Military or Market-Driven Empire Building: 1950-2008
by Prof. James Petras
Global Research, April 29, 2008
Introduction
From the middle of the 19th century but especially after the Second World War, two models of empire building competed on a world scale: One predominantly based on military conquests, involving direct invasions, proxy invading armies and subsidized separatist military forces; and the other predominantly based on large-scale, long-term economic penetration via a combination of investments, loans, credits and trade in which ‘market’ power and the superiority (greater productivity) in the means of production led to the construction of a virtual empire.
Throughout the 19th to the middle of the 20th centuries, European and US empire building resorted to the military route, especially in Asia, Africa, Central America, North America and the Caribbean. By far the British and US colonized the greatest territories through military force, followed by the introduction of state directed mercantile systems, the Monroe doctrine for the US and imperial preference for the British. South America following independence became the site of the growth of market powered empire building. British and later US capital successfully captured the commanding heights of the economies, especially the agro-mining and petroleum export sectors, trade, finance and in some cases attached customs and treasury to cover debt collection. As late developing capitalist countries and emerging imperial powers (EIP), the US, Germany and Japan faced the hostility of the established European empires and limited access to strategic markets and raw materials. The EIP adopted several strategies in challenging the existing empires. These included demands for free trade with their colonies and the end of imperial (colonial) privilege/ preference. The EIP established parallel colonial settlements and concessions, bordering the old empires. They fomented and financed ‘anti-colonial’ revolts to replace existing colonial collaborators and pursued economic penetration via superior production. They disseminated political propaganda promoting ‘democratic’ values within a market driven empire. World War Two marked the decline of the European military based colonial empire and the US transition from a predominantly market to military-based empire. This ‘transition’ was facilitated by earlier military occupations in the Philippines and the Caribbean and a multitude of invasions in Central America.
Nationalist liberation movements, based on liberal, nationalist and socialist leaders and programs, drawing on returning soldiers, weakened colonial control and post-war European anti-fascist and anti-war sentiments, led to the dismantling of their military-based empires. Internal reconstruction and domestic working class radicalism influenced the agenda for most European colonial powers. The attempts by the European powers to re-impose their colonial empires failed despite bloody wars in Indo-China, Kenya, Algeria, Malaya and elsewhere. The French, English and Israeli invasion and occupation of the Egyptian Suez (1956) marked the last major attempt at military-driven imperialism.
The US opposition to this effort at European re-colonization marked the supremacy of US-centered empire building and, paradoxically, the beginning of US military-driven empire building. The European powers, especially Great Britain, engineered a strategic shift from a colonial-military empire toward market-driven empires based on supporting pro-capitalist nationalist against socialist revolutionaries (India, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.). While Europe transited to the market-driven empire building model based first and foremost on the reconstruction of their war-torn domestic capitalist economy, the US quickly moved toward a military based empire building approach. The US established military bases throughout Europe, militarily intervened in Greece, elaborated a complex and comprehensive military buildup to challenge Soviet spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and intervened in the Chinese and especially the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars.
Immediate Post-WWII: The Combination of Market and Military Roads to Empire
Because the US economy and military came out of the victory during WWII with enormous resources far surpassing any other country or group of countries, it was able to pursue a dual approach to empire building, engaging in military and economic expansion. The US dominated over 50% of world trade and had the greatest surplus public and private capital to invest overseas. The US possessed technological and productivity advantages to promote ‘free trade’ among its would-be competitors and to increase domestic living standards.
These advantageous circumstances, directly related and limited to the first decade of the post-WWII period, became embedded in the practice and strategic thinking of US policymakers, Congress, the Executive branch and both major parties. The conjunctural ‘world superiority’ generated a plethora of elite ideologies and a mass mind set in which the US was seen to be ‘by nature’, by ‘divine will’, destined by ‘history’ and its ‘values’, by its ‘superior education, technology and productivity’ to rule over the world. The specific economic and political conditions of the ‘decade’ (1945-1955) were frozen into an unquestioned dogma, which denied the dynamics of changing market, productive and political relations that gradually eroded the original bases of the ideology.
Divergence in the World Economy: US-Europe-Japan
Beginning with the massive military buildup with the ‘Cold War’ and the subsequent hot war in Korea, the US allocated a far greater percentage of its budget and GNP to war and military empire building than Western Europe or Japan.
By the mid-1950’s, while the US vastly expanded its state military apparatus (armed forces, intelligence agencies and clandestine armies), Western Europe and Japan expanded and built up their state economic agencies, public enterprises, investment and loan programs for the private sector. Even more significantly, US military spending and purchases stimulated Japanese and European industries. Equally important state-private procurement policies subsidized US industrial inefficiency via cost over-runs, non-competitive bidding and military-industrial monopolies.
US empire building via projections of military power absorbed hundreds of billions of dollars in government expenditures in regions and countries with low economic payoffs in the Caribbean, Central American, Asia and Africa.
While military-driven empire building did increase short term domestic growth and rising income, and led to some important civilian spin-offs and technological breakthroughs that entered the civilian economy, European and Japanese market-based empire building moved with greater dynamism from domestic to export led growth and began to challenge US predominance in a multiplicity of productive sectors.
The US prolonged and costly war against Indo-China (roughly 1954-74) epitomized the replacement of European colonial-military empire building by the US version. The hundreds of billions of dollars in US government war spending spilled over into Japanese and South Korean high-growth manufacturing industries. Western European manufacturing achieved productivity gains and export markets in former African and Asian colonial nations, while the US Empire’s murderous wars in South East Asia discredited it and its products throughout the world. Domestic unrest, widespread civilian protests and military demoralization further weakened the US capacity to pursue its imperial agenda and defend strategic collaborating regimes in key regions.
The relative decline of US manufacturing exports was accompanied by the massive growth of US public debt, which in turn stimulated the vast expansion of the financial sector which then shaped regional and national policy toward de-industrializing central cities and converting them into a finance-real estate and insurance monoculture.
The contrasting and divergent roads to empire building between the US on the one hand and Europe and Japan on the other, deepened with the advent of the ‘Second Cold War’ under the Carter-Reagan years. While the US spent billions in proxy wars in Southern Africa (Angola and Mozambique), Latin America (Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala) and Asia (Afghanistan), the Europeans were expanding economically into Eastern Europe, China, Latin America and the Middle East. Even at the moment of greatest imperial success, the overthrow of Communism in the USSR and East Europe and China’s transition to capitalism, the US militarily driven empire failed to reap the benefits: Under Clinton the US promoted the raw pillage of the Russian economy and destruction of the state (civilian and military), market and scientific base rather than stabilize and jointly exploit its existing markets and human and material resources. The US spent billions undermining Communism, but the Europeans, primarily Germany, and to a much lesser degree France, England and Japan, were the prime beneficiaries in terms of securing the most productive industries and employing the better part of the skilled labor and engineers in the former Soviet bloc. By the end of the Clinton era and the bursting of the information technology speculative bubble, the European Union eclipsed the US in GNP, outperformed the US in accumulating trade surpluses and foreign debt management.
Market Versus Military Empire Building in the 1990’s
During the Bush-Clinton years, US military-driven empire-building vastly expanded its commitments in financing and providing troops into the Balkan and Iraq wars, military entry into Somalia, the bombing of the Sudan, the increased subsidy of Israel’s colonial wars, the Afghan wars, Colombia’s counter-insurgency and to a lesser extent the Philippine’s counter-insurgency and counter-separatist wars. While the US spent billions to prop up a gangster-ridden and corrupt KLA regime in Kosova in order to spend billions more in building a huge military base, Germany was reaping the economic benefits of its economic hegemony in the relatively prosperous regimes of Croatia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. While the US spent hundreds of billions in the First and Second Gulf Wars, China, the new emerging market-driven empire builder, was looking to sign lucrative oil and gas contracts in the Middle East, especially with Iran. While the US was backing an unpopular minority regime backed by its client Ethiopian military force in Somalia, China was signing major oil contracts in Sudan, Angola and Nigeria and even in Northern Somalia (Puntland). While the US military-centered empire-building state was giving away over $3 billion in military aid (plus transferring its most up-to-date military technology to competitor firms) per year to Israel, European, Asian and Latin American private and public enterprises were signing long-term lucrative contracts with the Gulf oil states as well as with Iran.
A clear sign of the long-term economic decay of the US global competitive position between 2002-2008 is evidenced by the fact that a 40% depreciation of the dollar has failed to substantially improve the US balance of payments, let alone produce a trade surplus. Despite the handicap of appreciating currencies, China, Germany and Japan continued to accumulate trade surpluses, especially with the US. While the US spent hundreds of billions in Asian wars, CIA propaganda and subversive operations in the former USSR, Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, the Caribbean (Cuba/Venezuela) and the Caucuses, the principle beneficiaries were the revitalized European market-driven empire-builders and the newly emerging market empire builders.
While the US spends enormous sums in building new military bases surrounding Russia, including new offensive operations in Kosova, Poland and the Czech Republic, with new preparations for NATO bases in Georgia and the Ukraine, Russian, Chinese and European capital expands buying out or investing in privatized and public-private strategic mining, petrol and manufacturing enterprises in Africa, Latin America, Australia and the Gulf.
While China harnesses foreign capital, including major US MNCs to make itself the ‘manufacturing workshop of the world’, Germany with its high precision heavy manufacturers are prospering by ‘constructing the workshops’ for the Chinese. US manufacturers and productive capital flee to state-subsidized (via tax reductions and low interest rates) financial, real estate and speculative sectors, and go overseas to avoid high rent and fringe payments to US labor. The resulting decline of the domestic market and a shrinking base of industrially trained labor reinforce the overseas and speculative movements on US capital. These capitalist structural changes undermined the economic fundamentals underlying the financial sector.
The deterioration of the US economy became apparent as the speculative paper pyramid (sub-prime and credit crises) collapsed during the 2007-08 recession. The recycling of multiple layers of ‘exotic’ financial ‘instruments’ each more precarious than the other, each more divorced from any tangible productive unit in the real economy characterized this period. Their predictable collapse dragged the US into recession. Even among the big banks and financial houses there is no knowledge of the real value of the paper being traded or of the ‘material collateral’ (housing and commercial property being held). The fictitious economy revolves around unloading the devalued paper, to cover costs and lessen losses…and let the next holder of the paper face the risks and uncertainties. As a result there is a total lack of confidence in the market because the ‘objects’ up for sale have become so lacking of value, i.e. so intangible and unrelated to the real economy.
The decline of the real producer basis of goods and social services and the predominance of the paper economy accentuated the divergence between military-directed empire building and the global economic interests of the US. The paper economy is not directly influenced by imperialist militarism, as is the case with US MNC’s with physical assets at risk from imperial wars, armed resistance, the disruption of trade routes, the destruction of overseas markets and the disarticulation of access to minerals and energy sources.
The ascendancy of speculative finance capital coincides with the greater autonomy of the militarist empire builders over and against the residual influence of American manufacturing and commercial interests supporting market imperialism. The extraordinary role that the pro-Israel power bloc plays in shaping a bellicose Middle East foreign policy over and above what US oil companies looking to sign contracts with Arab countries exercised, can only be understood within the large upsurge of ‘militarist driven imperial policy’.
Washington’s unconditional support of Israel’s militarist colonial regime reflects two important structural changes in US empire building. One is the extraordinary organization and influence of the principle pro-Israel Jewish organization over local, regional, national legislative and executive bodies and in the mass media and financial institutions. The second change is the rise of a political class of executive and legislative militarist policy-makers, which has an affinity with Israeli colonialism and its offensive military strategy. Israel is one of the few – if not only – military-driven ‘emerging imperial powers’ and that is part of the reason for the ‘resonance’ between Jewish leaders in Israel and Washington policy-makers. This is the real basis of the often stated and affirmed ‘common interests and values’ between the two ‘countries’. Military-driven imperial powers, like the US and Israel, do not share ‘democratic values’ – as even the most superficial observer of their savage repression of their conquered peoples and nations (Iraq and Palestine) can attest – they share the military route to empire-building.
Historic Comparison of Market and Military Driven Imperialism
A rational cost efficient evaluation of the US major and minor military invasions demonstrates the high economic cost and low economic benefits to both the capitalist system as a whole and even to many key economic enterprises.
The US blockade and subsequent war with Japan ultimately unleashed the Asian national liberation movements, which undercut European, and US colonial-style military imperialism. The Korean War ignited the massive re-industrialization of Japan and created optimal conditions for Korea’s model of protectionism at home and free trade with the US (so-called Asian state-led export model). The result was the creation of two major manufacturing rivals to the US economic expansion in Asia, North America and later in the rest of the world.
The US invasion, colonial occupation and imperial war in Indochina and its subsequent defeat severely weakened the military capacity to subsequently defend global imperial interests and client states in Southern Africa, Iran and Nicaragua. More to the point, by concentrating resources on war-making the US lost markets to the emerging market empire-builders and diverted capital from increasing the productivity and productive forces which create market dominance.
In the broader picture, military and market driven imperialism, which coexisted and seemed to complement each other diverged in the period between 1963-1973, with the militarist faction gaining supremacy in directing US empire-building. The divergence was papered over by several instances of complementary activity such as the overthrow of President Allende in Chile on behalf of US MNCs and similar earlier cases as in Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953) and in other countries where quick imperial victories over smaller countries did not seem to carry any significant economic or political costs.
The ascendancy of Reagan and the negative long-term economic impact of new arms buildup were obscured by the break-up of the Communist system and the Chinese and Vietnamese transitions to capitalism. The windfall gains to US economic interests in the former European communist countries, especially Russia, were largely based on pillaging existing resources in alliance with gangster-capitalists. Long-term, large-scale benefits were not due to US capitalist taking over and developing the forces of production and developing the internal markets of the ex-communist countries. The political and military gains that accrued to US military empire building obscured the continued loss of economic power in the world marketplace to the market-driven imperial powers. Moreover, China unleashed a large-scale, long-term process of dynamic capital accumulation, which in less than two decades displaced the US from manufacturing markets and challenged its access to energy markets.
In other words favorable resolution of the US-Soviet conflict led to their mutual economic decline. What is worse from a practical historical perspective, the military-driven empire builders saw their ‘victory’ over Communism as vindication and license to escalate their militarist approach to empire building. According to this line of argument, the Soviets fell because of military pressure, backed by ideological warfare. Moreover in the absence of a countervailing military pole, the Bush-Clinton-Bush Presidencies saw an open field for pursuing the military road to empire building.
From the Gulf, to the Gulf and Back to the Gulf : 1990-2008 (and beyond)
The first Bush Presidency assumed the military road to empire building but tried to avoid the high costs of occupation and colonization. The Israeli colonial model had to await the Zionist occupation of policy-making positions in later administrations. The first Iraq War was intended to project US imperial military power, secure US economic interests among the Gulf oil states (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) as well as expand Israeli influence in the Middle East. Most of all it was seen as the launching of a ‘New World Order; centered in US world supremacy, supported by docile allies and financed by rich Arab oil states.
Shortly after the Gulf War, the triple alliance, which emerged during the war, collapsed as Europe pursued its own market-driven empire in competition with the US, Saudi Arabia paid some of the US military expenditures and then abruptly ended its funding, and domestic opposition grew as the electorate demanded less imperial expenditures and the re-building of the domestic economy.
Military-Driven Empire-Building (MDE) and Zionism
The Zionist Power Configuration in the United States successfully secured from the White House and Congress massive sustained multi-billion dollar military and economic grant and aid packages for Israel throughout the 1980’s ensuring Israel’s military superiority in the Middle East. Yet both Presidents Reagan and Bush (father) tried to maintain a balance between the interests of major US oil multi-nationals working with Arab regimes on the one hand and on the other Israeli and Washington’s military-driven empire building (MEB).
Bush Senior’s attack of Iraq in the First Gulf War, greatly reduced Baghdad’s military capability but he refrained from destroying its armed forces or overthrowing Saddam Hussein as Israel and the ZPC were demanding at the time. Above all Bush did not want to destabilize the region for US oil deals in the Gulf, even as he imposed a US military presence to ensure dominance.
With the election of Clinton and the Democratic-controlled Congress, the MDE and the ZPC gained strategic positions in the elaboration and implementation of foreign policy. Madeleine Albright, ‘Sandy’ Berger, Dennis Ross, Cohen, and Martin Indyk and an army of lesser known functionaries, militarists and Zionists launched a series of wars, military attacks and severe sanctions against Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq. They devastated their population (over 500,000 children died in Iraq as a direct result of US starvation sanctions), destroyed their national productive facilities and, intentionally disarticulated and fragmented their nations into violent ethno-tribal and religious mini-states. While Clinton embraced the military road to empire building, he was also totally committed to the financial sector of the US economy (in particular, the most speculative activities) by de-regulating all controls, oversight and constraints on ‘hedge funds’, investment banks and equity houses. Under the tutelage of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, the pro-Israel Alan Greenspan, the Clinton regime became the launching pad for the full conversion of the US into a speculation-driven economy, culminating in the dot-com bubble which burst in 2000-2001, and the massive Enron and World Com swindles leading up to the current financial meltdown of 2006-2008.
While the MDE gained a dominant role, the ascendance of speculative capital marginalized and eroded the political influence and economic weight of productive capital, forcing it overseas and/or to transfer funds into the financial-speculative sector. The socio-economic basis of market-driven empire-building (MDEB) was weakened relative to the militarists and the ZPC in setting the US foreign policy agenda. This new power configuration opened the door for the total takeover by these same forces during the 8 years of Bush (Junior)’s presidency. The latter quickly eliminated any residual influence of the market-driven imperialists, forcing the resignation of his first Treasury Secretary O’Neal and others. Even hybrid market-militarists like Colin Powell who went along with the global war strategy but raised tactical questions were subsequently forced into retirement.
