National Insecurity by David Rothkopf

Author:David Rothkopf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2014-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

In Obama’s mind, the way to handle Israel was not to embrace it warmly like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had done, but rather to meet all of its security requirements. He would state repeatedly that the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security was “steadfast” and he meant it. Under his instructions, the Pentagon, CIA and State Department took security cooperation with their Israeli counterparts to new highs. . . . No matter the level of tension on the political level, there was never any hint from the Obama Administration of withholding security assistance to Israel. . . . On the other hand, Obama was intent on pursuing the “other woman” in the U.S.-­Israeli relationship.

On his second day in office, President Obama announced the appointment of former Senate majority leader George Mitchell of Maine as his special envoy for Middle East peace. The move underscored the importance of the Arab-Israeli mission to Obama, which in turn sent the message that this White House, unlike some of its predecessors, would not relegate Palestinian-Israeli peace to an afterthought. Mitchell was a no-nonsense, canny lawyer who had achieved considerable success helping broker the peace in Northern Ireland. Like Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mitchell was one of a soon to be burgeoning cadre of so-called policy czars who marked the early years of the Obama tenure. The “czars” were top appointments with special missions intended to signal that the president was deeply invested in particular issues ranging from diplomacy to technology.* ­Almost inevitably such special positions, although helpful in small doses, created tensions with existing bureaucracies.

The overlap in responsibilities and interests between Mitchell and Dennis Ross, who was perhaps the most experienced Arab-Israeli peace negotiator in modern US history and who was a senior player within the NSC hierarchy, would create friction and dysfunction.

Mitchell’s first trip to the region came in the week after the inauguration when the Gaza conflict had ended. There was no criticism of the Bush administration’s policies or approaches in any of these early meetings. The main thrust was to “create a context in which the peace process could be restarted because we knew that many of the players’ attitudes had hardened. And that there was a great deal of emotion and publicity in connection with the conflict.”

Mitchell then met with the president’s staff that had been assigned to cover the conflict: Dan Shapiro, the NSC staffer assigned to this beat who would later become the US ambassador to Israel; the director of the Near East bureau at State, Jeffrey Feltman, who later would serve as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2009 to 2012; and Feltman’s deputy, career diplomat David Hale, who Mitchell later recruited as his deputy.

In consultation with Clinton, Mitchell crafted an approach to his mission that was deliberately different from that of other czars, notably Holbrooke: “first, when I served in Northern Ireland, where I had been coming and going for a total of about five years, during

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