 |
| Volume XIV, Summer 2007, Number 2 |
| |
| Editor's Note |
| |
As this goes to press, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has just announced his impending retirement from office, to take place at the end of June. He leaves behind a legacy tainted by his enabling of the Bush administration’s Iraq War. By contrast, five days ago, he helped close a peace deal for Northern Ireland, where the leaders of both sides appear to have buried the hatchet after a very long and bitter conflict. Blair deserves great credit for spending a decade and much political capital trying to achieve this result. It makes one think it might be possible to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together using some of the same tools, and we are publishing an article in this issue by a British Member of Parliament who puts forward that case (see Ancram, p. 22). One must remain skeptical, however, due to the “domestic political realities” in the United States that militate against a just outcome along the lines of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the international consensus. In fact, U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross claims he has even managed to morph the long-recognized legal “rights” of the parties into “needs,” a category belonging to the realm of pop psychology. Ross describes this shift in his memoir about the last attempt at a settlement, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (see Norman Finkelstein’s astute analysis in the winter 2007 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies). Ross himself is now a political activist poised to influence any negotiations in the foreseeable future, holding a position of leadership at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a.k.a. AIPAC’s think tank.
It appears that all the high cards are still in the Israelis’ hands. The government of Israel, whether right-wing or left, will be the deciders, and U.S. administrations of whatever stripe will back them, as in 1993, when Rabin made the strategic decision that only peace could make Israel secure and that a favorable deal could be extracted from a weakened Yasser Arafat. The Clinton administration went along, somewhat reluctantly at first. Now that the Islamists are ascendant in Palestine, however, conditions are less favorable for a near-term solution (see Fredricksen, p. 30). For one thing, the leaders of Hamas seem to operate on a different timetable, calculating that their idea of justice will take decades to achieve. Their first marker is 25 years down the road, at the end of a cease-fire that has yet to begin. They will not be rushed, apparently, and the willingness of the population to endure whatever is perpetrated against them, to be victims until the tide of history turns, may change the calculus somewhat.
The administrations of the United States and Israel — boosted by the eloquent Tony Blair — wanted regime change in the Middle East, selling it as the key to the freedom and socioeconomic improvements commonly known here as modernization. When the polities of the region became more like us, peace would break out, they claimed. Many decent and influential people who were eager to promote human rights signed on. Blair would claim to be one of them, though his motives were no doubt mixed; he did not want to be relegated to playing second banana to Jacques Chirac. Of course, now we know that it was “peaceiness” (as Stephen Colbert might put it) rather than the real thing that our leaders had in mind. President Bush’s deputy national security adviser, Elliott Abrams, is actually quoted in the Forward of May 10 to the effect that Condoleezza Rice is just going through the motions (“process”) with her frequent trips to the region, to make the Europeans and moderate Arab governments think the Bush administration is serious about promoting peace.
As regime-change advocates would have it, real peace talks cannot happen first; a deal with Syria involving an exchange of land for peace would cement in place the ruling Baath party of Bashar al-Asad. If he were to regain through negotiations the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since its Blitzkrieg of June 1967, he would be a god to his people, having set right what his father could not. A popular leader is very hard to topple, even in a weak state. The fantasy of finding a Syrian Ahmad Chalabi to take power and stop making trouble for Israel and Lebanon dies hard. This domino was supposed to fall when Iraq was shocked and awed back in 2003 (see the symposium proceedings for a discussion of U.S. concerns about talking to Syria, p. 1).
A comprehensive plan for the Middle East, the Arab Peace Initiative, has been on the table for the past five years, but real negotiations would be difficult to initiate right now, considering the weakness of the Israeli government, if nothing else. The Olmert team, along with the IDF chief of staff, has been found by an official investigating body (the Winograd Commission) to be guilty of incompetence in the July 2006 war in Lebanon: it failed to crush the Hezbollah insurgency (this is only the first of two parts of the judgment; the second is expected in July). The Winograd report echoes the informal verdicts of virtually all those who have looked into the U.S. debacle in Iraq — a tactical mess, a fiasco. On strategic questions, however, there is less commentary from mainstream analysts. It seems to be a given that the United States and Israel have the right to control the region by force, since the other side refuses to capitulate and has been judged by Western elites to be morally inferior besides (see articles inside relating to Gulf security, Iran and the terrorism “war”).
The missing “vision thing” cannot be openly discussed in the United States. Sensitive topics would arise, such as the vital interests of the country and how they might best be realized through alternative policy choices. Honest debate in this election season is hampered, as always, by the political correctness (or, rather, the abject fear) of mainstream political figures, both neoconservative and neoliberal, and the media will not get out ahead of them. They all have to protect themselves from the charge of antisemitism, which has now been successfully conflated with criticism of the State of Israel — an achievement that former Israeli ambassador to the United States Zalman Shoval has claimed as his own. To be fair to the candidates, the voters also seem to prefer just-so stories to hard truths about what is feasible in foreign policy, though the polls indicate that the public is now more eager to leave Iraq than most of the politicos.
Six months ago, Middle East Policy added a member to the very small staff that puts out this journal: Stephen Magro, our new book-review editor. He spent 10 years in the publishing world of New York City dealing with acquisitions in the Middle East field and has been doing a superlative job for us, surveying new books and acquiring reviews from top-flight analysts. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, but can best be reached through the Council or at his e-mail, smagro@mepc.org.
Anne Joyce
May 15, 2007
|
| |
|
