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Details, Schmetails

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:58:00 EDT

Some interesting exchanges from a Jewish Journal interview with John McCain:

McCain also defended his support of the controversial Rev. John Hagee, a staunchly pro-Israel evangelical who has been criticized for his anti-Catholic comments. I asked the senator how he would get pro-Israel evangelicals, who have been staunchly opposed to Israel giving up territory or compromising on the status of Jerusalem, to support any peace agreement.

"You can't jump ahead here," he said. "I know they favor a peace process. I know they favor that because of my close relations with them, and pastor John Hagee ... is one of the leaders of the pro-Israel-evangelical movement in America."

I started to correct him -- Hagee and other evangelicals most certainly don't support compromise on territory or Jerusalem, and McCain must know this. That's when I got my first taste of the famous McCain technique: I'll-talk-so-you-can't.

"Look," he cut me off, "I just have to tell you that we should be so grateful for the support of the evangelical movement for the state of Israel, given the influence that they have, beneficial influence that they have over millions of Americans, and then we'll worry about a peace process later on, but I know that they are committed to peace between Palestinians and Israelis as well." [...]
Does he think the war has strengthened Iran in the region?

"I think that our failures for nearly four years obviously did it," the senator said. "But I believe that that is being reversed as the surge succeeds, and I think that the Iranians are very possibly going to step up their assistance to the Jihadists, because they don't want us to succeed in Iraq.... Osama Bin Laden has said that the central front in the battleground is Iraq, and their Palestinian brothers are next. So what are the implications to the State of Israel if they prevail on Iraq? I think they're very obvious." [...]
On the domestic front, I praised the senator in his call for energy independence, but pointed out that every president since Richard Nixon has issued the same call. Why would he succeed?

"Because I believe I can inspire the American people," he said, "and I think that when the price of oil went over $100 a barrel that there was certainly a psychological barrier there."

Whole thing here; link via LA Observed. I'll be on The Charles Goyette Show on Phoenix's KFNX, 1100 on your AM dial, starting in a few minutes here at 10:05 EDT.

No miracles in Cana

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A determined refrain heard among those thinking about or dealing with the Middle East is that the Gordian knot of the region is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cut it and conflict will recede everywhere, because the frustrations engendered by Arab-Israeli animosity will evaporate.

Maybe. The Bush administration partly adopted that logic several months ago when it sponsored a regional peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland. President George W. Bush promised that a final agreement would be signed between Israelis and Palestinians before he leaves office in January. Some don't buy into that deadline; many accuse Washington of being insincere in its efforts. But the real question is whether the United States can actually do anything when it comes to altering the outcomes.

The Palestinians complain that the Bush administration leans too heavily in Israel's favor, and is therefore not a credible mediator. Most egregiously, the U.S. is allowing Israel to create facts on the ground in Jerusalem and the West Bank, complicating prospects for peace. As the Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri has written: "There is now only one real test of progress, or criterion of political seriousness, in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the short term: Can the United States make Israel stop expanding its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories? If not, talk of peace is a cruel hoax that will only raise and then dash expectations, leading to unknown consequences when the backlash occurs."

The Israeli argument is that the Palestinians, divided between Hamas and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, pose a persistent security threat to Israel. Unless there is a Palestinian interlocutor who can guarantee a positive outcome in negotiations, there is little need to offer vital concessions at present. The Palestinians respond that such an attitude only strengthens Hamas by discrediting the Palestinian Authority—which supports a peace deal with Israel—making a resolution even less probable. The Israelis come back that if the Palestinian Authority is so frail, then Israel has even less of an incentive to negotiate. And on and on the exchange goes, descending into proliferating circles of disputation—all of it very logical, all of it tightening further the Gordian knot.

But what can the United States do? The reality is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so replete with minefields that even a concerted American push would almost certainly fail in the end.

Yet no one can deny that there is a need to break out of the sterile cycle of rhetoric afflicting Palestinians and Israelis alike. Israel's obtuseness in dealing with the Palestinians, its uninterrupted expansion of settlements, and its reluctance to dismantle even those settler outposts successive governments have declared illegal, has strengthened its most dedicated enemies. Yet no Israeli government today is likely to survive the kind of concessions needed to revive the Palestinian Authority. At the first sign of dramatic change, the right-wing parties, perhaps even cabinet ministers, would oppose major concessions. This would likely lead to early elections that could bring about the victory of Likud, which is even less enthusiastic about giving up land. We would soon be back where we started. But then even the ruling Kadima and Labor parties don't believe in the Palestinian Authority enough to conduct serious business with it.

