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Obama Is Right: America Can't Fix the Middle East
(Politico) Aaron David Miller - The very idea that the United States seriously believes - alone or with its partners - that it can address, much less resolve, the challenges of governance, sectarian conflict, religious divisions, hatreds, lack of respect for human rights, and the conspiratorial and irrational reasoning that afflict large parts of the Arab world is a leap of arrogance and ignorance so large that it threatens to consume what's left of American credibility. America can assist in important ways. But it cannot fix, repair or transform the Middle East - especially right now. Secretary of State Kerry is fond of saying regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that he doubts there's anyone "who doesn't actually know pretty much what a final status agreement actually looks like." That may well be true for the peace process industrial complex, but such statements trivialize the difficulty of actually getting there. The reality, as Kerry's failed 2013 initiative shows, is that neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority agree to those terms, let alone possess the capacity and will to implement them. America has infantilized the Arabs, Iranians, Israelis - and even itself for that matter - by assuming we know what's best, that we can get the locals to actually own and take possession of the things that need to be done, by lecturing, hectoring and offering up clever formulae; or worse, naively trying to scare them with the grim fate that awaits them if they don't choose another, more enlightened course when their own instincts and agenda run in the opposite direction. The Middle East is littered with the remains of great powers that wrongly believed they could impose their will by force on small tribes or persuade them to accept their plans for peace and accommodation. The writer is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.