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| Volume X, Winter 2003, Number 4 |
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| Editor's Note |
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Is the closest parallel to the Iraq War not Vietnam but Algeria (with the United States in the role of France), as several analysts have suggested? The 1967 film "The Battle of Algiers" was recently screened at the Pentagon. To summarize, the powerful imperialists get psychologically wasted and abruptly pull out, after an ugly leave taking. Whether the right term is "quagmire" or just "a long, slow slog" may be a distinction without much difference. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seemed lost in the fog of this slog in one of his snowflake memos, dropped October 22 on four of his senior people. Some say he leaked it himself, perhaps to signal that he was too smart to buy the rosy scenario the White House had been spinning to an increasingly skeptical public. Less than a week later, on day one of Ramadan, his deputy was nearly killed in a rocket attack on a hotel in Baghdad. That same day, the Red Cross headquarters was blown up by a car bomb. Just in time for the Sunday talk shows on November 2, a Chinook helicopter was shot down near the Iraqi capital by a shoulder-fired missile, killing at least 16 American soldiers and wounding many more.
Things are going so badly that even those responsible can no longer bring themselves to deny that we are in serious trouble. President Bush, although he did not personally concoct the Iraq adventure, is having to answer for the mess to a suddenly critical press corps. His Sunday-school-teacher affect has turned testy. He even blamed sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln for carefully positioning the "mission accomplished" backdrop for his TV speech. Reporters are no longer accepting platitudes about “evil doers." At the Pentagon, the public-relations machine is working overtime to generate favorable press for Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who recently was quoted as saying, without apparent irony, “There are too many foreigners in Iraq." Wolfowitz's alleged idealism, humanism and warm feelings for Iraqis cancel out his hubris, fallacious reasoning, self-serving mendacity and irresponsibility, we are assured. Meanwhile, back on earth, ever fewer people seem to see Wolfowitz's war as emblematic of his alleged virtues. And the men and women of the U.S. Army have been left holding the bag in Baghdad.
How did we get into this miserable position? We apparently had no strategy, only tactics -- just like whoever is shooting at our forces in Iraq. (Diehards? Outside agitators? Perhaps, as Pogo famously discerned, "We have met the enemy and he is us.") Blitzkrieg and out was the plan, now history. The Iraqi defectors wanted us to help with their "experiment," to use Kanaan Makiya's term. Makiya and others bore witness to the savagery of Saddam Hussein, the appalling outrages the neocon architects of the war needed to divert attention from the awkward lack of WMD and al-Qaeda connections. A war justified by urgent threats to our national security is now revealed as a pure exercise in humanitarianism, unconnected to U.S. national interests, vital or otherwise.
Some analysts suggest there was a strategy that could not be discussed openly because the public would never have bought it. It involved remaking the Middle East to purge it of Arab nationalism and cut it up along ethnic, religious and sectarian lines. Then Tom Friedman's description of the region would be truly apt: tribes with flags. Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Bashar al-Asad, Husni Mubarak and the Al Saud stand in the way of Israeli rightist fantasies and their echoes in the Pentagon and the vice-president's office. If the Arabs won't make peace on Israel's terms, they will be reduced to their more manageable constituent parts. In this vision, there could be some local democracy, but responsibility for "protecting" the energy resources would have to devolve to Big Brother, while Israel managed the rest of the issues in the region.
Such a strategy assumes that security depends on creating "good Arabs" and that the only good Arab is an Arab shocked and awed into servility. The theory behind this strategy is one Ariel Sharon has spent a lifetime trying, with conspicuous empirical lack of success, to prove. It is a strategy that has been shown to be both morally corrosive and fatally counterproductive in practice. It has backfired so badly that the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces felt obliged to declare that military tactics against the Palestinians in the territories are now so repressive that they are fomenting "hatred and terrorism that might be impossible to control." This must have been a difficult admission for the head of the most important institution in Israel to make. It is one with major implications for U.S. policy in Iraq as well as the Holy Land. The violence of occupation and the violence of terrorism are, Sharon has demonstrated, causally linked. This strongly suggests that what the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands has done for Israel and the security of its citizens, the U.S. occupation of Iraq might well, in time, do for us and our personal security at home and abroad.
The United States is responsible for its own errors in Iraq. But we cannot escape a measure of culpability for self-destructive Israeli policies in the West Bank, Gaza and beyond. We give Israel a fortune in tax money every year and say, in effect, do what you like with it; we'll give you more, regardless. It should not surprise us that Ariel Sharon then feels free to act, regardless of our views and interests, or that Israelis have few incentives to apply cost-benefit analysis to their practices and actions. Unqualified support of this kind has disemboweled the peace process and forced those who want peace to pursue it regardless of the United States. Amy Ayalon, the former head of Israel's security service, Shin Bet, and Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian activist and president of Birzeit University, are working together to collect signatures on a document of principles for a two-state solution to the conflict. The Geneva Understandings, new agreements settling the major issues of contention, were crafted recently by, among others, the senior Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo and a former member of Ehud Barak's government, Yossi Beilin (see his review of Arbitrating Armed Conflict in the back of this journal).
Other Israeli critics have gone public. Former speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg has eloquently warned about the moral bankruptcy the occupation has visited on the Zionist dream. Tony Judt, an American Jew and head of the Remarque Institute at New York University, has called the Jewish state an "anachronism" among the modern nations of the West, which reject racial exclusivism. Europeans today consider Israel to be the "greatest threat to world peace," according to an EU poll. This in turn has caused the Simon Wiesenthal Center to attempt to get the EU kicked out of the Quartet, the entity in charge of bringing the two parties together. Israel is also trying to have the definition of antisemitism revised to include criticism of "how the government of Israel chooses to protect itself." Despite their military power, Israelis rightly feel insecure.
The cowardice of American political leaders in the face of the "friends" of Israel is legendary, and this is an election year. Ariel Sharon will be able to continue using excessive force, collective punishment and other repressive tactics -- until his own people and army stop him. Our government has the military power to do the same elsewhere in the Middle East -- until the American people and the U.S. military stop them.
Anne Joyce, November 2003
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