Bernd Debusmann

When U.S. President Barack Obama and the leaders of  Germany, France, Britain, Canada and the European Union first issued public calls for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, the death toll in Syria stood at 2,000. That was in August 18 last year.

When Obama repeated the call on May 19, as host of a summit meeting of the Group of Eight, the body count had reached 10,000, according to United Nations estimates. The two figures highlight the lack of success of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure on a ruthless leader who learned lessons in unrestrained brutality from his father, Hafez al-Assad, whom he succeeded in office.

A peaceful solution to Syria’s protracted crisis now looks remote enough to wonder whether Bashar al-Assad might outlast Obama in power. The U.S. president is not assured of winning another term in office next November. But the odds of the Assad regime surviving into 2013 look better with every passing day, even though one of the U.S. government’s top experts on Syria has labeled the Syrian president a “dead man walking.”

There are several reasons for skepticism about a resolution to the Syrian crisis in the near future. One is the government’s military superiority over fractured and lightly-equipped opposition forces. More importantly, there is no international consensus on how to deal with what began 14 months ago as peaceful demonstrations against a 40-year family dictatorship and now includes huge suicide bombings of government targets that have raised suspicions of al-Qaeda involvement.

At the summit of the G8 – the United States, Germany, France,  Italy, Japan, Russia, Canada and Japan – an  aide to Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev made clear, again, that Moscow, unlike the West, does not see Assad’s departure as a necessary step towards ending the bloodshed.  “Some may like or dislike the Syrian government…but one cannot avoid a question – if Assad goes, who will replace him?” said Mikhail Margelov.

That’s a question to which there is no  answer in Washington or the European and Arab capitals whose leaders say that Assad must go. Doubts over what would happen “the day after” explain why the U.S. and its allies have been reluctant to consider arming the opposition and why they rule out military intervention on the model of Libya.

Where Russia is concerned, some critics see motives that go beyond opposition to regime change, the prospect of losing a major client for arms exports, and fears of  losing the Soviet-era naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus, Russia’s only outpost in the Mediterranean. Said Gary Kasparov, a vocal Putin critic, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal:

“The Kremlin is desperate to keep Bashar al-Assad in place…since any conflict in the region sustains the high oil prices  Mr. Putin and his cronies need to maintain power.”

ASSAD’S FRIENDS

Whatever the motive, it’s difficult to see Assad leaving as long as he enjoys arms supplies and backing from Russia, diplomatic support from China, military and intelligence advice from Iran, and shipments of diesel fuel from Venezuela. After a flurry of wrong predictions of Assad’s imminent exit late last year, political crustal-gazers have been wary of forecasts.

But punters on an online exchange that allows bets on political events, rate Assad’s chance of being in office by the end of the year at 68 percent, up from 42 in February, when China and Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that provided for Assad to hand over power to a deputy.

The two countries voted in favor, two months later, of a Security Council resolution that backed a six-point peace plan drawn up by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Its provisions included an end to all violence by the government and the rebels, talks aimed at a “political transition” and the dispatch of an unarmed U.N. force to monitor a truce that both sides are ignoring. .

There’s a Catch-22 in the Annan initiative. It specifies a “Syrian-led, inclusive political transition “which perversely makes al-Assad part of the negotiations (if ever they begin). There is no good reason to think he would be inclined to make concessions on the negotiating table after making none in months of bloody crackdowns on the opposition.

Administration officials have made clear that U.S. patience with Assad, and with the slow progress of the Annan plan, is running out. Some of the bluntest language from Obama aides has come from his ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. She has pointed out that the mandate of the truce supervision mission runs out at the end of July.

“No one should assume that the United States will renew this mission,” she has said. “If there is not a sustained cessation of violence, full freedom of movement of UN personnel and rapid meaningful progress on all other aspects of the six-point plan, then we must all conclude that the mission has run its course.”

And then what? Obama wading deeper into yet another Middle East conflict four months before the elections?

