Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International &
Public Affairs, Brown University
9 June 2016 Washington, DC
I have been
asked to speak about the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East, the
realignments occurring among states there, and the prospects for the
achievement of renewed stability in the region.
I’m tempted to suggest that you read my latest book, America’s
Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East. So much has gone wrong that it is hard to be
either brief or optimistic.
Two hundred and
eighteen years ago today, Napoleon was preparing to take Malta. His purpose was to clear an obstacle to his
seizure of Egypt for revolutionary France.
He was able to invade Egypt on July 1, 1798. Napoleon’s campaign there and in Palestine
kicked off a two-century-long effort by the West to transform the Middle
East. European imperial powers and,
latterly, the United States, have repeatedly sought to convert Arabs, Persians,
and Turks to the secular values of the European Enlightenment, to democratize
them, to impose Western models of governance on them in place of indigenous, Islamic
systems, and more recently to persuade them to accept a Jewish state in their
midst.
This experiment
in expeditionary, transformative diplomacy has now definitively failed. The next administration will inherit a
greatly diminished capacity to influence the evolution of the Middle East. Amidst the imbecilities of our interminably
farcical election season, it has proven expedient to blame this on President
Obama. If only he had bombed Syria,
repudiated his predecessor’s agreement to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq,
refused to compromise with Iran on nuclear matters, knuckled under to
Netanyahu, or whatever, the old order in the Middle East would be alive and
well and the United States would still call the shots there.
But this is
nonsense. Our estrangement from the
Middle East derives from trends that are much deeper than the manifest
deficiencies of executive and congressional leadership in Washington. Americans and our partners in the Middle East
have developed contradictory interests and priorities. Where shared values existed at all, they have
increasingly diverged. There have been
massive changes in geo-economics, energy markets, power balances, demographics,
religious ideologies, and attitudes toward America (not just the U.S. government). Many of these changes were catalyzed by
historic American policy blunders. In
the aggregate, these blunders are right up there with the French and German
decisions to invade Russia and Japan’s surprise attack on the United
States. Their effects make current
policies not just unsustainable but counterproductive..
Blunder number one was the failure to
translate our military triumph over Saddam’s Iraq in 1991 into a peace with
Baghdad. No effort was ever made to
reconcile Iraq to the terms of its defeat.
The victors instead sought to impose elaborate but previously
undiscussed terms by UN fiat in the form of the UN Security Council Resolution
687 – “the mother of all resolutions.”
The military basis for a renewed balance of power in the Gulf was there
to be exploited. The diplomatic vision
was not. The George H. W. Bush
administration ended without addressing the question of how to replace war with
peace in the Gulf.
Wars don’t end
until the militarily humiliated accept the political consequences of their
defeat. Saddam gave lip service to UNSCR
687 but took it no more seriously than Netanyahu and his predecessors have
taken the various Security Council resolutions that direct Israel to permit
Palestinians to return to the homes from which it drove them or to withdraw
from the Palestinian lands it has seized and settled. Like Israel’s wars with the Arabs, America’s
war with Iraq went into remission but never ended. In due course, it resumed.
The United States needs to get into the
habit of developing and implementing war termination strategies.
Blunder number two was the sudden
abandonment in 1993 of the strategy of maintaining peace in the Persian Gulf
through a balance of power. With no
prior notice or explanation, the Clinton administration replaced this
longstanding approach with “dual
containment” of both Iraq and Iran. For
decades, offshore balancing had permitted the United States to sustain
stability without stationing forces other than a very small naval contingent in
the Gulf. When the regional balance of
power was undone by the Iran-Iraq War, Washington intervened to restore it,
emphasizing that once Kuwait had been liberated and Iraq cut back down to size,
U.S. forces would depart.
The new policy
of “dual containment” created a requirement for the permanent deployment of a
large U.S. air and ground force in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar as well as
an expanded naval presence in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The political and socioeconomic irritants
this requirement produced led directly to the founding of al Qa`ida and the
9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
“Dual containment” was plausible as a defense of Israel against its two
most potent regional adversaries, Iran and Iraq. But it made no sense at all in terms of
stabilizing the Gulf.
By writing off
Iraq as a balancer of Iran, dual containment also paved the way for the 2003 American
experiment with regime removal in Baghdad.
This rash action on the part of the United States led to the de facto
realignment of Iraq with Iran, the destabilization and partition of Iraq, the
destabilization and partition of Syria, the avalanche of refugees now
threatening to unhinge the EU, and the rise of the so-called “Islamic state” or
Da`esh. With Iraq having fallen into the
Iranian sphere of influence, there is no
apparent way to return to offshore balancing.
