Israel to Rice: “Back off.” Rice to Israel: “Okay.”

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has told US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to back off with respect to Israel’s attack on Lebanon. That’s according to Steve Clemons, who writes on foreign policy and has what he describes as reliable sources within the state department.

Clemons, who works on public diplomacy and foreign policy strategy issues at the New America Foundation, says the exchange occurred when Rice called Olmert to urge restraint on the Israeli actions in Gaza and Lebanon.

He went on to say that “Rice is not one to be told to back off without the other party paying a price,” but it’s far from apparent that Rice is in the position to exact any sort of price from Israel. What is apparent is that at the same time Rice’s appeal was rejected, Rice’s deputy at the UN, John Bolton, vetoed a Qatar-sponsored resolution calling on Israel to halt the assault on Gaza, while her boss offered outright support for Israel’s actions.

Among the problems Rice faces is that the US has no moral authority on the use of force in any situation, including force used to visit collective punishments on civilians; if it’s possible to project negative moral authority, the US is doing so. We hold more prisoners without charge than the Israelis do; we have flattened an Iraqi city, Falluja, killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians in pursuit of someone, Zarqawi, who may not have even been in the city; our soldiers have raped and murdered Iraqi civilians; our occupation of Iraq has proved every bit as deadly and counter-productive as Israel’s of Palestinian territory, and we have shown even less of an inclination to support a legitimate government in Iraq, or even the ability to do so, than the Israelis have in the occupied territories.

There’s no telling whether Olmert has a sense of irony sufficient to find humor in any US attempt to calm the Israeli military actions against Gaza and Lebanon, which is to say that if Clemons is right, we don’t know whether Olmert laughed at Rice’s diplomatic initiative or just dismissed it as unwarranted meddling. Either way, Bush has made perfectly clear that while he may find the fallout from what is looking more and more like the inauguration of another endless war in the region unpleasant, he has no intention of doing anything to reign the Israelis in even in the unlikely event that he could.

Bush reiterated his support for Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah party got creamed in the elections that led to the Hamas government, and whom Israel’s actions have rendered completely irrelevant.

Equally irrelevant, and macabrely comedic in their own right, were Rice’s remarks at the Moscow G-8 summit reaffirming the US commitment to the “Roadmap to Peace” in Israel and Palestine.

We have reaffirmed several commitments, first and foremost our commitment to a two-state solution, the course of which, the pathway of which, is developed in the roadmap and our hopes that all parties will find a way soon back onto the roadmap so that a two-state solution can be found.
[...]
As concerns the current situation and the current crisis, we also had a discussion of that. That is detailed in the statement that has been released by the parties here. Let me just say that this crisis, of course, just underscores the need to have all parties, all Palestinian parties, work for an end to terrorist activities. We also called on the Palestinian Government and other parties to secure the release of the Israeli soldier. And we are asking Israel to exercise restraint in this circumstance because with restraint perhaps we can get back to a place where there can be hopes again for a peace process.

“Perhaps we can get back to a place where there are hopes …” That’s about as neat a summation of the administration’s Middle East policy as one could hope for, and an unusually frank one.

Let’s review: Iraqis, living in a country which the president describes as a place where a free press and freedom of religion flourish, are effectively without a government; so are Palestinians; so soon may be the Lebanese. Iran is both under threat of attack from Israel and the US and, should it be attacked, a grave threat on its own; moving westward, Afghanistan is decaying once again and has joined Kashmir as the playing field for the contest between nuclear foes India and Pakistan. Where we have not weakened democracy, or stood by as others weaken it, we have salted the earth where it might take root.

We have killed outright tens of thousands of civilians, and have acquiesced in the killings of more by our putative allies; we have normalized the practice of seizing and imprisoning thousands of people who may or may not pose a threat, holding them under conditions that violate every standard of international and domestic law, and then releasing many of them with an “Oops,” and in the process empowered the very people whose own heinous crimes we condemn.

The roadmap is dead: major landmarks on it — Gaza’s power plant, Beiruit’s airport — have been blown to bits. The extremists who successfully goaded the US and Israel into fatally overwrought retaliations, and the extremists in the US and Israeli governments who have against all odds increased the popularity of groups like al Qaeda and Hezbullah and Hamas, have colluded in making a dangerous world exponentially more so.

The first warplanes sheared through the sky at about 3:30 am Friday, just as the call to prayer wavered out from the mosque, the faint, pre-recorded voice of the muezzin drowned in the rising growl of their engines. The bombings began soon after, and the anti-aircraft guns kicked in at about 4 am; we didn’t get to sleep until dawn. I woke up at 9, when a text message bleeped into my cell phone. It was from a friend in Baghdad, who wrote “I hope U R OK and fine. We all here in Iraq feel worried about U.” I was glad to hear from him, but it his message didn’t make me feel any better: When Iraqis are texting from Baghdad to see if you’re OK, you know it’s not good.

That’s Annia Ciezaldo writing from Beirut in The Nation. Feel safer yet?