PHOTO: REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri (SYRIA)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

When Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency, he spoke eloquently about America‘s moral obligation to Iraqis working for U.S. forces in their country. “We must keep faith with Iraqis who kept faith with us,” he said in a 2007 campaign speech.

“One tragic outcome of this war is that the Iraqis who stand with America – the interpreters, embassy workers and subcontractors – are being targeted for assassination. Keeping this moral obligation is a key part of how we turn the page in Iraq. Because what’s at stake is bigger than the war – it’s our global leadership.”

The war Obama inherited from George W. Bush officially ended this week when U.S. soldiers rolled up the flag of military forces in Iraq in a low-key ceremony attended by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. The remaining U.S. soldiers will be out by Dec. 31. They leave behind thousands of the faithful Iraqis Obama described on the campaign trail.

They are still targets, seen by anti-American militants as traitors or collaborators.

A special program set up in 2008 provided for an annual quota of 5,000 visas for Iraqis at risk. Fewer than a quarter have been allotted so far. Thousands of applications are pending, stuck in a “nightmarish, dysfunctional screening process,” in the words of Bob Carey, a resettlement policy expert with the International Rescue Committee. What’s worse, he said in an interview, there is no contingency plan to protect Iraqis at risk after the last American soldier leaves. “Are they being abandoned, betrayed?”

There is a certain symmetry to the beginning and the end of the war. At the beginning, there was little or no planning for the post-combat phase. At the end, there is no post-withdrawal planning to get U.S.-affiliated Iraqis to safety quickly if the need arises. There are precedents for such operations.

In 1996, the administration of Bill Clinton airlifted 6,600 Kurds who were under attack by Saddam Hussein’s army to the Pacific island of Guam, where they went through the asylum process in less than half the time it usually takes.

Just how much risk is there for the estimated 70,000 who worked for the U.S. military, embassy and American sub-contractors? The List Project, an advocacy group set up by Kirk Johnson, a former official of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has begun compiling a threat spreadsheet. A typical entry, from November 24: “Iraqi who worked with the U.S. contacts TLP, explaining that he had been threatened outside his home by an Iraqi policeman, who told him that he would be beheaded because he was a disloyal traitor and an American puppet.”

A STABLE IRAQ?

A police officer threatening a fellow Iraqi with beheading does not quite fit into the post-U.S. Iraq that Obama described in a speech to troops at Fort Hood to mark the end of the war. The United States, he said, was leaving behind a stable country. How stable it will be remains to be seen. Doubts go beyond refugee advocacy groups and human rights organizations.

In one of the last press briefings by a senior U.S. military officer, Lieutenant General Frank Helmick, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, listed a string of difficulties – Iranian-backed militias, violent extremists, tensions between Sunnis and Shias and between Arabs and Kurds.

One gauge of how stable Iraqis will see their country after the last U.S. soldier leaves will be the rate of return of an estimated 1.6 million who sought refuge in neighboring countries from the sectarian violence uncorked by the U.S. invasion in 2003. Even though violence has subsided substantially from its peak in 2007, there has been no rush of returnees. Neither has there been much change, according to refugee organizations, in the number of internal refugees – people driven from their homes by successive waves of ethnic cleansing in mixed neighborhoods.

Taken together, this makes for more than 3 million people – the largest population displacement in modern Middle East history. It is a consequence of the war barely noticed in the United States. That, too, goes for the number of Iraqis killed since the U.S. invasion. Estimates vary but the lowest figure given by the Iraq Body Count is 104,080 – more than 23 times the 4,500 U.S. troops killed in Iraq who are mentioned in virtually every U.S. news story on the war.

Once the last U.S. soldier is out and Iraq fades from the media spotlight, humanitarian workers fear that the already steep uphill battle to focus Western minds on the plight of Iraqi victims of the war will become even more difficult.

As Maxwell Quqa, who runs the Sponsor Iraqi Children Foundation, an organization that helps Iraqi orphans and street children, puts it: “What we face is compassion fatigue.”