On the Palestinian side, the situation is even more dysfunctional. The Palestinian leadership is divided between two rival governments, one dominated by Fatah, the other by Hamas, each claiming legitimacy. The president, Mahmoud Abbas, refuses to speak to Hamas unless the Islamist movement first reverses its takeover of Gaza last summer. Yet Abbas' control over armed Palestinian groups, even those opposed to Hamas, is tenuous. The international community, particularly the United States, supports the Palestinian Authority, but all that does is discredit Abbas in the eyes of his own people, because such support has not even allowed him to end Israel's physical and economic strangulation of Gaza. Everyone regards Abbas as weak, so that now even Western pundits, former officials, and think-tank mavens are calling increasingly on Israel and the international community to talk to Hamas—a step that would all but destroy what remains of the Palestinian Authority

The thing is, Abbas happens to be the one Palestinian partner willing to give up land to achieve a mutually acceptable peace pact with Israel. Hamas has no such intention and has never committed publicly to the idea. However, this hasn't prevented Israel from taking measures that, intentionally or not, have facilitated the emergence of an Islamist mini-state in Gaza, headed by a movement that considers armed struggle against Israel a quasi-religious duty. In fact, Hamas' charter tells us "that the land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf [religious endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day."

The Islamists believe history is on their side, and see a region shaping up in their favor. In Egypt, the government faces a potent and rising challenge from the Muslim Brotherhood, as does the monarchy in Jordan. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is deployed along Israel's northern border with tens of thousands of rockets in its arsenal. Hamas, observing the heightening of contradictions all around, but also sensing that it may be close to overwhelming its rivals within Palestinian society, feels it can wait Israel out and one day push for victory in collaboration with its allies elsewhere. The movement's charter also outlines steps toward this end by asking "Arab countries surrounding Israel...to open their borders to the fighters from among the Arab and Islamic nations so that they could consolidate their efforts with those of their Muslim brethren in Palestine."

Faced with this mess, the Bush administration has few ways to succeed. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is today a perfect storm of unfeasible diplomacy. No one wants to give up the fight, because a vacuum may be far worse than keeping up some kind of dialogue, whatever the results; but no one has much of a clue about how to reach the endgame either.

When in a stalemate, the theory goes, try something new—anything. Take the idea of talking to Hamas, now all the rage. No one has defined what Israel or the international community should talk to Hamas about, let alone what Hamas would agree to discuss, given that the movement refuses to even recognize Israel's right to exist. So, the prevailing outlook is that Israel and Hamas should avoid the matter of recognition now and agree to a long-term truce, allowing a revived peace process to kick in. But giving precedence to the gesture of talking over the substance of recognizing the other party means that Hamas has everything to gain from continuing to deny recognition. The signs are that it hopes to do just that while imposing a ceasefire during which it could rout its Palestinian foes and rearm for a final showdown with Israel in future decades.

How can the U.S. address all this? Trying to stifle Hamas isn't working. Talking to the movement will go nowhere, but will kill Abbas politically. Forcing Israel to make serious land concessions would bring down the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert—to be replaced by one bound to be even more intransigent. And expecting the Palestinian Authority to impose its will on all Palestinian factions is laughable. So the short answer is that the U.S. has little to offer any of the parties. Blame Bush for many things; blame him for acting too late on the Israeli-Palestinian front. But don't seriously expect him to produce a miracle.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon

Diary of an Israel Junketeer, Part Three

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:13:00 EDT

(Editor's Note: reason Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan recently traveled though Israel on a program sponsored by the American Israel Education Fund, a program for journalists sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This is his third and final dispatch. The other two are online here and here.)

The West Bank—The settlements that sprouted up after the Six Day War, during which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, have retracted and expanded, a constant source of friction amongst Palestinians and Israelis alike. Indeed, a majority of Israelis support disengagement from most West Bank settlements. Herzl Makov, the former chief of staff to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, is not one of them. Standing atop the Kfar Adumim settlement, looking out on the breathtaking and empty vista that surrounds the West Bank community, says this is Jewish land. He employs an odd understanding of property law. "There was no one living here before the settlement began in 1979," he says, indicating that the area is therefore fair game.

As Jonathan Tepperman recently pointed out in The New York Times, the settlement issue has long "cut through the left-right divide in Israeli politics." The outposts floating in the post-1967 borders have been encouraged and supported by politicos from both Likud and Labor; there is near, but not total, unanimity of opinion on the efficacy and legality of some settlements, and bitter debate about others.

Not living in Israel, not being an expert on the issue, I best not wade too deeply into the murky waters of the debate. But for those who are interested, I would recommend this book by left-leaning historian Gershom Gorenberg. I can say this: If Makov bases his land claim on a messianic biblical literalism, and it appears he does, than it is impossible to debate the issue with him. The West Bank, he says, is Eretz Israel—land bequeathed to the Jews by God. It appears that he also believes Jordan to be part of Israel, though I could have misheard him. As he barrels forward, I am getting the sinking feeling that he believes most everything to be part of the great Jewish state, and wait impatiently for the land claims on Saskatoon and Waziristan.