MDE were in total control of the government in all spheres, from the elaboration of war propaganda, the build-up of a global network of terror and assassination teams, to colonial wars and the systematic use of torture abroad and the savaging of elementary freedoms at home. Within the MDE, the ZPC gained dominance, especially in the formulation and the implementation of total war strategies in Iraq and the unconditional backing of Israel’s genocidal politics in Gaza and the West Bank. Every sector of the government was geared to war, bellicose action and especially to subordinating economic policies to military practices informed by the military-driven Israeli colonization.
The convergence of policy and practice between the MDE and the ZPC within the highest levels of government and their mutual reinforcement, gave US foreign policy its extremist military character. Zionist cultural and media power provided an army of academic and journalistic ideologues and mass media platforms which the MDE previously lacked – and amplified their message. The linking of traditional US MDE and the emerging power of the Israeli-ZPC buttressed the spread of authoritarian controls and harsh and widespread censorship over any politician, intellectual or media critic of Israel and its unconditional supporters in the ZPC.
The joint forces of the MDE and ZPC have reshaped the US military command to serve their plans for new major wars – against Iran – and the prolongation and extension of wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and elsewhere. The MDE have failed to pursue the free trade openings in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East – leaving the field wide open for entirely new trading and investment networks involving China, Europe, Japan, India, Russia and the Middle Eastern sovereign funds. Even with the onset of the recession in the US and the meltdown of the financial markets, the militarists have refused to change or alter their stranglehold on the budget and foreign policy, causing the government to resort to printing currency to finance the bailout of speculators and their investment banks.
Imperial Wars, Social Revolutions and Capitalist Restorations
The historical record demonstrates that imperial wars destroy the productive forces and social networks of targeted countries. In contrast, market-driven economic empire building gains hegemony via collaboration with local political and economic elites, taking control of strategic industries, minerals and energy via direct investments and loans, privatizations and denationalization, and favorable trade and monetary agreements. Market-driven empire building takes over, it does not destroy the productive forces; it does not demolish the social fabric, it reconstructs or ‘adjusts’ it to accommodate its accumulation needs.
The evolution of social revolutionary regimes in a post liberation period shows a common pattern reflecting the political-economic external constraints imposed by military imperialism. The revolutionary regimes expropriate and nationalize the major means of production, control foreign trade and organize the planning of the economy. They eliminate foreign control over strategic economic sectors, centralize political and economic control as well as redistribute land and income. In many cases these radical measures were imposed upon the revolutionary governments by imperial economic boycotts, the flight of capitalist and landlords, the non-cooperation of managers and technicians and by the necessity of reconstruction in the face of large-scale destruction. The US embargo and similar constraints on external financial aid have forced revolutionary governments to rely on the rationing of scarce resources for priority public projects, limiting its capacity to increase individual consumption.
As a result, the post-revolutionary regimes were forced to deal with market-driven empire builders. They contracted large-scale short-term and long-term trade agreements, joint investment ventures through equitable profit sharing agreements and a broad range of technological contracts involving royalty payments. In other words, given the unfavorable position of the revolutionary economy in the world market and the low level of development of the forces of production, the market-driven empire building countries were in a position to secure lucrative economic opportunities. In contrast, the military driven empire attempted to inflict maximum economic damage to compensate for its military defeat.
The revolutionary regimes under Communist leadership featured characteristics, which foreshadowed positive future relations with market-driven imperial countries. Their vertical leadership and concentrated political power facilitated quick and relatively easy changes from collectivist to neo-liberal policies, while hindering the democratic mechanisms, which might have corrected erroneous and harmful economic decisions. Secondly, unchecked power at the top in a time of scarcity led to the conversion of power into privilege, corruption and social inequalities. These developments created a wealthy nepotistic elite with an interest in deepening ties with their capitalist counterparts from the imperial states. These internal changes coincided with the interests of market-driven capitalists willing to establish lucrative ‘beach heads’ and relations with elite groups in the post-revolutionary society and state. Market-driven empire builders were attracted to the tight controls exercised over labor and the lack of competition from other military-driven imperial states.
Post-revolutionary economies continued to be embedded in the world capitalist marketplace and subject to its competitive demands. In the best of circumstances, even with a democratic and socially egalitarian leadership and relatively favorable world commodity prices, the revolutionary regime would need to balance the social demands of a socialist domestic economy (with demands for increases in income, social services and workplace improvement and consumer goods) and the world market demands for greater efficiency, increased capital investments, rising productivity and labor discipline. Given the built-in biases toward political and military security embedded in the bureaucratic centralist structures, it was not surprising that production would stagnate. The constraints and the centralized elites’ inability to micro-manage the economy beyond the period of reconstruction was one reason for stagnation. The other was that the regime would prefer a hierarchical organized capitalist structure (over any democratic changes from below), which would not challenge, but rather strengthen, the communist elite’s position in a ‘new’ eclectic system.
In other words there would be a dual transition from imperial-dominated extractive capitalism to centralized socialism which would entail a period of reconstruction and national unification with an organized and disciplined labor force. This would be followed by a transition to a centralized mixed state capitalist economy, increasingly penetrated by market-driven imperial capital.
Was ‘Socialism a Detour to Capitalism’? Were ‘Imperial Wars Necessary for Capitalist Expansion’?
The historical record documents the continued growth and expansion of market-driven empire building throughout the post World War II period, without wars, significant military intervention, boycotts, embargos or other offensive belligerent actions. The expansion took place in the context of non-revolutionary, revolutionary and post-revolutionary regimes. Germany’s market-driven empire builders traded with the Communist East, China and Russia before, during and after the fall of Communism, accumulating huge trade and productive advantages over the US. The same occurred with Japan with regard to China and other Asian communist countries.
The market imperialists did not depend, as some apologists for military imperialists argue ‘on the protective umbrella’ of US militarism, but on their superior position in the world market and the greater development of the forces of production, which allowed them to enter and secure favorable and lucrative economic positions.
In contrast, the US empire builders, who started the post-war 1945-50 period in a uniquely favorable position in the world market, wasted their massive economic resources in funding wars against successful revolutions - China, Korea, Indochina, Cuba, and now in prolonged colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Billions more have been spent in numerous surrogate wars in Angola, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Chile with no economic payoffs for US MNCs over and against its European and Asian competition. The US imperial wars failed to enhance its economic empire. US Empire builders shifted massive resources away from producing goods for the international market and upgrading their industrial productivity in order to retain world and domestic market shares to its monstrous and wasteful military budgets. The result has been a steady decline of the US economic empire relative to its competitor market-driven empires. Ironically, when the centralized collectivist regimes eventually made the transition toward capitalism, it was because of their inner social and economic contradictions and not because of US military policies. The restoration of capitalism had little to do with the hundreds of billions of dollars in US military spending.
In contrast, the market-driven empires from the end of the 1940’s benefited from US imperial wars, by securing lucrative US military contracts and were able to concentrate their state expenditures and investment policies on securing overseas markets. They were in an ideal position to reap the benefits resulting from the socialist regimes’ transition to capitalism.
Given the emergence of post-Communist political and social ruling elites who blindly adhered to free market dogma with their corrupt, authoritarian and privileged political practices, in retrospect ‘socialism’ did appear as a ‘detour’ to capitalist restoration. However the structural changes of some communist political elites, especially in China and Vietnam, created the essential foundations for a capitalist take-off. They unified the country, educated and trained a healthy, disciplined work-force, launched basic industries, eliminated war lords and local ethnic fiefdoms. Subsequently Communist liberalization opened the door to the peaceful economic invasion of market-driven imperialism, safeguarded by a strong centralized state limiting any working class or nationalist opposition or protest. The Communist elites established a framework ideal for subsequent imperialist reentry and expansion.
The historical record makes it clear that imperial wars were not necessary for economic expansion. Empire-driven militarism thoroughly undermined the US long-term competitive position. If the driving force of empire building is economic conquest, then market-driven empires are far superior to military-driven empires. The goal of ‘colonial political dominance’, pursued by military-driven imperialists, is in the modern period, a chimera, as demonstrated by a history of political defeats in Asia, Africa, Latin America and now in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Military-Driven Imperialism Today and the Newly Emerging Imperial Powers
One might conclude that the US imperial leadership would have ‘learned the lessons’ of failed military-driven empire building from the their experience over the past 50 years. But as we pointed out earlier, the internal structural dynamics of the US economy and the reconfiguration of the political elite directing the political system have led in the opposite direction. The 21st century has witnessed the ascendancy of the most zealous exponents of military-driven empire building in the entire post-World War II period. An overview of US imperial policy shows the proliferation and intensification of direct wars, surrogate wars, military confrontations in which the US favors militarist allies over countries with lucrative markets and profitable investment opportunities in natural resources.
Market-Driven Versus Militarist Alliances
The militarist and Zionist takeover of US empire building in the 21st century is manifested in their strategic decisions, alliances and priorities, each and everyone of which is diametrically opposed to market-based empire building and ultimately doomed to further erode the position of the US empire.
The newly emerging empire building states (like China), rely almost exclusively on market-driven strategies designed by political elites linked to industrialists and technocrats. They are quickly dominating manufacturing markets, accessing strategic raw materials and securing long-term trade agreements at the expense of the increasingly militarist, but internally deteriorating US empire. Near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the imperial policies of the US militarists and Zionists have demonstrated their willingness to make deep sacrifices in market growth by choosing to align the US with costly and dubious militarist regimes in all regions of the world, beginning with the US alliance with Israel.
In the Middle East, unlike market-driven empire builders, the US militarists and Zionists have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, destroying many lucrative oil deals and joint ventures and leading to the quadrupling the world price of oil. Instead they have invested (and lost) over a trillion dollars in non-productive, non-economic, military activity. Militarist imperialism has weakened the entire economic fabric of the US Empire without any ‘compensatory’ gains on the military side. The prolonged war in Iraq (6 years and running) has demoralized the US ground troops and weakened US military capability to engage in any ‘third front’ in which the US has important economic interests. US liberal market-driven imperialists describe this as ‘imperial overstretch’. While the US invests in non-productive and unsuccessful military conquests, profoundly indebting the domestic economy, China, India, Korea, Russia, Europe, the Middle East and even Latin America pile up trade surpluses while expanding their economic empires via private and sovereign investments.
Largely because of the political fusion and strategic convergence of interests between militarists and Zionists, the US empire builders choose to sacrifice lucrative ties to the richest markets among the Gulf State in the Middle East and among predominantly Muslim countries in order to favor Israel, a resource-poor militarist-colonial state with a third rate market for goods and investments. US militarists have subjected America’s empire building to strategies in the Middle East, which mostly favor Israel’s colonial and regional hegemonic drive. This places the US on a direct confrontational path with Lebanon, Syria, Iran and even the Gulf States who feel threatened by Israel’s constant resort to offensive military power to attack its neighbors. No Arab oil country, no matter how conservative and pro-capitalist, can afford to open its economy to the US, if it believes that Washington will subordinate it to the vision of a militarist Israel-US dominated sphere of influence. By unconditionally backing Israel’s colonial and hegemonic interests, American militarists have gained a strategic domestic political ally (the Zionist Power Configuration) but it has come at an enormous cost to US economic empire building. Moreover the Israeli state has run the biggest and most aggressive espionage operations in the US of any country since the fall of the USSR, thus calling into question its ‘security benefits.’ The multiplicity of enemies resulting from Israel’s racist-colonialist policies ensures that the US will be engaged in decades of war, or as long as the US taxpayers can sustain the demands of the military empire.
Military-driven empire building is manifested not only in the Middle East but throughout the world. In Africa, the US backs the Ethiopian military regime and its weak and isolated puppet regime in Somalia against an Islamist-secular nationalist coalition representing the majority of Somalis. Washington and Israel finance and arm the Sudanese separatists in Darfur against the oil-rich central Sudanese government. In both Somalia and Sudan, China and other emerging imperial powers have secured access to strategic oil rich sites. While the US spends billions of dollars on endless wars, propaganda campaigns and sanctions, China reaps hundreds of millions in profits. While the US financed African wars destroy the entire fabric of production and society in Somalia, militarizing impoverished Ethiopia, the Chinese build roads and infrastructure to facilitate exports in both the Sudan and Northern Somalia. Pentagon-directed colonial wars in Africa, conducted by surrogates, undermine the political support of economic collaborators while the market-driven empires enhance their ties with local economic elites and political rulers.
In Latin America, the US military imperialists have so far contributed $6 billion dollars in military aid to Colombia’s militarist regime during the 21st century, destroying the entire social fabric in the rural areas, while the rest of Latin America expanded their ties with Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Washington has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in failed efforts to destabilize Venezuela’s nationalist-democratic Chavez Government. As a result US capitalists have lost out on billions of dollars in investments and trading contracts in Venezuela to China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Iran. By making Colombia the centerpiece of their South American policy, US militarist empire builders have lost out on the enormously lucrative economic opportunities accompanying the commodity price boom in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia.
In Asia, despite the deepening US economic dependence on China to sustain to the rapidly depreciating US dollar (China holds $1.5 trillion dollars in foreign reserves which has lost 60% of its value since 2002), the US militarists still engage in sustained anti-Chinese propaganda campaigns and highly provocative incidents. The US-backed violent protests against the Chinese presence in Tibet fomented by the Dalai Lama and CIA-funded exile organizations is only the more recent example. American Zionists have directed a political campaign against the expansion of Chinese investments and contracts (market-driven imperialism) in the Sudan. The Zionist role in the so-called ‘Darfur’ campaign is based on Sudan’s support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza.
China has so far generally overlooked US military provocations such as the shooting down of a Chinese fighter plane, spy flights over Chinese offshore territory, the deliberate bombing of its embassy in Belgrade and the sale of advanced missiles to Taiwan. The US financing of the separatist demonstrations among Tibetan exiles is designed to tarnish China’s image in the lead up to its hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics. China’s market-driven empire builders ignore US military provocations because they had little effect on Chinese overseas and domestic economic expansion. Nevertheless China has increased spending on modernizing its military defense capabilities. More significantly, as the US economy declines and enters a deep recession in 2008, and as the dollar continues to fall ($1.60 to 1 Euro as of May 2008), China has turned toward the Asian, European, Middle Eastern markets. Asian markets now account for 50% of world trade growth as of 2008. In 2007 China increased production and the development of its market to sustain growth rates at least five times higher than the militarist-dominated US Empire. Even more significant, the great majority of Chinese exporters (over 800,000) have shifted payments to Euros, Yen, Pounds Sterling and the Renminbi in its trading with non-US trading partners.
Russia, shaking off the shackles of Clinton-backed pillage during the gangster capitalism of the Yeltsin years in the 1990’s, has taken off during the 21st century under the leadership of President Putin. US military-driven empire builders were able to integrate and subordinate all the former members of the Russia-centered Warsaw Pact into the US-dominated NATO. In the 21st Century, the Russian economy has expanded rapidly between 6% and 8%, established majority control over strategic resources and has sought to lessen its vulnerability to US military encirclement. While Germany, Italy and most of the major Asian trading countries (China, India and Japan) have obtained lucrative trading and investment agreements with Russia, the US militarists have concentrated on military encroachment along Russia’s European and Asian borders. The US is pushing to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and preparing to station offensive, so-called ‘missile shields’ in Poland and the Czech Republic on the absurd pretext that such highly sophisticated installations are intended to protect Western Europe from attacks by distant Iran rather than target Moscow, just 5 minutes away by missile attack.
Conclusion
US military-driven empire building has made costly military alliances with peripheral countries at a catastrophic economic cost. The persistence of militarist empire builders has systematically undercut market-driven empire building and has pushed the domestic US economy to near bankruptcy. The twin motors of the contemporary empire and domestic economy, speculative finance and militarism, have driven the US economy backwards at the same time that established and emerging imperial competitors are advancing.
Comparative historical data covering the entire half-century to the present demonstrates that European, Japanese and now China and India’s market-driven expansion has been far more successful in securing market shares, developing the productive forces and accessing strategic raw materials than US military empire building.
Market-driven empire building has both resulted from and created a strong civil society in which socio-economic priorities take precedent in defining domestic and foreign economic policy over military priorities and definitions of international reality. US empire builders, academics and political advisers have interpreted, what they call ‘the rise of US global power its victory in the Cold War and the decline of Communism’ as a vindication of military-driven empire building. They have ignored the rise of capitalist competitors and the relative and absolute decline of the US as an economic power. It can be argued that the newly emerging market-driven former Communist countries (like China and Russia) represent a greater global challenge to the US Empire than the previous stagnant bureaucratic Communist regimes.
Militarism is deeply embedded in the structure, ideology and policies of the entire US governing class, its political parties, the executive and legislative branches, the judiciary and the armed forces. Over the same half-century countervailing market-driven empire builders have declined as a defining force in the formulation of foreign policy in the US. The growing encroachment of the militant Zionist power configuration within the policy-making directorate has been greatly facilitated by the ascendancy of militarism and the relative decline of economic-empire building.
The long period of incremental decline of US economic empire building and the trillions of dollars wasted by military-driven empire building has come to a climax. In the new millennium with the profound devaluation of the imperial currency (the dollar), the huge indebtedness and loss of markets Washington is totally dependent on the good will of its commercial partners to keep accepting constantly devalued dollars in exchange for essential commodities.
The immediate outcome is likely to be a major domestic crisis, which could be accompanied by one more desperate and futile military attack on Iran and/or Venezuela or a forced confrontation with China and/or Russia. Desperate acts of declining military empires have historically accelerated the demise of imperial rulers.
Out of the debris of failed empires two possible outcomes could emerge. A new rabidly nationalist authoritarian regime or the re-birth of a republic based on the reconstruction of a productive economy centered on the domestic market and social priorities, free from foreign entanglements and power configurations whose only purpose is to subordinate the republic to overseas colonial ambitions.
The dismantling of the military driven empire will not occur ‘by choice’ but by imposed circumstances, including the incapacity of domestic institutions to continue to finance it. The demise of the militarist governing class will follow the collapse of their domestic economic foundations. The result could be a withered empire, or a democratic republic. When and how a new political leadership will emerge will depend on the nature of the social configurations, which undertake the reconstruction of US society.