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

So much for charges from conservative contenders for the 2012 U.S. presidential elections that Barack Obama is not pro-Israel enough — the president just won seals of approval from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and the U.S. lobby that usually reflects their views.

If the elections, as some predict, will include a contest on who loves Israel most, Obama can use their praise to good effect. How much it will contribute to his legacy is another matter.

The plaudits came in response to Obama’s address to the United Nations on Sept. 21, when he rejected the Palestinians’ bid for U.N. membership in what one Israeli journalist, Chemi Shalev of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, described as “probably the warmest pro-Israel speech ever given at an annual U.N. General Assembly meeting by any U.S. president, bar none.”

Its tone differed sharply from his moving description of the plight of the Palestinians in a speech in Cairo in 2009, five months after taking office. For 60 years, he said, they had endured the pain of dislocation and “the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. Let there be no doubt,” he said, “the situation of the Palestinians is intolerable.”

The Cairo speech raised expectations in the Arab world that here was a president who sympathized with the Palestinians and had the power, global prestige and commitment to succeed where a long line of his predecessors had tried and failed – help create a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel. It didn’t work that way.

Fast forward to Sept. 21, 2011. No word about daily humiliations, dislocation, occupation, intolerable conditions. Instead, the emphasis was on centuries of persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic Arab school books, Israelis killed by Palestinian rockets and suicide bombs. As Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute put it, “He recited a litany of suffering of Israelis with nothing about Palestinian hardships in a conflict whose most recent flare-up in 2008-09 left over 1,300 Palestinian victims and 13 Israelis.”

Netanyahu saw it differently. Obama had won a “badge of honor” with his address. Lieberman, a driving force behind the relentless construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, praised Obama for not mentioning that negotiations on a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be based on the 1967 borders.

The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issued a statement expressing its appreciation for Obama’s rejection of the Palestinian U.N. bid and his insistence on the return to negotiations. Off and on, they have dragged on for two decades, during which Israel has tripled the number of Jewish settlements on land that is supposed to become a Palestinian state.

POLITICS TRUMP POLICY

What explains Obama’s transition from Cairo 2009 to New York 2011? In Washington, politics trump policy and Israel has been more of a domestic than a foreign policy issue even before the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948. When President Harry Truman and his top advisers discussed plans for the partition of Palestine in 1945, the experts warned against it. Truman is said to have responded: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Sixty-six years later, that kind of calculation still plays a role but in the case of Obama, there has been an additional element – a battle of will with the Israeli prime minister in which the leader of the world’s remaining superpower backed down repeatedly, on issues from a demand for a settlement freeze to the territorial lines on which negotiations should be based. The score so far: Netanyahu 3, Obama 0.

Which makes it rather bizarre that the two front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, are portraying Obama as favoring the Palestinians at the expense of Israel. In language that highlighted both ignorance and the toxic nature of American politics, Perry said Obama had pursued a policy of “appeasement” of the Palestinians.

The term dates back to the 1930s when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made concessions to Adolf Hitler to avoid going to war against Nazi Germany. In slightly less over-the-top terms, Romney talked of Obama’s efforts to “throw Israel under the bus.”

Whether Perry, Romney and other prominent Republicans manage to turn support for Israel into a wedge issue in 2012 is open to doubt in a race almost certainly dominated by jobs and the economy. But if it does emerge as a campaign topic, Obama can always wave the “badge of honor” awarded him by Netanyahu, to show that he is no different from a long line of American presidents much closer to Israel than to the Palestinians.

There’s good news and bad news on the war on drugs in Mexico and the United States. The good news: cooperation between U.S. and Mexican security forces has rarely been closer. “Unprecedented,” President Barack Obama termed it in a message of sympathy for 52 people killed in an arson attack on a casino in northern Mexico.

The unprecedented cooperation he referred to ranges from the United States providing intelligence drawn from wiretaps and aerial surveillance by U.S. drones to taking part in planning operations to capture drug lords.

American agents, according to accounts from both sides of the border, had a role in hunting down 21 of the 37 men on Mexico’s list of most-wanted organized crime chiefs.

