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| Volume XIII, Winter 2006, Number 4 |
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| Editor's Note |
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The Gulf Cooperation Council, an effort at Arab unity that was generated by Britain’s colonial
retreat, is 25 years old. Some of the first articles on the fledgling GCC were published in this journal
in 1983: one by Abdulla Bishara, the first secretary-general of the organization, and another by
Abdulla El-Kuwaize, assistant secretary-general for economic affairs at that time. The GCC Charter
and Unified Economic Agreement were also reprinted in a special Documentation section. A salient
quote from Secretary-General Bishara’s piece deserves repeating, “It is impossible to separate the
security of the Gulf from the question of Palestine. No matter what we say, the Gulf will never be
able to arrive at security and stability unless this question of the Middle East is resolved.”
Twenty-three years and several wars later, a solution still eludes the parties, and the Gulf is in
turmoil.
It is often said that “everyone” knows the requirements of peace between Israelis and Palestinians
— and that it could be achieved quickly if people of good will came to power in Jerusalem and
Washington — but it seems to be receding over the far horizon. Even the foreign-policy elders
from the team of Bush the father, headed by James Baker, who are trying to rescue Bush the son
from the debacle in Iraq, may not be able to save the day. Another international peace conference
is impossible this time; Muslim religious partisans are ascendant now, and the United States does
not want to accord them a place at the table. Besides, the current administration refuses to
negotiate with Iran. The situation was different in 1991, when the United States was perceived as
the world's benign superpower, rescuer of Kuwait from the clutches of Saddam Hussein. The call
to an international peace conference in Madrid was met with an optimism that today seems naïve.
This time the first step, improving the situation in Iraq, is itself an almost impossible task, even
though the political consensus in Washington is that this issue needs to be off the table by the
2008 presidential election.
There is a bright side: the United States will probably not attack Iran. This does not sit well
with the Olmert government in Israel and its supporters in the United States. Israel hints often that
it will take matters into its own hands, but it would need the firm backing of Washington to attack
Iran. The U.S. midterm election results indicate some distaste for military adventure, even as
elected officials profess support for whatever Israel might do. Behind the scenes there is much
more going on, though few members of the Establishment will speak frankly about the U.S.-Israel
relationship. Israel remains the elephant in the corner when the Middle East is discussed at public
forums. This year, the war in Lebanon and the murderous assaults in Gaza have revealed a country
in trouble, its friends unable to help — though its enemies may be powerless to destroy it. Only
Israel itself can do that, and it appears to be busy at the task. Three articles in this journal deal
directly with the problem of America’s close embrace of the Jewish state: Wesley Moore on war
crimes during last summer’s fight with Hizbollah, Ronald Stockton on divestiture and the Presbyterian
Church, and Chas. Freeman on Israel’s lack of talent for peace making.
Most American political figures are wary of calling public attention to the need for a reasonable
peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. Former President Jimmy Carter, by
contrast, soldiers on. His forthcoming book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has drawn criticism
from many of his fellow Democrats who are still in office. They have urged him not to use the
loaded Afrikaans word to describe Israel’s ethnically based oppression and have even pressured
Simon & Schuster to recall the book and change the title. Perhaps Carter’s book can breathe some
new life into the moribund search for peace, though it seems improbable, given the hysterical
reaction to the title. The substance will now be secondary to the distraction of whether his rhetoric
is antisemitic.
The redefining of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians since 9/11 has made it
respectable to ignore questions of fairness, equity and international law. The dispute is now often
characterized as a case of terrorist barbarism provoking the understandable reaction of beleaguered
Israeli innocents wanting to go about their lives in peace but having to fight against evil, more in
sorrow than in anger. Fortunately, there is some self-criticism going on in Israel (and a little among
the Hamas leadership, as Ghazi Hamad writes in this issue). The respected author David Grossman
gave an eloquent speech on the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination that has gained wide
attention, particularly as his son had been killed in Lebanon on the last day of Israel’s recent war of
choice. Grossman asked, “How do we continue to watch as though hypnotized by the insanity,
rudeness, violence and racism that has overtaken our home? …Rabin took the road of peace with
the Palestinians …because he discerned very wisely that Israeli society would not be able to
sustain itself endlessly in a state of unresolved conflict.” He advised Prime Minister Olmert to
“turn to the Palestinians; …address them over the heads of Hamas; appeal to their moderates,
…acknowledge their ongoing suffering. … Make them an offer their moderates can accept.” If
only. The welcoming by the Olmert government of Avigdor Lieberman and his far-right party into
the ruling coalition is the latest indicator that compromise is not being considered.
Israel’s hard-liners are no doubt puzzling over the U.S. election results. There are clear
indications of the limited popular appeal of the Bush war project — the “long war,” that is, of which
Iraq is only one theater. At the Middle East Policy Council’s recent Capitol Hill conference “Are
We Trapped in the War on Terror?” the question of how we got into the Iraq War came up. The
well-known military analyst Edward Luttwak, who opposed the war on practical grounds, said he
knows the neoconservatives who promoted it and that they were primarily interested in fostering
democracy in the region in order to modernize it. Paul Wolfowitz himself admitted in an interview in
Vanity Fair just after the 2003 invasion that the WMD issue was used to gain support for the war
because it was the most persuasive to the general public. To paraphrase Luttwak, war brought
modernity and secularism to feudal Europe, and it might be expected do the same to the tribally
based societies of the Middle East, remaking them more to our liking.
The many recent critiques of the Iraq debacle (see the Lang and Record book reviews) focus
on the tactical incompetence of the military occupation and the malfeasance of civilian contractors
rather than on strategic questions. But why were so many in the American political Establishment
convinced of the value of the Iraq project in the first place? Tony Judt of New York University has
put the most generous interpretation on one part of it. A high-minded sub-group comprising
“liberal hawks” such as Paul Berman and Michael Ignatieff had invested so much in the ideas and
rhetoric of universal values and human rights that they were caught in a trap after 9/11. They had
to choose sides between Good and Evil, a no-brainer. These fellow travelers were very useful to
the neocons, though not for reasons either universal or moral. Their main foreign-policy fixation
was the security of Israel, which they thought could be arranged by forcing radical political change
on all its neighbors, starting with the low-hanging fruit — the weak rogue state of Iraq. They
claimed that fostering democracy was their goal, though after elections brought Islamists to power
all over the region, they may have started having second thoughts.
Some neocons are now even claiming to have been against the Iraq War in the first place.
“The levels of brutality that we’ve seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I under-estimated
the depravity,” says Richard Perle in a recent Vanity Fair article by David Rose. He adds that total
defeat — an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic “failed state” — is not yet
inevitable but is becoming more likely. “And then,” says Perle, “you’ll get all the mayhem that the
world is capable of creating.” As this is written, on November 11, a question arises that the German
chancellor in World War I posed upon learning that his army commander was going to resume the
ghastly, futile assaults on Verdun: “Where does the incompetence end and the crime begin?”
Anne Joyce
November 11, 2006
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