2013 Palestine Center Annual Conference – Panel IV

 

Video and Edited Transcript
Dr. Shibley Telhami, Dr. Toby C. Jones, Mr. Trita Parsi
and Mr. Paul R. Pillar
Transcript No. 396 (15 November 2013)

15 November 2013
The Palestine Center
Washington, DC

Dr. Shibley Telhami: There is a profoundly different set of interests here, between what the West wants in terms of focusing on nuclear weapons and what the Israelis and the Saudis want, and that’s one reason why we see this disequilibrium in the relationship, where in general American interests never have the same common fate of those two anchoring states in the relationship with the US. I think that’s something that we have already seen the crisis this has led to in the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia and also the relationship between the US and Israel.

Dr. Trita Parsi: So an Iran that achieves a nuclear weapon, despite the United States, might be more dangerous strategically to Israel and Saudi Arabia than an Iran that cuts a deal with and improves relations with the United States. Do others agree?

Dr. Paul Pillar: I think the overall impact of a nuclear weapon has been overstated everywhere, here, Israel, Saudi Arabia, everywhere. A nuclear weapon for Iran would be useful as a deterrent against Israel striking the Iranian homeland and it’s not very useful to much of anything else and there aren’t a lot of people who realize that. But to expand on what my colleague said I agree with Trita in terms that there isn’t a political base in the foreseeable future in either the United States or Iran to have some new 1970’s type partnership. I think what we’ve had the in the Middle East in these last couple of decades is that the US-Soviet Cold War atmosphere has been replaced by a US-Iran Cold War, and that has not worked to anyone’s advantage, not Iran’s and not ours. And while that cannot be resolved and we’re not going to have a new partnership, there are different ways of managing the Cold War type relationship. Tom Friedman had a column this week in the times in which he spoke of it in very similar terms that I’m speaking about now, a cold war. And he appealed first to US interests in managing the Cold War and not simply bowing to the understandable discomfort of other countries that have been our allies. Of course the Saudi’s and of course the Israelis are not going to want to see even short of a partnership, the kind of rapprochement that would comparable to the detente with the Soviets in the 1970’s or like our rapprochement with the Chinese. And to the extent that the Middle East becomes more of a truly multipolar Middle East, not kind of bipolar norm in which you have the Iranians, Shia, and radical Sunnis on one side and the us (U.S.A.), Israelis and good Sunnis on the other side, that’s not how most people in the region view the region. The extent to which we can get away from that is a matter of US policy and deal with a multipolar Middle East the same way we dealt with the Cold War in the 70’s would be to our advantage.

Mr. Yousef Munnayer: Along with Iran, we also have Saudi Arabia, which has long been the most important actor on the Arabian Peninsula and one of the most important actors of course in the Arab World. With Syria and Egypt in disarray, its prominence has been even further magnified. What are the Saudi Government’s key interests and goals in the region, particularly how have they changed in the last several years given the uprisings?

Dr. Toby Jones: I think we have to be careful in characterizing Saudi Arabia’s position in 2013 as a response to the perceived needs or even to maneuverings between Iran and the United States. The Saudi’s have a number of anxieties that both predate the Arab uprisings and that were magnified by them. One of them Paul mentioned, of course, being the oil economy issue. The Saudis are poised to become a net importer of energy sometime in the next fifteen years because they use a lot of their own energy reserves to finance and subsidize things like turning seawater into freshwater, which they have now sources of on their own, as well of providing an elaborate source of the welfare state. So there’s something fundamentally wrong with Saudi Arabia’s economy that oil can’t solve. What does that mean? Well that means that you need to be able to sell oil at high prices so that they can continue to subsidize the way things run. The Saudis have other issues beyond the geopolitical anxieties and fears about Iranian hegemony ambitions. And those have to do very basically with the specter of democratic aspirations across the region. There’s no secret that up to 2.5 million Saudis live below the poverty line according to Saudi Arabia’s own ministry of labor and its own statistics. It’s staggering to think that in a place that generates somewhere around a quarter of a trillion dollars in oil revenue a year, they can’t subsidize everybody’s basic wants and needs. That’s translated into various kinds of political demands over the last decade or so, including a robust human rights agenda, the erasing, at least among shia, of certain kinds of revolutionary language that predominated in the earlier era, as well as efforts to reach out to inside the kingdom from other places outside of it, and calls for a warm robust kind of politics in which citizens have influence. The Saudi leadership fears nothing as deeply as they fear the political empowerment of their own people. So an uprising threatened both the regional order and to open up the possibility of democratic politics. But in two years, I think the Saudis have mobilized pretty effectively to at least shut that down where they can. So, in saying all of this, the Saudi’s are balancing a number of anxieties that aren’t only about geopolitics or about Iranian noveling.