The bad news is that closer cooperation in taking out the CEOs of illicit business enterprises has done little to curb violence in Mexico or throttle the flow of drugs north and the smuggling of guns and cash south. One CEO goes, another one steps in his place. Real change would require an admission by political leaders that conventional drug war strategies have failed and, more importantly, that there’s a need for significant societal changes in both countries.

In the United States, millions of Americans would need to stop snorting, sniffing or injecting the drugs produced in Latin America and smuggled across the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. In Mexico, deeply-rooted traditions resistant to assistance from outside allow crime syndicates to flourish – acceptance of corruption as a way of life and “dreadfully little respect for the law,” in the words of former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda.

In an insightful new book — “Manana Forever – Mexico and the Mexicans” — he writes that “Mexico has no way out of its drug wars … unless it changes its attitudes towards the law. This is not occurring.”

Statistics tell the story of the drug wars’ failure on both sides of the border. In the United States, where President Richard Nixon declared “war on drugs” 40 years ago, they are at least as easily available now as they were then. The laws of supply and demand proved more powerful than progressively harsher enforcement. “The market forces of replacement and adaptation make the drug-dealing industry resilient even in the face of heavy enforcement,” Mark Kleiman, a widely respected drug policy expert, writes in a thoughtful essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

“The United States sends five times as many drug dealers to prison today as it did 30 years ago, but this has not prevented the 80-90 percent reductions in the prices of cocaine and heroin over that time, which came as a result of falling dealers’ wages and increased efficiency in trafficking.”

Numbers tell a similarly bleak story in Mexico, where President Felipe Calderon formally declared war on his country’s drug traffickers and sent the military into action shortly after taking office in December 2006. That opened the bloodiest chapter in Mexico’s history since the 1910-1920 revolution. By the end of 2007, the body count stood at 4,300. It climbed steadily: 5,400 deaths in 2008, 9,600 in 2009, 15,000 in 2010 and around 7,000 so far this year.

GOVERNMENT SPIN AND COMMON CRIME
The government long insisted that criminals killing other criminals in often gruesome ways (beheadings became commonplace) accounted for around 90 percent of the dead, soldiers five percent and innocent civilians the rest. That account glossed over an enormous wave of common crime, from murder and kidnapping to the protection racket apparently behind the Monterrey casino attack.

The criminal-on-criminal story line died on August 25, when gunmen set fire to Monterrey’s Casino Royale. Of the 52 people who died, 42 were bingo-playing middle-class women, most of them asphyxiated when they found the emergency exits locked. The attack highlighted the scant respect for rules and regulations Castaneda complains about.

The casino had been ordered closed by the Monterrey mayor’s office for various code violations but a local judge reversed the move and ordered the place reopened. Like many of the casinos that sprouted during Calderon’s presidency — from 198 in 2006 to 790 now, according to the magazine Proceso — its functions are said to have included laundering dirty money.

As he has done frequently, Calderon took the casino attack as an opportunity to rebuke the United States for not doing enough to “drastically reduce” Americans’ consumption of drugs and curb the flow of cash and guns from the United States to Mexico. But in a speech on September 2, he also listed what he called the most important challenge facing his government: “Repair the fabric of society torn by lack of opportunity for the young, the disintegration of families and the loss of values.”

That will take time and meanwhile, the drug wars continue, with strategies that have a proven record of failure. Could the wars be waged more effectively? Yes, says Kleiman, in his Foreign Affairs essay headlined Surgical Strikes in the Drug Wars.

In the United States, shrinking the market could be done by reducing the use of hard drugs (i.e. non-cannabis) by what he estimates are around 3 million people. This small minority of drug users, according to Kleiman, accounts for around 80 percent of hard drug use and an even larger share of crime associated to their addiction, with about 75 percent having at least one felony arrest in the course of a typical year.

Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers an unorthodox idea for Mexico: rather than fight all criminal groups with equal force at the same time, publicly identify the most violent through a scoring system taking into account the overall number of its killings, its targets (dealers, enforcement agents, ordinary citizens, journalists, community leaders etc), and kidnappings.

