U.S. foreign policy

Hu Jintao is simultaneously President of China, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and chairman of China's Central Military Commission. Last year Newsweek labeled him the "second most powerful man in the world," and he has undoubtedly watched the events of the past few years with keen interest and no small amount of satisfaction. Here's what I imagine he's thinking these days...

"We are realists here in the People's Republic, and in a sense we have been for centuries. Even during the most radical phases of our history -- such as the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution -- our foreign policy was prudent and keenly attuned to the balance of power.
 
The United States has had the world's largest economy for more than a century, and despite some self-inflicted wounds, it is still the world's most powerful country. We recognize this fact, and our current strategy of "peaceful rise" reflects what we have learned by studying the U.S. experience. America became a great world power by remaining aloof from the quarrels of the other major powers and letting them destroy each other in ruinous wars, while it built its own economic strength and gradually established itself as the dominant power in its own region. When it did fight wars, it picked weak and easily defeated opponents or it waited until the last minute to get involved in wars with other great powers. The United States was the last major power to enter both World War I and World War II, and it made sure that other states bore the heaviest burdens during the fighting. As a result, both wars ended with the United States in the strongest position.
 
Our strategy of "peaceful rise" reflects a similar set of calculations. We want to stay out of pointless quarrels with others and avoid costly military commitments, at least until our economic strength equals that of America.  For this reason, we are happy to let the United States take the lead in troubled regions like the Middle East or Central Asia. Why shouldn't we want them to squander their strength trying to fix intractable global problems, while we retain good relations with all parties? It just makes sense.

I do miss President George W. Bush, of course. We had good relations with the United States while he was president, and he even came to visit us during our Olympics. I probably should have thanked him personally for all the foolish things he did, like letting Bin Laden and the Taliban slip through his fingers in Afghanistan and then invading Iraq in 2003.  He did cultivate closer ties with India and that development didn't make me happy, but on the whole, his threats and bluster frightened many U.S. allies and made U.S. relations with states like Iran even worse than they were before. Needless to say, these policies created valuable opportunities for China, and we've been quick to take advantage of them. While America was distracted and wasting hundreds of billions occupying hostile countries -- we were establishing profitable commercial ties in the oil-rich Persian Gulf and quietly expanding our influence in our own Asian backyard.
 
President Bush also helped us by presiding over scandals such as Abu Ghraib, Hurricane Katrina, and the treatment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo. To be frank, I never understood why some Americans are so obsessed with protecting "rights." In fact, I was pleased to discover that former Vice President Cheney agrees with me; he understands how a strong executive deals with potential troublemakers! I sometimes think he'd make a good Vice President here. 

Anyway, the good news for us is that these events made the United States look both incompetent and hypocritical and made it harder for Washington to criticize my own domestic policies. I owe former president Bush a real debt of gratitude; I should probably call him and say thanks.
 
I confess that I wanted John McCain to win the 2008 election, because I thought he would keep America on the same failed course. And having someone like Governor Palin as Vice President was almost too much to hope for. So naturally I was worried when Barack Obama got elected; he seemed smart and level-headed and is obviously a gifted politician. He's much more charismatic than Bush and to be frank, he's a lot more charismatic than I am. So I asked myself: Would he be able reverse America's recent missteps and restore its international reputation? And at first, it seemed like he might do just that.

But now I'm not so concerned. President Obama may have good instincts and intentions, but his aides don't seem to be giving him very good advice. He is going to get most U.S. troops out of Iraq (a smart move for him, but not so good for me) but he's getting a lot of pressure to put more troops and money into Afghanistan. I hope he does, because that will leave the United States with fewer resources to devote to containing China.  Moreover, President Obama doesn't seem to be making any headway with Iran or the Middle East peace process, and failure there will make that big speech in Cairo look rather silly. Obama also wants China and India and other developing countries to make big concessions on greenhouse gas emissions, but he's having trouble getting his own Congress to adopt a serious program and I doubt we'll face much genuine pressure at the upcoming summit in Copenhagen. That's a relief.
 
