE WEARS THIN

“We are a river country,” an Egyptian friend once told me when I marveled at his country’s patience with corrupt, incompetent and repressive regimes. “We go on and on.”

Perhaps. But that legendary patience with the bumbling but stubborn, 82-year-old President Mubarak seems to be wearing out.  Change is coming to Egypt, either very soon or shortly thereafter. And what happens in Egypt matters, to Egyptians, of course, but also to the U.S., Israel and the entire Arab world.

Diminished as it may be today, Egypt remains the centerpiece of the Arab world. With its population of 80 million, it is not only the largest Arab country. It is historically, culturally and intellectually the heart of the Arab crescent from Morocco to Lebanon. An old saying in the region is that there can be no peace between Israel and her Arab neighbors without Syria, and no war without Egypt. It is still true today. No surprise that President Obama chose Cairo for his first major speech on relations between the U.S. and the Arab and Muslim world.

But now Obama confronts the ticklish task of encouraging change in Egypt without seeming to abandon the Mubarak government .  Egypt has served as a crucial counterweight to Syria and Iran. It has received tens of billions of dollars worth of U.S. aid over the years and carved out a cold but diplomatically important peace with Israel. As Egypt goes, so go Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The stakes are enormous.