James Petras is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by James Petras
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8841
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Saturday, May 3, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Truth or Neo-Consequences by Morgan Strong
consortiumnews.com
Truth or Neo-Consequences
By Morgan Strong
April 29, 2008
An obscure academic dispute – over whether Israeli archeology sought to obscure the land's last two millennia of history and promote a continual Jewish claim of ownership – has shown again how tensions in the Middle East can reverberate in unlikely ways in the United States.
The dispute centered on whether Barnard College should grant tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American-born scholar of anthropology who, in the 1990s, challenged the scientific integrity of what she saw as the Israeli use of archeology in a politically motivated way to justify Jewish settlements on territory that had belonged to Palestinians.
Although the controversy wasn't new – it had been argued out within archeological circles in Israel for years – El-Haj became a lightning rod because she was the first academic of Palestinian descent to publicize the debate in a 2001 book, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.
This academic debate boiled over the past two years when El-Haj – who had been a professor at Barnard College since 2002 – applied for tenure in 2006 and became a target of neoconservative attack groups determined to punish her for undermining Israel's claims to the Holy Land.
On Aug. 7, 2007, a petition entitled "Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj Tenure" was posted on petitionline.com, describing her as a scholar of "demonstrably inferior caliber" who had unfairly assailed the methodology of Israeli archeological digs.
The petition – prepared by Paula Stern, a 1982 graduate of Barnard and a resident of the occupied West Bank – also accused El-Haj of calling the ancient Israelite kingdoms a "pure political fabrication" and of lacking basic skills to undertake her studies, including an ability to "speak or read Hebrew." The petition said, "We fail to understand how a scholar can pretend to study the attitudes of a people whose language she does not know."
The petition became a hot topic among American neoconservatives.
Campus Watch, a right-wing organization that monitors the teaching of Middle Eastern studies in the United States, joined in the attacks on El-Haj. Campus Watch was founded in 2002 by Daniel Pipes, a prominent neoconservative and son of Richard Pipes, a key figure in the Cold War-era Committee on the Present Danger.
A blog of pro-Israeli professors known as Scholars for Peace in the Middle East also joined in the anti-tenure campaign. Stern's petition eventually attracted about 2,500 signatures including many alumni from Barnard and its affiliate, Columbia University in New York City.
Errors Admitted
However, two months after Stern posted the petition, she acknowledged to The Jewish Week that some of the petition's criticisms of El-Haj and her book were inaccurate.
Stern "incorrectly quotes from Abu El-Haj's book in charging she is grossly ignorant of Jerusalem geography," according to The Jewish Week article by Larry Cohler-Esses. "Stern also conceded attributing to Abu El-Haj a viewpoint that Abu El-Haj does not voice as her own in her book. The petition does so by taking a quote fragment from a section in which Abu El-Haj describes others as having the opposite viewpoint."
The article also noted that the petition ignored references in El-Haj's book to Hebrew language sources and an acknowledgement to her Hebrew tutor. [The Jewish Week, Oct. 25, 2007]
Despite its inaccuracies, the petition – and the anti-tenure campaign – threatened to exact a price from Barnard and Columbia for granting tenure to El-Haj; the schools would stand to suffer financial harm from offended alumni withholding contributions.
This pattern of ugly controversies whenever a Muslim or an Arab-American criticizes Israel or is seen as promoting some Islamic agenda has become more and more common, with influential neoconservative groups now operating in a concerted way to destroy careers and livelihoods.
Often the strategy succeeds, as the New York Times reported on April 28 in connection with the forced resignation of Debbie Almontaser, the founder of New York's Khalil Gibran International Academy, which had a goal of teaching Arabic to children of various ethnicities, including Arab-Americans.
Almontaser, who had a reputation as a Muslim moderate, stepped down after confronting a campaign that labeled her a "radical," a "jihadist" and a "9/11 denier." The Times reported that the campaign was part of "a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life."
Some of the leaders of the battle against Almontaser – such as Daniel Pipes – also participated in the anti-tenure campaign at Barnard against El-Haj, reflecting how these activists view the marginalizing of Muslims as a coordinated national struggle.
"It's a battle that's really just begun," Pipes told the Times, claiming that this new enemy – "lawful Islamists" – must be stopped before they made enough inroads to enable them to impose sharia law from the Koran on Americans.
"It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia," Pipes said. "It is much easier to see how, working through the system – the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like – you can promote radical Islam." [NYT, April 28, 2008]
So, this strategy holds that Muslims and their non-Muslim allies especially in academia must be marginalized and denied legitimacy. To achieve these ends, neoconservatives and sympathetic media outlets often turn small issues into huge controversies that create enormous pressure on mainstream politicians to distance themselves from the targets.
That was the case with Almontaser when Rupert Murdoch's neoconservative New York Post linked the school principal to a group that lent office space to an Arab-American organization that promoted t-shirts reading "Intifada NYC." Amid the furor, the mayor's office of New York City pushed Almontaser into resigning, although federal judges have since agreed that the Post "inaccurately reported" her words.
Barnard's El-Haj tenure struggle followed a similar pattern, with key roles played by some of the same activists. In both cases, the battle involved neoconservatives who distorted the words of their targets in order to build a public hysteria strong enough to overwhelm the principle of academic freedom.
The Barnard Battle
El-Haj was born in New York, the daughter of a mother of French-Norwegian descent and a Palestinian father, who had received his Doctorate in Economics from Columbia in the late 1950s.
In 1975, her family lived in Teheran, where her father was employed by the United Nations and where she learned Farsi. A few years later, the family moved to Lebanon where she became fluent in Arabic. Her family frequently visited her father's relatives in East Jerusalem.
In 1980, she undertook her undergraduate education at Bryn Mawr. In 1990, as a graduate student at Duke University, she decided on a project in epistemology, "to examine knowledge in a social context, connected to time, place, politics and identity."
Wanting to find a place where that identity was in dispute, she chose Israel/Palestine. She then spent months in Israel learning Hebrew and examining Israeli archeology's role in the creation of, and establishment of, the State of Israel.
Israeli archeology, from the founding of Israel in 1948, claimed to have uncovered evidence supporting an ancient and continuous Hebrew presence, which in turn provided legitimacy to Israeli government claims that Palestinian land should be part of the modern state of Israel.
After achieving her Doctorate in 1995, she adapted her doctoral thesis into a book, Facts on the Ground, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001.
.
The book examined the role of Israeli archeology in what was essentially a political context. El-Haj traced the history of how archeological discoveries – pottery, ancient stones, even human remains – were used in a manipulative way to establish the legitimacy of Israeli claims to Palestinian land.
El-Haj questioned the veracity of some Israeli claims, saying the science of archeology had been exploited in the "formation and enactment of [Israel's] colonial-national historical imagination and ... the substantiation of its territorial claims."
Her book cites the example of an archeological dig in Jezreel, in the Galilee region. El-Haj said British and Israeli archeologists used bulldozers "to get down to the earlier strata, which are saturated with national significance, as quickly as possible."
Bulldozing a site – or using large shovels – to a specific depth of an archaeological dig, where one could expect to find remnants of an ancient Hebrew settlement, or not excavating to lower levels eliminates the possibility of finding evidence that other civilizations preceded or followed the Hebrews.
Israeli archeologist David Ussiskin of the University of Tel Aviv denied that bulldozers at the site were used in the fashion alleged by El-Haj's book or that evidence of more recent strata had been damaged.
Despite a spirited debate about her book, El-Haj's academic career continued to advance. She taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Barnard College in 2002 and sought tenure in April 2006.
That's when El-Haj was caught up in the surging neoconservative campaign to keep Islam – and criticism of Israel – as far out of mainstream American thought as possible.
In this case, however, the neocons did not prevail. El-Haj was awarded tenure on Nov. 1, 2007, representing at least one moment when free speech and academic freedom won out over the sophisticated political pressure that neoconservatives have made their hallmark.
[For more on the El-Haj controversy, see The New Yorker's edition of April 14, 2008.]
Morgan Strong was an adviser on the Middle East to CBS News "60 Minutes." He is a former Professor of Middle Eastern History at MercyCollege and S.U.N.Y.
Truth or Neo-Consequences
By Morgan Strong
April 29, 2008
An obscure academic dispute – over whether Israeli archeology sought to obscure the land's last two millennia of history and promote a continual Jewish claim of ownership – has shown again how tensions in the Middle East can reverberate in unlikely ways in the United States.
The dispute centered on whether Barnard College should grant tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American-born scholar of anthropology who, in the 1990s, challenged the scientific integrity of what she saw as the Israeli use of archeology in a politically motivated way to justify Jewish settlements on territory that had belonged to Palestinians.
Although the controversy wasn't new – it had been argued out within archeological circles in Israel for years – El-Haj became a lightning rod because she was the first academic of Palestinian descent to publicize the debate in a 2001 book, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.
This academic debate boiled over the past two years when El-Haj – who had been a professor at Barnard College since 2002 – applied for tenure in 2006 and became a target of neoconservative attack groups determined to punish her for undermining Israel's claims to the Holy Land.
On Aug. 7, 2007, a petition entitled "Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj Tenure" was posted on petitionline.com, describing her as a scholar of "demonstrably inferior caliber" who had unfairly assailed the methodology of Israeli archeological digs.
The petition – prepared by Paula Stern, a 1982 graduate of Barnard and a resident of the occupied West Bank – also accused El-Haj of calling the ancient Israelite kingdoms a "pure political fabrication" and of lacking basic skills to undertake her studies, including an ability to "speak or read Hebrew." The petition said, "We fail to understand how a scholar can pretend to study the attitudes of a people whose language she does not know."
The petition became a hot topic among American neoconservatives.
Campus Watch, a right-wing organization that monitors the teaching of Middle Eastern studies in the United States, joined in the attacks on El-Haj. Campus Watch was founded in 2002 by Daniel Pipes, a prominent neoconservative and son of Richard Pipes, a key figure in the Cold War-era Committee on the Present Danger.
A blog of pro-Israeli professors known as Scholars for Peace in the Middle East also joined in the anti-tenure campaign. Stern's petition eventually attracted about 2,500 signatures including many alumni from Barnard and its affiliate, Columbia University in New York City.
Errors Admitted
However, two months after Stern posted the petition, she acknowledged to The Jewish Week that some of the petition's criticisms of El-Haj and her book were inaccurate.
Stern "incorrectly quotes from Abu El-Haj's book in charging she is grossly ignorant of Jerusalem geography," according to The Jewish Week article by Larry Cohler-Esses. "Stern also conceded attributing to Abu El-Haj a viewpoint that Abu El-Haj does not voice as her own in her book. The petition does so by taking a quote fragment from a section in which Abu El-Haj describes others as having the opposite viewpoint."
The article also noted that the petition ignored references in El-Haj's book to Hebrew language sources and an acknowledgement to her Hebrew tutor. [The Jewish Week, Oct. 25, 2007]
Despite its inaccuracies, the petition – and the anti-tenure campaign – threatened to exact a price from Barnard and Columbia for granting tenure to El-Haj; the schools would stand to suffer financial harm from offended alumni withholding contributions.
This pattern of ugly controversies whenever a Muslim or an Arab-American criticizes Israel or is seen as promoting some Islamic agenda has become more and more common, with influential neoconservative groups now operating in a concerted way to destroy careers and livelihoods.
Often the strategy succeeds, as the New York Times reported on April 28 in connection with the forced resignation of Debbie Almontaser, the founder of New York's Khalil Gibran International Academy, which had a goal of teaching Arabic to children of various ethnicities, including Arab-Americans.
Almontaser, who had a reputation as a Muslim moderate, stepped down after confronting a campaign that labeled her a "radical," a "jihadist" and a "9/11 denier." The Times reported that the campaign was part of "a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life."
Some of the leaders of the battle against Almontaser – such as Daniel Pipes – also participated in the anti-tenure campaign at Barnard against El-Haj, reflecting how these activists view the marginalizing of Muslims as a coordinated national struggle.
"It's a battle that's really just begun," Pipes told the Times, claiming that this new enemy – "lawful Islamists" – must be stopped before they made enough inroads to enable them to impose sharia law from the Koran on Americans.
"It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia," Pipes said. "It is much easier to see how, working through the system – the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like – you can promote radical Islam." [NYT, April 28, 2008]
So, this strategy holds that Muslims and their non-Muslim allies especially in academia must be marginalized and denied legitimacy. To achieve these ends, neoconservatives and sympathetic media outlets often turn small issues into huge controversies that create enormous pressure on mainstream politicians to distance themselves from the targets.
That was the case with Almontaser when Rupert Murdoch's neoconservative New York Post linked the school principal to a group that lent office space to an Arab-American organization that promoted t-shirts reading "Intifada NYC." Amid the furor, the mayor's office of New York City pushed Almontaser into resigning, although federal judges have since agreed that the Post "inaccurately reported" her words.
Barnard's El-Haj tenure struggle followed a similar pattern, with key roles played by some of the same activists. In both cases, the battle involved neoconservatives who distorted the words of their targets in order to build a public hysteria strong enough to overwhelm the principle of academic freedom.
The Barnard Battle
El-Haj was born in New York, the daughter of a mother of French-Norwegian descent and a Palestinian father, who had received his Doctorate in Economics from Columbia in the late 1950s.
In 1975, her family lived in Teheran, where her father was employed by the United Nations and where she learned Farsi. A few years later, the family moved to Lebanon where she became fluent in Arabic. Her family frequently visited her father's relatives in East Jerusalem.
In 1980, she undertook her undergraduate education at Bryn Mawr. In 1990, as a graduate student at Duke University, she decided on a project in epistemology, "to examine knowledge in a social context, connected to time, place, politics and identity."
Wanting to find a place where that identity was in dispute, she chose Israel/Palestine. She then spent months in Israel learning Hebrew and examining Israeli archeology's role in the creation of, and establishment of, the State of Israel.
Israeli archeology, from the founding of Israel in 1948, claimed to have uncovered evidence supporting an ancient and continuous Hebrew presence, which in turn provided legitimacy to Israeli government claims that Palestinian land should be part of the modern state of Israel.
After achieving her Doctorate in 1995, she adapted her doctoral thesis into a book, Facts on the Ground, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001.
.
The book examined the role of Israeli archeology in what was essentially a political context. El-Haj traced the history of how archeological discoveries – pottery, ancient stones, even human remains – were used in a manipulative way to establish the legitimacy of Israeli claims to Palestinian land.
El-Haj questioned the veracity of some Israeli claims, saying the science of archeology had been exploited in the "formation and enactment of [Israel's] colonial-national historical imagination and ... the substantiation of its territorial claims."
Her book cites the example of an archeological dig in Jezreel, in the Galilee region. El-Haj said British and Israeli archeologists used bulldozers "to get down to the earlier strata, which are saturated with national significance, as quickly as possible."
Bulldozing a site – or using large shovels – to a specific depth of an archaeological dig, where one could expect to find remnants of an ancient Hebrew settlement, or not excavating to lower levels eliminates the possibility of finding evidence that other civilizations preceded or followed the Hebrews.
Israeli archeologist David Ussiskin of the University of Tel Aviv denied that bulldozers at the site were used in the fashion alleged by El-Haj's book or that evidence of more recent strata had been damaged.
Despite a spirited debate about her book, El-Haj's academic career continued to advance. She taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Barnard College in 2002 and sought tenure in April 2006.
That's when El-Haj was caught up in the surging neoconservative campaign to keep Islam – and criticism of Israel – as far out of mainstream American thought as possible.
In this case, however, the neocons did not prevail. El-Haj was awarded tenure on Nov. 1, 2007, representing at least one moment when free speech and academic freedom won out over the sophisticated political pressure that neoconservatives have made their hallmark.
[For more on the El-Haj controversy, see The New Yorker's edition of April 14, 2008.]
Morgan Strong was an adviser on the Middle East to CBS News "60 Minutes." He is a former Professor of Middle Eastern History at MercyCollege and S.U.N.Y.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Obama and Wright by William Pfaff
Obama and Wright
William Pfaff
Paris, April 30, 2008 – The thing that from the beginning of the presidential campaign I found most striking about Barack Obama is that he seemed to be grown-up.
Politicians, I suppose, mostly start out as normal human beings, but as they approach the heights of the political ladder something terrible usually happens and they turn into robotic constructions of cynicism, pandering, claptrap patriotism and false sentiment. Ten years ago Hillary Clinton was a smart woman you could have a conversation with. Possibly ten years from now she will again be that woman. She and we are now trapped in the terrible meantime.
Some survive. Adlai Stevenson remained human, but then he was a loser. John Kennedy as president remained wise-cracking, intelligent and unpompous during the 34 months he had to live. Jimmy Carter seems a nice and good man, but he too was a loser. If Ronald Reagan was a phony (playing "his greatest role," as Gore Vidal said) he never showed any evidence of being other than what he presented himself as being. Bill Clinton may like to present himself as ol' dawg, but in person always struck me as closer to a neurotic fox terrier in quest of affection.
Obama is cool, and not in the fashionable sense. He displays common sense and less than total patience in responding to the inanities of the primary debates and infantile harassment by those Washington reporters who think not wearing an American flag pin is a big story. He prefers finishing the waffle.
Now he has an uncool enemy who seems more anxious to take him down than Hillary Clinton. When a video of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. seemingly damning America was unearthed and polemically edited by Fox Television, Obama replied to the frenzy with a serious speech on American race relations.
He undoubtedly realized that his words would be wasted on many, but was speaking to the American people, paying them the tribute of an intelligent and deeply-felt response to an episode that might reasonably have disturbed them.
The Rev. Mr. Wright, slighted by Obama's distancing himself from Wright's words, retaliated on public television and in public appearances in Washington last weekend, embellishing his criticisms of white America and its government, and denying that Obama could think any differently.
The press reaction was scandalized and sanctimonious when it was not vicious, as when the columnist George Will called Wright's statements "paranoia" and insinuatingly asked, in the light of his relationship with Wright, "what remains to be explored" about Obama?