The U.S. is stuck in the Gulf.
The political irritations this generates ensure that some in the region
will continue to seek to attack the U.S. homeland or, failing that, Americans
overseas.
The United States needs to find an
alternative to the permanent garrisoning of the Gulf.
Blunder number three was the unthinking
transformation in December 2001 of what had been a punitive expedition in
Afghanistan into a long-term pacification campaign that soon became a NATO
operation. The objectives of the NATO
campaign have never been clear but appear to center on g
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International &
Public Affairs, Brown University
9 June 2016 Washington, DC
I have been
asked to speak about the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East, the
realignments occurring among states there, and the prospects for the
achievement of renewed stability in the region.
I’m tempted to suggest that you read my latest book, America’s
Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East. So much has gone wrong that it is hard to be
either brief or optimistic.
Two hundred and
eighteen years ago today, Napoleon was preparing to take Malta. His purpose was to clear an obstacle to his
seizure of Egypt for revolutionary France.
He was able to invade Egypt on July 1, 1798. Napoleon’s campaign there and in Palestine
kicked off a two-century-long effort by the West to transform the Middle
East. European imperial powers and,
latterly, the United States, have repeatedly sought to convert Arabs, Persians,
and Turks to the secular values of the European Enlightenment, to democratize
them, to impose Western models of governance on them in place of indigenous, Islamic
systems, and more recently to persuade them to accept a Jewish state in their
midst.
This experiment
in expeditionary, transformative diplomacy has now definitively failed. The next administration will inherit a
greatly diminished capacity to influence the evolution of the Middle East. Amidst the imbecilities of our interminably
farcical election season, it has proven expedient to blame this on President
Obama. If only he had bombed Syria,
repudiated his predecessor’s agreement to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq,
refused to compromise with Iran on nuclear matters, knuckled under to
Netanyahu, or whatever, the old order in the Middle East would be alive and
well and the United States would still call the shots there.
But this is
nonsense. Our estrangement from the
Middle East derives from trends that are much deeper than the manifest
deficiencies of executive and congressional leadership in Washington. Americans and our partners in the Middle East
have developed contradictory interests and priorities. Where shared values existed at all, they have
increasingly diverged. There have been
massive changes in geo-economics, energy markets, power balances, demographics,
religious ideologies, and attitudes toward America (not just the U.S. government). Many of these changes were catalyzed by
historic American policy blunders. In
the aggregate, these blunders are right up there with the French and German
decisions to invade Russia and Japan’s surprise attack on the United
States. Their effects make current
policies not just unsustainable but counterproductive..
Blunder number one was the failure to
translate our military triumph over Saddam’s Iraq in 1991 into a peace with
Baghdad. No effort was ever made to
reconcile Iraq to the terms of its defeat.
The victors instead sought to impose elaborate but previously
undiscussed terms by UN fiat in the form of the UN Security Council Resolution
687 – “the mother of all resolutions.”
The military basis for a renewed balance of power in the Gulf was there
to be exploited. The diplomatic vision
was not. The George H. W. Bush
administration ended without addressing the question of how to replace war with
peace in the Gulf.
Wars don’t end
until the militarily humiliated accept the political consequences of their
defeat. Saddam gave lip service to UNSCR
687 but took it no more seriously than Netanyahu and his predecessors have
taken the various Security Council resolutions that direct Israel to permit
Palestinians to return to the homes from which it drove them or to withdraw
from the Palestinian lands it has seized and settled. Like Israel’s wars with the Arabs, America’s
war with Iraq went into remission but never ended. In due course, it resumed.
The United States needs to get into the
habit of developing and implementing war termination strategies.
Blunder number two was the sudden
abandonment in 1993 of the strategy of maintaining peace in the Persian Gulf
through a balance of power. With no
prior notice or explanation, the Clinton administration replaced this
longstanding approach with “dual
containment” of both Iraq and Iran. For
decades, offshore balancing had permitted the United States to sustain
stability without stationing forces other than a very small naval contingent in
the Gulf. When the regional balance of
power was undone by the Iran-Iraq War, Washington intervened to restore it,
emphasizing that once Kuwait had been liberated and Iraq cut back down to size,
U.S. forces would depart.