Dr. Pillar: Adding to the source of sectarian concern is protecting Sunnis. And secondly, looking especially at their concern about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a concern about about anything that lays an alternative claim to combining religion and politics from a different way from the House of Saud.

Dr. Jones: We can debate whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood is a democratic force or not, and I would not come down on the side of the brotherhood, but in Saudi Arabia, the brotherhood has been the leading edge of descent since the late 1980’s and early 1990’s and the Saudi’s certainly viewed them historically as an internal threat and fifth column, which explains why I think they’ve supported Morsi’s ouster. With respect to sectarianism, there’s no greater engine of sectarianism and Sunni-Shia violence in the region than the Saudis. The Saudis aren’t protecting anybody from anything, they’re embedding and facilitating sectarian conflict in the region.

Dr.  Telhami: On the Saudi issue, I think that we have to just sit back for a little bit and look at what happened at the border. There is no question that they, like everyone else, particularly after Mubarak was overthrown, felt terrified by the power of the uprisings. Whatever they say publicly, every ruler who used to think it couldn’t happen to them, had to think it could happen to them. You know how much money that would be? Billions of dollars. And actually in some ways, it brought the Gulf states together in ways that they hadn’t been together, including the Qataris despite some of the differences or issues relating to the Arab uprisings, it actually brought them together to coordinate. For example, the coverage of the uprisings between Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera the gap diminished quite a bit since the uprisings when you look at the coverage. What happened I think is that if you look at the Arab political order, it is by default that the Gulf States actually increases their influence in the short-term. In a large part because if you look, Iraq is gone as a major player in the Arab World, Syria is internal, the wild card of Al-Qaddafi is gone, and of course Egypt is, in the short term, a dependent state on handouts. That really increased the influence of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. They became very influential but for what purposes and what are they using? You see the influence really manifesting itself, principally on the issue of Syria where they help the opposition and on giving money to other monarchies, particularly Morocco and Jordan to keep them in line with them, but especially after the overthrow of Morsi with bringing money to Egypt. But if you look at that relationship, with Egypt trying to assert itself again in the Arab world, and you look at Egypt now in the short term as dependent on economic support from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and still Qatar despite what people say they are still giving them money, substantial amounts of money and you can even see them as an alternative to American aid in some ways. And yet, they don’t have an identical agenda. They all don’t like the Muslim Brotherhood for sure, but you take the issue of Syria, the Egyptians didn’t want American intervention in Syria. Egypt is getting lots of tolerance from countries who are angry with the US for not intervening, and here is Egypt not supporting it. The Egyptians, for sure, they want Iran contained, but they’re not too worried about the Iranian deal. They want it mostly in the context of what they think is more important, which is a non-proliferation agreement that’s region wide that includes Israel. So there’s a lot of differences between Saudi Arabia and Egypt that have not played themselves out in the short term. I don’t know how that’s going to affect Saudi foreign policy, particularly their choices that are going to be coming up in the relationship with Egypt.

Dr. Jones: The Saudi Position is shortsighted because it structurally has to be. They operate from a position of managing and even inflaming crisis when it’s convenient for them to do so. But it’s also a sclerotic, aging, political leadership that can’t think beyond the short term immediate term so they operate in the moment. It’s remarkable right? The Saudis are gambling on sustaining an autocratic order and so they’ve tried to move as back as pre-2011 And so this is the durable political system that will endure going forward and we’re going to bankroll it because the Saudis cannot indefinitely bankroll an autocratic order, which means they’re simply buying time. You know, it’s Abdallah managing, a 91 year old managing day to day, wondering who is going to take over. There are all kinds of immediate pressing issues that the Saudi’s don’t see beyond.

Mr. Munnayer: Keeping on Saudi Arabia and also on Iran, is the U.S. relationship with the two of them a zero sum game? We started to touch on this, can U.S.-Iranian relations improve without alienating Riyadh? Or is that impossible?