My first reaction was to ask what country these people live in. Have
they never heard white people, possibly even cynical journalists, say such things about the contemporary United States as Wright said? Maybe they have never been to a black church; but have they never heard a black preacher on the radio or television? Have they never read black intellectuals or black novelists on the black experience in America?
Have they never heard of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin? They were saying things about America a half-century ago that when said today cause white editors and journalists to pretend are shocking and unpatriotic.
In a way it is as if these people had never listened to Obama's Philadelphia speech, when he soberly explained where all of this comes from. But Wright was not elaborating on the meaning of the black experience but apparently trying to do Obama in, and he quite possibly has succeeded. Obama, the man who was white enough for the whites and black enough for the blacks, looked a lot blacker after Wright's performance.
More damaging is that, as an anonymous campaign observer has already suggested, the main danger to Obama is not that he is black but that he is too exotic. "He's not like us." This once seemed an asset – he wasn't like the Clintons, the Bushes, the corporate fat-cats, the Washington power players. But it could also prove a liability with a much larger group of potential voters than the much-stigmatized working-class Catholics. It might include such people as his white grandmother, about whose inhibitions he already has told us.
Part of the press is already saying that his Winston-Salem press conference was not "tough enough" on Wright, renewing doubt about how he would handle that 3 A.M. telephone call from the Strategic Air Command. But what is he supposed to do about Wright? Hire someone to push him down a flight of stairs?
He's tough enough to have dismissed the half-century-old American foreign policy principle of never talking with enemies until they have preemptively surrendered. That's real toughness, in today's Washington. He has said that he won't sign on to the plan to give American drivers a gasoline tax holiday during the pre-electoral summer season, which McCain proposed and Clinton supports.
To the shock-horror of the policy establishment he says that he would talk to Iran. Who knows, he might even talk to Hamas or Hezbollah, or the Cubans, or sign off on the new Pakistani government's talking with the Taliban and the tribes in Waziristan, whom we are incessantly told harbor mortal threat to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Europe, Israel and even Winston-Salem. That's toughness.
It would be a novelty to have a government that instead of just killing them, might talk with some of those people "who hate us so" -- as George Bush wonderingly put it back in 2001. One can never tell, but a grown-up with common sense might try to change other things in America that many Americans agree are broken. We may never know.
© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
William Pfaff
Paris, April 30, 2008 – The thing that from the beginning of the presidential campaign I found most striking about Barack Obama is that he seemed to be grown-up.
Politicians, I suppose, mostly start out as normal human beings, but as they approach the heights of the political ladder something terrible usually happens and they turn into robotic constructions of cynicism, pandering, claptrap patriotism and false sentiment. Ten years ago Hillary Clinton was a smart woman you could have a conversation with. Possibly ten years from now she will again be that woman. She and we are now trapped in the terrible meantime.
Some survive. Adlai Stevenson remained human, but then he was a loser. John Kennedy as president remained wise-cracking, intelligent and unpompous during the 34 months he had to live. Jimmy Carter seems a nice and good man, but he too was a loser. If Ronald Reagan was a phony (playing "his greatest role," as Gore Vidal said) he never showed any evidence of being other than what he presented himself as being. Bill Clinton may like to present himself as ol' dawg, but in person always struck me as closer to a neurotic fox terrier in quest of affection.
Obama is cool, and not in the fashionable sense. He displays common sense and less than total patience in responding to the inanities of the primary debates and infantile harassment by those Washington reporters who think not wearing an American flag pin is a big story. He prefers finishing the waffle.
Now he has an uncool enemy who seems more anxious to take him down than Hillary Clinton. When a video of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. seemingly damning America was unearthed and polemically edited by Fox Television, Obama replied to the frenzy with a serious speech on American race relations.
He undoubtedly realized that his words would be wasted on many, but was speaking to the American people, paying them the tribute of an intelligent and deeply-felt response to an episode that might reasonably have disturbed them.
The Rev. Mr. Wright, slighted by Obama's distancing himself from Wright's words, retaliated on public television and in public appearances in Washington last weekend, embellishing his criticisms of white America and its government, and denying that Obama could think any differently.
The press reaction was scandalized and sanctimonious when it was not vicious, as when the columnist George Will called Wright's statements "paranoia" and insinuatingly asked, in the light of his relationship with Wright, "what remains to be explored" about Obama?
My first reaction was to ask what country these people live in. Have
they never heard white people, possibly even cynical journalists, say such things about the contemporary United States as Wright said? Maybe they have never been to a black church; but have they never heard a black preacher on the radio or television? Have they never read black intellectuals or black novelists on the black experience in America?
Have they never heard of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin? They were saying things about America a half-century ago that when said today cause white editors and journalists to pretend are shocking and unpatriotic.
In a way it is as if these people had never listened to Obama's Philadelphia speech, when he soberly explained where all of this comes from. But Wright was not elaborating on the meaning of the black experience but apparently trying to do Obama in, and he quite possibly has succeeded. Obama, the man who was white enough for the whites and black enough for the blacks, looked a lot blacker after Wright's performance.
More damaging is that, as an anonymous campaign observer has already suggested, the main danger to Obama is not that he is black but that he is too exotic. "He's not like us." This once seemed an asset – he wasn't like the Clintons, the Bushes, the corporate fat-cats, the Washington power players. But it could also prove a liability with a much larger group of potential voters than the much-stigmatized working-class Catholics. It might include such people as his white grandmother, about whose inhibitions he already has told us.
Part of the press is already saying that his Winston-Salem press conference was not "tough enough" on Wright, renewing doubt about how he would handle that 3 A.M. telephone call from the Strategic Air Command. But what is he supposed to do about Wright? Hire someone to push him down a flight of stairs?
He's tough enough to have dismissed the half-century-old American foreign policy principle of never talking with enemies until they have preemptively surrendered. That's real toughness, in today's Washington. He has said that he won't sign on to the plan to give American drivers a gasoline tax holiday during the pre-electoral summer season, which McCain proposed and Clinton supports.
To the shock-horror of the policy establishment he says that he would talk to Iran. Who knows, he might even talk to Hamas or Hezbollah, or the Cubans, or sign off on the new Pakistani government's talking with the Taliban and the tribes in Waziristan, whom we are incessantly told harbor mortal threat to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Europe, Israel and even Winston-Salem. That's toughness.
It would be a novelty to have a government that instead of just killing them, might talk with some of those people "who hate us so" -- as George Bush wonderingly put it back in 2001. One can never tell, but a grown-up with common sense might try to change other things in America that many Americans agree are broken. We may never know.
© Copyright 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
Bitterlemons International Middle East Roundtable: May 1, 2008, Syria and Israel
bitterlemons-international.org
Middle East Roundtable
Edition 17 Volume 6 - May 01, 2008
Syria and Israel
• The challenges of normalization - Mahdi Abdul Hadi
Bashar al-Assad could soon be as recognizable to the residents of Tel Aviv as the tame Mahmoud Abbas.
• Faking it - Rime Allaf
The sudden emergence of peace talk rumors is confusing.
• New factors both resurrecting and stalling "secret talks" - Riad Kahwaji
Damascus could either gain back the Golan or find itself in the crossfire between the Iran-Hizballah axis and almost everyone else.
• Syria looking for tangible reward - Waleed Sadi
It seems that Barak now realizes that aborting the peace deal that was in the making under the auspices of Clinton was a major strategic error.
• The fear of war, the hope for peace - Eyal Zisser
If peace negotiations are not resumed, Israeli-Syrian relations are not likely to go anywhere constructive.
The challenges of normalization
Mahdi Abdul Hadi
Many contradicting trends and confusing political signals have been exchanged in recent months in the Middle East, making it a daunting task to untangle the intertwining motives in the region. The revelation of talks between Israel and Syria adds yet another twist in the political knot, and we are once again reminded that the fates of the Middle East states are connected. Syria has now opened important diplomatic and other fronts with Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel, and it is likely that the same concerns will be shared by all parties--namely, state and societal security within recognized borders, management of oil and water resources, economic cooperation, and protection of the rights of minority populations and the right of refugees to return to their homelands. Still, the question remains: are the leaders in Syria and Israel genuine in their efforts toward normalization between their nations, and if so, are they up to the challenge?
On the surface, it looks like Syria holds a strong hand in the politics of Middle Eastern conflict. President Bashar al-Assad has received high-level visitors like US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Former US president Jimmy Carter, each of whom came away convinced that the US should invite the Syrians into the "peace process". Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was also welcomed to Damascus on an official visit. Assad even managed to save an Arab summit in April that was threatened with collapse due to the absence of the Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians. At the same time, Syria's relationships with Hizballah, Hamas and Iran have proven to be lasting in the face of outside pressure, and Assad has opened an economic partnership with Turkey. To paint Syria as an important player in the region is an easy task when it has all of these elements working in its favor. Unfortunately for the regime in Damascus, its position is not as comfortable as it may seem.
For evidence of Syrian vulnerability one need look no further than the lack of response to the string of affronts that have come Syria's way over the last few years. For example, Israel tested Syria's commitment to Hizballah during its war in June of 2006, executed an air strike in Deir-a-Zour in September 2007 and managed to assassinate Hizballah leader Imad Mugniyeh in the heart of Damascus in February. Each of these actions passed without Syrian reprisal. For all the posturing of the two sides, the border between Syria and Israel has been a quiet front for the last four decades. This inaction has led the Israeli leadership to believe that in Syria it has found a partner that will be responsive and pliable, one that can be led along slowly in a process of normalization.
This fact is an important one for Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, as his hold on power is tenuous at best. The negotiations with the Palestinians have irreparably stalled, with no hope of being revived by the weak leadership of Olmert and his counterparts in Ramallah and Washington. With political opponents breathing down his neck and Israeli public opinion turning increasingly against him, Olmert is seeking to buy more time by opening up a dialogue with Syria. He has made no promises to the Syrians and has committed to nothing, yet this new Syrian intrigue could prove useful in turning the public's attention away from the predictable but politically damaging impasse that has befallen the negotiations with the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership faces internal crisis and a deeply divided society and has become dependent on the political interests and direction of Riyadh, Cairo and Amman. Gaza continues to be strangled by the hands of the Israeli army and military incursions occur throughout the occupied territories on a regular basis. With regard to Syria, Palestinians can only sit back and watch as a story with many similarities to their own unfolds. Just as Palestinian society--including everything from the rule of law to political governance to the educational system--has been revealed to Israeli eyes, so will the Syrian national structure. If Olmert is successful, Bashar al-Assad could soon be as recognizable to the residents of Tel Aviv as the tame Mahmoud Abbas, a man whose platform is a far cry from the revolutionary tone of Yasser Arafat.
The Syrians and Israelis will also find that no matter what they can agree upon, nothing can be concluded or implemented without a comprehensive regional solution. Any discussion on the status of the Golan Heights will inevitably spur immediate speculation on the prospects of Israel withdrawing to pre-1967 borders. Rabin, Netanyahu, Barak and now Olmert have all claimed to be willing to cede the Golan and yet there has been no serious follow-up. Even if Israel were to make partial concessions in the Golan in exchange for normalization with Syria, this would only strengthen the Israeli grip on the West Bank and Jerusalem, much like what has transpired in the aftermath of the "disengagement" from Gaza.
No one, especially not the Palestinians, should be so naive as to expect that empty political normalization between Israel and Syria could lead to progress in breaking the impasse of the Middle East conflict.- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Dr Mahdi Abdul Hadi is head of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, PASSIA, in Jerusalem.
Faking it
Rime Allaf
Facts have rarely gotten in the Bush administration's way when demonizing a political opponent, even when that opponent has actually tried to accommodate multiple American demands. Accused of enemy complicity in most places where the US or its allies are involved, Syria has nevertheless regularly offered concrete help in the "war on terror" (including in the infamous extraordinary renditions) and in policing and sealing the Iraqi border.
A last minute invitation to Annapolis, in November 2007, was merely a reluctant move by US President George W. Bush to pretend he was serious about reaching a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. Under no circumstance should Syria have imagined this meant American pressure would stabilize, or even decrease, especially after the Israeli raid on a mysterious Syrian target in September 2007, which was clearly blessed by Bush.
Seven months after that raid, the US suddenly divulged that Israel had destroyed a nuclear reactor, built with North Korean help, which would have produced enough plutonium for one or two weapons within a year of becoming operational. The allegations were supported by "proof" presented in a series of graphs and photographs of "North Korean faces", nuclear equipment and satellite images of buildings, which were promptly discredited by some experts while used as evidence by others.
The IAEA was understandably outraged that this information was not produced for its inspection, before the Israeli raid and in the months following it. While some have chosen to believe that the current disclosure was meant to pressure North Korea, Bush offered several reasons for this delay. In particular, he explained, the US wanted to prevent confrontation and conflict in the region (raid notwithstanding, apparently) and was concerned that Syria would feel pressured to retaliate against Israel if the nuclear intelligence was made public, a reasoning that is difficult to take seriously. Clearly, the US is somehow convinced that Syria's urge to defend itself has now passed.
Even by the low standards of the Bush administration and its record of manufactured intelligence and fabricated liberations, the allegations about the timing are implausible and have other aims: since his arrival at the White House, Bush has done everything to thwart a potential peace deal between Syria and Israel, regardless of the fluctuating positions of the latter.
Indeed, even when taking into account the invitation to Annapolis, US behavior toward Syria has at least been consistent throughout the tenure of the Bush administration, with political pressure steadily increasing over the years and sanctions imposed. In contrast, Israel's demeanor vis-a-vis Syria has been erratic, sending mixed messages and failing to adopt a solid position.
It is odd that a prime minister raiding a site on enemy ground, supposedly knowing it is a nuclear facility, should praise that same enemy leader ten days later, declaring his respect. It is also strange that a massive war drill should subsequently be choreographed, groundlessly fueling war speculations. At the same time, Israeli officials have repeatedly confirmed that Syria poses no military threat, an acknowledgement that not only lays to rest looming war fears from its side, but also annuls the security factor in the Golan withdrawal equation.
The sudden emergence of peace talk rumors is confusing in the midst of such conflicting messages. Divulged by Syria, uncharacteristically, an initiative by Turkey has put negotiations back on the agenda. Most importantly, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, confirmed to his Turkish mediators that Israel would return the entire Golan in exchange for peace with Syria. Normally, such statements are unnecessary, given that UNSC Resolution 242 already obliges Israel to return to its June 4, 1967 position. Furthermore, the Rabin Deposit, since the early 1990s, had already pledged Israel's full withdrawal from occupied Syrian land. In the current regional balance, however, Olmert's unexpected statement would have been music to Syrian ears.
Lest there be too much enthusiasm that an immediate deal is imminent, however, the Syrian president was quick to clarify that this would not be possible before 2009, when a more reasonable US administration, one assumes, is in place. Syria seems to be discounting the possibility of a McCain presidency, or else ignorant of the latter's own visions, and it seems to expect that whoever Bush's successor is, he or she will be a more willing and honest broker. Even if Syria and Israel warm to each other under the matchmaking talents of their common friend Turkey, all parties know that an eventual wedding can only be officiated by an American minister. It would thus be premature to interpret the current messages as signs of seriousness or of a breakthrough.
Damascus has often been accused of wanting to engage for engagement's sake, but its position has not changed over the years as it called repeatedly for a return to negotiations. In contrast, Israel continuously found excuses to procrastinate while claiming it doubted Syria's intentions. Obviously, Israel knows a peace deal means a complete withdrawal from the Golan, to which Israelis seem to have gotten rather attached over the years, and whose return to Syria will cost the latter a lot more than just "peace" according to the blueprints developed in track two talks. Israel is clearly in no hurry to reach this stage, making the timing of Olmert's declaration suspect as well, especially when considering his domestic political struggles and his attempt to avoid "painful concessions" on the Palestinian track.
It seems rather unfortunate that the public acknowledgement of Israel's full withdrawal from the Golan should coincide with the "revelation" of Syria's amazing nuclear capacities. What remains to be determined is whether Bush was helping Olmert retract, whether Olmert was helping Bush attack, or whether both were simply, as usual, simultaneously scratching each other's backs.- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Rime Allaf is associate fellow at London's Chatham House.
New factors both resurrecting and stalling "secret talks"
Riad Kahwaji
Describing the state of relations between Syria and Israel is not as easy a task as an average observer would think. Although the two countries regard one another as arch foes and have fought four wars over the past 60 years, they nevertheless seem to have learned to coexist with one another, at least at the level of ruling parties on both sides of the border. The point of dispute proclaimed to be delaying a peace treaty between the two is the Golan Heights that Israel captured in the 1967 war. Neither side has been able to convince the other of the need to close a deal. The events that followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, up until the Syrian pullout from Lebanon in 2005, further complicated the situation between Syria and Israel.
While official talks between the two sides were halted in 2000, non-official contacts between Israel and Syria at the level of experts and civil servants have continued almost non-stop. People who have attended track II behind-the-scenes meetings in Europe and some Arab capitals over the past few years have witnessed Israelis and Syrians meeting and talking. In listening to the two sides exchanging views one could come to the conclusion that Damascus has not been able to convince Israel that it must withdraw from the Golan.
Why would Israel withdraw when there are no military activities near the occupied heights, the regime in Damascus does not feel confident enough to try to liberate the land by force and many Israelis still believe in the strategic importance of the Golan and its water resources? On the other side, the Syrian regime does not feel pressed to warm up the Golan front, still controls Palestinian factions that can be used to wage a proxy war on Israel from outside Syrian territory and feels it can survive without real change in the current regional environment.
Despite all the heated rhetoric from both sides, events before, during and after the summer 2006 war between Hizballah and Israel have shown that neither side wants war. However, the war with Hizballah and the situation in the Gaza Strip and in Iraq have presented to Israel as well as the United States and its allies a major new challenge: Iran. The Islamic Republic has succeeded in spreading its influence and creating pressure points in many places. Tehran's strong strategic relations with Damascus have enabled it to achieve this expansion within the Arab-Israel geopolitical space.
