Secretary of State John Kerry added to the already ample fanfare
surrounding the launch of talks between Israeli and Palestinian
negotiators by holding a press conference yesterday to introduce his new
special envoy to the peace process, Martin Indyk.
Indyk,
unlike his predecessor George Mitchell, has made a career out of the
peace process – first as an active participant in the negotiations
during the Clinton administration, where he was a National Security
Council official and then as ambassador to Israel, and more recently at
the Brookings Institution, where he has written, lectured, advised, and
founded the Saban Forum, an annual Brookings conference on the peace
process.
Kerry gave a simple reason for
selecting Indyk: “He knows what has worked and he knows what hasn’t
worked, and he knows how important it is to get this right.” Indyk
indeed has cultivated the perception that he has not emerged from
decades in the Middle East business empty-handed – itself a shrewd way
of transforming his involvement in repeated failure into a story of
hard-earned wisdom. In Indyk’s (and Kerry’s) telling, twenty years of
trafficking in bad ideas and marching down dead-ends have forged a wise
elder statesman, a hard-bitten veteran who won’t make rookie mistakes.
Indyk’s memoir of his involvement in the peace process, published in 2009, is self-deprecatingly titled Innocent Abroad.
More by Noah Pollak
Unfortunately, this humble and attractive story
simply isn’t true. Indyk’s record during the Obama era isn’t one of
speaking tough truths earned from years of experience in the field. It
is a typical Washington story, that of a careerist trying to advance his
prospects with the incumbent administration, navigating toward the
hoped-for moment when he will be invited back into a position of power
and acclaim. For Indyk, this job has been particularly challenging: In
2008, he supported Hillary Clinton, while his colleague Dennis Ross
backed Obama. Ross got an administration job; Indyk stayed at Brookings.
Thus Indyk became a cheerleader for nearly every
first-term mistake Obama made in the peace process, right until the
moment it became safe to criticize those mistakes. Kerry was famously
for the Iraq war before he was against it; Indyk was for the
administration’s policies before he was against them, which was before
he took a job in the administration so that he could be for them again.
Consider some examples of Indyk’s having it opposite ways:
At yesterday’s press conference, he quoted from
Obama’s recent speech in Jerusalem that “peace is necessary, peace is
just, and peace is possible” – and added, “I couldn’t agree more with
President Obama. It’s been my conviction for 40 years that peace is
possible.” Yet in an interview just last year on Israeli radio,
Indyk was asked whether peace was possible. “I'm not particularly
optimistic because I think that the heart of the matter is that the
maximum concessions that this government of Israel would be prepared to
make fall far short of the minimum requirements that Abu Mazen [Mahmoud
Abbas] will insist on,” he replied. “So it may be possible to keep the
talks going, which is a good thing but I find it very hard to believe
that they will reach an agreement.”
The single most astonishing example of Indyk’s
opportunism is the settlement freeze that Obama demanded of Israel as a
precondition for talks, today widely acknowledged – including by Obama
and Indyk – as having been counterproductive. In 2009, Indyk endorsed Obama’s demand for the freeze as the only way to get the Palestinians into talks:
There's one Israeli action that may help move things forward, and Obama was not shy in bringing it up at the press conference: Israel's Road Map obligation to stop settlements. A real settlements freeze, and the dismantlement of unauthorised settlement outposts (another Road Map obligation), would give Palestinians renewed hope in negotiations…if Netanyahu were willing to fulfil that commitment, Obama might be able to persuade the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs to reciprocate by normalising relations with Israel.
In an April 2010 op-ed for the New York Times, shortly after Obama used an ill-timed settlement announcement during Vice President Biden’s visit to Israel as casus belli for
open political warfare on Netanyahu, Indyk castigated the prime
minister for his failure to immediately submit to Obama’s demand for a
freeze on Jewish construction in East Jerusalem:
Netanyahu explained that his presence at the summit would have prompted some leaders to focus attention on Israel’s nuclear program. But one suspects the real reason for his conspicuous absence was that he does not have an answer to President Obama’s demand that he freeze new building announcements in East Jerusalem for a few months to give peace negotiations with the Palestinians a chance to take off.
At no point during the period in which the
administration made an obsession out of settlements did Indyk go on
record uttering a word of caution or criticism about such an approach.
Yet today, he is full of wise criticism. In his 2012 book Bending History,
his criticism of Obama on these issues is scathing. Obama’s approach –
the approach Indyk fully endorsed when it mattered – “created a deeply
problematic context for the showdown that Obama sought over Israeli
settlement activity.” The large number of Israelis living in
settlements, Indyk noted, “render[s] a total freeze unrealistic.” He
continues: “In demanding a complete settlements freeze, Obama failed to
make any distinction, thereby implying that building in east Jerusalem
had to cease, too, and inadvertently encouraging the Palestinians to
insist on that.” Indyk titled an entire section of the book “The
Settlements Freeze Fiasco,” concluding that “Seven months of U.S.
diplomatic effort had been wasted and Obama’s credibility damaged for no
good purpose.”
