Not quite deja vu
Saul Singer in the Jerusalem Post looks at the latest incarnation of Bush administration Middle East coalition building. As Singer notes, "Every time the White House decides to confront a rogue regime, the State Department decides it's time to build a coalition." It happened with Afghanistan and with Iraq, and now it's happening with Iran.
In the first two instances, the coalition building process placed pressure on the U.S. to pressure Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians in order to win European and Arab support. To his enduring credit, President Bush mostly resisted that pressure. Indeed, as Singer notes, in the build-up to the Iraq war, Bush turned the tables and, assigning blame where it belonged, called for new Palestinian leadership.
Now, as the administration tries to build another coalition, it faces the same pressure to produce "progress" in Israeli-Palestinian relations. The White House, as Singer acknowledges, is denying that it sees a need to win Arab support to build a coalition on Iran. And State Department spokesman Sean McCormack wrote to Power Line to assure our readers that there is no "new linkage" between the Israeli-Palestinian issues and Iran. But Singer sees Secretary Rice's latest visit to the region as reason to suspect the contrary.
So do I. Prior to its war with Hezbollah, Israel was ready to withdraw from much of the West Bank, but the rocket attacks on Israel have presumably made this prospect much more remote. Even if we were not trying to put together another coaltion, I doubt that this would sit well with the State Department. The need to deal with Iran gives State the arguments it needs to push the U.S. back into the pressuring Israel business.
As noted, President Bush ignored the State Department last time, but under Secretary Rice that bureaucracy is much more influential now. And Bush seems more malleable.
The sad part is that, no matter what concessions the U.S. might induce Israel to make, there is little hope that we could ever assemble a broad coalition that would back the only measures that might prevent Iran from going nuclear. But for some, leaning on Israel seems to be an end in itself.