The new policy
of “dual containment” created a requirement for the permanent deployment of a
large U.S. air and ground force in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar as well as
an expanded naval presence in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The political and socioeconomic irritants
this requirement produced led directly to the founding of al Qa`ida and the
9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
“Dual containment” was plausible as a defense of Israel against its two
most potent regional adversaries, Iran and Iraq. But it made no sense at all in terms of
stabilizing the Gulf.
By writing off
Iraq as a balancer of Iran, dual containment also paved the way for the 2003 American
experiment with regime removal in Baghdad.
This rash action on the part of the United States led to the de facto
realignment of Iraq with Iran, the destabilization and partition of Iraq, the
destabilization and partition of Syria, the avalanche of refugees now
threatening to unhinge the EU, and the rise of the so-called “Islamic state” or
Da`esh. With Iraq having fallen into the
Iranian sphere of influence, there is no
apparent way to return to offshore balancing.
The U.S. is stuck in the Gulf.
The political irritations this generates ensure that some in the region
will continue to seek to attack the U.S. homeland or, failing that, Americans
overseas.
The United States needs to find an
alternative to the permanent garrisoning of the Gulf.
Blunder number three was the unthinking
transformation in December 2001 of what had been a punitive expedition in
Afghanistan into a long-term pacification campaign that soon became a NATO
operation. The objectives of the NATO
campaign have never been clear but appear to center on guaranteeing that there
will no Islamist government in Kabul.
The engagement of European as well as American forces in this vague mission
has had the unintended effect of turning the so-called “global war on
terrorism” into what appears to many Muslims to be a Western global crusade
against Islam and its followers.
Afghanistan remains decidedly unpacified and is becoming more, not less
Islamist.
The United States needs to find ways to restore conspicuous cooperation with
the world’s Muslims.
Blunder number four was the
inauguration on February 4, 2002 – also in Afghanistan – of a campaign using
missiles fired from drones to assassinate presumed opponents. This turn toward robotic warfare has evolved
into a program of serial massacres from the air in a widening area of West Asia
and northern Africa. It is a major
factor in the metastasis of anti-Western terrorism with global reach.
What had been a
U.S. problem with a few Islamist exiles resident in Afghanistan and Sudan is
now a worldwide phenomenon. The
terrorist movements U.S. interventions have spawned now have safe havens not
just in Afghanistan, but in the now failed states of Iraq and Syria, as well as
Chad, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger,
Nigeria, Pakistan, the Sinai, Somalia, and Yemen. They also have a growing following among
European Muslims and a toehold among Muslim Americans. We have flunked the test suggested by the
Yoda of the Pax Americana, Donald Rumsfeld.
We are creating more terrorists than we are killing.
s American forces in this vague mission
has had the unintended effect of turning the so-called “global war on
terrorism” into what appears to many Muslims to be a Western global crusade
against Islam and its followers.
Afghanistan remains decidedly unpacified and is becoming more, not less
Islamist.
The United States needs to find ways to restore conspicuous cooperation with
the world’s Muslims.
Blunder number four was the
inauguration on February 4, 2002 – also in Afghanistan – of a campaign using
missiles fired from drones to assassinate presumed opponents. This turn toward robotic warfare has evolved
into a program of serial massacres from the air in a widening area of West Asia
and northern Africa. It is a major
factor in the metastasis of anti-Western terrorism with global reach.
What had been a
U.S. problem with a few Islamist exiles resident in Afghanistan and Sudan is
now a worldwide phenomenon. The
terrorist movements U.S. interventions have spawned now have safe havens not
just in Afghanistan, but in the now failed states of Iraq and Syria, as well as
Chad, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger,
Nigeria, Pakistan, the Sinai, Somalia, and Yemen. They also have a growing following among
European Muslims and a toehold among Muslim Americans. We have flunked the test suggested by the
Yoda of the Pax Americana, Donald Rumsfeld.
We are creating more terrorists than we are killing.
The United States needs to wean Israel off
its welfare dependency and end the unconditional commitments that enable
self-destructive behavior on the part of the Jewish state.
Blunder number eight has been basing
U.S. policies toward the Middle East on deductive reasoning grounded in
ideological fantasies and politically convenient narratives rather than on
inductive reasoning and reality-based analysis.