Then, wipe out that group and start the process again, going after the next group. “The process could continue until none of the remaining groups was notably more violent than the rest. In effect, such a strategy would condition the traffickers’ ability to remain in business on their willingness to conduct their affairs in a relatively nonviolent fashion.”

Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But so is the idea that there is a way to stop people from using drugs.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

“Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich. So if I need $600 million, I can put $600 million in myself. That’s a huge advantage … over the other candidates.”

So says real estate magnate and reality TV show host Donald Trump, talking about the 2012 U.S. presidential elections.

It’s 18 months to go to November 6, 2012, an eternity in politics, but two things already seem clear: it will be the most expensive campaign ever and the line between the political fringe and mainstream politics will often be blurred.

First, the numbers. The opening of President Barack Obama’s election campaign on April 4 prompted a slew of predictions that he would manage to raise $1 billion, comfortably in excess of the $780 million his supporters provided in 2008. That was a record, more than twice as much as his rival, Republican John McCain (and almost exactly twice as much as George W. Bush in 2004).

None of the potential Republican candidates has yet declared he (or she) is in the running. None can boast to match the “beauty” of Trump, who ranks 488 on Forbes magazine’s 2010 list of the world’s billionaires with an estimated net worth of $2 billion. If he did run, he could afford the $600 million he is talking about. In a series of television interviews, Trump has said he would make a decision in June.

Whether he runs or not, the total candidates will spend for 2012 is almost certain to top the $1.6 billion raised for the 2008 elections. One might expect that sums of that magnitude would prompt grumbles from an electorate grappling with unemployment and foreclosures but the subject of campaign finance reform has rarely stirred widespread interest.

That can’t be said of statements Trump has been making over the past three weeks, when he became the most prominent American to give credence to the views held by the diverse community known as “birthers”.

They are Americans who insist — in the face of much evidence to the contrary — that Obama was born in Kenya, his father’s native country, not the United States, and therefore his presidency is illegitimate.

The logic that underpins this belief implies an intricate intercontinental conspiracy in 1961 to get a Hawaii hospital to certify a birth and two newspapers to publish notices of birth.

“If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility, then he has pulled one of the greatest ever con tricks,” Trump said on April 10.

He went on to assure television viewers that “this country is going to hell,” the world was laughing at the United States, and the country was no longer respected. Not to worry, though. If he were elected, “I would run a great, great country … They (the world) won’t be laughing if I’m president.”

Among the reasons: “I happen to be smart, I happen to have a lot of common sense, I happen to know what I’m doing.”

LUNATIC FRINGE OR MAINSTREAM?
Liberal pundits have sprinkled their commentaries on Trump’s advocacy of the birthers with the words “fringe” or “lunatic fringe.” But judging from recent polls, among Republicans these views are not fringe — they are mainstream. A survey conducted by Public Policy Polling in February showed that 51 percent of Republican voters do not believe Obama was born in the United States. Another poll showed birther support at 42 percent.

This presents Republican leaders in Congress with something of a dilemma. Since many of the party faithful have doubts over Obama’s place of birth, Republican heavyweights have treated the issue with great caution, more so since a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in the first week of April showed Trump tied in second place among potential contenders for the party’s nomination for 2012.

That poll, taken after Trump publicly embraced the birther theory, came as a surprise. Polling experts ascribed his good showing partly to high name recognition. His lavish lifestyle, marriages and divorces, and his changing business fortunes (up-down, down-up) have been tabloid fodder for decades. His show “Celebrity Apprentice” is one of the most widely watched on U.S. television.

Its ratings have gone up since Trump started talking about the president’s birth certificate — one reason why cynics believe that his public pondering of a presidential run is a publicity ploy rather than a desire to restore the world’s remaining superpower to the greatness he says it lost.

If the aim is to profit from publicity, Trump is doing well. According to Nielsen Research Data, the season premiere of his show, in March, drew 7.9 million viewers. That ticked up each time he publicly raised his possible candidature and his doubts over Obama. Last week, viewership stood at 8.64 million. That’s up 9.3 percent from the debut.