Dr. Parsi: I think it’s possible and ,correct me if I’m wrong on this, my impression is that from the Saudi perspective, part of the reason why a deal between the United States and Iran is viewed so negative is not just because Iran would be legitimized and that could reduce the Saudis’ role, but because I think they view it as a proxy, as a decision that would cement their fear that the United States is leaving the region, it is no longer going to live up to its old promise to the Saudis, which is “you keep your oil prices at a specific level and stable and in return we guarantee the survival of your regime”, fears that the Saudi’s already have had ever since the Arab Spring, particularly  since the United States, from the Saudi perspective, betrayed Mubarak by siding with the people in Tahrir Square to everything else that’s gone on, particularly the anger over the idea that the U.S. would actually come in and negotiate on the side of or be the lawyer of the protesters in Bahrain against the king. If, on top of all of that, the U.S. strikes a deal with Iran, which means that the U.S. would no longer automatically be opposed to everything Iran does in the region, would not automatically devote so much resources to containing Iran, they view that, I think, as the final nail in the coffin: The U.S. is leaving, the agreement with Saudi Arabia is gone and the Saudis are left alone.

Dr. Pillar: The Saudis will adapt. If we have an improvement in relations with in the current awful relationship with Iran, they know how to adapt, they know what repertoire means. They make some of their own, partial at least ample ideas with Tehran. It’s not going to be a matter of pulling their tent and denouncing the United States for what they’ve done.

Dr. Jones: And they also overstate the extent to which the United States is threatening to isolate and get away from them. The U.S. has supported the Saudis in Yemen, in Bahrain, they’ve come around to the position on Egypt, I’m sure Syria has become a sticking point. But it’s not as if the U.S. is going to dismantle the Fifth Fleet in spite of the very earnest pleas on the part of Saudi. It’s just not going to happen, so it’s not as though in practice the U.S. is actually going to walk away.

Mr. Munnayer: One place where Saudi Arabia and Iran are both playing a significant role is in Syria. And there was a moment earlier this year, a very bizarre series of events that took place after the events in Syria, where it seemed like the United States was a 45 minute stroll away from launching an attack on Syria. Then we saw U.S.-Russian cooperation, well at least what seemed to be US-Russian cooperation on moving forward with what is happening in Syria. And Paul, you described Obama having boxed himself in. I was wondering, how can you explain that bizarre series of events that we saw for those two or three weeks in last August and September that ended up leading to U.S.-Russian cooperation that seems to be on hold for the moment, but led to the involvement of chemical weapons inspectors.

Dr. Pillar:
The prequel to my earlier accounts was that was that Mr. Obama was looking for ways to deflect pressure back home to do something more about Syria.

Dr. Telhami: But there was no pressure back home, public opinion was against it.
Paul Pillar: But that wasn’t felt or discovered by Congress or the administration until it seemed to become a real option. Meanwhile, every other day in the Washington Post, the lead editorial was about doing more about Syria. There was pressure certainly, certainly from the right, certainly from a lot of the editorialists. And so a convenient way for the president to deal with that, one of the ways to deal with that was “Well I’m not doing anything right now but if those bastards use chemical weapons, that’s a game changer and then we’re going to have to do something”, and the rest is history. And I’ll stand by my earlier analysis that it was a matter of the Russians having an opportunity to play a role that they couldn’t play, and the administration crammed it. And one hopes that something good will come out of it in terms of the CW story itself.

Dr. Telhami: I really don’t understand how the president got to that decision. I agree with Paul that obviously about the narrative. We know what he said and how he felt boxed in, but I think they convinced themselves of this public pressure, but they were taking polls for months, it’s not like suddenly once they made a decision we knew the public would support it. The public was consistently for weeks and months from the beginning of the Syrian crisis profoundly proposed to any action by the United States. Yeah the Washington Post or editorials, yes sure , that’s not public pressure and I think that even with them boxed in, the statement that he made about this rebel line and so forth, well he didn’t say “if they do it I’m going to launch a military attack unilaterally”, there was no such thing, he just said “I’ll do something” or “that would be a red line for me” or “I’d take it to the UN” He could have interpreted it anyway he wanted to take it. I think that a lot of things were going on with him because he was looking a little bit weak, a little indecisive, a little bit hesitant, and I think we did have a change of bargain in the administration during that period. There’s always been a division in the administration on these issues, always this is not new, both the White House and the State Department. And there was a little tilt that took place with the change, particularly in the White House in favor of the intervention. It comes on the tail end of looking very hesitant on Egypt. Because he was getting it from the right and left about not being decisive. “Is this a coup, is this not a coup”? “Do we cut the aid or don’t we cut the aid?”, “is this good or is this bad?” and he was just wavering and on the back of his mind there was the decision that may come about what may happen on the Iranian file, whether he is going to be tested for his toughness on Iran. He’s rather be tested for his toughness on the Syria issue that seemed to be much more doable. And then he persuaded himself that this is really not going to war, just firing a few missiles. I really don’t know what firing missiles at a sovereign nation is other than war, but that’s the way it was. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been depressed about what happened in Syria, to see the atrocities and the killing.

