PRESIDENT Obama spent his first week in office dismantling a number of Bush policies.
Demanding reports on a faster Iraq withdrawal or closing Gitmo amount to no more than political sleight of hand. But Obama’s actions on the Middle East may substantially alter US strategy.
The first such move is the appointment of ex-Sen. George Mitchell as special Middle East peace envoy, a position he held briefly in 2000.
The move has two notable implications.
First: The new president isn’t interested in the so-called Quartet created by the Bush administration. This exercise in multilateral diplomacy sought a common front among the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia in Mideast peace talks. Its dismantling would give America greater control over future negotiations – but would also leave it solely responsible for any failure.
Second: By appointing Mitchell without informing (let alone consulting) the Quartet partners, Obama has in effect called for the resignation of the Quartet’s peace envoy, British ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Obama clearly thinks that he can succeed in finding a solution to the Arab-Israel problem, where 10 presidents before him have failed over six decades.
Obama’s second move is to appoint a special envoy to Iran. Said to be Dennis Ross, a seasoned diplomat, the envoy would open a channel to Tehran as soon as possible.
Some Obama advisers had argued that it would be better to wait until after the Iranian presidential election in June, in hopes that someone less controversial than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might emerge as their key interlocutor. But Obama dismissed that advice, partly out of concern that Tehran might use delay to speed up its nuclear program.
Unconfirmed reports say that the first informal contacts have already taken place, via two Iranian-American intermediaries in contact with Tehran’s UN legation in New York.
Here, too, Obama is dismantling his predecessor’s multilateral scheme. By seeking unconditional talks with Tehran, he is also setting aside three unanimous, mandatory UN Security Council resolutions.
The move also means the effective dissolution of the “5+1 Group,” created three years ago to deal with Iran. Apart from America, the group includes Russia, China, Britain and France (the four other veto-holding Security Council members), plus Germany.
By seeking talks even with Ahmadinejad, Obama has distanced himself from European leaders like France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has stated he’d never shake hands with “a man who denies the Holocaust.”
Again, Obama is clearly counting on the “audacity of hope,” not to mention his charisma, to succeed where all US presidents since Jimmy Carter have failed.
Finally, Obama is abandoning his predecessor’s multilateral approach on a third issue – Afghanistan. By naming Richard Holbrooke as special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the new president has, in effect, killed the idea of appointing a Kabul coordinator backed by all of NATO.
Britain and France, which both put forward names for the position, are surely disappointed that Obama has scrapped the policy without even consulting America’s NATO allies.
Indeed, Obama may have made it harder to persuade those allies to contribute more troops and money for the Afghan war. By seeking direct, exclusive control of the issue, the new administration may wind up turning Afghanistan into a purely American responsibility, something that Washington had tried to avoid since 2001.
In both Europe and the Middle East, the response to Obama’s appointments has been mixed. In Arab countries, Mitchell is hailed as a good choice because of his close ties with Saudi Arabia and his understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Europeans are equally positive about Mitchell’s appointment because of his role in brokering a Northern Ireland peace deal.
But Obama’s gesture on Iran has met with mixed reactions. Some Europeans, especially the Germans, are happy that they’ll no longer have to be in the frontline of a diplomatic war on Tehran. But others, especially the French, fear that the Islamic Republic will use talks with the United States to buy time to complete its nuclear project.
Holbrooke’s appointment has received an even cooler response in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he is seen as the man who rubber-stamped Serbian territorial gains, secured through ethnic cleansing and the massacre of Muslims, in Bosnia in exchange for a piece of paper signed at Dayton, Ohio. The Europeans, on the other hand, hope that Holbrooke will somehow succeed in uniting Afghanistan and Pakistan in a joint anti-terrorism strategy.
Overall, within the first 72 hours of his presidency, Obama has tried to underline that he isn’t George W. Bush, at least on Middle East issues. Whether not being Bush in this context is a good or a bad thing, only time will tell.
Amir Taheri’s latest book is “The Persian Night: Iran Under The Khomeinist Revolution.”