Not bad for a possible presidential candidate. Or an accomplished showman.
(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

There is fresh thinking, of a peculiar sort, in the perennial debate over gun violence in the United States, world leader in civilian ownership of firearms. Censorship of news reporting on the mass shootings that have long been part of American life will help prevent other mass shootings.

So says the National Rifle Association (NRA) in an open letter responding to President Barack Obama’s suggestion that it is time for all sides in the gun debate to get together and find a “sensible, intelligent way” to make the United States a safer place. The president mentioned common sense and a White House spokesman talked of the need to find common ground.

Common sense has not been in abundant supply in decades of on-again, off-again debate on guns and violence. As to finding common ground between the leading gun lobby and advocates of better controls, the NRA’s Executive Vice President, Wayne LaPierre, says his group will “absolutely not” take part in the sort of meeting envisaged by Obama. Such a meeting, he said in a series of media interviews, would be with people opposed to the constitutional right to bear arms.

Talking to people of different views is obviously not a concept the politically powerful gun lobby intends to embrace.

In his open letter, LaPierre listed steps the president could take to prevent mass shootings, such as the January 8 rampage in Tucson that killed six people and wounded a member of Congress, Gabrielle Giffords. “One of these (steps) is to call on the national news media to refrain from giving deranged criminals minute-by-minute coverage of their heinous acts, which only serves to encourage copycat behavior.”

It’s an argument that presupposes that there are plenty of deranged Americans who, like the Tucson shooter, are well-armed, passed the background check required to purchase guns, and are primed to spring into action after they see scenes of carnage on television. It’s also an argument fit for a pre-Internet dictatorship where presidents could tell the media how and what to report.

Until he tip-toed into the subject of gun violence on March 13, with an op-ed article in the Arizona Daily Star, Obama had kept silent on the issue, disappointing many of those who had voted him into office after a campaign in which he promised various gun control measures, including a permanent ban on the sale of assault weapons. The disappointment ran so deep that one of the most prominent gun control groups, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, gave him an “F”, a failing grade,  after his first year in office.

The president’s belated entry into the discussion, stirred anew after the Tucson shooting, will not earn him a reputation as an audacious reformer of a system even some gun enthusiasts admit is defective. “No guts on gun reform,” noted a headline over an opinion piece critical of Obama in The Washington Post.

OBAMA MUM ON KEY ISSUES

The president made no mention of assault rifles, no mention of the high-capacity magazines control advocates want banned, no mention of private sales of guns that do not require background checks, no mention of the so-called Tiahrt Amendment which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important information to trace guns, no mention of a proposal that would have required around 8,500 gun shops along the border with Mexico to report multiple sales of two or more assault weapons to the same person.

Thousands of weapons from those gun shops end up in Mexico, where more than 36,000 people have died since 2006 in parallel wars drug traffickers wage against each other – for access to the rich U.S. market – and against the government. President Felipe Calderon has repeatedly called for a re-instatement of the ban on assault weapons the administration of George W. Bush allowed to lapse in 2004.

The Mexican government expressed disappointment when the limited measure – it called for reporting, not prohibiting, bulk sales – died in the House of Representatives in February after energetic lobbying by the NRA. For it, and other gun rights group, tighter regulations are part of a long-standing conspiracy to undo the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Passed in 1789, the amendment says that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The sinister forces working for infringement, in the eyes of many gun owners, include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the coalition he set up in 2006, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

It has grown from 15 mayors then to 550 now, advocates “common sense legislation for background checks”, and in January dispatched on a tour of 25 U.S. states a truck carrying a billboard with a running tally of Americans killed by guns since the Tucson mass shooting. When the truck left New York, on February 16, that count stood at 1,300. By March 17, it had risen to 2,316. Daily average: 34.

Such figures do not impress the self-appointed guardians of the Second Amendment. Neither does a bigger number: since the September 11, 2001, attack on New York and Washington, more than a quarter million Americans have died by firearms  (murder, suicide, accidents).

