Michael Oren’s candid account of Obama’s Mideast policy has won him the right enemies.
By BRET STEPHENS
Michael
Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, has written the smartest
and juiciest diplomatic memoir that I’ve read in years, and I’ve read my share.
The book, called “Ally,” has the added virtues of being politically relevant
and historically important. This has the Obama administration—which
doesn’t come out looking too good in Mr. Oren’s account—in an epic snit.
The tantrum began two weeks ago, when
Mr. Oren penned an op-ed in this newspaper undiplomatically
titled “How Obama Abandoned Israel.” The article did not acquit Israel of
making mistakes in its relations with the White House, but pointed out that
most of those mistakes were bungles of execution. The administration’s slights
toward Israel were usually premeditated.
Like, for instance, keeping Jerusalem
in the dark about Washington’s back-channel negotiations with Tehran, which is
why Israel appears to be spying on
the nuclear talks in Switzerland. Or leaking news of secret Israeli military
operations against Hezbollah in Syria.
Mr. Oren’s op-ed prompted Dan Shapiro, U.S.
ambassador in Tel Aviv, to call Mr. Netanyahu and demand he publicly denounce
the op-ed. The prime minister demurred on grounds that Mr. Oren, now a member
of the Knesset, no longer works for him. The former ambassador, also one of
Israel’s most celebrated historians, isn’t even a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s
Likud party, which makes him hard to typecast as a right-wing apparatchik.
But it’s typical of the administration that no Israeli
slight is too minor not to be met with overreaction—and not only because Mr.
Obama and his entourage have thin skins. One of the revelations of “Ally” is
how eager the administration was to fabricate crises with Israel, apparently on
the theory that strained relations would mollify Palestinians and extract
concessions from Mr. Netanyahu.
To some extent, it worked: In 2009, Mr. Netanyahu endorsed a
Palestinian state, an unprecedented step for a Likud leader, and he later
imposed a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction, a step not even Labor
Party leaders like Yitzhak Rabinever took.
But no Israeli concession could ever appease Mr. Obama, who
had the habit of demanding heroic political risks from Mr. Netanyahu while
expecting heroic deference in return. In 2010, during a visit from Joe
Biden, an Israeli functionary approved permits for the housing
construction in a neighborhood of Jerusalem that Israel considers an integral
part of the municipality but Palestinians consider a settlement.
The administration took the Palestinian side. Hillary Clinton spent 45 minutes berating
Mr. Netanyahu over the phone. Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg “summoned”
Mr. Oren to Foggy Bottom and read out his list of administration demands. What
follows is one of the more memorable scenes in “Ally.”
“Steinberg added his own furious comments—department
staffers, I later heard, listened in on our conversation and cheered—about
Israel’s insult to the president and the pride of the United States. Then came
my turn to respond.
“ ‘Let me get this straight,’ I began. ‘We inadvertently
slight the vice president and apologize, and I become the first foreign
ambassador summoned by this administration to the State Department. Bashar
al-Assad hosts Iranian president Ahmadinejad, who calls for murdering
seven million Israelis, but do you summon Syria’s ambassador? No, you send your
ambassador back to Damascus.’ ”
“Ally” is filled with such scenes, which helps explain why
it infuriates the administration. Truth hurts. President Obama constantly
boasts that he’s the best friend Israel has ever had. After reading Mr. Oren’s
book, a fairer assessment is that Mr. Obama is a great friend when the
decisions are easy—rushing firefighting equipment to Israel during a forest
fire—a grudging friend when the decisions are uncomfortable—opposing the
Palestinian bid for statehood at the U.N.—and no friend at all when the
decisions are hard—stopping Iran from getting a bomb.
Best friends are with you when the decisions are hard.
***
Since “Ally” was published, Mr. Oren has been denounced in
near-hysterical terms in the media, Israeli and American. In Israel the carping
is politics as usual and in the U.S. it’s sucking-up-to-the-president as usual.
The nastiest comments came from Leon Wieseltier, the gray eminence of
minor magazines, and the most tedious ones came from the Anti-Defamation
League, that factory of moral pronouncement. When these are the people yelling
at you, you’ve likely done something right.
Mr. Oren has. His memoir is the best contribution yet to a
growing literature—from Vali Nasr’s “Dispensable Nation” to Leon Panetta’s “Worthy Fights”—describing how foreign
policy is made in the Age of Obama: lofty in its pronouncements and rich in its
self-regard, but incompetent in its execution and dismal in its results. Good
for Mr. Oren for providing such comprehensive evidence of the facts as he lived
them.
***
***
It is interesting that Michael Oren managed to do what Bret
Stephens never
did – quote Bernard Lewis’s opinion on MAD and Iran!