But you’re talking about a country making the decision to go to war even unilaterally. He didn’t have UN support, he didn’t have NATO support, he didn’t even have UK support, and it obviously hurt him even in Congress, and certainly with the American people. Obviously he was going to Congress at the last minute as a way to see if he can come back out of it. Putin threw him a line and he grabbed it, so you have to give him credit for grabbing it because I think that’s an opportunity that could have gone a different way. The remarkable thing is that the military action could not have possibly ended the chemical weapons of Syria. And he wasn’t even promised to have done it and in fact it was a very strange kind of argument that if we do it, then he will be threatened enough not to do it again because he thinks he would believe that we would come even more strongly against him afterwards and at the same time we tell him this is a one shot deal, we’re not going to do it again and this is supposed to be deterred. So there was a lot of contradictions in that position. I think it’s one of the things that they’re going to have to look at on how not to make a decision on major strategic interests of this sort.

Dr. Parsi: Just to add to what Shibley was saying, the pending assessment before all of this on what it would take to secure all of Syria’s chemical weapons was that it would take 10 years and 75,000 troops. So clearly, diplomacy so far seems to be out before a military action, with a factor of I don’t know how much. But I think that whether or how we got there etc, there are a couple conclusions we can draw of what this all helped achieve, with the way that this whole things developed. One of the things that happened was that the White House realized that the domestic political cost of diplomacy actually is far far less than the domestic political cost of taking military action. In much of the calculations of the administration, there was always this fear that if you go down the diplomacy path, you will be dealing with what you’re dealing with right now in congress and that would be too high of a cost. But the American public, with the very ferocious reaction that they had to the Syrian War, made it very clear that actually, that’s the lower cost. The higher cost is if you take military action because a lot congressional careers would have ended if that had taken place, if they had voted in favor. Moreover, I also think it’s interesting where we’re sitting right now to realize that, in my view at least, what this revealed is that various groups have oftentimes been viewed as being dominant and undefeatable on Capitol Hill and they have a stranglehold on policy are actually dominant because the American public has been absent. It’s only in their absence that they have dominance. When the American public is as present as they were on the Syria debate, which of course was a unique situation because it was an imminent decision, they actually beat not only the president, they also beat the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, and the beat the defense industry all at the same time. I think that says something about how the political landscape actually can change quite dramatically and why it looks the way it usually looks when most of the public is far more concerned about who’s twerking and what’s happening on MTV.

Mr. Munnayer: This has been a fascinating discussion and we’re going to move onto Q&A in a moment, I will just pose this final question before we do that. Is it likely that Israel and Gulf States align as the US seeks progress with the Iran? And what effect would this have on the region, and specifically what could it mean for the Palestinians?

Dr. Jones: It’s already aligned. It’s been aligned for at least a decade. Whatever intelligence sharing that goes on between the Israelis and the Gulf States, I don’t know or have any insight. But politically and strategically they both used Iran in various ways, the Israelis to defer on the peace process and to defer on questions of democracy.

Dr. Parsi: I agree with Toby, I think it is aligned but I think it’s highly uncomfortable for both of them for it to be aligned. Just to give an example, a couple weeks ago my organization held a panel near Capitol Hill and we had Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia, we had Aaron Miller, who I’m sure everyone here in this room knows very well, and we had Yossi Alpher from Israel, and we also had a former Iranian diplomat. I think this is the first time such a panel was put together. And halfway through, I felt that Prince Turki became a little bit uncomfortable about how identical the Israeli and Saudi position was on Iran, so in the middle of it he started a big fight about Palestine with the Israelis, just to be able to divert the conversation and show some differences, but in reality it was next to identical.

