• Prepare to be disappointed  - Ali Abunimah
Reading between the lines of leaks from the Baker group, it is clear that no one has any brilliant ideas to bring peace to Iraq.

• A little help to an American friend  - Akiva Eldar
An Israeli leader is supposed to know that the centers of power in America are looking for any way possible to get out of Iraq.

• More important things in Iraq  - Saad N. Jawad
George W. Bush and his neo-conservative aides are still in charge, and armed with the powers they have, new policies stand little chance.

• The status quo ante does not solve the problem  - Danielle Pletka
The straws in the wind bode ill for the hundreds of millions in the Middle East who live under "stable" autocrats and tyrants.

Prepare to be disappointed
 Ali Abunimah

Every US election brings ritual declarations of hope that, freed from the pressure of campaigning, policymakers will adopt a more sensible approach to the Middle East. In the wake of the Democratic victory in the recent midterm elections this may be true, but only to a very limited degree.

The Democrats, who first voted overwhelmingly in favor of the US war on Iraq in October 2002 and then turned on the dissidents among them who dared call for immediate withdrawal, now position themselves as the war's leading critics. It is no mystery why. Despite the Washington consensus that long sustained the war, the American people turned against it, a wave of rejection that could no longer be ignored.

The new mood is captured well by a Newsweek cover which bore a photo of former president George H.W. Bush, with the headline "Daddy Knows Best". Amidst growing recognition that President George W. Bush's policies have brought catastrophe to everything he has touched, it seems comforting to turn to the father's associates, principally the well-respected James Baker and former CIA Director Robert Gates, appointed to replace Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary. That Baker is leading the ostentatiously "bipartisan" Iraq Study Group fits in well with the new spirit.

Yet reading between the lines of leaks from the Baker group, it is clear that no one has any brilliant ideas to bring peace to Iraq. David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, reported that among top Democrats and Republicans there is a consensus that the US must be out of Iraq before the 2008 presidential election. The best that may be hoped for then is that the Iraq Study Group will serve as a cover for US withdrawal and abandonment of the mission in Iraq. That will assuage the American public angered by the long deployments of US troops and the rising US casualty toll. Iraqis will be consigned to their fate, whatever it is. The United States can and will do little for them now.

Palestinian leaders are trying to catch this apparent wind of change and harness it for their own purposes. Afif Safieh, the PLO representative in Washington, expressed hope that the Iraq Study Group would also recommend attempts to resuscitate the long-dead "peace process". Safieh said, "Now that the election is behind us, I believe the American political establishment will be thinking of what is the American national interest." Safieh, who is new in Washington, should prepare for disappointment.

Democratic Representative Tom Lantos, one of the most hawkish pro-Israel members of Congress, is slated to chair the influential House International Relations Committee. University of San Francisco professor Stephen Zunes points out that Lantos "co-authored legislation with House Republican leaders directly challenging findings by Amnesty International and other reputable human rights groups regarding Israeli violations of international humanitarian law and has denounced the United Nations and the International Court of Justice for their defense of the Fourth Geneva Conventions." Lantos, along with Representative Nancy Pelosi, soon to be the new speaker, co-sponsored the notorious Syria Accountability Act in 2003 and has consistently pushed legislation sanctioning the Palestinians.

There are however faint signs that the debate on Palestine is slowly shifting thanks to another former president. Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid", may force onto the agenda issues that both parties have agreed should remain taboo. But Pelosi, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean and several other members of Congress have already issued a statement denouncing the book in advance of its release. "It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously," the statement said. "With all due respect to former President Carter, he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel." - Published 16/11/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of "One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse".

Even the closest friends of the Bush family don't dare say anything about Iraq that approximates what Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told President George W. Bush in their recent meeting at the White House. For having made even more guarded statements than Olmert's declaration that the peoples of the Middle East should be grateful to America and to President Bush for the operation in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a number of Republican congressmen were forced to retire. Robert Gates, designated to replace Rumsfeld, would certainly not sign off on Olmert's observation that the war in Iraq made a "dramatic positive contribution" to security and stability in the region. Even Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Bush's close ally, would probably not have replied like Olmert to a question about a possible withdrawal from Iraq that he doesn't know that America is weighing a withdrawal.

If Olmert thought he was simply being charitable to his host the president, he was wrong about what it is politically correct for an Israeli leader to say these days about the crisis in Iraq. An Israeli leader is supposed to know that the centers of power in America--the administration, Congress, the media and public opinion--are looking for any way possible to get out of Iraq, not to stay in that inferno. Even without statements like Olmert's, many Americans suspect that it was Israel that dragged Bush into an adventure that continues to draw their blood and wealth with no end in sight. Rumsfeld's resignation will reduce neo-conservative influence on foreign policy during the coming two years. We can conclude that the Bush administration understands that the congressional elections were a referendum over Iraq in which the Republicans took a bad beating.

