Statecraft and Botox

Jacob Heilbrunn reviews Dennis Ross’s new book — “Statecraft:  And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) — in today’s New York Times Book Review. You would think that someone involved in the biggest diplomatic disaster of the last decade would be more . . diplomatic in his criticism of those who had to deal with the situation he left them:

Ross’s most censorious remarks are reserved for the administration’s disengagement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ross believes Arab antipathy toward America has been greatly heightened by the perception that Bush is “indifferent to a conflict that animated a basic grievance among those in the Arab and Islamic worlds.”

As Ross sees it, while nothing America did could by itself have permanently ended the conflict, the Bush administration remained recklessly aloof. Coupled with the fiasco in Iraq, America undermined its own security by inadvertently becoming Al Qaeda’s best recruiting agent.

How can this mess be fixed? Ross concludes that an injection of what he calls a “neoliberal agenda for U.S. foreign policy” will almost instantly act as a form of Botox to firm up America’s sagging reputation.

What, exactly, is the “basic grievance” that Bush supposedly was “indifferent to” and from which he was “recklessly aloof”? 

It cannot be the absence of a Palestinian state.  Ross spent four months, after the failure of Camp David in July 2000, preparing the Clinton Parameters — formally offered to both sides on December 23, 2000, proposing a state on 97% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, with a capital in Jerusalem and full international compensation of all refugees — and saw the offer rejected by the Palestinians even after Ross warned them (as he recounts in day-by-day detail in his prior book) that they would not see such an offer again.

Notwithstanding that rejection (and a new war), Bush offered the Palestinians a state a year and a half later, conditioned on dismantlement of their terrorist infrastructure and acceptance of a phased process of negotiation.  He put together an internationally-accepted roadmap to get there.  He got Israel to sign on to it.  He negotiated a deal under which Israel completely withdrew from Gaza to give the Palestinians the chance to demonstrate their ability to “live side by side, in peace and security.” 

He tried, in other words, to create a Palestinian state in a way that did not simply repeat the “hands-on” failure of Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross.  And once again, the Palestinians “missed an opportunity.” 

It’s almost as if a second state was not the opportunity they sought.

No people in the history of the world have had a state offered to them more times than the Palestinians, nor had their supposed “basic grievance” addressed more often, over a longer period of time, even after losing multiple wars to exterminate their neighbor.  The beginning of diplomatic wisdom would be a recognition that the “basic grievance” is something else. 

So it is no wonder that Ross in the next breath admits that “nothing America did could by itself have permanently ended the conflict.”  Indeed the only reasonable conclusion, after watching Clinton and Ross and then Bush and Rice try multiple approaches unsuccessfully over 14 years, and watching rockets into Israel from areas from which all Jews have totally withdrawn, is that no new “plan,” no amount of new “concessions,” no degree of “hands-on” involvement, no prescription of endless “statecraft” can meet the real grievance involved.  

Given all this history, the one thing we know will not work — and that will in fact make matters worse — is simply to give ourselves an injection of Botox to re-create the happy faces we used to have.