America's misadventures cannot be excused as “intelligence errors.” They are the result of the ideological
politicization of policy-making. This
has enabled multiple policy errors based on wishful thinking, selective
listening, and mirror-imaging. Examples
include:
✦ The
conviction, despite UN inspections and much evidence to the contrary, that
Saddam’s program to develop weapons of mass destruction was ongoing, representing
an imminent danger, and could only be halted by his overthrow;
✦ The supposition
that, despite his well-documented secularism, because he was an Arab, a Muslim,
and a bad guy, Saddam must be colluding with the religious fanatics of al
Qaeda;
✦ The
assumption that the U.S. military presence in Iraq would be short, undemanding,
and inexpensive;
✦ The belief
that the overthrow of confessional and ethnic balances would not cause the
disintegration of societies like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Lebanon or ignite a
wider sectarian conflict;
✦ The spurious
attribution to people in Iraq of political attitudes and aspirations found
mostly among exiles abroad;
✦ The ludicrous
expectation that U.S. forces invading Iraq would be greeted as liberators by
all but a few;
✦ The unshakeable
presumption that Israel must want peace more than land;
✦ The impulse
to confuse mob rule on the Arab street with a process of democratization;
✦ The
confidence that free and fair elections would put liberals rather than Islamist
nationalists in power in Arab societies like Palestine and Egypt;
✦ The
supposition that the removal of bad guys from office, as in Libya, Yemen, or
Syria, would lead to the elevation of
better leaders and the flowering of peace, freedom, and domestic tranquility
there; and
✦ Imagining
that dictators like Bashar Al-Assad had little popular support and could
therefore be easily deposed.
I could go on
but I won’t. I’m sure I’ve made my
point. Dealing with the Middle East as
we prefer to imagine it rather than as it is doesn’t work. The
United States needs to return to fact-based analysis and realism in its foreign
policy.
All these
blunders have been compounded by the consistent substitution of military
tactics for strategy. The diplomatic
success of the Iran nuclear deal aside, the policy dialogue in Washington and
the current presidential campaign have focused entirely on the adjustment of
troop levels, whether and when to bomb things, the implications of
counterinsurgency doctrine, when and how to use special forces, whether to
commit troops on the ground, and the like, with nary a word about what these
uses of force are to accomplish other than killing people. When presented with proposals for military
action, no one asks “and then what?”
Military
campaign plans that aim at no defined political end state are violence for the
sake of violence that demonstrably create more problems than they solve. Military actions that are unguided and
unaccompanied by diplomacy are especially likely to do so. Think of Israel’s, our, and Saudi Arabia’s
campaigns in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen.
By contrast,
military interventions that are limited in their objectives, scale, and
duration, that end or phase down when they have achieved appropriate
milestones, and that support indigenous forces that have shown their mettle on
the battlefield can succeed. Examples
include the pre-Tora Bora phase of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and the
first round of Russian intervention in Syria.
The objectives
of what was initially conceived as a punitive raid into Afghanistan in October
2001 were (1) to dismantle al Qaeda and (2) to punish its Taliban hosts to
ensure that “terrorists with global reach” would be denied a continuing safe
haven in Afghanistan. The United States
pursued these objectives by supporting mostly non-Pashtun enemies of the mostly
Pashtun Taliban who had proven politico-military capabilities and staying power. A limited American and British investment of
intelligence capabilities, special forces, air combat controllers, and air
strikes tilted the battlefield in favor of the Northern Alliance and against
the Taliban. Within a little more than
two months, the Taliban had been forced
out of Kabul and the last remnants of al Qaeda had been killed or driven from
Afghanistan. We had achieved our
objectives.
But instead of
declaring victory and dancing off the field, we moved the goal posts. The United States launched an open-ended
campaign and enlisted NATO in efforts to install a government in Kabul while
building a state for it to govern, promoting feminism, and protecting poppy
growers. The poppies still
flourish. All else looks to be
ephemeral.
Mr. Putin’s
intervention in Syria in 2015 relied for its success on ingredients similar to
those in the pre-Tora Bora U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The Russians committed a modest ration of air
power and special forces in support of a Syrian government that had amply
demonstrated its survivability in the face of more than four years of Islamist
efforts to take it down. The
Russian campaign had clear political
objectives, which it stuck to.
Moscow sought
to reduce the complexities of Syria to a binary choice between life under the
secular dictatorship of the Assad regime and rule by Islamist fanatics. It cemented a Russian-Iranian entente. It hedged against the likelihood that the
Syrian Humpty Dumpty cannot be reassembled, ensuring that, whatever happens,
Russia will not lack clients in Syria or be dislodged from its bases at Tartus
and Latakia. Russia succeeded in forcing
the United States into a diplomatically credible peace process in which regime
removal is no longer a given and Russia and Iran are recognized as essential
participants. It retrained, reequipped,
and restored the morale of government forces, while putting their Islamist
opponents on the defensive and gaining ground against them. The campaign reduced and partially contained
the growing Islamist threat to Russian domestic tranquility, while affirming
Russia’s importance as a partner in combating terrorism.