It stands to reason that when Bush met with the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, and when he replaced Rumsfeld with Gates, he knew that Baker and Gates do not belong to the school of thought that believes that when force fails the only solution is more force. Any beginning Middle East scholar is aware that the former secretary of state and the former CIA chief were among the advisors who persuaded the elder George Bush after the first Gulf war that expanding the coalition of moderate states was the best way to solidify the US position in the region in the long run.

Now there are growing signs in Washington that after 15 years the winds of Madrid are again blowing, and the reality of the past three years will not prevail in the coming two years. Naturally the Democrats, who were always more involved in the peace process, will not stand in the way. While opinions are split in Washington regarding Syrian President Bashar Assad's readiness to follow in his father's footsteps toward full peace with Israel, it is widely agreed that a Palestinian solution can serve American interests in the Gulf.

In his speech to the General Assembly of American Jewish communities in Los Angeles, Olmert addressed the central challenge confronting the US and its allies in the region: he called upon moderate Sunni leaders to form a coalition against Iran, Hizballah and other religious fanatics who threaten peace in the region. He spoke of a Sunni alliance that would stand firm against Shi'ite forces, an alliance against the pro-Iranian actors seeking to take over Iraq shortly after the US withdraws.

The key question is, what is Israel prepared to contribute to the formation of such a pragmatic regional coalition. What is the prime minister of Israel ready to do to stop those Islamic fanatics who are in fact Sunnis and who are multiplying in the areas under Israeli occupation? The strengthening of Hamas on the ruins of the peace process is of great concern to the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They do not hide their concern that the first Muslim Brotherhood state that is emerging (in Gaza) will not be the last in the region. It is this fear that prompts President Husni Mubarak and the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan to send repeated peace initiatives to the Americans in the hope of resuscitating President Mahmoud Abbas and the other leaders of the pragmatic secular Palestinian camp. They desperately need an Israeli-Palestinian peace process success.

It's too bad these initiatives, and particularly the important Arab League peace plan of March 2002 that offers Arab normalization with Israel in return for a withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 borders, again and again run into stone walls in Jerusalem. Here we encounter a double missed opportunity. First, and most obviously, the missed opportunity to lower the flames of the Palestinian and perhaps the Syrian and Lebanese conflicts.

The second missed opportunity concerns Israel's strategic relationship with the US. The Iranian threat to the entire region, coupled with the dead-end American dilemma in Iraq, place Israel in a unique position. For the first time the American superpower, Israel's most important ally, needs its help. And this time, unlike toward the end of the Clinton administration in July 2000, the issue is not an American president angling for a Nobel peace prize. This time it is a question of America's status in the Middle East and the world.

The help the US needs is not controversial verbal support by the prime minister for its policy since the problematic occupation of Iraq. Rather, America needs courageous and smart practical support for a process that could produce a win-win-win situation: for Israel, for the moderate forces in the region, and for Israel's most important backer.- Published 16/11/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Akiva Eldar is a senior political commentator and columnist at Haaretz daily newspaper, Tel Aviv. During the 1990s he was the paper's correspondent in Washington.

Many Iraqis have been asked what they thought of the results of the American mid-term elections. The truth is, the vast majority couldn't care less. There are more important things to care about: the lack of electricity, a failing water supply, corruption, the absence of law and order, inflation and a host of other difficulties.

And who can blame them? After more than three and a half years of occupation, Iraqis have seen their country slide into chaos rather than flourish politically, socially and economically, as their American rulers promised them.

Iraqis agree that the Republican defeat was due to the Iraq factor. But when they remind themselves that the occupation of Iraq was undertaken in the service of two overriding objectives--the security of Israel and oil--they see no real change on the horizon for American policy on Iraq. Speaker-elect of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi's remarks about the security of Israel and its right to exist and the latest US veto in the United Nations Security Council to prevent a condemnation of Israel for the massacre in Beit Hanoun only helped strengthen this belief.

President George W. Bush and his neo-conservative aides are still in charge, and armed with the powers they have, new policies stand little chance. Iraqis have noticed the change in American public opinion, but they have also noticed that this change occurred because of the increasing number of American soldiers killed in Iraq. Only very few US voices are daring to say that the whole venture was based on false and fabricated arguments and that the war and the occupation themselves were wrong.

Some tactical adjustment may be made to American policy in Iraq, but only to make American solutions--"cut and run", a division of the country into three federal states or finding new Iraqi allies for a military coup d'etat--easier to apply in the future.

Two factions worry the most about any drastic change in American policy in Iraq, however: the Iraqi government and the Iraqi politicians of the "green zone" who have totally allied themselves with the US. These two elements are devastated by the idea of being left alone in a country they are failing to rule and organize. The images of American forces running away from Vietnam and leaving their allies to their fate haunt them. Needless to say, any of the above alternatives and solutions will be detrimental to them.

