Anti-Israel Foreign Policy Experts Got Saudi Arabia, Other Arab Countries 100% Backwa

[JJ_BPK]

If this posting is correct, I worry about what Berry will do to make his hianus the pivots point?

Sucking up to the Saudi throne could stretch the AD to the breaking point.

Not sucking up, I have no idea, but losing a semi-friendship in the middle-east in not what we need..

http://bigpeace.com/oceren/2010/11/2...ck/#more-54709

Wikileaks: Anti-Israel Foreign Policy Experts Got Saudi Arabia, Other Arab Countries 100% Backward On Iran Attack
Posted by Omri Ceren Nov 29th 2010 at 12:49 pm in Foreign Policy

It didn’t get nearly as much play as it should have, but Obama’s June 2009 meeting with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah ended with the monarch flying into a tirade and more or less telling the President to get a grip. This was the Riyadh meeting that Obama took on his way to his insulting and failed Cairo Speech, the better to prepare himself by visiting “the place where Islam began.” The sit-down was such a disaster that Dennis Ross was hurriedly brought into the White House and given a broader role, yielding the impression that the President wanted a Middle East adviser who kind of understood something about the Middle East – and didn’t think he had one.

There were two theories on why the meeting went so badly.

On one side you had typical left-leaning foreign policy experts, the ones who had been advising Obama from the beginning and who now needed to explain why things turned out the opposite of how they predicted. Their approach to the Middle East is grounded in the two dogmas of anti-Israel foreign policy sophistication: (a) linkage, according to which Middle East pathologies are a result of the unresolved Arab/Israeli conflict rather than vice versa and (b) “if only Israel would…,” according to which the Arab/Israel conflict could be resolved were Israel to offer more concessions. They had promised that an “even-handed approach” to the Middle East that “put daylight” between the US and Israel would lead to Israeli gestures, at which point Arab regimes would reciprocate. Nothing of the sort came out of the Riyadh meeting. Instead of admitting that they had somehow gotten Saudi priorities or intentions wrong, that crowd doubled down and insisted that the Saudis cared so much about the Palestinians that Obama needed to put even more pressure on Israel to bring around Arab countries.

On the other side you had Middle East experts like Dan Diker, who insisted on One Jerusalem Radio’s Omri Ceren Show that the Saudis gave Obama a bruising lecture on what they actually care about, and it wasn’t the Palestinians. Under this theory King Abdullah expected to talk about militarily confronting Iran, and he couldn’t believe it when Obama kept reciting bromides about the earth-shattering importance of the Israeli/Arab conflict and his enthusiasm for solving it. That was a regular public topic between the two – Obama’s first talk with Abdullah focused on Gaza and the President later emphasized his abiding support for Saudi Arabia’s “Israel Has To Commit Suicide” plan – but the King kind of thought he was dealing with a serious person who could separate spectacle from policy. Instead he got the equivalent of an International Relations graduate student enamored with pseudo-sophisticated “insights” he’d gleaned from Arab media outlets. Ergo, meltdown.

So two theories about happened at the Obama/Abdullah meeting. One theory says that the Saudis were literally screaming their heads off about Iran, the implication being that experts who describe overarching anti-Israel outrage are more manufacturing it than commenting on it. It’s not that Arab leaders don’t care about the Israeli/Arab conflict, or that they wouldn’t want to see a Palestinian state, or that they won’t pay lip service to linkage. It’s just that they really, really care about stopping Iran by any means necessary – something that foreign policy experts who obsess over Israel’s ostensibly central regional role can’t have be true, lest their insistence that a Palestinian state is a necessary prerequisite to action on Iran seem more like personal fantasy than objective analysis.

The other theory insists that pro-Palestinian outrage does in fact drive Arab foreign policy, the flip side being that the tales of anti-Iran freakout are overblown neocon myths. See Walt for the neocon-specific stuff, and here’s Arab media expert Marc Lynch bringing his expertise to bear on Arab desire to confront Iran:

The hostility to Iran in various Arab circles should not lead anyone to believe that Arabs would support an attack on Iran by the U.S. or Israel, however. While Arab leaders would certainly like Iranian influence checked, they generally strongly oppose military action which could expose them to retaliation.

continued....

[Dozer523]

Originally Posted by JJ_BPK

If this posting is correct, I worry about what Berry will do to make his hianus the pivots point?

Sucking up to the Saudi throne could stretch the AD to the breaking point.

Not sucking up, I have no idea, but losing a semi-friendship in the middle-east in not what we need..

Sucking up to the House of Saud? Has that EVER happened before?

[Richard]

Strategically, people need to understand that Iran is not - never has been and never wants to be - an Arab state.

And so it goes...

Richard

[trvlr]

Originally Posted by Dozer523

Sucking up to the House of Saud? Has that EVER happened before?

I laughed out loud.

[aegisnavy]

During many years working for an ex-pat Iranian, I never once heard him mention Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. On the other hand, he showed a reserved disdain for things Arab. His pride in being Persian, the descendant of kings, scholars, and empire builders set him apart from what he thought were goat herders who got lucky with oil wealth.

The experience increased my SA concerning the Middle East by leaps and bounds.

Originally Posted by aegisnavy

During many years working for an ex-pat Iranian, I never once heard him mention Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. On the other hand, he showed a reserved disdain for things Arab. His pride in being Persian, the descendant of kings, scholars, and empire builders set him apart from what he thought were goat herders who got lucky with oil wealth.

The experience increased my SA concerning the Middle East by leaps and bounds.

All Iranian immigrants I know here view themselves as Persian, not Arab. They do hold themselves to higher ideals, philosophers, etc., some would say arrogant, I would interpret, pride and prideful. They feel elite and entitiled. They loath tpresident ahmadinejad, they want their country back, they would return to Iran after regime change. They hate the idea of being catagorized as goat herder and/or camel jockeys. I saw the same thing in Peru, the Spanish elite vs. indain, native, mixed blood. Some things are just beneath them.

Seems more and more, much of the world conflicts centers around racism, entitlements, and the big one, ECONOMICS.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPMmC0UAnj0