And I can't help smiling to myself whenever I think about America's domestic political system. Americans like to lecture China about the importance of "free speech" and other quaint Western concepts, but at least I don't have to deal with madmen spouting nonsense on television and radio and special interest groups making it impossible to enact reforms that the nation as a whole badly needs. I may have some minor problems in Xinjiang, but I hear states like California are rapidly becoming ungovernable and that the universities we used to envy are losing their edge. I even hear that Harvard isn't so rich anymore. This makes me smile too, because a well-educated population is the key to future power and a society that is content to be ignorant cannot remain a world power for long.

Meanwhile, my economy is beginning to grow rapidly again, while the United States piles up debt and lots of people there are looking for work. I do like that nice young Treasury Secretary; he understands that he needs my help to keep the world economy afloat and he isn't going to try to browbeat us very much.  The silly new tariff on imported tires is annoying and we will of course issue a loud protest, but even that reactionary magazine The Economist said it was "bad politics, bad economics, bad diplomacy, and hurts America."

So from where I sit, the view looks pretty good. America likes to say that it is the "leader of the free world" and I'm happy to let them have that title -- for now -- provided they stay focused on other issues and let China's peaceful rise continue. The more "global leadership" they insist upon taking, the more resources they will expend, the faster they will decline, and the sooner we will be in a position to supplant them.

I do have one lingering concern, however. America's leaders may come to their senses, and go back to the unsentimental realism that guided their rise to greatness in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They might discover what Sun Tzu taught -- "There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare" -- and stop insisting on bearing all the world's burdens themselves. But then I remember what their foreign policy "debate" is like, and I recall that both Democrats and Republicans seem equally eager to interfere all over the world, and suddenly that danger doesn't seem very great. In fact, the future looks bright."

MAYELA LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images

A couple of days ago, I posted an entry about the new Kagan/Kristol "Foreign Policy Initiative." After noting that the neoconservative approach to foreign policy had produced a disastrous war in Iraq and undermined America's image around the world, I wrote that "Neoconservatives also helped derail efforts to reach a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thereby strengthening Hamas, threatening Israel's future, and further damaging America's global position." 
 
Via Christian Brose, I received the following message from Robert Kagan, who writes:

The claim that I worked against a two-state solution in the Middle East is a complete fabrication. I have literally never written or spoken on the subject."

Fair enough. I did not say that Kagan himself opposed a two-state solution, but the juxtaposition was misleading and I'm happy to correct the record.
 
At the same time, Kagan’s statement raises an obvious question: what are his views on a two-state solution? He has been a prolific commentator on U.S. foreign policy in recent years -- including our Middle East policy -- yet he has apparently remained silent on one of the most important issues that shapes our entire approach to the region. A two-state solution has been the official goal of the past three U.S. Presidents -- Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama -- and I'd be curious to know if Kagan agrees with them. He and his fellow neoconservatives also favor the vigorous use of American power to achieve stated foreign policy objectives. So here's my question: Does Kagan favor the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, and does he think the United States should use its considerable leverage with both sides to bring that result about?

I was thinking about two former American government employees this weekend, and how the differences between them tell us a lot about why the United States is in so much trouble today.
 
The first person is Eugene Kranz, the legendary NASA flight director immortalized in the film Apollo 13. I watched a rerun of the film on Friday night, and was struck again by his remarkable leadership of the team that improvised the astronauts' rescue after an in-flight explosion crippled their spacecraft and placed their lives in peril. Many readers probably remember the moment in the film when Kranz tells his colleagues: "Failure is not an option." This line may have been apocryphal, but when I survey the landscape of problems we face at home and abroad, I wish we had more people like Kranz in key leadership positions.

Yes I know, it's just a movie, but Ed Harris's portrayal is consistent with what we know about Kranz himself. Above all, Kranz was a leader who took full responsibility for his actions. Here's what he told his colleagues after the tragic fire on the launching pad of Apollo 1, a fire that killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee:

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we... Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!'...We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. ... From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: 'Tough' and 'Competent.' Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do...Competent means we will never take anything for granted...When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write 'Tough and Competent' on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."

