E-mail a friendDr. Martin Indyk
airdate May 7, 2007
Dr. Martin Indyk was the first Jewish U.S. ambassador to Israel and worked intimately with five Israeli prime ministers. He's currently Director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Born in London and raised in Australia, Indyk has taught at several prestigious institutions, including Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center for Middle East Studies. He's also founding executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which specializes in Arab-Israel relations.
Dr. Martin Indyk
Tavis: Martin Indyk is the former U.S. ambassador to Israel who now heads the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Prior to his post in Tel Aviv, he served as an assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs in the Clinton administration. He joins us tonight from Washington. Ambassador Indyk, nice to have you back on the program, sir.
Martin Indyk: My pleasure. Thanks very much for having me.
Tavis: Let me start by asking your thoughts on this meeting that many some months ago thought unlikely between Condi Rice, our secretary of state, at this Iraq conference, and a Syrian representative.
Indyk: Well, you're right. It does seem a very unlikely occurrence, given everything else that's happened over the last six years, but I think Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state is very different to her role as national security adviser and she's now embarked on a diplomatic engagement that's quite breathtaking, in terms of if you look at it. It's North Korea, it's Iran, it's Syria. It's just about all those members of the axis of evil. And in this way, she could not be acting without the backing of the president; she's not freelancing here. So it represents something like a diplomatic revolution for the Bush administration.
Tavis: To your point of these countries being a part of that axis of evil that President Bush spoke of begs two questions: why, and why now?
Indyk: Well, I think that after six years of saying, "We don't do diplomacy, we just do policy," the administration came to understand that there was an advantage in (inaudible) not just war-warring, partly because the war-warring hasn't gone very well, as we can all see.
But I think that they came around to understanding that some problems don't get solved by a policy of regime change and preemption and democratization, and the urgency of trying to deal with the difficulties in Iraq in particular, by trying to get the neighbors to act differently, particularly Syria and Iran, the urgency of trying to head off Iran's nuclear program and North Korea's for that moment is all part of this sense that you have to indulge in the normal statecraft that nations engage in. And it's a good thing, too.
Tavis: Let me ask you, because you're much more adept, obviously, at diplomacy here than, say, I am. But I was just reading an article on something totally - this is a total non sequitur - just reading an article not long ago that reminded me that you never catch up on lost sleep. There is no such thing as catching up on lost sleep.
I raise that silly analogy to ask whether or not you can catch up on lost diplomacy. For all this time that they said, “We will not talk, “and now they've decided for whatever reason or reasons to talk, have we lost something in this time that cannot be gained? That cannot be brought back?
Indyk: Yes. Not exactly like lost sleep, but what we've lost in the process is the credibility of the United States. We've lost that not because we didn't talk to our adversaries; we lost it because things didn't go as planned Iraq. And that has had a traumatic influence on our influence in the region.
And on top of that, in areas like the Israeli-Palestinian arena, where the secretary of state also is lending her hand in trying to resolve that conflict now, six years of sitting on the sidelines while the Israelis and Palestinians had at it in the most bloody and horrible way has destroyed the trust between them, the confidence between them, and that makes it much more difficult now to try to resolve the problem than if the Bush administration had engaged in it in the first place.
Tavis: So we know that Secretary Rice, of course, last week spoke to a Syrian representative. We also know, conversely, that she did not speak - although had the opportunity, could have - did not speak with anyone from Iran. What do you make of that non-conversation still, as we speak?
Indyk: Well, her aides did have conversation with their Iranian counterparts, as they did in the earlier meeting of the Iraq's neighbor's group. But I think what we have here is typical of the sorry state of relations between Iran and the United States. It takes two to tango, to borrow a different analogy, and in the history of the relationship between the United States and the revolutionary republic of Iran, it's always been missteps.
When we've been ready, they haven't; when they're ready, we're not. And what we've got now is a situation where the secretary of state is almost chasing after them. And so they figure well, we'll hang back. So the foreign minister was not in any particular hurry to engage with the secretary of state, even though two years ago the Iranians were very keen to engage with us.
The secretary of state has a proposal on the table with the Iranians designed to meet their reasonable needs when it comes to nuclear energy, but to deny them the ability to make nuclear weapons. It involves a number of quite juicy carrots, but for the time being, the Iranians are not nibbling. And she'd be quite happy to sit down with them now and start negotiating, as she has her people doing with the North Koreans, but the Iranians are playing coy.
Tavis: Now we've talked about the axis of evil, at least those countries that were listed by President Bush in that trilogy, as it were. Let me ask one final question here while we stay in the region. This might seem a bit inside baseball - that is to say, the politics of what happens inside of Israel with regard to its prime minister.
It might seem a bit inside baseball to some watching tonight. Let me ask a question, then, as to why what happens inside of Israel as we speak with regard to whether or not Mr. Olmert, the current prime minister, is going to be pushed out because of disappointment in this war - the most recent war with Hezbollah, that it didn't accomplish the mission that was set out to be achieved. Is he going to survive, and if he doesn't survive, how does that impact us here in America?
Indyk: Well, he seems determined to hang on. But he has desperately low approval ratings, a final report at the end of August from this commission of inquiry that's probably going to recommend that he resign. The first report was scathing. And the bottom line is that the secretary of state, as part of this overall diplomatic push in the region has been trying to jump start final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
On the Israeli side, we have a leader and a government that doesn't have the trust of its people, so it's very hard to see how they would take the kinds of risks necessarily to get a process moving. And on the Palestinian side, we've got Hamas in the government, and Hamas doesn't recognize Israel and doesn't want to negotiate with it, and is engaged in a struggle for power with the nationalist part, Fatah, and the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
So she doesn't have a lot to work with on either side in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, which is too bad because finally when we have a secretary of state and behind her a president who really want to try to make something happen there, the parties themselves are in a very weak condition. It's difficult to see how they would engage.
Tavis: Clearly, we can't solve these issues here tonight, as they've been going on for generations, but we will continue to talk about these all-important issues relative to peace one day, perhaps, in the Middle East. Mr. Ambassador, nice to have you on the program, as always.
Indyk: Thank you. My pleasure.
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