The New Middle East (41 page)

If President Obama does decide to push things, then he now has someone in John Kerry who will be more willing than Secretary of State Clinton was to fight those battles for him. During her term in office Hillary Clinton implemented rather than shaped policy. She was never given the chance to be a great secretary of state because the White House made all the big decisions and quite a lot of the medium-sized ones too. The advice President Obama listened to most came from his own team of political advisers, not those in the State Department.

‘Clinton wanted to lead from the front, not from behind,’ said former State Department adviser Vali R. Nasr about her tenure as she stood down.
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Perhaps, though, that wasn’t always the case. While Secretary of State Clinton was frustrated about her inability to drive action on issues she felt strongly about, like arming the opposition in Syria, when it came to Israel and the Palestinians the back seat was where she was comfortable. That is why the peace process, in the first term, was largely delegated to envoys. ‘Hillary was and is sceptical about taking on issues that look like they are likely to fail,’ says William B. Quandt, who is professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and served in the Middle East office of the National Security Council under Presidents Nixon and Carter.

She is very attuned to domestic politics. So the two issues that are just poison in terms of American politics are dealing with Iran and putting pressure on Israel, and if you are going to get an Israeli–Palestinian agreement, at some point you are going to have to put some pressure on both sides, including Israel. Of course she saw her husband go through this. [Bill] Clinton tried to charm the Israelis into peace with the Palestinians and he tried to charm Arafat, but it didn’t work at the end of the day and she I think learned something from that. He invested a lot of time and energy and failed . . . so she focused on other issues and I think those were deliberate choices.

John Kerry is closer to Obama’s thinking than Hillary Clinton was, though he has already felt the frustration of the White House’s firm grip on foreign policy. He is more likely to be listened to on those occasions when his views differ from the president’s. If he is called upon to step into the fray Secretary of State Kerry may not find dealing with the Israeli prime minister any less bruising than his boss did. ‘I think Netanyahu has a visceral dislike, distrust and almost a condescending attitude towards the United States,’ says Ambassador Kurtzer. ‘It’s nothing to do with Barack Obama, he’s just the latest of his targets. He had the problem with Clinton and he had the problem with George H. W. Bush and James Baker, a Republican administration. I think there is a systemic internal problem with Netanyahu relative to this country.’

The Israeli people are still not in love with the American president, but they are still smitten with and grateful to America. Adjusting for inflation, the US has provided Israel with $233.7 billion in aid since the state was formed.
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Both the Israeli public and Netanyahu know that the US is their best friend and always will be. That is why the Israeli electorate slapped Netanyahu on the wrist and told him to ‘go play nice’. They know the first term of the Obama administration was very badly handled by the Israeli prime minister, though getting him to accept that is not easy.

Binyamin Netanyahu doesn’t talk to the foreign media based in the Middle East very often. His staff are much happier to agree to interviews on his foreign trips with journalists based abroad who are not normally steeped in the politics of the region. However once a year by tradition he speaks to the foreign media, based in Israel, and accepts a handful of questions with no follow-ups, the first of which is given to the elected chairman of the Middle East Foreign Press Association, who in 2012–13 was me. So I asked Prime Minister Netanyahu what his personal regrets were about the way he handled his relationship with President Obama in the first term and what he would change about that approach in the second. He dodged the question with a monologue:

I very much appreciate President Obama’s support for Israel during our operation in Gaza. I appreciate the fact that before that he supported Iron Dome and continues to support it with further assistance. I appreciate that he stood up against the unilateral resolution at the UN. I have had four conversations with the president in recent weeks and I will continue those conversations, I think it’s important for Israel, I think it’s important for Israel–American relations.

So I tried again.

‘And your regrets?’ By this stage the head of the Government Press Office was waving his hands at me to stop.

‘Who doesn’t have regrets, do you not have regrets?’ Netanyahu replied.

‘I’m not a prime minister, that’s why I am asking you,’ I said. The GPO head now looked like he was going to have a heart attack.

‘You could work at it, the doors are open,’ the prime minister told me, and then I had to give way to CNN. Their correspondent asked him how he accounted for the huge showing of support for him in a recent election campaign poll. He had no problem answering that one.

But even though the two leaders do not like each other on a personal level, they are going to have to deal with each other in the coming years, because the other issue that dogged their relationship is a lot less easier to kick into the long grass than the peace process is. That issue is Iran.

The Iranian regime, and its nuclear ambitions, is the only thing in the post-Arab Spring era that seriously worries all three of America’s pillars of policy in the region. It was also the first thing that put all four major players in the Middle East back on the same page.

Iran wasn’t originally in the ‘Axis of Evil’. The ‘Axis of Evil’, which began life as an ‘Axis of Hatred’, hinged on Iraq. It was supposed to hold the unproven link, in the January 2002 State of the Union address, between Saddam Hussein’s regime and 9/11. But George W. Bush’s then National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice thought focusing just on Iraq might sound like war was imminent, so she suggested adding other countries. North Korea and Iran were selected.
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‘I find it hard to believe that’s a thought-through policy’ was the immediate response to the speech by the European Union commissioner in charge of international relations, Chris Patten.
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It was a surprise too to the Iranians, who thought relations had improved after some initial cooperation with the US in Afghanistan. After 9/11, rather than weaken Iran the Bush administration’s actions in the wider region, and particularly the ousting of Saddam, strengthened it. And having got the weapons assessment so badly wrong in Iraq, it had very little credibility when it made similar noises about Iran.