That is the kind of attitude that lands men on the moon, builds a healthy economy, and when necessary, wins wars.

Now compare that frank and honest statement with the behavior of another former government employee: Richard Perle. In a recent article in The National Interest and a public appearance at the Nixon Center, Perle has tried to sell the story that neither he nor his fellow neoconservatives had any significant influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration, and especially the decision to invade Iraq. Specifically, he denounces the supposedly "false claim that the decision to remove Saddam, and Bush policies generally, were made or significantly influenced by a few neoconservative 'ideologues.'" He suggests that no one has ever documented this claim, either conveniently ignoring the many books and articles that did exactly that, or misrepresenting what these works actually say.

Given that Iraq turned into a debacle that the United States is having trouble escaping, it is hardly surprising that Perle is denying his role now. But that's not what he said back when the war looked more promising. In an interview with journalist George Packer, recounted in the latter's book The Assassins' Gate, Perle described the key role that the neoconservatives played in making the Iraq War happen. 

If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker, which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it."

The "people who wound up in important positions" were key neoconservatives like Douglas Feith, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and others, who had been openly calling for regime change in Iraq since the late 1990s and who used their positions in the Bush administration to make the case for war after 9/11, aided by a chorus of sympathetic pundits at places like the American Enterprise Institute, and the Weekly Standard. The neocons were hardly some secret cabal or conspiracy, as they were making their case loudly and in public, and no serious scholar claims that they "bamboozled" Bush and Cheney into a war. Rather, numerous accounts have documented that they had been openly pushing for war since 1998 and they continued to do so after 9/11. As neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan later admitted, he and his fellow neoconservatives were successful in part because they had a "ready-made approach to the world" that seemed to provide an answer to the challenges the U.S. faced after 9/11.

The bottom line is simple: Richard Perle is lying. What is disturbing about this case is is not that a former official is trying to falsify the record in such a brazen fashion; Perle is hardly the first policymaker to kick up dust about his record and he certainly won't be the last. The real cause for concern is that there are hardly any consequences for the critical role that Perle and the neoconservatives played for their pivotal role in causing one of the great foreign policy disasters in American history. If somebody can help engineer a foolish war and remain a respected Washington insider -- as is the case with Perle -- what harm is likely to befall them if they lie about it later?

Let's keep a few facts in mind. Perle and his neoconservative buddies helped develop and sell a policy that has left over 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead and more than 30,000 wounded, was directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and will end up costing the United States more than a trillion dollars. Yet instead of having the integrity and courage to acknowlege his role and admit his mistakes -- as an honest man like Gene Kranz would -- Perle now offers us a squid's ink cloud of lies and prevarications. Although his absurd claims have been promptly and properly challenged, does anyone seriously think he will pay a larger price? The National Interest was all-too-willing to publish his rewriting of the historical record, and no doubt prestigious organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations will be happy to give him a platform at future meetings. Look for him on the Lehrer Newshour and CNN too; heck, he could even end up with his own show on Fox News.

Let's face it: there is little or no accountability in Washington, where being wrong means never having to say you're sorry; indeed, you don't even have to admit responsibility for past mistakes, no matter how serious. It's just the American taxpayer who ends up footing the bill, along with the soldiers who fought and died for these blunders.

As Frank Rich and others have figured out, we are in trouble today because we have allowed a culture of corruption and dishonesty to permeate our institutions and pollute our public discourse. Until that changes -- until our public institutions contain a lot more truth-tellers like Gene Kranz and fewer liars like Richard Perle -- we are not going to know where we stand, where we are headed, or whom to trust.

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President Obama has decided to increase the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan by roughly 17,000 troops over the next few months. The increase will begin with an initial deployment of 8,000 Marines in the next few weeks, to be followed by subsequent deployments of an Army brigade of 4,000 troops and about 5,000 support troops next summer.

