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June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
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McGovern
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Close
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June
13, 2003
Jumbled Nightmares
in the Middle East
The
Man Who Wasn't There
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
I read something recently about America's Middle
East initiative, the "road map," offering Bush the
chance for greatness. Verbal excess like that demands a realistic
discussion of the prospects.
When Britain achieved a breakthrough
for peace in Northern Ireland, it did not do so by telling the
IRA that its representatives were terrorists, unacceptable to
negotiate. It had not surrounded the houses of IRA leaders with
tanks, blasting away until ruins remained. It did not forbid
IRA leaders from attending church or travelling. Yet this is
the way--along with a daily toll of reprisal killings and assassinations--Mr.
Sharon prepares for peace.
For many reasons, I can only be pessimistic
about the "road map." Sharon's immediate instinct was
to reject and belittle it. Under pressure from Washington to
reverse himself, he only did so with a list of qualifiers long
enough to make it a different document than the one Palestinians
accepted.
The fact that Mr. Sharon used, just once,
the honest word occupation, normally forbidden in the Cloud-cuckoo-land
of Israeli politics, and offered to trash a couple of clumps
of abandoned, beaten-up trailers where the most-crazed settlers
play cowboys-and-Indians with assault rifles do seem less than
signs of great events to come.
Consider some of the constraints around
this initiative. First, it is sponsored by a President who has
just launched the United States into two meaningless, destructive
wars. American forces, resources, and diplomacy now face huge,
complex, and long-term obligations in Afghanistan and Iraq that
did not exist a short time ago. Bush has, at the same time, threatened
Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and, at least in the case of North
Korea, a serious conflict may well be coming.
Second, this President's policies have
not ended terrorism, nor do I believe they ever can, which means
American concerns and resources will be stretched even further.
The President's policies since 9/11 have been exactly those followed
by Israel for fifty years, striking out against someone, almost
anyone, wearing the right kind of headdress. Has fifty years
of that solved Israel's problems? If anything, it has only created
new and desperate enemies, like the hopeless young people willing
to blow themselves up to strike a blow.
Third, the plan is in the hands of Secretary
of State Colin Powell, who has proved ineffective at almost everything
undertaken, a judgement from one who once admired him. More importantly,
Powell's stature among Bush's intimates is so low that you suspect
they have secretly uncovered he is a distant relative of Bill
Clinton, the political anti-Christ of neocon America.
Bush appointed Powell to reassure the
world that America had not fallen to a coup of drawling closet-fascists,
but the appointment has not proved especially helpful. The insane,
arrogant intensity of Bush's inner cabinet--including Rumsfeld,
Cheney, and Ashcroft--does mean that any civilized foreigner
with something important to say to the United States might rather
face Powell, but he or she will be addressing an exalted messenger
with little influence.
Powell works hard trying to overcome
the zealots' distrust, as with his recent rants and threats about
everything from French ingratitude and delusions of yet finding
strategic weapons in Iraq to warning Mr. Arafat about blocking
the "road map." He's even gone back in time to the
1960s by attacking the neocons' second-most hated figure after
Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro. All this only has him clumsily climbing
trees, sawing off unwanted limbs that block the Oval Office view,
while the viciously dysfunctional family that hired him gazes
through the windows gleefully awaiting his plunge to earth.
But perhaps the most important reason
for bleakness over the "road map" is the man who is
not at the discussions.
Yasser Arafat is now treated as the source
of all evil in the Middle East. He is for Sharon the Middle East's
equivalent of what Bill Clinton is for America's neocons, although
in Israel the nasty game is played with real blood, and likely
only Arafat's world-stature and connections have saved him from
Sharon's assassins.
Arafat doesn't speak English well, making
it easy to give him a bad press in America, and he is indeed
given a bad press. Few Americans even know that Arafat has a
better analytical brain than their current President. He is a
civil engineer and comes from a family that includes a remarkable
brother who is a pediatrician and the founder of many medical
institutions--not exactly the kind of hot-tempered, inarticulate
tribal chief he is so often portrayed in America.
As with almost anyone raised to authority
in his part of the world, his experience with democracy is limited
to being on the receiving end of what nations boasting of democratic
values--America, Britain and Israel--dish out abroad but wouldn't
dream of doing at home.
Since democracy naturally flows from
a healthy, growing society, it should come as no surprise that
Arafat's democratic values are less than perfect. One form or
another of authoritarianism is the way all the world's people
have been governed before experiencing the revolution of economic
growth. It is the way most of the world's people are governed
still. Does that preclude us from having negotiations, treaties,
and agreements with the governments of most of the world's people?