Dr. Telhami: I think it’s true that there’s been for a long time some instances of co-interests between the Gulf States and Israel. Iran is one obviously, but also I think that if you look at both groups, they feel the same way on that issue, and now with their seething anger at the US on this, that’s something they took up together. But don’t underestimate the Palestine-Israel question and just dismiss it as something rhetorical for them to create a distance. I think it’s an issue for the public that they can’t avoid. I’ll give an example. When I ask the opinion in Saudi Arabia, I do public opinion polls. So when I ask, “Name the two countries that pose the biggest threat to you personally”, number one by far is Israel, number two is the United States, and number three is Iran. As for the Saudi public, that’s the ranking of the order of threats. So you can see the prism through which they make an evaluation, it’s important to the public for sure. Number two, the Palestine-Israel question is not particularly a priority now because A there seems to be some diplomacy, at least people think there is something diplomatic going on. And B,   there’s no eruption, there’s no violence. When you have war, then everybody is mobilized, everybody creates distances. And you know how long that’s going to last because come 6 months, 9 months from now when people are going to come to reality, either you have an agreement or you don’t have an agreement. We know something is going to happen. We don’t know what is going to happen but it’s going to become a central issue on the table. So I don’t think the Saudis can afford to stray too far from that, where they create an uncomfortable relationship that comes back to haunt them. So I think they’ll manage it from afar, they’ll coordinate from afar, but they don’t have the same interests.

Dr. Pillar: With regard to the impact of the Palestinians, I think there is a near term and a long term for this. In the near term, the conventional wisdom seems to be that Mr. Netanyahu is hostile with regard to both rapprochement with Iran and with regard to the Palestinian issue and occupation, and that if he is forced to swallow or to live with an improved Us-Iranian relationship, he will be all the more hard-nosed on the Palestinian issue and the occupation. I think the conventional wisdom is correct, at least in the short term. Over the longer term, and Trita has written on this and I think his thoughts on this are pretty good, in the longer term, an improved US and Iranian relationship is really in Israel’s best long-term interest because it is a key ingredient in ultimately getting Israel out of its own position. Now you can’t separate that from the nuts and bolts of the occupation of the Palestinian issue itself. As long as that issue is there, the Iranians certainly aren’t going to shut up about it, they will be extremely vocal about it. To what extent that vocal-ness is because of genuine feelings and empathy and what proportion of it is to capitalize on an issue that has great resonance throughout the region with the Arabs, you could argue about that, but anyway they are still going to make a statement about it. But at the same time, they’re not going to be more Palestinian than the Palestinians; they don’t have an interest in that. So if somehow there were to be real progress on that issue, then we would see the long term benefits for the interest of Israel. The two issues are very much short term and long term.

Shibley Telhami is Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and non-resident senior fellow at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institute. Professor Telhami has also been active in the foreign policy arena. He served as advisor to the US Mission to the UN (1990-91), as advisor to former Congressman Lee Hamilton, and as a member of the US delegation to the Trilateral US-Israeli-Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee, which was mandated by the Wye River Agreements. He also has served as an advisor to the United States Department of State, the Iraq Study Group as a member of the Strategic Environment Working Group, and the U.S. Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World,where he co-drafted the report “Changing Minds, Winning Peace”.

Toby S. Jones is associate professor of history and Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is a non-resident scholar in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was Senior Research Associate at Human Rights Watch in 2012. Jones is the author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia, and is currently writing a new book entitled “America’s Oil Wars”. Jones is an editor ofMiddle East Report and has published widely, including in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of American History, The Atlantic, the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and else where.  From 2004-2006 he was the Persian Gulf analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Trita Parsi
is the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign politics, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States, and A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran. Parsi has followed Middle East politics through work in the field and extensive experience on Capitol Hill and at the United Nations. He is frequently consulted by Western and Asian governments on foreign policy matters.  Parsi has worked for the Swedish Permanent Mission to the U.N., where he served in the Security Council, handling the affairs of Afghanistan, Iraq, Tajikistan and Western Sahara, and in the General Assembly’s Third Committee, addressing human rights in Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Iraq.

Paul R. Pillar is a non-resident senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institute. He had a 28-year career as an intelligence officer with the CIA and National Intelligence Council, and later was on the faculty of Georgetown University. His research and writing chiefly address U.S. national security policy, Middle Eastern affairs, and intelligence.


This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.