This is a fateful decision. Yes, I know; he promised that he would do this during the campaign, but ignoring campaign promises is a time-honored tradition and I can't help feeling like this was one issue where a rethink was called for. Instead of being just another one of George Bush's mishandled legacies, Afghanistan will now become Obama's war. If increasing U.S. forces doesn't work, he will face pressure to do still more, and he will incur the political costs of any subsequent failure.

As other commentators have noted, what's missing in the announcement is a clear statement of U.S. strategy. To begin with, as William Pfaff notes here, it is not clear what our present goal is. Are we trying to bolster President Karzai, and do we still hope to build a stable democracy there? Is our real objective to defeat the Taliban once-and-for-all and eradicate poppy growing while we're at it? Is the objective the long-term delegitimation of the central Asian strains of Islamic extremism, and the encouragement of more moderate forms of Islamic observance? Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has already told Congress that we are not trying to create "some kind of Central Asian Valhalla" (which is both realistic and smart), but that still leaves a lot of other possibilities open.

In fact, we have only one vital national interest in Afghanistan: to prevent Afghan territory from being used as a safe haven for groups plotting attacks on American soil or on Americans abroad, as al Qaeda did prior to September 11. It might be nice to achieve some other goals too (such as economic development, better conditions for women, greater political participation, etc.), but these goals are neither vital to U.S. national security nor central to the future of freedom in the United States or elsewhere. Deep down, we don't (or shouldn't) care very much who governs in Afghanistan, provided they don't let anti-American bad guys use their territory to attack us. As I recall, President Bush was even willing to let the Taliban stay in power in 2001 if they had been willing to hand us Osama and his henchmen.

Second, it is not clear what the additional troops are going to do once they get there. In Iraq, we faced a mostly urban-based insurgency, and the so-called "surge" focused primarily on stabilizing Baghdad. By contrast, the Taliban is a rural movement, and an additional 17,000 troops (or even 30,000), won't be enough to provide reliable protection for the Afghan people. And as Juan Cole and Rory Stewart have warned, using U.S. and NATO troops to eradicate opium poppies or to engage in other forms of social engineering is likely to provoke a local backlash and make the Taliban even more popular.

Going forward, here are some critical things to watch:

1. Do the United States and its allies devote more resources to training the Afghan national army, and do these efforts succeed? If so, then we ought to follow the Iraq model and turn the country back to the Afghans as quickly as we can.

2. Is Obama able to persuade our NATO allies to increase their own efforts there, or will they mostly free-ride on Uncle Sam? (And watch out for token deployments intended to signal that the rest of NATO is with us on this one, but that have no real effect on the ground).

3. Can Obama (or more precisely, Richard Holbrooke) get Pakistan to do more to deny safe havens in Pakistan's frontier areas? If not, more U.S. troops on one side of the border won't have much effect. Does the recent ceasefire in the Swat Valley generate a backlash against the extremists who are imposing Shariah (as my FP colleague Thomas Ricks hopes), or do these groups continue to extend their sway? 

4. President Karzai is increasingly seen as the weak leader of one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. Was this new commitment of U.S. troops linked to specific changes in Karzai's policies, or did we just do this on our own? My understanding is that the surge in Iraq also involved pressuring Prime Minister Maliki to crack down on both Shiite and Sunni militias (rather than just the latter), a decision that helped reduce violence and may even have enhanced his own legitimacy somewhat. Before we decided to up the ante in Afghanistan, did we get some a clear commitment to reform from Karzai, and do we think he has to backbone to pull it off? If not, we're in trouble. Do the names Ngo Dinh Diem or Nguyen van Thieu ring any bells?

Given Central Asia's potential to become the bottomless pit of American foreign and military policy, I hope Obama's decision pays off. But it's hard to have much confidence at this stage, until we know what the objective is and why he thinks adding more troops is going to get us there.