Obama put himself at the heart of the attempt to re-engage with Iran, though he stopped well short of an earlier campaign pledge to meet with its leaders. After two months in the White House he extended greetings for the Persian New Year, Nowruz. Then during his Cairo speech he spoke of Iran again:

In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government [of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in August 1953]. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians. This history is well known. Rather than remain trapped in the past, I’ve made it clear to Iran’s leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward.
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And so he invited them to a party.

At the end of May 2009 US embassies around the world were told by the State Department ‘they may invite representatives from the government of Iran’ to their 4th July Independence Day celebrations.
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The United States has not had relations with Iran since its embassy in Tehran was seized in 1979 and its staff were held hostage for over a year. It was an event that largely cost Jimmy Carter his presidency. Iranian diplomats had been personae non gratae from then on. It was Carter in his 1980 State of the Union address who first declared the Persian Gulf to be a region of ‘vital interests’ to the United States of America which would be defended ‘by any means necessary, including military force’.
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By 2009 Obama had a lot of fences to mend, but before the 4th July bunting was even up, the Iranian leadership had pooped the party. On 12 June the Iranians held presidential elections. The interior ministry declared the following day that the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won with 62 per cent of the votes. Nobody believed them. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest in what became known as the ‘Green Movement’. It was a forerunner of the Arab revolts eighteen months later, and it too relied on social media to galvanise support.

Iran, like the Arab world, has a young population. Fifty per cent of the voters were under thirty. And like the people of Arab countries, they too were thoroughly misunderstood by the outside world. If you want to really understand this society you only need to watch the queue for the bathroom as your plane nears Iranian airspace on an inbound flight to Tehran. As soon as the pilot announces: ‘We will be landing shortly’ a parade of pretty young women in tight tops, heavy make-up and blue jeans forms a long line halfway down the aircraft. At this moment the small restroom takes on the transformational properties of Superman’s phone box. Each woman goes in looking like she just walked out of a disco and each one comes out looking like she is ready to step into a mosque. The next time you see images of young Iranians as they march past the camera promising to martyr themselves for the Palestinian cause, remind yourself that some of them probably have a push-up bra and a ‘Hello Kitty’ T-shirt on underneath.

The protests of 2009 after Iran’s disputed presidential elections revealed the disillusionment of the youth with the establishment. But these modern young things also have contempt for what they see as the cynical hypocrisy of the West. That is because most of the things that their government tells them about decades of conspiracies against the country are well documented and true. The Iranian nation has a whole host of genuine reasons for mistrust.

President Obama grasped that, and in that context his administration clearly didn’t know what to say as the protests gathered momentum and the government’s crackdown began. So he said very little. When he did speak he didn’t side with the young protesters. He parked his administration on the fence. On 15 June he said he was ‘deeply troubled’ by the violence but that: ‘My understanding is that the Iranian government says that they are going to look into irregularities that have taken place.’
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The protests were the largest since the 1979 revolution that deposed the Shah. More than a hundred demonstrators were killed, many by the paramilitary force, the Basiji.
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It was the death of a 26-year-old woman called Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot dead in Tehran, that finally produced an angry condemnation from Obama. Her dying moments were captured on a mobile phone and instantly went viral on the Internet. But it seemed even after the brutal suppression of the Green Movement that President Obama still believed there was room for engagement with the Iranians: ‘I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people.’ He was clearly frustrated by the repeated call from reporters to say what action he was willing to take. ‘We don’t know yet how this thing is going to play out. I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I’m not.’
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It played out with the Green Movement being smashed.

President Obama’s attempt to engage with Iran during his first term failed, but that engagement was not launched to encourage democracy. It was part of an attempt to discourage the Iranians from building a nuclear weapon. Dealing with Iran was the only thing Israel and Saudi Arabia could both agree on. They had been clear for some time about the best way to deal with the problem: some very big bombs needed to be dropped.

‘Cut off the head of the snake’ was the ‘frequent exhortation’ of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to the Bush administration.
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There was a more regular and public cry for action too from the entire Israeli administration once Netanyahu took office again in March 2009. In his speech to supporters at his 2013 election night rally, Netanyahu said of his new tenure: ‘The first challenge was and remains preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.’

The rhetoric now though will have to be a little more muted, because his coalition is a little less convinced of the urgency. There will probably be less of the grandstanding that marked the first term too. The highlight of that was Netanyahu standing at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2012 with a large ‘Loony Tunes’-style cartoon of a bomb, over the top of which he then drew a ‘red line’ in case the world’s leaders sitting before him were a little too stupid to get the message. It was even more memorable than his speech earlier in the year when he said of the Iranian nuclear programme: ‘If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then what is it? That’s right, it’s a duck – but this duck is a nuclear duck.’
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