Hence the theory of driving a wedge between Syria and Iran was born in order to isolate and subsequently weaken Hizballah and Tehran. This has added a new dimension to the "secret direct and indirect talks" between Israel and Syria. For some Israeli officials, the threat posed by the growing influence of a hard-line Islamic regime with a nuclear program outweighs the consequences of an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan.
So the Israeli message to Damascus is now: break up with Iran and Hizballah and the Golan is yours. The Syrian response has been: first return the Golan Heights or at least make an open written declaration of a full withdrawal within a short time period and then we will move away from Tehran and Hizballah. Given the shared history of hatred and deceit and the environment filled with mistrust, it is hard to predict who will make the first move.
To make things worse, new factors have emerged that weigh on the Syrian-Israeli talks. The international tribunal investigating the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri is perceived by the Syrian regime as a big threat. The strong performance by Hizballah in the 2006 war and the failure of the Israel Defense Forces to make any gains seem to have encouraged Damascus to reconsider the military option, at least from the a-symmetrical perspective, prompting Syria to boost its military procurement programs. Also, growing Iranian and Shi'ite influence in the region, abetted by Syria, has both alarmed and angered several Arab countries, especially heavyweights like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Thus, some Arab players are concerned that an Israeli-Syrian deal could torpedo the Hariri international tribunal and leave intact Iran's strength and regional influence. Another group of Israeli and western experts and officials even question whether the Syrian regime is strong enough to strile such a deal. Hizballah and Iranian officials are carefully watching the Syrians and would not likely sit still if they felt Damascus was about to turn on them. The truth is that nobody knows how strong or independent of Tehran's influence Damascus is today.
Meanwhile, Syrian officials do not believe the weak Israeli government of Ehud Olmert could give up the Golan Heights. Without true incentives from the international community, neither Syria nor Israel would likely make any tangible move toward one another despite the Iranian factor.
The focal point of interest or great concern to Israel, the US, the West and some Arab countries is Iran. With Syria in the middle, Damascus could either regain the Golan or find itself in the crossfire between the Iran-Hizballah axis and almost everyone else. It could even find itself fighting an undesired war. For Damascus at this juncture, the safest option is to play the waiting game until the next US presidential elections, in the hope of seeing a more flexible American administration that reverts to the old pattern of making deals based on pure national interest rather than--as has been the case with the current Bush administration--ideology. This strategy seems to suit Iran as well, insofar as it wants to strike its own deal with a more flexible administration in Washington.
But could the other side play the waiting game while Iran is building its nuclear program and expanding its influence in the region? Could the fragile situation in Lebanon and Gaza prevail without serious deterioration that could spark a war? Do the Israeli-Syrian talks now seek a true peace or merely the postponement of an inevitable showdown? As always, only time will tell.- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Riad Kahwaji is founder and director general of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA) in Dubai and is the Middle East bureau chief for Defense News.
Syria looking for tangible reward
Waleed Sadi
Conventional wisdom in the Middle East has it that while a regional Middle East war cannot break out without Egypt, no peace in the region can ever be attained without Syria. Hence, if the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt in 1979 did in fact eliminate the chances of an Arab-Israel war, the events and developments that occurred since also proved that a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world remains elusive as long as Damascus is sidelined and effectively excluded from the peace process.
Former US president Bill Clinton may have understood this critical Syrian role when, during his term in office, he nearly succeeded in brokering a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty along the following broad outlines: a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, the establishment of an international observation post there, diplomatic relations between the two countries and the continued flow of water to Lake Tiberius.
According to Clinton's memoir, "My Life", it was former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak who balked at the deal at the last minute by hardening his country's demands so that the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad could not but refuse. For example, whereas Syria accepted to leave a ten-meter stretch of territory along Lake Tiberius in the hands of Israel, Barak wanted half a kilometer. And while Syria accepted to have full diplomatic relations as soon as Israel completed its withdrawal from Syrian territory, Barak wanted it much sooner. On top of this, Barak insisted that a complete Israeli withdrawal should take three years; Syria wanted the withdrawal in 18 months. Syria also accepted the deployment of an international observation post manned by either the UN or US personnel. Israel wanted it to be manned by only Israeli observers.
Clinton wrote that peace between the two countries had been within reach and was almost a done deal until Barak, due to some internal political consideration, backed away from what was an imminent breakthrough. It is possible now that it has dawned on Israel that peace in the Middle East, including with the Palestinians, will remain elusive as long as Syria is isolated and not made part of the broader peace process.
Israel, under various shades of leadership, has tried to make peace with the Palestinians. Starting with the Oslo accords in 1994 and onward through the so-called roadmap of the Quartet and the series of summits held under the auspices of current US President George W. Bush, including the Annapolis summit, all have failed. The missing link in all these efforts has been and still is Syria.
Israel has only made things worse by occasionally switching from the Palestinian front to the Syrian front in its peace rhetoric as if trying to apply pressure on each Arab side to hurry up and make peace before it concludes peace with the other. Of late, Israel has been intimating that it seeks peace with Syria. Of all people, Ehud Barak--now the minister of defense in the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert--is sounding out Syria once again for a possible peace deal.
It seems that Barak now realizes that aborting the peace deal that was in the making under the auspices of Clinton was a major strategic error. Olmert seems to agree with this sentiment after it dawned on him that engaging the Palestinians in peace talks without the cooperation of Syria will only lead to a dead end. This has become all the more true in the wake of the Hamas takeover not only of Gaza but also of much of Palestinian public opinion in the West Bank. Damascus is home to the Hamas leadership and that's where real decisions on the Palestinian front are taken.
This brings us to Syria's decision to break its silence on the Israeli sneak aerial attack on a Syrian facility last September. According to the American version of the attack, Pyongyang had been busy building a nuclear reactor in Syria when Israel attacked. The North Korean intention behind constructing a North Korean prototype nuclear facility in Syria capable of producing enriched uranium is open for conjecture. More important for our purposes is the Syrian dimension to this episode.
It is a well-known fact that Syria has no fuel to use in such a nuclear facility even if it were fully operational. One explanation might be that Damascus was indicating that it might go nuclear sooner or later if it continues to be isolated from the peace process and its territory remains occupied. Damascus could be using the nuclear facility as a pressure tactic to force Israel to make good on its repeated talk about peace with Syria or else face the consequences. Why else not divulge the "evidence" collected by the US on the destroyed Syrian facility for nearly eight months?
Yet one thing seems certain. Given the fact that in 2002, Bush associated Syria with the "axis of evil", it is possible that Bush wants to break that axis by engaging Syria in behind-the-scenes talks. The fact that Israeli rhetoric about peace with Syria has picked up momentum recently shows that there may be some coordinated effort to break Syria out of this "axis of evil".
But it is not only Washington that wants to drive a wedge between Syria on the one hand and North Korea and Iran on the other. Some Arab capitals are also deeply involved in trying to lure Syria back to the pro-West Arab camp. All these Arab and non-Arab efforts are counting on divisions within Syrian circles. However, in order for Syria to change course, it must be offered something tangible, and nothing less than a complete Israeli withdrawal from its territory will do.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been sending signals to Damascus that Israel is now in a mood to strike such a deal. In the final analysis, everything depends on the true intentions of Israel. Does it or does it not want a true and comprehensive peace that all Arab sides can live with?- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Waleed Sadi is a former Jordanian ambassador to Turkey and the UN and other international organizations in Geneva. He is currently a columnist for the Jordan Times and Al Rai newspapers.
The fear of war, the hope for peace
Eyal Zisser
During the past few years, but mainly since the end of the Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hizballah in summer 2006, Israeli-Syrian relations have oscillated between hopes for the resumption of peace negotiations and even a breakthrough in these negotiations and fears of a possible confrontation. Two formative events recently expressed this structural tension in the delicate relations between Israel and Syria: the Israeli attack on a nuclear facility in northern Syria on September 6, 2007 and the dramatic announcement by Syrian President Bashar Assad on April 23, 2008 that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had committed himself to full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in return for an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement.
Indeed, the Second Lebanon War should be seen as a watershed in the development of Syrian-Israeli relations. Following the war, which the Syrians first regarded as an Israeli failure and a victory for Hizballah, Assad felt confident enough to threaten Israel that if it did not return the entire Golan Heights he might use force against it or at least adopt the option of "muqawama" (resistance), following the Hizballah model in southern Lebanon. These threats were followed by unprecedented Syrian military preparations for a possible confrontation with Israel, accompanied by similarly unprecedented preparations on the Israeli side of the border.
Following the 2006 Lebanon war, it also seemed as if the previously existing room for maneuver between the two countries had been reduced to almost zero. In light of the strident rhetoric, the growing tension and the intensified military preparations, neither side seemed prepared or able to continue suffering in silence the mistakes--one might say provocations--of the other. Any incident, even the most limited, on either side of the border could have led to a serious outbreak of fighting, even if neither side so intended. To a large extent, Syria benefited from the new situation. It seemed to give Assad the opportunity to create new ground rules, based on the new balance of power created by the Lebanon war.
Against the backdrop of this complex situation, with Israeli-Syrian relations deteriorating, the Israel Air Force carried out its early morning air attack of September 2007 in distant northeast Syria, aiming at a nuclear facility provided the Syrians by North Korea. Assad chose not to retaliate for this Israeli attack, giving Major General Amos Yadlin, head of IDF Intelligence, good reason for making the statement that Israel had restored its deterrent power vis-a-vis Syria. Indeed, when on February 13, 2008 Imad Mughniyyeh, head of the military wing of Hizballah, was assassinated in the heart of Damascus, presumably by Israel, and no response came from Syria or Hizballah, observers argued once again that Israel had restored its deterrent capability.
Quite a few observers have even claimed that one of the results, albeit indirect, of the IAF attack of September 2007 was Syria's decision to participate in the Annapolis Israel-Arab peace conference in November 2007. This step indicated that Syria had some degree of interest in renewing the peace talks with Israel, despite, or perhaps because of, the Israeli attack.
On April 23, 2008 Assad declared publicly that he had received a message from Olmert, through the good offices of their Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to which Olmert committed to a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights in return for peace with Damascus. If this was indeed the case, it was the first time since the failure of the Clinton-Hafez Assad summit in Geneva in March 2000 that a window of opportunity had been opened for a possible resumption of peace negotiations between Israel and Syria.
True, after the Second Lebanon War there had been a limited and hesitant exchange of messages between Israeli and Syrian leaders in which both countries expressed their interest in making peace. However, this exchange of messages did not lead anywhere; it has been cited by experts as proof not of both sides' desire for peace but, on the contrary, of their lack of political will to make the decisions necessary for peace.
For years, the Syrians demanded that Israel commit to full withdrawal to the shore of the Sea of Galilee as a precondition for the resumption of peace negotiations between the two countries. This time Ehud Olmert decided to take the political risk and meet this Syrian demand. In this he followed in the footsteps of the late PM Yitzhak Rabin, who made a similar commitment (the "Rabin deposit") in August 1993.
Yet the road to peace is still very long and complicated. A reminder of the difficulties was provided on the day after Assad's statement when the US administration chose to confirm that the Israeli attack of September 2007 had indeed targeted a nuclear facility provided to the Syrians by North Korea. While the American focus was on North Korea, many felt that Washington wanted to put a dampener on the warming-up of a peace process between Israel and Syria. After all, without active American participation in this process little can be achieved by Syria and Israel.
In conclusion, a window of opportunity has once again been opened to the winds of peace on Israel's northern front. But if peace negotiations are not resumed, Israeli-Syrian relations are not likely to go anywhere constructive. The dynamic activating them will turn out once again to be a negative one. Therefore, in the absence of any genuine prospects for a forward-moving peace process, and despite the temporary relaxation of tensions between the two countries, their relations will continue to be marked by accumulating tension, military preparations and, mainly, forecasts of war--if not in the spring then in the summer, and if not in 2008 then in 2009.- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Prof. Eyal Zisser is director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and chair of the department of Middle Eastern and African History, both at Tel Aviv University
Bitterlemons-international.org is an internet forum for an array of world perspectives on the Middle East and its specific concerns. It aspires to engender greater understanding about the Middle East region and open a new common space for world thinkers and political leaders to present their viewpoints and initiatives on the region. Editors Ghassan Khatib and Yossi Alpher can be reached at ghassan@bitterlemons-international.org and yossi@bitterlemons-international.org, respectively.
Middle East Roundtable
Edition 17 Volume 6 - May 01, 2008
Syria and Israel
• The challenges of normalization - Mahdi Abdul Hadi
Bashar al-Assad could soon be as recognizable to the residents of Tel Aviv as the tame Mahmoud Abbas.
• Faking it - Rime Allaf
The sudden emergence of peace talk rumors is confusing.
• New factors both resurrecting and stalling "secret talks" - Riad Kahwaji
Damascus could either gain back the Golan or find itself in the crossfire between the Iran-Hizballah axis and almost everyone else.
• Syria looking for tangible reward - Waleed Sadi
It seems that Barak now realizes that aborting the peace deal that was in the making under the auspices of Clinton was a major strategic error.
• The fear of war, the hope for peace - Eyal Zisser
If peace negotiations are not resumed, Israeli-Syrian relations are not likely to go anywhere constructive.
The challenges of normalization
Mahdi Abdul Hadi
Many contradicting trends and confusing political signals have been exchanged in recent months in the Middle East, making it a daunting task to untangle the intertwining motives in the region. The revelation of talks between Israel and Syria adds yet another twist in the political knot, and we are once again reminded that the fates of the Middle East states are connected. Syria has now opened important diplomatic and other fronts with Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel, and it is likely that the same concerns will be shared by all parties--namely, state and societal security within recognized borders, management of oil and water resources, economic cooperation, and protection of the rights of minority populations and the right of refugees to return to their homelands. Still, the question remains: are the leaders in Syria and Israel genuine in their efforts toward normalization between their nations, and if so, are they up to the challenge?
On the surface, it looks like Syria holds a strong hand in the politics of Middle Eastern conflict. President Bashar al-Assad has received high-level visitors like US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Former US president Jimmy Carter, each of whom came away convinced that the US should invite the Syrians into the "peace process". Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was also welcomed to Damascus on an official visit. Assad even managed to save an Arab summit in April that was threatened with collapse due to the absence of the Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians. At the same time, Syria's relationships with Hizballah, Hamas and Iran have proven to be lasting in the face of outside pressure, and Assad has opened an economic partnership with Turkey. To paint Syria as an important player in the region is an easy task when it has all of these elements working in its favor. Unfortunately for the regime in Damascus, its position is not as comfortable as it may seem.
For evidence of Syrian vulnerability one need look no further than the lack of response to the string of affronts that have come Syria's way over the last few years. For example, Israel tested Syria's commitment to Hizballah during its war in June of 2006, executed an air strike in Deir-a-Zour in September 2007 and managed to assassinate Hizballah leader Imad Mugniyeh in the heart of Damascus in February. Each of these actions passed without Syrian reprisal. For all the posturing of the two sides, the border between Syria and Israel has been a quiet front for the last four decades. This inaction has led the Israeli leadership to believe that in Syria it has found a partner that will be responsive and pliable, one that can be led along slowly in a process of normalization.
This fact is an important one for Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, as his hold on power is tenuous at best. The negotiations with the Palestinians have irreparably stalled, with no hope of being revived by the weak leadership of Olmert and his counterparts in Ramallah and Washington. With political opponents breathing down his neck and Israeli public opinion turning increasingly against him, Olmert is seeking to buy more time by opening up a dialogue with Syria. He has made no promises to the Syrians and has committed to nothing, yet this new Syrian intrigue could prove useful in turning the public's attention away from the predictable but politically damaging impasse that has befallen the negotiations with the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership faces internal crisis and a deeply divided society and has become dependent on the political interests and direction of Riyadh, Cairo and Amman. Gaza continues to be strangled by the hands of the Israeli army and military incursions occur throughout the occupied territories on a regular basis. With regard to Syria, Palestinians can only sit back and watch as a story with many similarities to their own unfolds. Just as Palestinian society--including everything from the rule of law to political governance to the educational system--has been revealed to Israeli eyes, so will the Syrian national structure. If Olmert is successful, Bashar al-Assad could soon be as recognizable to the residents of Tel Aviv as the tame Mahmoud Abbas, a man whose platform is a far cry from the revolutionary tone of Yasser Arafat.
The Syrians and Israelis will also find that no matter what they can agree upon, nothing can be concluded or implemented without a comprehensive regional solution. Any discussion on the status of the Golan Heights will inevitably spur immediate speculation on the prospects of Israel withdrawing to pre-1967 borders. Rabin, Netanyahu, Barak and now Olmert have all claimed to be willing to cede the Golan and yet there has been no serious follow-up. Even if Israel were to make partial concessions in the Golan in exchange for normalization with Syria, this would only strengthen the Israeli grip on the West Bank and Jerusalem, much like what has transpired in the aftermath of the "disengagement" from Gaza.
No one, especially not the Palestinians, should be so naive as to expect that empty political normalization between Israel and Syria could lead to progress in breaking the impasse of the Middle East conflict.- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Dr Mahdi Abdul Hadi is head of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, PASSIA, in Jerusalem.
Faking it
Rime Allaf
Facts have rarely gotten in the Bush administration's way when demonizing a political opponent, even when that opponent has actually tried to accommodate multiple American demands. Accused of enemy complicity in most places where the US or its allies are involved, Syria has nevertheless regularly offered concrete help in the "war on terror" (including in the infamous extraordinary renditions) and in policing and sealing the Iraqi border.
A last minute invitation to Annapolis, in November 2007, was merely a reluctant move by US President George W. Bush to pretend he was serious about reaching a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. Under no circumstance should Syria have imagined this meant American pressure would stabilize, or even decrease, especially after the Israeli raid on a mysterious Syrian target in September 2007, which was clearly blessed by Bush.