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A quick follow-up to Tuesday's post about U.S. options if the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes unworkable.

Several commenters suggested that even the presence of 500,000+ Israeli settlers outside the 1967 border is not an insurmountable obstacle to a two-state solution, because even that large number could be moved back to Israel in the context of a peace deal or and the majority of the settlers could actually be incorporated inside a redrawn border with the Palestinians receiving land of equal value in some sort of swap. This is certainly true in theory, but it gets harder with each additional settler and as Israeli opinion shifts rightward. Hamas' growing popularity is obviously another significant obstacle, and these two trends are reinforcing each other right now.  Nothing is impossible in politics, I guess, but movement is in the wrong direction at present and it is hard for me to imagine it reversing in the absence of strong outside pressure.

Matt Yglesias suggests I may be underestimating Israel's ability to retain U.S. support even if the two-state solution is abandoned and Israel creates a de facto apartheid state. He may be right -- especially in the short term -- but it is going to be a much harder sell, because this outcome is so at odds with American values and because discourse on these topics is becoming more open, even among Israel's supporters here in the United States. Matt himself is a good example of this phenomenon, and he's not alone. He's correct that the United States tolerated apartheid in South Africa for a long time and for a host of not-very-convincing Cold War reasons, but we weren't sending South Africa billions of dollars of aid every year and the geopolitical consequences of that policy were not as significant. (Southern Africa was never as important a strategic interest as the Middle East is). Over time, it will hard to sustain the current "special relationship" if the apartheid scenario comes to pass, and all the more so once the Arab population of greater Israel exceeds the Jewish population. That's the scenario that Prime Minister Olmert has been warning against, and it ought to be giving fresh energy to our diplomatic efforts now. It is this scenario that has motivated groups like J Street, and more hardline organizations like AIPAC ought to be thinking hard about it too and reconsidering their own positions.

The question is: what can they do to help Israel achieve a genuine and workable two-state solution and thus avoid all these worrisome alternatives?

For advice on what Obama should do, check out Ben-Gurion University professor Neve Gordon's new essay in The Nation. I'd be more optimistic if the new administration didn't have too much on their plate already. Obama's team doesn't just need to prove they can walk and chew gum at the same time; sometimes it looks like they need to walk, chew gum, juggle three eggs, compose a string quartet, dance a jig (or if you prefer, the hora), cook a five-course banquet, rotate the tires, wind-surf, and play slide guitar -- all at once.

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Lots of smart people have been focusing on the Israeli elections and trying to make sense of their immediate implications for the peace process. I can’t improve on the analyses provided by Glenn Greenwald, Yossi Alpher, Bernard Avishai, or Uri Avnery, who explain why there is little reason to be optimistic and many reasons to be worried.

I want to focus on a different issue, which is likely to be more important in the long run.

It's this: What do we do if a "two-state solution" becomes impossible?

During the past 10 years, the "two-state solution" has been the mantra of most moderates involved in the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni say they want it, and so does Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The 2007 Arab League peace plan envisions two states living side by side, and George W. Bush and Condi Rice repeatedly said that a two-state solution was their goal too (although they did precious little to achieve it). Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton all say they are going to push hard for it now. I might add that the two-state solution is also my preferred option.

Interestingly, this moderate consensus in favor of two states is itself a fairly new development. The 1993 Oslo Accords do not talk explicitly about a Palestinian state, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the agreement, never endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state in public. And when First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke about the need for a Palestinian state back in 1998, she was roundly criticized, and the White House promptly distanced itself from her remarks. In fact, Bill Clinton didn't endorse the idea of a Palestinian state until his last month in office. The mainstream "consensus" behind this solution is in fact a relatively recent creation.