Iraqi patience is wearing thin. American policy in Iraq was a disaster from the beginning and there is nothing to indicate that real change is coming, nor does it seem likely that the US will drop those Iraqis who misled them. The US has not even shown any desire to find an acceptable "semi-independent" Iraqi government. Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the US has always retained its role as the only power in the country and made it obvious that nobody else should have a say in any of the important decisions.

The elections may force some change within the US. We will surely see a lot of investigations and critical questions to be answered by the main architects of the war on Iraq. Surely people like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz will be embarrassed and may have to resign their positions.

In the meantime, American policy in Iraq will undergo some "tactical" changes that will not affect overall American objectives, such as maintaining permanent military bases in Iraq, easy access to Iraqi oil with preferential prices and keeping the country outside the Arab-Israel conflict. But in view of the growing effectiveness of the Iraqi resistance, the question is whether the American government will nevertheless be forced to admit defeat and leave.-Published 16/11/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Saad N. Jawad is a professor of political science at Baghdad University.

The recent American election has brought an unhappy convergence of left and right, a bizarre meeting of the minds in which liberals who despise the American mission in Iraq and conservatives who value stability over democracy agree: President George W. Bush's freedom agenda must end.

Iraq, unsurprisingly, is at the heart of misgivings about advancing democracy in the Middle East. More than 2,800 American servicemen and women have died, yet victory seems as elusive as ever. Many suggest without embarrassment that both Iraqis and Americans were better off under Saddam Hussein. Leading Democrats, including the incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, her candidate for House Majority Leader John Murtha, the incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and much of the new Senate leadership insist that redeployment from Iraq must come within four to six months.

It will be nigh on impossible for the Democratic Congress to force the president to withdraw US troops from Iraq. Mechanically, Congress has limited power to compel any commander-in-chief in time of war. Legislation denying funds to the war effort would likely face veto if, against all odds, it gained passage through both houses of Congress.

Increasingly, however, it appears that Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi will not need to force the president into a hasty retreat. In the wake of the Republican rout in midterm elections, the president signaled that his commitment to victory in Iraq might be in question. Within a week, Bush replaced his secretary of defense with a veteran of his father's realist administration and welcomed the members of the Iraq Study Group--a commission dominated by opponents to the war and to Bush's freedom agenda--into the Oval Office, reversing an earlier decision to shun the group.

The Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton, has been the focus of intense attention among tea leaf readers in the US and abroad. Both Baker and Hamilton have made clear that they believe Washington should define down its goals in Iraq, seeking "representative government, not necessarily democracy" as Baker told a television interviewer. In addition, both have loudly proclaimed the need for the United States to reach out to dictators in Syria and Iran, a move Bush has heretofore resisted.

Other straws in the wind bode ill for the hundreds of millions in the Middle East who live under "stable" autocrats and tyrants. The Department of State, tasked to implement the president's commitment to "lead freedom's advance", has balked at the job. Political prisoners languish from Libya to Egypt to Syria with nary a word of protest from either the secretary of state or America's emissaries in the region. On a recent trip to Cairo, the once outspoken Secretary Rice refused to challenge publicly the Mubarak regime on its declining human rights record, and recently referred to the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia as "moderate states [key to supporting] moderate voices" in the region.

Little wonder then that those in the region so heartened by the president's repeated commitments to stand with individuals over despots have begun to lose hope. They see all too clearly that the liberals who were once their tribunes and the conservatives who had so recently championed their cause are losing interest. Democracy is, after all, a messy thing. Institutions are hard to build, curricula are difficult to reform, and elections so often bolster the most organized in the Muslim political world, the Islamists. For much of the twentieth century, American diplomats embraced the one-stop shopping offered by the Middle East's dictators. In the face of the hapless Iraqi government, rampant corruption and violent sectarianism, some suggest the strong man is the right man.

A return to the status quo ante, however, does not solve the challenge facing the United States. The heart and soul of Islamic extremism is not in Iraq, but in the lack of freedom in the Middle East. People without choices turn to the only options available to them. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, jihadists worked in mosques, in schools and at the grass roots to persuade Muslims that they were the answer to the region's dictators. A resurgence of those dictators will mean even greater strength to al-Qaeda and its ilk.

After 9/11 many Americans, the president among them, awakened to the reality that the only antidote to the poison of Islamic extremism was freedom. In the early days after the attack, the United States worked to empower Arab and Persian democrats to fight the extremists. Once liberated, those forces cannot be eliminated. And sooner or later, the United States will again turn to them as the only salvation against our shared enemy.

The president may no longer be persuaded, and the leaders of the Democratic party may be too consumed by antipathy toward even the relics of the Bush agenda, but George Bush's 2003 clarion call for liberty continues to resonate for a simple reason: it is true. "Sixty years of western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe--because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."- Published 16/11/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Danielle Pletka is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.