Some of America’s leading experts on the Middle East have been assessing one of the Obama administration’s keynote policies: engagement with the Middle East and with the wide Muslim world. Their main conclusion, in the words of Marc Lynch of George Washington University, is that President Obama has “over-promised and under-delivered”.
Speaking at a conference at Tufts University in mid-October which brought together a stellar cast of specialists, Dr Lynch welcomed the US president’s Cairo speech in June 2009 as an attempt to create “a relationship [with the Muslim world] that was not defined by terrorism”. But he had created expectations he was unable to fulfil, and there was now a widespread sense of disappointment. (For a critical account of what the administration is doing, and not doing, see the report by Marc Lynch and Kristin Lord, America’s Extended Hand: Assessing the Obama Administration’s Global Engagement Strategy, published in Washington earlier this year and available at www.cnas.org.)
In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the extent of the president’s engagement with the issue was applauded. However, he came into office with a severe handicap. As former US ambassador Robert Pelletreau noted, “No US president has inherited a worse set of challenges in the Middle East.” In Mr Pelletreau’s view, the president had made two costly miscalculations – underestimating the extent to which the Israeli government would resist a settlement freeze, and overestimating the willingness of Arab states (notably Saudi Arabia) to move towards normalisation of relations with Israel in advance of a peace settlement. The consensus is that – while the administration’s commitment to progress is not in doubt – the chances of a breakthrough are bleak.
In the case of Iran, two leading experts told the conference how engagement had been tried and had led nowhere. As Farideh Farhi, an Iranian scholar at the University of Hawaii, remarked, the disputed presidential elections in Iran in June 2009 had made it extremely difficult for the US administration to “engage with an Iran in turmoil”. Criticising the US approach as “all tactics and no strategy”, Dr Farhi declared that Washington’s Iran policy had been “taken over by the Treasury” – in other words, by Stuart Levey, the principal architect of the administration’s sanctions policy.
There was no such thing as “smart sanctions”, she declared. Those who would suffer were the private sector and the middle class. This view was echoed by the American writer and journalist Barbara Slavin. Support for engagement with Iran within the Obama administration – the majority position when it came into office – was now, she said, a minority view. The chosen course was accordingly sanctions – a policy the US was likely to stick with for some time, since no short-term success was likely. “To do to Iran what we did to Iraq in the 1990s,” she declared – in other words, punishing the people in a futile attempt to weaken the regime – “would be a terrible mistake.”
The mood at the conference was sombre with regard to the big issues in the region. Few experts can muster much optimism about Afghanistan – and, interestingly, the consensus is that there will not be anything more than a symbolic drawdown of US forces in July 2011 (the date set by President Obama for the start of withdrawal). There was also a sense that Lebanon stands at a crossroads as it awaits the findings of the Special Tribunal investigating the assassination in 2005 of then-prime minister Rafik Hariri. The powerful Shi’ite movement Hizbullah, which is expecting some of its officials to be implicated in the killing, will do everything it can to discredit the tribunal’s report – expected by the end of the year. In the view of one well-informed expert, Randa Slim, a fresh outbreak of civil strife can’t be ruled out. Here, too, there are lessons for US engagement with the region. The Bush administration’s policy of supporting the country’s pro-Western, anti-Syrian forces (led by Hariri’s son, Saad) failed. Can the Obama administration do any better?
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