Seven months after that raid, the US suddenly divulged that Israel had destroyed a nuclear reactor, built with North Korean help, which would have produced enough plutonium for one or two weapons within a year of becoming operational. The allegations were supported by "proof" presented in a series of graphs and photographs of "North Korean faces", nuclear equipment and satellite images of buildings, which were promptly discredited by some experts while used as evidence by others.
The IAEA was understandably outraged that this information was not produced for its inspection, before the Israeli raid and in the months following it. While some have chosen to believe that the current disclosure was meant to pressure North Korea, Bush offered several reasons for this delay. In particular, he explained, the US wanted to prevent confrontation and conflict in the region (raid notwithstanding, apparently) and was concerned that Syria would feel pressured to retaliate against Israel if the nuclear intelligence was made public, a reasoning that is difficult to take seriously. Clearly, the US is somehow convinced that Syria's urge to defend itself has now passed.
Even by the low standards of the Bush administration and its record of manufactured intelligence and fabricated liberations, the allegations about the timing are implausible and have other aims: since his arrival at the White House, Bush has done everything to thwart a potential peace deal between Syria and Israel, regardless of the fluctuating positions of the latter.
Indeed, even when taking into account the invitation to Annapolis, US behavior toward Syria has at least been consistent throughout the tenure of the Bush administration, with political pressure steadily increasing over the years and sanctions imposed. In contrast, Israel's demeanor vis-a-vis Syria has been erratic, sending mixed messages and failing to adopt a solid position.
It is odd that a prime minister raiding a site on enemy ground, supposedly knowing it is a nuclear facility, should praise that same enemy leader ten days later, declaring his respect. It is also strange that a massive war drill should subsequently be choreographed, groundlessly fueling war speculations. At the same time, Israeli officials have repeatedly confirmed that Syria poses no military threat, an acknowledgement that not only lays to rest looming war fears from its side, but also annuls the security factor in the Golan withdrawal equation.
The sudden emergence of peace talk rumors is confusing in the midst of such conflicting messages. Divulged by Syria, uncharacteristically, an initiative by Turkey has put negotiations back on the agenda. Most importantly, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, confirmed to his Turkish mediators that Israel would return the entire Golan in exchange for peace with Syria. Normally, such statements are unnecessary, given that UNSC Resolution 242 already obliges Israel to return to its June 4, 1967 position. Furthermore, the Rabin Deposit, since the early 1990s, had already pledged Israel's full withdrawal from occupied Syrian land. In the current regional balance, however, Olmert's unexpected statement would have been music to Syrian ears.
Lest there be too much enthusiasm that an immediate deal is imminent, however, the Syrian president was quick to clarify that this would not be possible before 2009, when a more reasonable US administration, one assumes, is in place. Syria seems to be discounting the possibility of a McCain presidency, or else ignorant of the latter's own visions, and it seems to expect that whoever Bush's successor is, he or she will be a more willing and honest broker. Even if Syria and Israel warm to each other under the matchmaking talents of their common friend Turkey, all parties know that an eventual wedding can only be officiated by an American minister. It would thus be premature to interpret the current messages as signs of seriousness or of a breakthrough.
Damascus has often been accused of wanting to engage for engagement's sake, but its position has not changed over the years as it called repeatedly for a return to negotiations. In contrast, Israel continuously found excuses to procrastinate while claiming it doubted Syria's intentions. Obviously, Israel knows a peace deal means a complete withdrawal from the Golan, to which Israelis seem to have gotten rather attached over the years, and whose return to Syria will cost the latter a lot more than just "peace" according to the blueprints developed in track two talks. Israel is clearly in no hurry to reach this stage, making the timing of Olmert's declaration suspect as well, especially when considering his domestic political struggles and his attempt to avoid "painful concessions" on the Palestinian track.
It seems rather unfortunate that the public acknowledgement of Israel's full withdrawal from the Golan should coincide with the "revelation" of Syria's amazing nuclear capacities. What remains to be determined is whether Bush was helping Olmert retract, whether Olmert was helping Bush attack, or whether both were simply, as usual, simultaneously scratching each other's backs.- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Rime Allaf is associate fellow at London's Chatham House.
New factors both resurrecting and stalling "secret talks"
Riad Kahwaji
Describing the state of relations between Syria and Israel is not as easy a task as an average observer would think. Although the two countries regard one another as arch foes and have fought four wars over the past 60 years, they nevertheless seem to have learned to coexist with one another, at least at the level of ruling parties on both sides of the border. The point of dispute proclaimed to be delaying a peace treaty between the two is the Golan Heights that Israel captured in the 1967 war. Neither side has been able to convince the other of the need to close a deal. The events that followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, up until the Syrian pullout from Lebanon in 2005, further complicated the situation between Syria and Israel.
While official talks between the two sides were halted in 2000, non-official contacts between Israel and Syria at the level of experts and civil servants have continued almost non-stop. People who have attended track II behind-the-scenes meetings in Europe and some Arab capitals over the past few years have witnessed Israelis and Syrians meeting and talking. In listening to the two sides exchanging views one could come to the conclusion that Damascus has not been able to convince Israel that it must withdraw from the Golan.
Why would Israel withdraw when there are no military activities near the occupied heights, the regime in Damascus does not feel confident enough to try to liberate the land by force and many Israelis still believe in the strategic importance of the Golan and its water resources? On the other side, the Syrian regime does not feel pressed to warm up the Golan front, still controls Palestinian factions that can be used to wage a proxy war on Israel from outside Syrian territory and feels it can survive without real change in the current regional environment.
Despite all the heated rhetoric from both sides, events before, during and after the summer 2006 war between Hizballah and Israel have shown that neither side wants war. However, the war with Hizballah and the situation in the Gaza Strip and in Iraq have presented to Israel as well as the United States and its allies a major new challenge: Iran. The Islamic Republic has succeeded in spreading its influence and creating pressure points in many places. Tehran's strong strategic relations with Damascus have enabled it to achieve this expansion within the Arab-Israel geopolitical space.
Hence the theory of driving a wedge between Syria and Iran was born in order to isolate and subsequently weaken Hizballah and Tehran. This has added a new dimension to the "secret direct and indirect talks" between Israel and Syria. For some Israeli officials, the threat posed by the growing influence of a hard-line Islamic regime with a nuclear program outweighs the consequences of an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan.
So the Israeli message to Damascus is now: break up with Iran and Hizballah and the Golan is yours. The Syrian response has been: first return the Golan Heights or at least make an open written declaration of a full withdrawal within a short time period and then we will move away from Tehran and Hizballah. Given the shared history of hatred and deceit and the environment filled with mistrust, it is hard to predict who will make the first move.
To make things worse, new factors have emerged that weigh on the Syrian-Israeli talks. The international tribunal investigating the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri is perceived by the Syrian regime as a big threat. The strong performance by Hizballah in the 2006 war and the failure of the Israel Defense Forces to make any gains seem to have encouraged Damascus to reconsider the military option, at least from the a-symmetrical perspective, prompting Syria to boost its military procurement programs. Also, growing Iranian and Shi'ite influence in the region, abetted by Syria, has both alarmed and angered several Arab countries, especially heavyweights like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Thus, some Arab players are concerned that an Israeli-Syrian deal could torpedo the Hariri international tribunal and leave intact Iran's strength and regional influence. Another group of Israeli and western experts and officials even question whether the Syrian regime is strong enough to strile such a deal. Hizballah and Iranian officials are carefully watching the Syrians and would not likely sit still if they felt Damascus was about to turn on them. The truth is that nobody knows how strong or independent of Tehran's influence Damascus is today.
Meanwhile, Syrian officials do not believe the weak Israeli government of Ehud Olmert could give up the Golan Heights. Without true incentives from the international community, neither Syria nor Israel would likely make any tangible move toward one another despite the Iranian factor.
The focal point of interest or great concern to Israel, the US, the West and some Arab countries is Iran. With Syria in the middle, Damascus could either regain the Golan or find itself in the crossfire between the Iran-Hizballah axis and almost everyone else. It could even find itself fighting an undesired war. For Damascus at this juncture, the safest option is to play the waiting game until the next US presidential elections, in the hope of seeing a more flexible American administration that reverts to the old pattern of making deals based on pure national interest rather than--as has been the case with the current Bush administration--ideology. This strategy seems to suit Iran as well, insofar as it wants to strike its own deal with a more flexible administration in Washington.
But could the other side play the waiting game while Iran is building its nuclear program and expanding its influence in the region? Could the fragile situation in Lebanon and Gaza prevail without serious deterioration that could spark a war? Do the Israeli-Syrian talks now seek a true peace or merely the postponement of an inevitable showdown? As always, only time will tell.- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Riad Kahwaji is founder and director general of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA) in Dubai and is the Middle East bureau chief for Defense News.
Syria looking for tangible reward
Waleed Sadi
Conventional wisdom in the Middle East has it that while a regional Middle East war cannot break out without Egypt, no peace in the region can ever be attained without Syria. Hence, if the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt in 1979 did in fact eliminate the chances of an Arab-Israel war, the events and developments that occurred since also proved that a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world remains elusive as long as Damascus is sidelined and effectively excluded from the peace process.
Former US president Bill Clinton may have understood this critical Syrian role when, during his term in office, he nearly succeeded in brokering a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty along the following broad outlines: a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, the establishment of an international observation post there, diplomatic relations between the two countries and the continued flow of water to Lake Tiberius.
According to Clinton's memoir, "My Life", it was former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak who balked at the deal at the last minute by hardening his country's demands so that the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad could not but refuse. For example, whereas Syria accepted to leave a ten-meter stretch of territory along Lake Tiberius in the hands of Israel, Barak wanted half a kilometer. And while Syria accepted to have full diplomatic relations as soon as Israel completed its withdrawal from Syrian territory, Barak wanted it much sooner. On top of this, Barak insisted that a complete Israeli withdrawal should take three years; Syria wanted the withdrawal in 18 months. Syria also accepted the deployment of an international observation post manned by either the UN or US personnel. Israel wanted it to be manned by only Israeli observers.
Clinton wrote that peace between the two countries had been within reach and was almost a done deal until Barak, due to some internal political consideration, backed away from what was an imminent breakthrough. It is possible now that it has dawned on Israel that peace in the Middle East, including with the Palestinians, will remain elusive as long as Syria is isolated and not made part of the broader peace process.
Israel, under various shades of leadership, has tried to make peace with the Palestinians. Starting with the Oslo accords in 1994 and onward through the so-called roadmap of the Quartet and the series of summits held under the auspices of current US President George W. Bush, including the Annapolis summit, all have failed. The missing link in all these efforts has been and still is Syria.
Israel has only made things worse by occasionally switching from the Palestinian front to the Syrian front in its peace rhetoric as if trying to apply pressure on each Arab side to hurry up and make peace before it concludes peace with the other. Of late, Israel has been intimating that it seeks peace with Syria. Of all people, Ehud Barak--now the minister of defense in the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert--is sounding out Syria once again for a possible peace deal.
It seems that Barak now realizes that aborting the peace deal that was in the making under the auspices of Clinton was a major strategic error. Olmert seems to agree with this sentiment after it dawned on him that engaging the Palestinians in peace talks without the cooperation of Syria will only lead to a dead end. This has become all the more true in the wake of the Hamas takeover not only of Gaza but also of much of Palestinian public opinion in the West Bank. Damascus is home to the Hamas leadership and that's where real decisions on the Palestinian front are taken.
This brings us to Syria's decision to break its silence on the Israeli sneak aerial attack on a Syrian facility last September. According to the American version of the attack, Pyongyang had been busy building a nuclear reactor in Syria when Israel attacked. The North Korean intention behind constructing a North Korean prototype nuclear facility in Syria capable of producing enriched uranium is open for conjecture. More important for our purposes is the Syrian dimension to this episode.
It is a well-known fact that Syria has no fuel to use in such a nuclear facility even if it were fully operational. One explanation might be that Damascus was indicating that it might go nuclear sooner or later if it continues to be isolated from the peace process and its territory remains occupied. Damascus could be using the nuclear facility as a pressure tactic to force Israel to make good on its repeated talk about peace with Syria or else face the consequences. Why else not divulge the "evidence" collected by the US on the destroyed Syrian facility for nearly eight months?
Yet one thing seems certain. Given the fact that in 2002, Bush associated Syria with the "axis of evil", it is possible that Bush wants to break that axis by engaging Syria in behind-the-scenes talks. The fact that Israeli rhetoric about peace with Syria has picked up momentum recently shows that there may be some coordinated effort to break Syria out of this "axis of evil".
But it is not only Washington that wants to drive a wedge between Syria on the one hand and North Korea and Iran on the other. Some Arab capitals are also deeply involved in trying to lure Syria back to the pro-West Arab camp. All these Arab and non-Arab efforts are counting on divisions within Syrian circles. However, in order for Syria to change course, it must be offered something tangible, and nothing less than a complete Israeli withdrawal from its territory will do.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been sending signals to Damascus that Israel is now in a mood to strike such a deal. In the final analysis, everything depends on the true intentions of Israel. Does it or does it not want a true and comprehensive peace that all Arab sides can live with?- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Waleed Sadi is a former Jordanian ambassador to Turkey and the UN and other international organizations in Geneva. He is currently a columnist for the Jordan Times and Al Rai newspapers.
The fear of war, the hope for peace
Eyal Zisser
During the past few years, but mainly since the end of the Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hizballah in summer 2006, Israeli-Syrian relations have oscillated between hopes for the resumption of peace negotiations and even a breakthrough in these negotiations and fears of a possible confrontation. Two formative events recently expressed this structural tension in the delicate relations between Israel and Syria: the Israeli attack on a nuclear facility in northern Syria on September 6, 2007 and the dramatic announcement by Syrian President Bashar Assad on April 23, 2008 that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had committed himself to full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in return for an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement.
Indeed, the Second Lebanon War should be seen as a watershed in the development of Syrian-Israeli relations. Following the war, which the Syrians first regarded as an Israeli failure and a victory for Hizballah, Assad felt confident enough to threaten Israel that if it did not return the entire Golan Heights he might use force against it or at least adopt the option of "muqawama" (resistance), following the Hizballah model in southern Lebanon. These threats were followed by unprecedented Syrian military preparations for a possible confrontation with Israel, accompanied by similarly unprecedented preparations on the Israeli side of the border.
Following the 2006 Lebanon war, it also seemed as if the previously existing room for maneuver between the two countries had been reduced to almost zero. In light of the strident rhetoric, the growing tension and the intensified military preparations, neither side seemed prepared or able to continue suffering in silence the mistakes--one might say provocations--of the other. Any incident, even the most limited, on either side of the border could have led to a serious outbreak of fighting, even if neither side so intended. To a large extent, Syria benefited from the new situation. It seemed to give Assad the opportunity to create new ground rules, based on the new balance of power created by the Lebanon war.
Against the backdrop of this complex situation, with Israeli-Syrian relations deteriorating, the Israel Air Force carried out its early morning air attack of September 2007 in distant northeast Syria, aiming at a nuclear facility provided the Syrians by North Korea. Assad chose not to retaliate for this Israeli attack, giving Major General Amos Yadlin, head of IDF Intelligence, good reason for making the statement that Israel had restored its deterrent power vis-a-vis Syria. Indeed, when on February 13, 2008 Imad Mughniyyeh, head of the military wing of Hizballah, was assassinated in the heart of Damascus, presumably by Israel, and no response came from Syria or Hizballah, observers argued once again that Israel had restored its deterrent capability.
Quite a few observers have even claimed that one of the results, albeit indirect, of the IAF attack of September 2007 was Syria's decision to participate in the Annapolis Israel-Arab peace conference in November 2007. This step indicated that Syria had some degree of interest in renewing the peace talks with Israel, despite, or perhaps because of, the Israeli attack.
On April 23, 2008 Assad declared publicly that he had received a message from Olmert, through the good offices of their Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to which Olmert committed to a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights in return for peace with Damascus. If this was indeed the case, it was the first time since the failure of the Clinton-Hafez Assad summit in Geneva in March 2000 that a window of opportunity had been opened for a possible resumption of peace negotiations between Israel and Syria.
True, after the Second Lebanon War there had been a limited and hesitant exchange of messages between Israeli and Syrian leaders in which both countries expressed their interest in making peace. However, this exchange of messages did not lead anywhere; it has been cited by experts as proof not of both sides' desire for peace but, on the contrary, of their lack of political will to make the decisions necessary for peace.
For years, the Syrians demanded that Israel commit to full withdrawal to the shore of the Sea of Galilee as a precondition for the resumption of peace negotiations between the two countries. This time Ehud Olmert decided to take the political risk and meet this Syrian demand. In this he followed in the footsteps of the late PM Yitzhak Rabin, who made a similar commitment (the "Rabin deposit") in August 1993.
Yet the road to peace is still very long and complicated. A reminder of the difficulties was provided on the day after Assad's statement when the US administration chose to confirm that the Israeli attack of September 2007 had indeed targeted a nuclear facility provided to the Syrians by North Korea. While the American focus was on North Korea, many felt that Washington wanted to put a dampener on the warming-up of a peace process between Israel and Syria. After all, without active American participation in this process little can be achieved by Syria and Israel.
In conclusion, a window of opportunity has once again been opened to the winds of peace on Israel's northern front. But if peace negotiations are not resumed, Israeli-Syrian relations are not likely to go anywhere constructive. The dynamic activating them will turn out once again to be a negative one. Therefore, in the absence of any genuine prospects for a forward-moving peace process, and despite the temporary relaxation of tensions between the two countries, their relations will continue to be marked by accumulating tension, military preparations and, mainly, forecasts of war--if not in the spring then in the summer, and if not in 2008 then in 2009.- Published 1/5/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Prof. Eyal Zisser is director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and chair of the department of Middle Eastern and African History, both at Tel Aviv University
Bitterlemons-international.org is an internet forum for an array of world perspectives on the Middle East and its specific concerns. It aspires to engender greater understanding about the Middle East region and open a new common space for world thinkers and political leaders to present their viewpoints and initiatives on the region. Editors Ghassan Khatib and Yossi Alpher can be reached at ghassan@bitterlemons-international.org and yossi@bitterlemons-international.org, respectively.