I do not think there is the slightest
question that Arafat sincerely wants peace, although the peace
he wants includes the long-term interests of all parties with
the injustices and grievances attending the birth of modern Israel
having been reasonably settled. This runs up against the Sharon
concept of peace which means absolute, unconditional security
for Israel while giving little more than words to those who insist
on running around in keffiahs and kaftans. One suspects Sharon's
idea of a concession is to have his tanks roll back from the
center to the edge of a village recently flattened.
Of course, all of human history and the
especially the discoveries of modern physics demonstrate that
there are no absolute certainties in this world. Einstein, troubled
about quantum mechanics, said God didn't play with dice, but
we now know he was wrong about that. Israel's insistence on impossible
absolutes always prevents genuine progress--that is, the kind
of practical progress that characterizes normal human relationships
and decent relations among nations.
Short of driving the Palestinians, like
three-and-a-half million head of cattle, across the Jordan river--an
idea which finds considerable support in Israel and in America's
loony Bible-belt--Sharon's vision of peace appears to consign
Palestinians perpetually to walled ghettos, dotted with settlements
of armed, hostile fanatics and crisscrossed with no-go roads.
That is a fairly accurate summary of Barak's Camp David proposal
for a Palestinian state, and nothing since has happened to increase
Israel's inclination to be large or statesmanlike--rather, quite
the opposite.
Arafat correctly rejected Barak's degrading
concept of a nation, feeling humiliated after so many years of
effort and so many compromises before and after the Oslo Accords.
Accepting such an offer would only have seen Palestinians assassinate
him and likely tipped them into civil war, hardly contributions
to Israeli security. Indeed, once the insanity of civil war takes
hold anywhere, normal restraints and humanity are pitched aside
in a frenzy of killing and vengeance.
The second Intifadah can be understood
both as a natural human reaction to decades of oppression and
as an escape-valve for immense internal pressures. Israel blindly
insists on seeing only terrorism.
American commentators like Thomas Friedman
embroider the theme of Palestinian unreasonableness by asking
why Palestinians have not followed the teachings of Gandhi and
Dr. King to achieve their goals. I do not know whether this is
asked from naivete or utter cynicism, but the answer is simple:
the structures of these abusive situations are entirely different.
Israel, on short notice, can close Palestine
completely down and has done so briefly many times. Israel simply
imports guest workers or new migrants for the many daily tasks
done by Palestinians. Neither Imperial India nor Bull Connor's
South could do this. Also, the afflicted people of Gandhi and
King lived in many locations and were actually the large majority
in many or most places. Further, Palestinians have no citizenship
and no rights and no standing before Israeli courts. Even citizens
of Israel have no defined rights. A nation defined by ethnic/religious
identity makes a meaningful bill or charter of rights something
of a logical puzzle, a puzzle Israel has not solved in over fifty
years.
The possibility of bloody civil war among
the Palestinians, brought on by the steps of the "road map"
itself is not to be treated lightly, because the steps of every
American initiative always demand concessions disproportionately
from the weak side. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas
has only restated the obvious in refusing a harsh crack-down
on militants for fear of civil war, something Arafat has understood
for decades and that has always informed his resistance to Israel's
harsh, absolute demands.
Arafat has spent his adult life trying
to get a reasonable settlement for the Palestinians. He has made
mistakes, plenty of them, but the truth is that none of them
proved as bloody and destructive as, for instance, Mr. Sharon's
brutal invasion of Lebanon. Yet, Mr. Sharon's career of blunders
and bloodshed seems not to have disqualified him as spokesman
for his people. Indeed, he does more than this, he now determines
who is a fitting representative for the Palestinians.
Excluding Arafat may look attractive
from the limited vantage points of Israel's volatile politics
and Bush's born-again crowd, but to an independent observer,
it looks hopeless.
Israelis may be the victims of their
own propaganda about Arafat the terrorist, believing that his
replacement in talks can genuinely change the dynamics of the
situation. How easily Israelis forget that several of their prime
ministers had extensive service as terrorists on their resumes.
The achievement of peace requires genuine
risks and brutally hard work from all parties, but Israel demonstrates
no willingness to assume the kind of risks that ended Apartheid
in South Africa and has come close to ending the sectarian violence
of Northern Ireland, and Bush is someone who has never worked
hard at anything in his life. The existing human and political
mess in the Middle East is frozen in place by the immense protection
and subsidies of the United States, and so we come full circle
to the nature of the people in the present American government
and the terrible new obligations they have thoughtlessly assumed.
Then we have Bush's intimate relationship with America's delusional
Religious Right whose leaders daily rant against a Palestinian
state and cheerfully anticipate the promise of Armageddon from
the jumbled nightmares of the Book of Revelations.
Hopes for greatness? I think not.
Today's
Features
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/12
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