In a 2012 interview in
Israel, he elaborated further: “[Obama] put Abu Mazen in an impossible
position: he couldn’t have agreed for less than what Obama had demanded.
Obama, Abu Mazen complained, put me on a high horse. I have no way to
get off it.”
After years of encouraging Obama to treat Netanyahu
harshly and pressure Israel for concessions when such advice was
exactly what Obama wanted to hear, Indyk criticized Obama for doing
exactly what he had recommended – only, of course, after it was safe to
do so.
The same pattern of flattery and then criticism is
on display in Indyk’s treatment of Obama’s grandiose 2009 “Speech to the
Muslim World,” delivered in Cairo. After the speech, Indyk was of
course lavish in his praise:
President Obama, by his decision to start the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, to try to close Guantanamo Bay, to reach out to the Muslim world in this initiative of which the Cairo speech in June was the best example. All of those things I think helped to change the image of the United States and the president of the United States quite dramatically.
Fast-forward to the summer of 2012 and it turns out he thought the whole thing was a bad idea – and not just in retrospect, but at the time:
After the speech, I spoke to Obama’s close advisers, Ram [sic] Emanuel and David Axelrod. I told them that the Israelis took the speech badly. The comparison between the Holocaust and Palestinian suffering infuriated them. The fact that Obama chose to speak in Cairo but not visit Jerusalem hurt their honor. The two looked at each other in silence, as if to say, we knew it would happen, we warned him but he refused to listen.
In late 2010, sorting through the wreckage of the
Cairo speech and the settlement freeze, Indyk discovered a new idea to
get behind, one he was certain would get the peace process back on track
– just as certain as he’d been about the settlement freeze.
In a December 2010 op-ed,
days after the administration formally abandoned its
settlements-centric approach, Indyk offered the self-incriminating
observation that “Twenty months of US efforts to freeze Israeli
settlement activity to create a conducive environment for negotiations
have produced only deadlock.” His new suggestion: “‘It’s the borders,
stupid’ should be the mantra” for the administration. The “borders” he
was talking about are in fact the 1949 armistice lines, also called the
1967 lines, to which many advocates for the Palestinians think Israel
should withdraw. “Mr Obama should pronounce [the 1967 lines] as the
American position,” Indyk recommended.
Obama did just that. Six months later he delivered a speech that
attempted to dislodge the peace process from the settlements deadlock
by endorsing the 1967 lines as the starting point for future
negotiations. Such a declaration, Indyk had predicted in his op-ed,
would help “jump-start” and possibly even “turbo-charge” talks. As we
know, Obama’s endorsement of yet another Palestinian position had the
opposite effect: it angered the Israelis and ensured that Netanyahu’s
visit to Washington – he was arriving the very next day – would play out
as one of the most acrimonious moments in the history of U.S.-Israel relations.
Then there’s the “Syria track” of the peace
process, in which Israel would surrender the Golan Heights in exchange
for a peace treaty with the Assad regime that would also “flip” Syria to
the pro-western group of Arab states. In 2006, after 15 years of
failure to convince Assad of the benefits of this arrangement, Indyk
admitted that it was a useless pursuit. In an interview with Haaretz he said:
Look, I was personally involved in trying to achieve a peace treaty between Israel and Syria during eight years of the Clinton Administration. I personally argued throughout that period that the U.S. needed to give priority to a Syrian-Israeli deal, because it had obvious strategic benefits…But I don't feel the same way now…as a matter of strategy I think it's a mistake…Syria is allied with Iran, for good reasons of strategy, from their point of view. And the notion that you can somehow split them is, I think, fanciful.
Yet three years later, in May 2009, Indyk was back on the Syria track, writing that “A
peace deal with Syria would hold out considerable advantage to
Netanyahu and Obama because it would cut Iran's conduit of arms and
financial support to Hezbollah and Hamas.”
The next year, he went even further:
“Today, nothing could better help Obama to isolate Iran than for
Netanyahu to offer to cede the Golan, as four other Israeli prime
ministers have, in exchange for peace with Syria, which serves as the
conduit for Tehran’s troublemaking in the Arab-Israeli arena.”
Between 2006 and 2009, no relevant facts on the
ground in the Middle East had changed: Iran was still pursuing nuclear
weapons, Bashar al-Assad was still the dictator of Syria, and Hezbollah
was still entrenched in Lebanon. Only one fact had changed, and it was a
Washington fact: Barack Obama had become the president, and he had made
“engagement” with Syria a pillar of his Middle East policy. Indyk
dutifully discarded his previous objections to the idea.
Give him his due: His shameless positioning and
audacious reversals have been successful where they were intended to
count – not in making “the cause of peace his life mission,” as Kerry
said about him yesterday, but in advancing his career. Step one was
showing his loyalty to Obama after betting on the wrong candidate in
2008; step two was burnishing his image as a tough-minded veteran of the
Middle East who understands why things went wrong in Obama’s first term
and can be counted on to get it right in his second term. On the
substance, it’s been an awful, tawdry display. But as a matter of
Washington careerism, Indyk’s press conference yesterday, where he was
introduced and praised by the secretary of state, is inarguable proof of
success.
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