A new Middle East appointment in the Obama administration: Tamara Cofman Wittes

Tamara Cofman Wittes was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. As I have mentioned before, Middle East experts are no more appointed to the top Middle East positions in the State Department or The White House's National Security Council since the Reagan administration. Middle East experts like Richard Parker, Richard Murphy, William Quandt would never make it in the US government anymore. Bill Clinton administration took it a step further with the preference for pro-Israeli lobbyists and activists. This is another example: she was appointed as the second most important person in the Middle East policy making at the Department of State. She did get her PhD degree from Georgetown University's Department of Government: but she worked with non-Middle East experts. Her only qualification in the Middle East (aside from not knowing Arabic or Persian--that is seen as suspect in the US government for top Middle East job and this explains why Jeffrey Feltman can only say one Arabic word: "shukran", for thank you although he manages to corrupt the pronunciation of his one Arabic word) was her undergraduate thesis: she wrote it at Oberlin College on Zionism in Cleveland. Don't get me wrong: she has other Middle East qualifications: she worked for various Zionist organizations, like AJC (where she worked against the Arab economic boycott of Israel--don't you like it how Zionist fanatics in the US want us to believe that boycott is an democratic and unpeaceful when directed against Israel?). I have spent time yesterday reading all that I can find about her writings: and they are available at the Israeli Saban Center at Brookings which is led by Martin Indyk. But here is the thing about Ms. Wittes: she presents herself as an expert on "democracy" in the Middle East and yet while she supported the Bush Doctrine and gave it high marks, she is opposed to elections. Kid you not. Ms. Wittes is a Democracy promoter but she opposes elections if enemies of Israel are elected. In such cases, elections--according to this democracy advocate--should be opposed. Her words: "Second, the emphasis in US policy on early elections, even where security and political institutions, such as courts and parties, were weak, advantaged Islamist militias like Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. With superior organization, an anti-American, anti-regime message and only a feeble central government to counter them, they were able to exploit elections and enter government with their militias and terrorist cadres intact. From there they have succeeded in further eroding the state institutions of Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority, advancing radical agendas and pushing those states to, or even beyond, the brink of civil war." And she was not keen on the Lebanon's Hummus Revolution: she did not believe that Lebanon would present the exemplary model of democracy for the region. Instead, she made a prediction: she predicted that the Muhammad Dahlan police state in Ramallah was going to emerge as the exemplary model for democracy in the region, and that people in the region were going go want to emulate Muhammad Dahlan's form of government. I kid you not. These are her words: "After the death of their longtime leader, Yasser Arafat, Palestinians chose a successor through an open, contested election—despite continued Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This fact, especially in close proximity to the Iraqi elections, was a clear challenge to Arab leaders who tell their citizens that the need for stability trumps any exercise in political participation. If Iraqis and Palestinians could have free elections under such unfavorable conditions, some Arab commentators asked, why can't we? To compound the power of their action, Palestinians chose as their new president a man who took a clear stance on the major divide in his society—a stance that rejected violence against Israel as a means to free his homeland. Democracy produced not just a legitimate leader but a moderate one."