In online discussions about guns, without fail someone comes up with the observation that more people die in car accidents than by bullet. So, goes the inevitable question, should there be restrictions on car sales?

On February 18, the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories. The vote raises a question: Who dominates in the alliance between America and Israel?

Judging from the extent to which one partner defies the will of the other, decade after decade, the world’s only superpower is the weaker partner. When push comes to shove, American presidents tend to bow to Israeli wishes. Barack Obama is no exception, or he would not have instructed his ambassador at the United Nations to vote against a policy he himself stated clearly in the summer of 2009.

“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop,” he said in a much-lauded speech in Cairo.

Compare this with the text of the resolution that drew 14 votes in favor and died with the U.S. veto: “Israeli settlements established in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”

Linguists may quibble over the difference between “illegal” and “illegitimate” but the substance of the two statements is pretty much the same. So why the veto? It followed an energetic campaign by the Israeli government and its allies in the United States to keep the issue out of the United Nations, seen by Israel as a reflexively anti-Israeli body.

Washington’s ambassador at the U.N., Susan Rice, had a different explanation. Though the U.S. opposed settlements, she said, adopting that resolution would have risked hardening the positions of both sides in future negotiations. In other words, let’s return to the parallel universe of the “peace process.”

In that universe, American presidents make optimistic predictions detached from the realities on the ground. George W. Bush, early in 2009: “The peace agreement should happen and can happen by the end of the year.” Obama, last September, held out the prospect of an agreement that would, by next year,” lead to a new member of the United Nations – an independent state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”

While the peace process has sputtered on, Israel has been building settlements in the territory of what would be a Palestinian state. Demands from nine successive U.S. administrations that these settlements – illegal under the Fourth Geneva convention – be stopped have been ignored.

Since the peace process began with the Oslo accord of 1993, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank has risen from around 110,000 to more than 300,000. The government of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu refused to agree even to the extension of a temporary halt, despite an offer of jet fighters worth billion of dollars. American aid has been running at around $8.5 million a day for many years but obviously doesn’t buy much influence.

The number of optimists who still believe in the “two-state solution” – an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel – has been shrinking as the number of settlements grew. The peace process ground to a halt when the Palestinians refused to negotiate as long as there was no halt to settlements.

The problem with America’s role in the process (highlighted again by the February 18 veto) was spelt out with memorable clarity six years ago by Aaron David Miller, who worked in senior roles at the State Department for 25 years as a Middle East negotiator and adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs.

AMERICANS AS ISRAEL’S LAWYERS, NOT HONEST BROKERS

“For far too long,” he wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, “many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peace-making have acted as Israel’s attorney, catering for and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations. If the United States wants to be an honest and effective broker…then surely it can have only one client: the pursuit of a solution that meets the requirements of both sides.”

The obstacles to this are numerous and difficult, from a weak Palestinian leadership that does not represent all Palestinians to fractious Israeli politics that have moved farther and farther to the right and are now dominated by a government whose foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is a settler himself.

But perhaps the most difficult obstacle to American peace-making lies in the United States – the “Israel, right or wrong” crowd and its pervasive influence in Congress. That the Middle East policy decks would be stacked against the Palestinians became clear even before the creation of Israel in 1948.

When President Harry Truman and his top diplomats in the Middle East discussed plans for the partition of Palestine in 1945, the experts warned against it and predicted it would result in foreign policy problems for the U.S. His answer: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

No annual meeting of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee is complete without a senior member of the administration (Democratic or Republican) reminding the audience of the “unbreakable bond” between the U.S. and Israel, as evidenced by the fact that Truman recognized the state of Israel just 11 minutes after its declaration of independence. (His calculation about constituents is not part of the homage.)

So, if the peace process is really dead, as many experts now say, what’s next? At the end of the 2007 Annapolis conference, one of a long string of peace summits that produced photo opportunities but no progress, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had this to say: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-like struggle for equal voting rights…the State of Israel is finished.