Obama in the Wilderness by Jim Sleeper
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/29/obama_in_the_wilderness/index.php
Talking Points Memo Café
April 29, 2008
Obama in the Wilderness
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/avatars/Jim%20Sleeper_15.jpg
By Jim Sleeper
Now you can understand why I wrote Liberal Racism: After 20 years in inner-city Brooklyn, I'd had it watching too many black people and too many white liberals and radicals indulge self-styled "race men" like Jeremiah Wright.
Certainly I was exasperated by the race men themselves - by Johnny Cochran, Hosea Wilson, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox, Vernon Mason, Leonard Jeffries, even Derrick Bell, and sometimes Cornel West, and countless other smart, brave, sometimes grand, but also wounded, raving, preening narcissists who cried "Racism Forever!" Some of them styled themselves prophets of white doom and black resurrection, reaping an adulation seldom enjoyed by real prophets, who are heard mainly after their time.
These men weren't all bad. More than once, as I recounted here recently concerning Brooklyn's Rev. William Augustus Jones, I personally gave them the benefit of the doubt and stood up for them. And, sometimes, they did not disappoint. On the contrary, their forbearance and fortitude taught me how deeply the world had disappointed them. Yes, I understood "God Damn America!," but not from those who shouted it for the roar of the crowd.
The more I understood the difference between feeling it and shouting it, the more I despised the shouters for massaging poor, downtrodden people's broken hearts on the way to their wallets, and for drawing in still others whose bitterness, more fine-spun, sought something like relief in rhetoric that came with a simulacrum of erudition. Yes, watching Wright at the NAACP takes me back to the many demonstrations I witnessed of imagined racial solidarity in self-doom.
But I reserved a special circle in Hell for guilt-ridden white liberals and opportunistic leftists who supported this sad writhing and the politics of racial paroxysm that gripped this country in the 1980s and 1990s. These supporters' own "white" emotional and ideological effusions delivered nothing to poor, upright, faithful blacks, whose souls were rested only when their feet were tired from marching, who spent years on their knees not in church but scrubbing white people's floors to give their children a better chance.
And now there is another circle, this one reserved for those who are gloating and smirking over Obama's pastor's self-immolation.
Given the odds most blacks have faced through most of American history, it would be wrong to say that some didn't, in fact, get better chances thanks to the Wrights and even the Farrakhans - to those who ran religious institutions that provided services, solidarity in oppression, and some discipline and hope. But sometimes this happened almost despite the iconic leaders (think of Farrakhan's Million Man March, which transcended him.)
So spare me Wright's bloviations about "the prophetic tradition" of "the" black church. As the historian David Chappell, author of the remarkable A Stone of Hope, reminded me this morning, "the" black church is not "prophetic," claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
The only thing "the" black church is... is black. It has had its prophets but also its imposters and parasites, as has the Roman Catholic and every other prideful church whose supercelestial claims belie some subterranean morals.
Wright himself is a strong, smart, wounded, and angry man who has not carried his pain very well. Who among us would do it better? Look at the maunderings of the sonorously judgmental, the worldly (and wordy) Obama-bashing Leon Wieseltier, or the historian-cum-Clinton sycophant Sean Wilentz, smirking or gloating right now over Obama's travails at Wright's hands.
Obama's "Yes we can" speeches summoned memories of those women scrubbing floors, of those scared black churchgoers marching into sunlit Southern courthouse squares, dressed in their Sunday best , shivering in the heat, assured of no safety from federal marshals or God.
Somehow, they summoned the faith-based courage to reenact the Hebrew Exodus myth against the dogs and mobs: "[T]heir very indifference to the issue of success or failure provided the stamina which made success possible," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952 of earlier struggles. "Sometimes the heroes of the faith perished outside the promised land."
Niebuhr hadn't yet heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. who had recently been a student absorbing Niebuhr's own admonition that "[t]his paradoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded. The injunction of Christ: 'Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul' (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature."
That faith made the protests uncanny and unsettling. King and others opened the hearts of astonished Northern Protestants and Jews whose ancestors had made history of the same Exodus narrative in ages past. Suddenly, it was poor Southern blacks who knew best what the others had forgotten: that the story would unfold only across years of wandering in the wilderness, worship of golden calves, brutal conquests and other perfidies -- including sophistry and charlatanry.
Where in that epic does Jeremiah Wright stand? Even his glib detractors must grant that he would have been marching into the desert away from the fleshpots of Egypt, and it is that side of Wright that Barack Obama came seeking after college.
But even as Obama found what he came seeking, he saw the other side, the man who had become embittered in the wilderness. And now, the dead hand of that past lies like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Obama will survive those, like the tragic Wright, who now would kill the soul if not the body. But whether the rest of us and the American republic will survive those who are smirking and gloating remains to be seen. I'd like to think that since countless blacks stood up to dogs and mobs, we who support Obama can find in ourselves the faith to withstand his cankered, middling detractors.
Go to www.jimsleeper.com
Talking Points Memo Café
April 29, 2008
Obama in the Wilderness
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/avatars/Jim%20Sleeper_15.jpg
By Jim Sleeper
Now you can understand why I wrote Liberal Racism: After 20 years in inner-city Brooklyn, I'd had it watching too many black people and too many white liberals and radicals indulge self-styled "race men" like Jeremiah Wright.
Certainly I was exasperated by the race men themselves - by Johnny Cochran, Hosea Wilson, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox, Vernon Mason, Leonard Jeffries, even Derrick Bell, and sometimes Cornel West, and countless other smart, brave, sometimes grand, but also wounded, raving, preening narcissists who cried "Racism Forever!" Some of them styled themselves prophets of white doom and black resurrection, reaping an adulation seldom enjoyed by real prophets, who are heard mainly after their time.
These men weren't all bad. More than once, as I recounted here recently concerning Brooklyn's Rev. William Augustus Jones, I personally gave them the benefit of the doubt and stood up for them. And, sometimes, they did not disappoint. On the contrary, their forbearance and fortitude taught me how deeply the world had disappointed them. Yes, I understood "God Damn America!," but not from those who shouted it for the roar of the crowd.
The more I understood the difference between feeling it and shouting it, the more I despised the shouters for massaging poor, downtrodden people's broken hearts on the way to their wallets, and for drawing in still others whose bitterness, more fine-spun, sought something like relief in rhetoric that came with a simulacrum of erudition. Yes, watching Wright at the NAACP takes me back to the many demonstrations I witnessed of imagined racial solidarity in self-doom.
But I reserved a special circle in Hell for guilt-ridden white liberals and opportunistic leftists who supported this sad writhing and the politics of racial paroxysm that gripped this country in the 1980s and 1990s. These supporters' own "white" emotional and ideological effusions delivered nothing to poor, upright, faithful blacks, whose souls were rested only when their feet were tired from marching, who spent years on their knees not in church but scrubbing white people's floors to give their children a better chance.
And now there is another circle, this one reserved for those who are gloating and smirking over Obama's pastor's self-immolation.
Given the odds most blacks have faced through most of American history, it would be wrong to say that some didn't, in fact, get better chances thanks to the Wrights and even the Farrakhans - to those who ran religious institutions that provided services, solidarity in oppression, and some discipline and hope. But sometimes this happened almost despite the iconic leaders (think of Farrakhan's Million Man March, which transcended him.)
So spare me Wright's bloviations about "the prophetic tradition" of "the" black church. As the historian David Chappell, author of the remarkable A Stone of Hope, reminded me this morning, "the" black church is not "prophetic," claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
The only thing "the" black church is... is black. It has had its prophets but also its imposters and parasites, as has the Roman Catholic and every other prideful church whose supercelestial claims belie some subterranean morals.
Wright himself is a strong, smart, wounded, and angry man who has not carried his pain very well. Who among us would do it better? Look at the maunderings of the sonorously judgmental, the worldly (and wordy) Obama-bashing Leon Wieseltier, or the historian-cum-Clinton sycophant Sean Wilentz, smirking or gloating right now over Obama's travails at Wright's hands.
Obama's "Yes we can" speeches summoned memories of those women scrubbing floors, of those scared black churchgoers marching into sunlit Southern courthouse squares, dressed in their Sunday best , shivering in the heat, assured of no safety from federal marshals or God.
Somehow, they summoned the faith-based courage to reenact the Hebrew Exodus myth against the dogs and mobs: "[T]heir very indifference to the issue of success or failure provided the stamina which made success possible," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952 of earlier struggles. "Sometimes the heroes of the faith perished outside the promised land."
Niebuhr hadn't yet heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. who had recently been a student absorbing Niebuhr's own admonition that "[t]his paradoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded. The injunction of Christ: 'Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul' (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature."
That faith made the protests uncanny and unsettling. King and others opened the hearts of astonished Northern Protestants and Jews whose ancestors had made history of the same Exodus narrative in ages past. Suddenly, it was poor Southern blacks who knew best what the others had forgotten: that the story would unfold only across years of wandering in the wilderness, worship of golden calves, brutal conquests and other perfidies -- including sophistry and charlatanry.
Where in that epic does Jeremiah Wright stand? Even his glib detractors must grant that he would have been marching into the desert away from the fleshpots of Egypt, and it is that side of Wright that Barack Obama came seeking after college.
But even as Obama found what he came seeking, he saw the other side, the man who had become embittered in the wilderness. And now, the dead hand of that past lies like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Obama will survive those, like the tragic Wright, who now would kill the soul if not the body. But whether the rest of us and the American republic will survive those who are smirking and gloating remains to be seen. I'd like to think that since countless blacks stood up to dogs and mobs, we who support Obama can find in ourselves the faith to withstand his cankered, middling detractors.
Go to www.jimsleeper.com
Iraq and Iran: Drifting Toward Conflict? MEI Commentary
Iraq and Iran: Drifting Toward Conflict?
MEI Commentary
April 30, 2008
Wayne White
Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger April 29, 2008
The U.S. once again is stepping up its rhetoric aimed at Iran. Renewed charges of nefarious Iranian activities related to Iraq have been surfacing ever since the hearings featuring General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker earlier this month. Diplomacy is stalled on both Iran's nuclear ambitions and Iraq. It is unclear whether the U.S. and Iran will succeed in avoiding a military confrontation of one sort or another.
Not only have accusations escalated, but also the tone of Administration and U.S. military commentary on Iran has become noticeably more shrill. There has been a focus on Iranian-trained "special groups" operating in Iraq, especially in the context of this month's bloody confrontation involving radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Late last week, Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, alluded to Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" (in Iraq). The normally cautious Mullen even went so far as to note that the Pentagon is preparing for "potential military courses of action" against Iran. General Petraeus reportedly is preparing a briefing on Iran's provision of lethal munitions to anti-U.S. elements in Iraq.
On the nuclear front, Defense Secretary Gates -- also typically reserved -- charged in a speech last week that Iran "is hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons."
Tehran probably is guilty of supplying sympathetic militias in Iraq with money, arms, and training. The evidence so far has not made believers of many observers, but the sheer volume of reporting on this is sizeable. Yet, the U.S. does not seem to appreciate that Iraq is in Iran's backyard and expecting the Iranians to eschew involvement therespecially in the face of a robust U.S. presence--is simply unrealistic.
On the diplomatic front, there is little prospect for meaningful progress. Talks between Ambassador Crocker and the Iranians consist of American accusations against Iran and predictable Iranian denials. The restriction of these exchanges to Iraq blocks any useful trade-offs that might be drawn from other contentious issues dividing the two governments. The dim prospects for useful engagement were underscored when Secretary of State Rice apparently went to a major regional meeting on Iraq this month with explicit instructions not to engage with the Iranians.
A key factor the Administration either does not wish to acknowledge or cannot appreciate is that Iran's overall responsibility for the mess in Iraq is actually quite limited. In a country shattered by war, looting and violence, saddled with a dysfunctional, sectarian and corrupt government and ethno-sectarian communities with maximalist agendas, the fundamental problems are inherently Iraqi. Indeed, the Administration's focus on Iran might be, in part, driven by the need to distract attention from the more fundamental reasons for disappointmentven failure--in Iraq.
Regarding Iran's nuclear intentions, Defense Secretary Gates may be right. However, the main driver for any Iranian nuclear weapons program most likely relates to Iran's desire for the ultimate defensive deterrent against U.S. interferenceot a desire to launch a suicidal nuclear first-strike against Israel.
Gates has noted quite accurately that war with Iran would be "disastrous." Hostilities between the U.S. and Iran would trigger a major crisis without a clear end game in the Persian Gulf upon which the world depends for a huge slice of its tightening energy supplies.
Something often neglected in American policymaking is the good sense to proceed cautiously in certain highly complex situations. To avoid another massive crisis the U.S. can ill-afford, it would be best to acknowledge an Iranian role in Iraq, engage Tehran in a less one-dimensional fashion, and prepare to live with a nuclear Iran.
Wayne White is an Adjunct Scholar with the Middle East Institute. Previously he served as Deputy Director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Office of Analysis for the Near East, with a special focus on Iraq.
Disclaimer: Assertions and opinions in this Commentary are solely those of the above-mentioned author(s) and do not reflect necessarily the views of the Middle East Institute, which expressly does not take positions on Middle East policy.
MEI Commentary
April 30, 2008
Wayne White
Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger April 29, 2008
The U.S. once again is stepping up its rhetoric aimed at Iran. Renewed charges of nefarious Iranian activities related to Iraq have been surfacing ever since the hearings featuring General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker earlier this month. Diplomacy is stalled on both Iran's nuclear ambitions and Iraq. It is unclear whether the U.S. and Iran will succeed in avoiding a military confrontation of one sort or another.
Not only have accusations escalated, but also the tone of Administration and U.S. military commentary on Iran has become noticeably more shrill. There has been a focus on Iranian-trained "special groups" operating in Iraq, especially in the context of this month's bloody confrontation involving radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Late last week, Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, alluded to Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" (in Iraq). The normally cautious Mullen even went so far as to note that the Pentagon is preparing for "potential military courses of action" against Iran. General Petraeus reportedly is preparing a briefing on Iran's provision of lethal munitions to anti-U.S. elements in Iraq.
On the nuclear front, Defense Secretary Gates -- also typically reserved -- charged in a speech last week that Iran "is hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons."
Tehran probably is guilty of supplying sympathetic militias in Iraq with money, arms, and training. The evidence so far has not made believers of many observers, but the sheer volume of reporting on this is sizeable. Yet, the U.S. does not seem to appreciate that Iraq is in Iran's backyard and expecting the Iranians to eschew involvement therespecially in the face of a robust U.S. presence--is simply unrealistic.
On the diplomatic front, there is little prospect for meaningful progress. Talks between Ambassador Crocker and the Iranians consist of American accusations against Iran and predictable Iranian denials. The restriction of these exchanges to Iraq blocks any useful trade-offs that might be drawn from other contentious issues dividing the two governments. The dim prospects for useful engagement were underscored when Secretary of State Rice apparently went to a major regional meeting on Iraq this month with explicit instructions not to engage with the Iranians.
A key factor the Administration either does not wish to acknowledge or cannot appreciate is that Iran's overall responsibility for the mess in Iraq is actually quite limited. In a country shattered by war, looting and violence, saddled with a dysfunctional, sectarian and corrupt government and ethno-sectarian communities with maximalist agendas, the fundamental problems are inherently Iraqi. Indeed, the Administration's focus on Iran might be, in part, driven by the need to distract attention from the more fundamental reasons for disappointmentven failure--in Iraq.
Regarding Iran's nuclear intentions, Defense Secretary Gates may be right. However, the main driver for any Iranian nuclear weapons program most likely relates to Iran's desire for the ultimate defensive deterrent against U.S. interferenceot a desire to launch a suicidal nuclear first-strike against Israel.
Gates has noted quite accurately that war with Iran would be "disastrous." Hostilities between the U.S. and Iran would trigger a major crisis without a clear end game in the Persian Gulf upon which the world depends for a huge slice of its tightening energy supplies.
Something often neglected in American policymaking is the good sense to proceed cautiously in certain highly complex situations. To avoid another massive crisis the U.S. can ill-afford, it would be best to acknowledge an Iranian role in Iraq, engage Tehran in a less one-dimensional fashion, and prepare to live with a nuclear Iran.
Wayne White is an Adjunct Scholar with the Middle East Institute. Previously he served as Deputy Director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Office of Analysis for the Near East, with a special focus on Iraq.
Disclaimer: Assertions and opinions in this Commentary are solely those of the above-mentioned author(s) and do not reflect necessarily the views of the Middle East Institute, which expressly does not take positions on Middle East policy.
OUr Dreams Are Dead by Linda Bird Francke, Newsweek
NEWSWEEK
4/29/08
'Our Dreams Are Dead'
Violence in Gaza gets the headlines. But the slow suffocation of the West Bank should get more attention too, writes a Middle East traveler.
Linda Bird Francke
The walls stand 30 feet high, huge slabs of gray cement, snaking their way through the West Bank for almost 500 miles. They block roads, bisect villages, cut off kids from their schools, farmers from their fields, families from relatives. "Welcome to the Ghetto, Walls of Tears" reads one of the many graffiti. "The Dumb Wall Is Screaming," "Make Love, Not Walls," read others. And my favorite, in huge orange letters on the road to Ramallah: "Control*Alt*Delete." Around Bethlehem the walls have become a protest art gallery—an oversize white donkey with tears running down its cheeks, a dove wearing a flak vest with a bull's-eye painted on its breast, a young girl frisking a soldier. The Israelis call them separation walls. The Palestinians call them apartheid walls. They are a nightmare.