Today, invoking the "two-state" mantra allows moderates to sound reasonable and true to the ideals of democracy and self-determination; but it doesn't force them to actually do anything to bring that goal about. Indeed, defending the two-state solution has become a recipe for inaction, a fig leaf that leaders can utter at press conferences while ignoring the expanding settlements and road networks on the West Bank that are rendering it impossible. Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is a perfect illustration: He has lately become an eloquent voice in favor of two states, warning of the perils that Israel will face if the two-state option is not adopted. Yet his own government continued to expand the settlements and undermine Palestinian moderates, thereby putting the solution Olmert supposedly favors further away than ever, and maybe even making it unworkable.

There are two trends at play that threaten to undermine the two-state option. The first is the continued expansion of Israel settlements in the land that is supposed to be reserved for the Palestinians. There are now about 290,000 settlers living in the West Bank. There are another 185,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. Most of the settlers are subsidized directly or indirectly by the Israeli government. It is increasingly hard to imagine Israel evicting nearly half a million people (about 7 percent of its population) from their homes. Although in theory one can imagine a peace deal that keeps most of the settlers within Israel's final borders (with the new Palestinian state receiving land of equal value as compensation), at some point the settlers' efforts to "create facts" will make it practically impossible to establish a viable Palestinian state.

The second trend is the growing extremism on both sides. Time is running out on a two-state solution, and its main opponents -- the Likud Party and its allies in Israel, and Hamas among the Palestinians -- are becoming more popular. The rising popularity of Avigdor Lieberman's overtly racist Yisrael Beiteinu party is ample evidence of this trend. And it's not as though Kadima or Labor have been pushing hard to bring it about. According to Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times:

The result is that the next Israeli government, left to its own devices, is likely to opt for the status quo with the Palestinians - continued occupation of the West Bank, desultory peace talks, steadily expanding settlements and military force in response to Palestinian rockets or bombs. The long-term pursuit of a two-state solution will be brushed aside, with the argument that the Palestinians are too divided and dangerous to be negotiating partners."

One does not need to look far down the road to see the point where a two-state solution will no longer be a practical possibility. What will the United States do then? What will American policy be when it makes no sense to talk about a two-state solution, because Israel effectively controls all of what we used to call Mandate Palestine? What vision will President Obama and Secretary Clinton have for the Palestinians and for Israel when they can no longer invoke the two-state mantra?

There are only three alternative options at that point. First, Israel could drive most or all of the 2.5 million Palestinians out of the West Bank by force, thereby preserving "greater Israel" as a Jewish state through an overt act of ethnic cleansing. The Palestinians would surely resist, and it would be a crime against humanity, conducted in full view of a horrified world. No American government could support such a step, and no true friend of Israel could endorse that solution.

Second, Israel could retain control of the West Bank but allow the Palestinians limited autonomy in a set of disconnected enclaves, while it controlled access in and out, their water supplies, and the airspace above them. This appears to have been Ariel Sharon's strategy before he was incapacitated, and Bibi Netanyahu's proposal for "economic peace" without a Palestinian state seems to envision a similar outcome. In short, the Palestinians would not get a viable state of their own and would not enjoy full political rights. This is the solution that many people -- including Prime Minister Olmert -- compare to the apartheid regime in South Africa. It is hard to imagine the United States supporting this outcome over the long term, and Olmert has said as much. Denying the Palestinians their own national aspirations is also not going to end the conflict.

Which brings me to the third option. The Israeli government could maintain its physical control over "greater Israel" and grant the Palestinians full democratic rights within this territory. This option has been proposed by a handful of Israeli Jews and a growing number of Palestinians. But there are formidable objections to this outcome: It would mean abandoning the Zionist dream of an independent Jewish state, and binational states of this sort do not have an encouraging track record, especially when the two parties have waged a bitter conflict across several generations. This is why I prefer the two-state alternative.

But if a two-state option is no longer feasible, it seems likely that the United States would come to favor this third choice. After all, supporting option 2 -- an apartheid state -- is contrary to the core American values of freedom and democracy and would make the United States look especially hypocritical whenever it tried to present itself as a model for the rest of the world. Openly endorsing apartheid would also demolish any hope we might have of improving our image in the Arab and Islamic world. Lord knows I have plenty of respect for the Israel lobby's ability to shape U.S. foreign policy, but even AIPAC and the other heavyweight institutions in the lobby would have great difficulty maintaining the "special relationship" if Israel was an apartheid state. By contrast, option 3 -- a binational state that provided full democratic rights for citizens of all ethnic and religious backgrounds -- is easy to reconcile with America's own “melting pot” traditions and liberal political values. American politicians would find it a hard option to argue against.