Moscow also put
its hands on the stopcock for the refugee flow from West Asia that threatens
the survival of the European Union, underscoring Russia’s indispensable
relevance to European affairs. It
demonstrated its renewed military prowess and reestablished itself as a major
actor in Middle Eastern affairs. And it
showed that Russia could be counted upon to stand by protégés when they are at
risk, drawing an invidious contrast with the American abandonment of Hosni
Mubarak in 2011. The cost of these
achievements has been collateral damage to Russia’s relations with Turkey, a
price Moscow appears willing to play.
But state
failure in Syria continues, as it does in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Jordan and Bahrain are under pressure. Tunisia and Turkey – once avatars of
democratic Islamism – seem to be leaving democracy behind. Israel is strangling Gaza while swallowing
the rest of Palestine alive. Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain are in a near state of war with
Iran, which is in the midst of a breakthrough in relations with Europe and Asia,
if not America. Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar
are trying to stay out of the fight.
Once the region’s Arab heavyweight, Egypt now subsists on handouts from
the Gulf Arabs and cowers under martial law.
Sudan has been partitioned, sidelined, and ostracized by the West.
The Middle East
kaleidoscope has yet to come to rest. We
can see that the region’s future political geography will differ from its past
and present contours. But we cannot yet say
what it will look like.
“More-of-the-same”
policies will almost certainly produce more of the same sort of mess we now
see. What is to be done? Perhaps we should start by trying to correct
some of the blunders that produced our current conundrums. The world’s reliance on energy from the Gulf
has not diminished. But ours has. That gives us some freedom of maneuver. We should use it.
We need to
harness our military capabilities to diplomacy rather than the other way
around. The key to this is to find a way
to reenlist Iraq in support of a restored balance of power in the Gulf. That would allow us reduce our presence there
to levels that avoid stimulating a hostile reaction and to return to a policy
of offshore balancing.
This can only
be done if Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Sunni states rediscover the differences
between the varieties of Shi`ism in Iraqi Najaf and Iranian Qom. The shi`ism of Najaf tends to be fatalistic
and supportive of Iraqi nationalism. The
shi`ism of Qom is more assertively universalistic and activist. The Saudis and
their allies need to make common cause with Shi`ite Iraqis as Arabs rather than
castigate them as heretics. The limited
normalization of Iranian relations with the West, including the United States,
is an inevitability. The strategies of our Arab partners in the region need to
anticipate and hedge against this. And
we need to prepare them to do so.
Such an
adjustment will take some very tough love from the United States. It will require the Saudis and their allies
to back away from the policies based on Salafi sectarianism they have followed
for the better part of this decade and reembrace the tolerance that is at the
heart of Islam. It will also require
some measure of accommodation by them with Iran, regardless of the state of
US-Iranian relations. Without both a
turn away from sectarianism and the achievement of a modus vivendi with Iran,
the Saudis and their allies will remain on the defensive, Iraq will remain an
extension of Iranian influence, and the region will remain inflamed by religious
warfare. All this will spill over on
Americans and our European allies.
Islamism is an
extreme form of political Islam – a noxious ideology that invites a political
retort. It has received none except in
Saudi Arabia. There a concerted
propaganda campaign has effectively refuted Islamist heresies. No effort has been undertaken to form a
coalition to mount such a campaign on a regional basis. But such a coalition is essential to address
the political challenges that Muslim extremists pose to regional stability and
to the security of the West. Only the
Saudis and others with credibility among Salafi Muslims are in a position to
form and lead a campaign to do this.
This is an instance where it makes sense for the United States to “lead
from behind.”
The United States needs a strategy that
does not continuously reinforce blowback.
Blunder number five was the aid to Iran
implicit in the unprovoked invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. This rearranged the region to the severe
strategic disadvantage of traditional U.S. strategic partners like Israel and
Saudi Arabia by helping to create an Iranian sphere of influence that includes
much of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. It
showed the United States to be militarily mighty but geopolitically naive and
strategically incompetent. Rather than
underscoring American military power, it devalued it. The U.S. invasion of Iraq also set off a
sectarian struggle that continues to spread around the globe among the Muslim
fourth of humanity. The U.S. occupation
culminated in a “surge” of forces that entrenched a pro-Iranian regime in
Baghdad and that only its authors consider a victory.