“The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”

That rings even more true now, when Israel’s Arab neighbors are ousting their dictators in mass movements for democracy, than it did then.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

After breaking a promise to tackle immigration reform in his first year in office, President Barack Obama now thinks the time has come to deal with the thorny issue “once and for all.” It’s a safe bet that he will fail to repair America’s broken immigration system. Why? George W. Bush helps explain.

The immigration reform Bush championed would have provided tighter control over the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, a new visa system for temporary workers, and a path to legal status for millions of illegal immigrants already in the country. The bill failed in 2007 after running into stiff opposition from congressional leaders of his own Republican party.

In his memoir, Decision Points, he says the debate over the reform had been affected by “a blend of isolationism, protectionism and nativism,” apocalyptic warnings of a “third world invasion and conquest of America” by TV radio hosts and commentators and last but not least the influence of ideological extremes in Congress.

“The failure of immigration reform points out larger concerns about the direction of our politics,” Bush writes in a perceptive passage. Since members of Congress in safe districts do not have to worry about challenges from the opposition party, their greatest vulnerability is getting outflanked in their own party. The result is a drift towards the extreme, he writes, and “this is especially true in the era of bloggers, who make national targets out of politicians they deem ideologically impure.”

That trend was obvious in the 2010 mid-term elections that gave Republicans a 49-seat majority in the House of Representatives and brought in many extremely vocal guardians of ideological purity, adherents to the populist tea party movement.

It is not a congress with an appetite for fixing what Obama, like his predecessor, has described as a broken immigration system. And the obstacles for him are even bigger than they were for Bush. Isolationism, protectionism and nativism are still running strong in the debate. The talk radio hosts and TV commentators Bush complains about in his book treated him, a fellow Republican, much more gently than they do Obama, whom they tend to portray as the devil incarnate.

So Obama’s remark, in his State of the Union address on January 25, that the debate “will be difficult and take time” sounds like the understatement of the year. Particularly because it came just a few weeks after anti-immigration hard-liners added a new element to the long-running political battle.

ANCHOR BABIES” AND THE CONSTITUTION
That involves a constitutional amendment, dating back to 1868, providing U.S. citizenship to almost all babies born in the United States. (The children of foreign diplomats are excluded). In the terminology of proponents of tighter immigration rules, children born to illegal immigrants are “anchor babies,” meant to ensure legal status for their parents and prevent their deportation.

The phrase adds a toxic element to the immigration debate but it is misleading. Until such children reach the age of 21, they cannot sponsor their parents for legal immigration status. That has not stopped an anti-anchor baby movement from gathering momentum.

Two days after Obama’s “once and for all” remark, two Republican senators, Rand Paul and David Vitter, introduced legislation that would end the right to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants born in the U.S.

A day earlier, Arizona Republicans filed similar legislation, part of a coordinated drive in several U.S. states to highlight claims that the federal government is not doing enough to curb illegal immigration.

The aim is to fuel debate over the 14th amendment of the U.S. constitution which guarantees citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Interpreting the second half of that sentence will boost the income of lawyers but do little to repair the immigration system.

The key to doing that is what Bush pursued and Obama echoed in his State of the Union speech: a way to “protect our borders, enforce our laws and address the millions of undocumented workers who are now living in the shadows.”

There are at least 11 million of them and to the ideological purists, any proposal to give them a path to legal status is tantamount to “amnesty,” like “anchor babies” one of the terms that touch emotional buttons and tend to drown practical considerations. Common sense would dictate that border security, an out-of-date visa system and the status of millions of people already in the country must be dealt with simultaneously and in one package.

But for long, leading Republicans have insisted on a sequence – first, there must be full “operational control” over the border, defined by law as “the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics and other contraband.”

The ambitious, or elusive, nature of that requirement was best described by Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano when she was governor of Arizona: “Show me a 50-foot wall and I will show you a 51-foot ladder.”
And the solution?  None in sight. If Obama has a plan on how to solve the problem, he has yet to spell it out clearly.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)