America and the Middle East: How to learn from history

What Barack Obama can learn from Bill Clinton’s failed peacemaking IF ONLY men could learn from history. Alas, experience is a “lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us”. It is fitting that Martin Indyk, one of America’s most seasoned diplomats in the Middle East, starts his insider’s account of peacemaking under Bill Clinton with this famous passage by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. For if Barack Obama intends to make peace between Israel and the Arabs, his first job is to understand why Mr Clinton, the last president to make a real effort to do so, discovered that he could not. Mr Clinton faced far riper circumstances in the 1990s than Mr Obama inherits today. He had in Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, a visionary leader willing to return the Golan Heights to Syria and negotiate directly with Yasser Arafat, whom previous Israeli leaders considered an incorrigible terrorist. America wielded vast regional influence following its routing ... (link)