The United States needs to deal with the
reality and the challenges to others in the region of the Iranian sphere of
influence it helped create.
Blunder number six has been to confuse
the motives for terrorism with the religious rationalizations its perpetrators
concoct to justify its immorality. Many
of those who seek revenge for perceived injustices and humiliations at the
hands of the West and Western-backed regimes in the Middle East, or who are
treated as aliens in their own countries in Europe, give voice to their anger
in the language of Islam. But their
political grievances, not heretical Islamic excuses for the mass murders they
carry out, are what drive their attempts at reprisal. Islamism is a symptom of Arab anguish and
rage. It is a consequence, not a cause of
Muslim anger.
Religious
ideology is, of course, important. It is
a key factor in justifying hatred of those outside its self-selected
community. To non-believers, arguments
about who is a Jew or whether someone is a true Muslim are incomprehensible and
more than a little absurd. But to the
intolerant people doing the excommunicating, such debates define their
political community and those who must be excluded from it. They separate friend from foe. And to those being condemned for their disbelief
or alleged apostasy, the judgments imposed by this intolerance can now be a
matter of life or death.
In the end, the
attribution of Muslim resentment of the West to Islam is just a version of the
facile thesis that “they hate us because of who we are.” This is the opiate of the ignorant. It is self-expiating denial that past and
present behavior by Western powers, including the United States, might have
created grievances severe enough to motivate others to seek revenge for the
indignities they have experienced. It
is an excuse to ignore and do nothing about the ultimate sources of Muslim rage
because they are too discomfiting to bear discussion. Any attempt to review the political effects
of American complicity in the oppression and dispossession of millions of
Palestinians and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths caused
by U.S. sanctions, bombing campaigns, and drone warfare is ruled out of order
by political correctness and cowardice.
The United States needs to work with its
European allies, with Russia, and with partners in the Middle East to attack
the problems that are generating terrorism, not just the theology of those who
resort to it.
Blunder number seven was the adoption
after the 1973 Yom Kippur War of a commitment to maintain a “qualitative
military edge” for Israel over any and all potential adversaries in its region.
This policy has deprived Israel of any incentive to seek security through non-military
means. Why should Israel risk resting
its security on reconciliation with Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors
when it has been assured of long-term military supremacy over them and relieved
of any concern about the political or economic consequences of using force
against them?
Confidence in
Israel’s qualitative military edge is now the main source of moral hazard for
the Jewish state. Its effect is to
encourage Israel to favor short-term territorial gains over any effort to
achieve long-term security through acceptance by neighboring states, the
elimination of tensions with them, and the normalization of its relations with
others in its region. U.S. policy
inadvertently ensured that the so-called “peace process” would always be
stillborn. And so it proved to be.
Israel’s lack
of concern about the consequences of its occupation and settlement of the West
Bank and its siege of Gaza has facilitated its progressive abandonment of the
universalist Jewish values that inspired Zionism and its consequent separation
from the Jewish communities outside its elastic borders. U.S. subsidies underwrite blatant tyranny by Jewish settlers
over the Muslim and Christian Arabs they have dispossessed. This is a formula for the moral and political
self-delegitimization of the State of Israel, not its long-term survival. It is also a recipe for the ultimate loss by
Israel of irreplaceable American political, military, and other support.
For our part,
Americans must be led to correct our counterproductive misunderstanding of
Islam. Islamophobia has become as American as gun massacres. The presumptive candidate of one of our two
major parties has suggested banning Muslims from entry into the United States. This is reflective of national attitudes that
are incompatible with the cooperation we need with Muslim partners to fight
terrorist extremism. If we do not
correct these attitudes, we will continue to pay not just in treasure but in
blood. Lots of it.
Finally, the
United States must cease to provide blank checks to partners in the region
prone to misguided and counterproductive policies and actions that threaten
American interests as well as their own prospects. No more Yemens. No more Gazas or Lebanons. No more military guarantees that
disincentivize diplomacy aimed at achieving long-term security for Israel.
The obvious
difficulty of making any of these adjustments is a measure of how far we have
diverged from an effective approach to managing our relations with the Middle
East and how impaired our ability to contribute to peace and stability there
has become. Our mainstream media is
credulous and parrots the official line.
Our politicians are devoted to narratives that bear almost no relation to
the realities of the Middle East. Our
government is dysfunctional. Our
politics is ... well, ... you pick the word.
Frankly, the
prospects that we will get our act and our policies together are not good. But history will not excuse us for acting out
Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing more of the same and expecting
different results. We won’t get them.
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