Bottom line: If the two-state solution dies, as seems increasingly likely, the United States is going to face a very awkward set of choices. That’s one reason why Obama and his team -- as well as Israel's friends in the United States -- should move beyond paying lip-service to the idea of creating a Palestinian state and actually do something about it. But it's hard to be optimistic that they will.

And while I'm at it, here's one more heretical thought. Shouldn't someone in the U.S. government start thinking about what our policy should be in the event that the two-state solution collapses? Starting to contemplate this possibility is risky, of course, because it might undermine our efforts to create two states if it became known that we were beginning to plan for an alternative future. But the fact is that we may face that future before too much longer. If so, then it might be a good idea if somebody began thinking about how to deal with it now, so that we don’t have to invent a new approach on the fly.

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Yesterday's New York Times contained three interesting items that deserve to be read together. Taken as a whole, they tell you a lot about the fundamental challenge facing Barack Obama.

The first item was Frank Rich's op-ed column, a jeremiad about Washington's insider culture. Rich nicely describes a world where out-of-touch elites with the right connections continue to enjoy ready access to power. Rich focuses his attention on Tom Daschle's fall from grace and the prominent role of economic advisors "who are either alumni of the financial bubble's insiders club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe." His broader point, however, is that Washington is infused with a culture of non-accountability and intellectual incest that helps explain why so many policy initiatives are ill-conceived or ineptly executed, or both.

The second article was a page 1 profile of special envoy Richard Holbrooke, who is now Obama's point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke is a long-time Washington insider who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and was the driving force behind the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the Bosnian civil war. (He was also managing editor of Foreign Policy back in the 1970s). Since 2001, he has been vice-chairman of Perseus LLC, a Manhattan-based private equity firm. According to the article, "During the Bush years, Perseus was Mr. Holbrooke's base, providing him with what friends say was a relatively undemanding job and lavish compensation as he bounced from topic to topic, almost as if seeking a problem tough enough to rivet all of his attention." Unfortunately, one of the topics he landed on was the invasion of Iraq, which he strongly supported. Holbrooke said Colin Powell's infamous U.N. Security Council speech "documenting" Iraq's fictitious WMD programs (an episode Powell later recalled as the "lowest moment of his life") was "a masterful job of diplomacy." While critical of the Bush administration's pre-war diplomacy, Holbrooke nonetheless argued that Saddam Hussein "was the most dangerous governmental leader in the world," and that the United States had "a legitimate right to take action."

Which brings us to item No. 3 (also on page 1): an unflattering article describing how Afghan President Hamid Karzai has gone from being Washington's best hope for success to being regarded as a weak and ineffective leader of what may be the most corrupt regime in the world. Buried in the article is a telling sentence: "Many Afghans and Western officials here believe that it was the Iraq war, more than any other factor, that deprived Mr. Karzai of the resources he needed to help the Afghan state stand on its own and to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban." That's right: the same Iraq war that Holbrooke backed.

Put these three separate articles together, and you get a good sense of how U.S. policy gets made. Powerful people with the right connections rise to important roles in government. When not in power, they land lucrative jobs that still leave them with lots of time to engage in public life, spending most of it hobnobbing with other people with similar backgrounds, advantages, and world-views, while building the connections they will need to get back into power later on. (Holbrooke apparently spent some of his Perseus earnings hosting an annual dinner for Hillary Clinton, replete with a set of A-list guests). And then the political wheel turns, and they return to public life, eager to solve the very problems they helped create.