To spend a week among the Palestinians in the West Bank, as I recently did, is grounds for antidepressants. Not half enough has been written about what is going on there. The violence in Gaza gets almost daily press—more border attacks and rockets launched into Israel, a new retaliatory body count (including, just this week, a mother and four young children killed during an Israeli operation in northern Gaza)—but the slow suffocation of the Palestinians in Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, in Ramallah, in every village in the West Bank, gets scant attention. "Our dreams are dead," says Ali Asamil Abkhrka, a bead vendor outside a Bethlehem restaurant. "There can never be peace with the Israelis. Never." A Palestinian policeman in the Church of the Nativity echoes him: "The wall closes the earth, closes the life. Everything is going backward."
I was in Jerusalem with friends to visit our old friend Karim Nashashibi. Karim, a Palestinian, recently retired from the International Monetary Fund in Washington and is now financial adviser to Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. Karim could have had any number of high-paying jobs in the United States but felt an obligation to help Fayyad, his friend and predecessor at the IMF, work toward peace with the Israelis. It seems a thankless job to me, but Karim's distinguished family's roots in Jerusalem stretch back five centuries, and his grandfather was mayor in the 1920s. Still, he's up against it.
Consider the Israeli travel restrictions. No Palestinian living in the West Bank is allowed to enter Jerusalem without written permission from the Israeli government. Islah Jad lives in Ramallah and is an associate professor in gender studies at Birzeit University. When her sisters visited her recently from Egypt, they wanted to go to Jerusalem to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque. Dr. Jad went to a nearby Israeli settlement to apply for a permit. "Come back tomorrow," they said. She went back. "It's not ready. Come back tomorrow," she was told. The third time she came home without a permission slip, she gave up. "Why waste a week for a permit for a few hours," she told me. "It's humiliating." Her sisters went to Jerusalem without her.
The license plate is key. Palestinians living outside Jerusalem in Ramallah or Bethlehem or anywhere in the West Bank have green and white license plates and are forbidden to drive on the smooth, wide "settler" roads that link the necklace of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Palestinians who live in Jerusalem have yellow license plates and are allowed on the roads, but such an apparent privilege is muted at the checkpoints, some 500 of them. The blue and white ID cards, which all Israelis and Palestinians carry, identify the bearer's religion and ethnicity. The Israelis are waved through. The Palestinians are pulled aside. "As soon as they see Arabic on the ID card they say, 'Security'," says Najwa, a lovely young Palestinian woman who works in a Jerusalem hotel. "We have to pull over, and they go through the luggage, the glove compartment, the papers of everybody in the car. It can take hours to get through. I have friends in Ramallah whom I haven't seen in years. The hassle is just too great."
The checkpoints have personalities of their own. The direct road from Jerusalem to Ramallah has been blocked by the wall, funneling the traffic through twisty, rutted roads to the Qalandya checkpoint. Getting through the checkpoint to enter the Palestinian city of Ramallah is easy. Getting back is not. Unless they have yellow plates, Palestinians with permission to travel to Jerusalem have to leave their cars on the Palestinian side, walk through a series of security turnstiles on foot, show their papers to the Israeli soldier on duty and then, if cleared, continue their journeys in so-called service cars, beat-up yellow vans jammed to overflowing. The checkpoint on the direct road to Bethlehem is closed to Palestinians altogether.
Despair is the word I hear most often from West Bank Palestinians, 58 percent of whom have fallen below the poverty line. "I can't get work from the Israeli side because I am haram [forbidden], and the Palestinians can't even afford to pay me bus fare," says an architect reduced to working in a bookstore. The night offers particular terrors. Jad, who works late, recognizes the sounds of frequent Israeli raids, "explosions and hard beats on doors and screams," she says.
There are many sympathetic Israeli groups that document the treatment of the Palestinian people. Yesh Din, for example, monitors the trials of West Bank Palestinians in military courts and recently released a scathing report: 99 percent of defendants in 2006 were found guilty, many after hearings that lasted less than two minutes. Another group, Machsom Watch, which is made up of accomplished Israeli women, videotapes the treatment of Palestinians at the checkpoints. Their latest complaint, filed while I was there, involved 46 Palestinians looking for work being held for 16 hours at a checkpoint. The Palestinians were allowed no food or toilet facilities and were forced to stand for hours on end. "When they sit down they make trouble," the report quoted a member of the IDF saying. At some point during their detention, the tires of their vans were punctured and some of their cars were vandalized.
Prime Minister Fayyad wears heavily the burdens on his people. He looks tired when we meet in his modest office in Ramallah, but he perks up when he tells me about his children. His oldest son is at his American alma mater, the University of Texas in Austin, where Fayyad earned his doctorate in economics. His daughter has just received early admission to MIT; his youngest is still in grade school in Jerusalem. Like my friend Karim, Salam Fayyad accepted his post, first as finance minister and then as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, out of a sense of duty. "It was natural and instinctive," he says. "I thought it was important to be in a position to contribute."
Fayyad lays out clearly the Palestinian position. "The objective of this enterprise is to end the occupation and have an independent, viable, contiguous Palestinian state emerge on the land that was occupied in 1967," he says. "For us Palestinians to get a chance to live as free people in a state of our own, in peace and harmony with all of our neighbors, including Israel." That, of course, is what everyone wants. But how to get there?
Though he doesn't criticize the Israeli government, Fayyad methodically lists the impediments to the peace process. Foremost is the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in direct contravention of every peace initiative since 1967, including the current "road map" to peace laid out by the Quartet—the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia—in 2002. "Not one more brick!" Fayyad says emphatically. "It's a road map obligation. It means not one more block, no exceptions, no nothing. And that's not what is happening." In the five-week period following the re-ignition of the peace process in Annapolis in the fall of 2007, he points out, the Israelis added 747 new units to the settlements, which in fact are cities, commanding the tops of hills the length of the West Bank. "If this keeps on happening, clearly the viability of the solution keeps on eroding," he says. "This is logical."
Israel's "security behavior" in the occupied territories is also a deterrent. Fayyad is proud that the Palestinian Authority police force has been effective in bringing about "conditions of law and order after years of complete lawlessness and chaos. It is one of the things we have focused on." But the ongoing raids by the Israeli Army into urban areas "where we have our own troops," he says, undermines the PA's authority and credibility. "It's happening in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, everywhere," he says. "This has to change." So, he says, do the travel restrictions on Palestinians. "We cannot go on like this," he says. "You cannot have economic development under conditions of lack of mobility. The only way you can keep an economy like this afloat is by continuing to inject official assistance into the system, and that's not our vision for Palestine. We do not want to be a beggar nation."
On the Palestinian side, a major setback to statehood, Fayyad readily admits, are the militias. "To tell you the truth," he says, "were it not for the chaos of weapons for the militias roaming around, with everyone doing what they want wherever they want to do it, the political differences would not have translated into the bloodshed we experience." Weapons should be the "sure purview" of the state, he says, and the "key goal" of his government is to try to "import this concept."
Our interview is interrupted by the arrival of Jimmy Carter and his entourage. "He's early," says Fayyad, looking at his watch. Rosalynn Carter, whose memoir I worked on, is startled to see me. "What on earth are you doing here?" she asks as we hug. Fayyad's meeting with Carter is going to last at least an hour, Carter's senior aide says to me apologetically. The meeting with the Palestinian prime minister has become all-important because Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is visiting Washington and the Israeli government has stonewalled Carter because of his intention to meet with the head of Hamas in Syria.
I ask Fayyad when we resume if he is in touch with Hamas in Gaza. "No," he says. "I have no official or unofficial contact with them. However, I talk to the people in Gaza all the time. Here we are. You see? You just made a mistake, unwittingly of course, of using the word 'Hamas' and 'Gaza' interchangeably. That's not the reality. Hamas is in control of Gaza, there's no question about that, but not every Palestinian man, woman and child living and suffering in Gaza is Hamas or under Hamas obligation. This is an odd situation which I hope and pray will not be anything but transitional and will soon be a part of our past."
What about the walls, I ask him, and the checkpoints and the permits and the mood of despair I'd found in the West Bank? "I can definitely tell you it is justified," he says. Is he optimistic that things will change for the better? He pauses for a long time before answering. "I'm not discouraged," he finally says. "There's a big difference. I'm convinced we're going to get there."
He smiles and tells me a story that he says will illustrate something about his world view. Last week he was in a little village of 300 residents to inaugurate a kindergarten. The minute he stepped out of the car someone stuck a microphone in his face and said, "What about the walls?" "I said, 'Look at all the olive trees around you. The youngest tree is older than the wall.' And the mere fact that this event was about children and the future was the most positive of ironies. [It] was the most positive day of my life as prime minister—notwithstanding the miserable context in which all this is taking place."
4/29/08
'Our Dreams Are Dead'
Violence in Gaza gets the headlines. But the slow suffocation of the West Bank should get more attention too, writes a Middle East traveler.
Linda Bird Francke
The walls stand 30 feet high, huge slabs of gray cement, snaking their way through the West Bank for almost 500 miles. They block roads, bisect villages, cut off kids from their schools, farmers from their fields, families from relatives. "Welcome to the Ghetto, Walls of Tears" reads one of the many graffiti. "The Dumb Wall Is Screaming," "Make Love, Not Walls," read others. And my favorite, in huge orange letters on the road to Ramallah: "Control*Alt*Delete." Around Bethlehem the walls have become a protest art gallery—an oversize white donkey with tears running down its cheeks, a dove wearing a flak vest with a bull's-eye painted on its breast, a young girl frisking a soldier. The Israelis call them separation walls. The Palestinians call them apartheid walls. They are a nightmare.
To spend a week among the Palestinians in the West Bank, as I recently did, is grounds for antidepressants. Not half enough has been written about what is going on there. The violence in Gaza gets almost daily press—more border attacks and rockets launched into Israel, a new retaliatory body count (including, just this week, a mother and four young children killed during an Israeli operation in northern Gaza)—but the slow suffocation of the Palestinians in Jerusalem, in Bethlehem, in Ramallah, in every village in the West Bank, gets scant attention. "Our dreams are dead," says Ali Asamil Abkhrka, a bead vendor outside a Bethlehem restaurant. "There can never be peace with the Israelis. Never." A Palestinian policeman in the Church of the Nativity echoes him: "The wall closes the earth, closes the life. Everything is going backward."
I was in Jerusalem with friends to visit our old friend Karim Nashashibi. Karim, a Palestinian, recently retired from the International Monetary Fund in Washington and is now financial adviser to Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. Karim could have had any number of high-paying jobs in the United States but felt an obligation to help Fayyad, his friend and predecessor at the IMF, work toward peace with the Israelis. It seems a thankless job to me, but Karim's distinguished family's roots in Jerusalem stretch back five centuries, and his grandfather was mayor in the 1920s. Still, he's up against it.
Consider the Israeli travel restrictions. No Palestinian living in the West Bank is allowed to enter Jerusalem without written permission from the Israeli government. Islah Jad lives in Ramallah and is an associate professor in gender studies at Birzeit University. When her sisters visited her recently from Egypt, they wanted to go to Jerusalem to pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque. Dr. Jad went to a nearby Israeli settlement to apply for a permit. "Come back tomorrow," they said. She went back. "It's not ready. Come back tomorrow," she was told. The third time she came home without a permission slip, she gave up. "Why waste a week for a permit for a few hours," she told me. "It's humiliating." Her sisters went to Jerusalem without her.
The license plate is key. Palestinians living outside Jerusalem in Ramallah or Bethlehem or anywhere in the West Bank have green and white license plates and are forbidden to drive on the smooth, wide "settler" roads that link the necklace of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Palestinians who live in Jerusalem have yellow license plates and are allowed on the roads, but such an apparent privilege is muted at the checkpoints, some 500 of them. The blue and white ID cards, which all Israelis and Palestinians carry, identify the bearer's religion and ethnicity. The Israelis are waved through. The Palestinians are pulled aside. "As soon as they see Arabic on the ID card they say, 'Security'," says Najwa, a lovely young Palestinian woman who works in a Jerusalem hotel. "We have to pull over, and they go through the luggage, the glove compartment, the papers of everybody in the car. It can take hours to get through. I have friends in Ramallah whom I haven't seen in years. The hassle is just too great."
The checkpoints have personalities of their own. The direct road from Jerusalem to Ramallah has been blocked by the wall, funneling the traffic through twisty, rutted roads to the Qalandya checkpoint. Getting through the checkpoint to enter the Palestinian city of Ramallah is easy. Getting back is not. Unless they have yellow plates, Palestinians with permission to travel to Jerusalem have to leave their cars on the Palestinian side, walk through a series of security turnstiles on foot, show their papers to the Israeli soldier on duty and then, if cleared, continue their journeys in so-called service cars, beat-up yellow vans jammed to overflowing. The checkpoint on the direct road to Bethlehem is closed to Palestinians altogether.
Despair is the word I hear most often from West Bank Palestinians, 58 percent of whom have fallen below the poverty line. "I can't get work from the Israeli side because I am haram [forbidden], and the Palestinians can't even afford to pay me bus fare," says an architect reduced to working in a bookstore. The night offers particular terrors. Jad, who works late, recognizes the sounds of frequent Israeli raids, "explosions and hard beats on doors and screams," she says.
There are many sympathetic Israeli groups that document the treatment of the Palestinian people. Yesh Din, for example, monitors the trials of West Bank Palestinians in military courts and recently released a scathing report: 99 percent of defendants in 2006 were found guilty, many after hearings that lasted less than two minutes. Another group, Machsom Watch, which is made up of accomplished Israeli women, videotapes the treatment of Palestinians at the checkpoints. Their latest complaint, filed while I was there, involved 46 Palestinians looking for work being held for 16 hours at a checkpoint. The Palestinians were allowed no food or toilet facilities and were forced to stand for hours on end. "When they sit down they make trouble," the report quoted a member of the IDF saying. At some point during their detention, the tires of their vans were punctured and some of their cars were vandalized.
Prime Minister Fayyad wears heavily the burdens on his people. He looks tired when we meet in his modest office in Ramallah, but he perks up when he tells me about his children. His oldest son is at his American alma mater, the University of Texas in Austin, where Fayyad earned his doctorate in economics. His daughter has just received early admission to MIT; his youngest is still in grade school in Jerusalem. Like my friend Karim, Salam Fayyad accepted his post, first as finance minister and then as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, out of a sense of duty. "It was natural and instinctive," he says. "I thought it was important to be in a position to contribute."
Fayyad lays out clearly the Palestinian position. "The objective of this enterprise is to end the occupation and have an independent, viable, contiguous Palestinian state emerge on the land that was occupied in 1967," he says. "For us Palestinians to get a chance to live as free people in a state of our own, in peace and harmony with all of our neighbors, including Israel." That, of course, is what everyone wants. But how to get there?
Though he doesn't criticize the Israeli government, Fayyad methodically lists the impediments to the peace process. Foremost is the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in direct contravention of every peace initiative since 1967, including the current "road map" to peace laid out by the Quartet—the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia—in 2002. "Not one more brick!" Fayyad says emphatically. "It's a road map obligation. It means not one more block, no exceptions, no nothing. And that's not what is happening." In the five-week period following the re-ignition of the peace process in Annapolis in the fall of 2007, he points out, the Israelis added 747 new units to the settlements, which in fact are cities, commanding the tops of hills the length of the West Bank. "If this keeps on happening, clearly the viability of the solution keeps on eroding," he says. "This is logical."
Israel's "security behavior" in the occupied territories is also a deterrent. Fayyad is proud that the Palestinian Authority police force has been effective in bringing about "conditions of law and order after years of complete lawlessness and chaos. It is one of the things we have focused on." But the ongoing raids by the Israeli Army into urban areas "where we have our own troops," he says, undermines the PA's authority and credibility. "It's happening in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, everywhere," he says. "This has to change." So, he says, do the travel restrictions on Palestinians. "We cannot go on like this," he says. "You cannot have economic development under conditions of lack of mobility. The only way you can keep an economy like this afloat is by continuing to inject official assistance into the system, and that's not our vision for Palestine. We do not want to be a beggar nation."
On the Palestinian side, a major setback to statehood, Fayyad readily admits, are the militias. "To tell you the truth," he says, "were it not for the chaos of weapons for the militias roaming around, with everyone doing what they want wherever they want to do it, the political differences would not have translated into the bloodshed we experience." Weapons should be the "sure purview" of the state, he says, and the "key goal" of his government is to try to "import this concept."
Our interview is interrupted by the arrival of Jimmy Carter and his entourage. "He's early," says Fayyad, looking at his watch. Rosalynn Carter, whose memoir I worked on, is startled to see me. "What on earth are you doing here?" she asks as we hug. Fayyad's meeting with Carter is going to last at least an hour, Carter's senior aide says to me apologetically. The meeting with the Palestinian prime minister has become all-important because Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is visiting Washington and the Israeli government has stonewalled Carter because of his intention to meet with the head of Hamas in Syria.
I ask Fayyad when we resume if he is in touch with Hamas in Gaza. "No," he says. "I have no official or unofficial contact with them. However, I talk to the people in Gaza all the time. Here we are. You see? You just made a mistake, unwittingly of course, of using the word 'Hamas' and 'Gaza' interchangeably. That's not the reality. Hamas is in control of Gaza, there's no question about that, but not every Palestinian man, woman and child living and suffering in Gaza is Hamas or under Hamas obligation. This is an odd situation which I hope and pray will not be anything but transitional and will soon be a part of our past."
What about the walls, I ask him, and the checkpoints and the permits and the mood of despair I'd found in the West Bank? "I can definitely tell you it is justified," he says. Is he optimistic that things will change for the better? He pauses for a long time before answering. "I'm not discouraged," he finally says. "There's a big difference. I'm convinced we're going to get there."
He smiles and tells me a story that he says will illustrate something about his world view. Last week he was in a little village of 300 residents to inaugurate a kindergarten. The minute he stepped out of the car someone stuck a microphone in his face and said, "What about the walls?" "I said, 'Look at all the olive trees around you. The youngest tree is older than the wall.' And the mere fact that this event was about children and the future was the most positive of ironies. [It] was the most positive day of my life as prime minister—notwithstanding the miserable context in which all this is taking place."
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