An American president has just wrapped up another episode in the longest-running reality show on American television, the Middle East peace process, and unlike reality television, this episode ended rather a lot like all the previous ones. One would think American politicians would tire of all of this. I am reminded of something William F. Buckley wrote in a different context:
John Barrymore said he could induce a severe case of delirium tremens by reckoning the amount of whiskey he had drunk during his lifetime and imagining it all in a single glass (about the size of a small movie theater) poised for him to start all over again.
I wonder if American politicians, especially those of the presidential variety, likewise are struck with delirium tremens at the thought of the press conferences, speeches, traveling, hosting of foreign dignitaries, historic handshakes, and pitched battles over the particular diction that is to be employed in the argot of Middle East peacemaking—I wonder if our politicians will ever tire of this?
President Bush, obviously, has not, and the question arises today whether his sudden interest over the past year in repeating the failures of his predecessors—failures that he against in his presidential campaign in 2000—is due simply to naivety and legacy-burnishing, or whether something else is at play. Obviously, we are not privy to the off-the-record agendas of political leaders in Jerusalem, and it is difficult to estimate what was actually discussed in such meetings. But we do know that Bush ended up hosting Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s likely next prime minister, and that their meeting, which was attended by Secretary Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Josh Bolten, was consumed with an intense discussion of the Iranian threat.
And that, of course, is the only issue that should matter right now for Israel. The recently-released National Intelligence Estimate appears to have completely extinguished the prospect of an American strike on the Iranian nuclear program, which, were it not for the American military presence in Iraq, might be viewed as strangely liberating for Israel to be able to finally settle this score on its own. As Barbara Opall-Rome put it in the New York Post,
with all the US aircraft, radar signals and other assets in the skies along Israeli routes to Iran, such a strike could prove disastrous without meaningful operational coordination between the two sides—and not enough of that is ongoing. And an Iranian response could affect not only Israel but also the hundreds of thousands of US servicemen and -women and other US interests across the region.
We are entering a phase in the American-Israeli relationship in which Israel must begin reassessing an alliance that, while usually of immense benefit to Israel, today, with American resolve flagging in the Gulf, could ominously be turning into an American-imposed military straightjacket. Israel might soon find itself in the position of being allied with a patron who simultaneously will not strike at its most dangerous enemy, but will not consent to allowing Israel to do so itself by permitting the overflight of American airspace in Iraq. The manner in which the Iranian threat is challenging the U.S.-Israel alliance should be foremost on the minds of Israeli political and military leaders. Obviously this is an obsession of Bibi’s, as it should be. For Olmert, we should not be nearly so confident.