Like most elites, the current policy establishment is a forgiving culture that cherishes conventional wisdom and rarely punishes anyone for being wrong -- even about big things -- provided that they know the right people. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it exactly wrong: for at least some American lives, there's no end to second chances.

My point here isn't to single out Ambassador Holbrooke, who is talented and tenacious and has some genuine accomplishments to his credit, and who is hardly a poster child for the adage "to get along, go along." In fact, given our current circumstances, I wish we had a few more Holbrookes to put to work on our current challenges.

My aim is simply to highlight Obama's basic dilemma. He has huge problems to solve and not a lot of time to do it. So he needs to work with the institutions and individuals that are currently entrenched in the Washington-New York nexus. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, "you go to work with the government you have." But it is those same institutions and individuals who created the mess we're in. If Obama tackles that dysfunctional power structure head-on it will go to the mattresses to defend itself, thereby making it harder to address the immediate problems we face. But if he doesn't establish new ways of doing the public's business, the old problems will persist and derail his efforts anyway. I don't see an obvious way out of this box, so I'm hoping the President is a lot smarter than me.

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My nominee for the silliest comment on the Iraqi provincial elections comes from -- no surprise here -- former UN Ambassador John Bolton. After praising the elections as a vindication of the "surge" and characterizing them as a setback for Iran, Bolton warned that the elections will not "put an end to Iran's ambitions. Tehran appears to believe that its influence in the region is expanding and that its neighbors and the United States have failed to respond effectively. This belief is unsurprising, given the Obama administration’s acquiescent attitude toward Tehran."

Let me get this straight. Obama has been in office for about two weeks, and Iran has already drawn the lesson from that brief period that "its influence is expanding." Has Bolton forgotten about the Bush administration, whose mishandling of Mideast policy failed to slow Iran's nuclear program and strengthened Iran's position in the Gulf, in Lebanon, and possibly in Gaza as well? The neoconservatives who ran our Mideast policy couldn’t have done more to help Iran if they had been on Tehran's payroll.

Better get used to Bolton's line of argument, because we are going to hear it over and over and over. As the new administration wrestles with the mess that Bush & Co. bequeathed them, neoconservative stalwarts will be rewriting history at every opportunity. They will try to portray our position on January 21, 2009, as basically sound, pin every subsequent bit of bad news on Obama, and hope we all forget who we got us into this situation. I have no doubt that Obama and his team will make some mistakes of their own -- and I'll be happy to criticize them when they do -- but let's not forget who dealt them the hand they are being forced to play now.

My take on the elections? They contain some encouraging signs but also some disturbing features, notably the growing accusations of fraud and the fact that exceptional measures had to be taken to prevent violent disruptions. A substantial number of Iraqis seem to be rallying around more secular parties and around Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in particular, which may make it easier for the United States to stick to the withdrawal timetable agreed to in the Status of Forces agreement signed last November. (Don't forget that a majority of Iraqis want us out either immediately or soon, and Maliki's toughminded handling of the SOFA negotiations probably boosted his popularity, even among some Sunnis.) Maliki's Dawa Party and his main coalition partners (the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq) aren't going to be Tehran's lackeys, but as Juan Cole points out (directly contradicting Bolton’s claims), both groups have good relations with Tehran and are viewed much more favorably by Tehran than Saddam ever was.

One aspect of the results give me pause. Iraq's voters appear to have endorsed parties who favor a strong central state, as opposed to those who might favor greater regional autonomy. On the one hand, a unified Iraq is in the U.S. interest, and we want a central government that is strong enough to maintain order after U.S. forces withdraw. But on the other hand, the stronger the central government becomes, the more that the contending groups will want to control it and greater the potential for trouble with Iraq's Kurds, who still want autonomy if not independence. If Iraq's Sunni population thinks it is getting shut out of power again, then prospects for genuine political reconciliation will remain bleak and renewed violence is likely after we are gone. And that has been the $64,000 question ever since the idea of invading Iraq was first proposed: What is the political formula by which Iraq will be governed now that Saddam's brutal dictatorship is gone?

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