In fairness, he makes one compelling point. If 20 percent of Israel is made up of Arabs who more or less live side-by-side, in peace with their neighbors (as with every issue in the Middle East, let me carefully provide a caveat to this claim by acknowledging that this clearly isn't a perfect arrangement, though Israeli Arabs are represented in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court, for instance), why not allow Jews to settle in a Palestinian state? It's a fair question. But when Makov is asked if the Kfar Adumim settlement was absorbed into a Palestinian state, would he and his family stay, his answer is swift. Not a bloody chance.

Speaking of which, after a gin-soaked evening, I find myself gently badgering two Israeli Muslims in the city of Tiberias about when, how, and why they are discriminated against, restricted in travel, forced to endure checkpoints, and the like. The two look amused, but unfazed. Things might happen here and there, they both agree, but not to them. The Americans and Europeans, one them sighs, are always looking for some morality tale, some bit of discrimination to take home with them as a souvenir. I slink away, far too drunk to be embarrassed, only later recalling the mention, somewhere in my babbling, that they are Druze, a group not considered by many Arabs to be "real" Muslims. A group, unlike Israeli Arabs, allowed to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, and a group that overwhelmingly self-identify as Israeli.

Later in the day, while visiting the graves of socialist founders of the kibbutz movement, an Israeli archeologist, who spent his twenties living on a kibbutz, relates the story of why he is no longer an enthusiastic backer of the kibbutzim. "My wife and I were socialists. But one day, a friend of ours decided he wanted to travel and work abroad for a few years. When he presented this to the kibbutz committee, they decided that he wasn't allowed to go; he was needed to perform some duty or another on the farm. He was completely fine with this decision. But my wife and I, on the other hand, pretty much decided that we were no longer socialists." These types of kibbutzim still exist, he says, but they are few. "An overwhelming majority found it necessary for their financial survival to privatize."

The rumor here, in the newspapers, amongst those in and around government, is that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, despite his repeated denials, has worked behind the scenes with Hamas to achieve a hudna—a cease fire—in Gaza. With an extremist group like Hamas, who have no intention of working towards any sort of peace deal, but rather desire the establishment of an Islamic state in the entire region, it can only be a brief lull in the jihad. Unlike diplomatic exchanges that result in "land for peace," cease fires are but respites in a long war. Avi Issacharoff of the left-leaning Haaretz (whom a group of us dined with earlier in the week) quotes "senior [Palestinian Authority] people in Ramallah" declaring that any long-term hudna leading to negotiation with Israel would be bad for the Hamas political brand. "It will no longer be a fighting 'resistance' organization, but rather a political movement that arrives at agreements with the ‘Zionist entity' in order to ensure the well-being of its leaders." Nearly all those asked to comment on the possibility of fruitful discussions with Hamas dismiss it as mere posturing. At dinner, even Issacharoff confessed that "Hamas won't ever make peace with the Jews." It is an opinion echoed by every politician, intelligence official, and expert we meet.

Luckily, the hudna was in effect when we arrived in Sderot, the Israeli town on the Gaza border that is the recipient of daily rocket attacks from both Hamas and the even more fanatical Islamic Jihad. The rockets trigger an "early" detection alarm, which helpfully allows the people a full 15 seconds to take cover. We speak with a woman who is an avowed pacifist who says her life in Sderot is "hell," yet still supports the disengagement and desires a dialogue with Hamas. She works with disabled children. She explains that trying to move them to cover is an almost impossible task, that driving home during a day of raining rockets can turn a five-minute drive into a 30-minute exercise in pulling to the side of the road and diving behind rocks.

After a visit to Israel's northern border with Lebanon, it was time to head back to D.C. Though organized by AIPAC, which advertises itself as "America's pro-Israel lobby," there was a wide variety of opinion represented, both among my fellow junketeers and the people we met. Our guide and custodian on the trip, Josh Block, is a former Democratic Party operative with experience in the Clinton and Gore campaigns, and worked for Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). Among the participants, there were conservatives, liberals, lefties, and moderates representing small (techpresident.com), medium (The Weekly Standard), and large (Slate, Politico) publications. The debates precipitated by our meetings were constant and vigorous, if not occasionally wildly impolite. The Israeli officials and journalists we encountered similarly represented a wide range of opinions. It was a trip of scrupulous political balance—Israeli Arabs, Palestinian Authority officials, a centrist Kadima Party official, a Sharon-hating Likud Party parliamentarian, a left-leaning journalist, a right-leaning intelligence official, even that pacifist from the besieged town of Sderot.

By the end of the trip, I am ready for home, ready for some degree of normalcy. It is, I realize, quite nice to have a coffee without being searched, to walk into The Gap without being profiled, to not read tea leaves in order to determine the likelihood of a third intifada.

Attack in Jerusalem

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:19:00 EST

A Palestinian gunman open fired on a packed cafeteria at a Jerusalem seminary today, killing eight Israelis and wounding dozens more. It is the worst attack in Israel since April 17, 2006, when a suicide bomber killed six in Tel Aviv. Sketchy details from the Jerusalem Post:

Witnesses said that only one terrorist had entered the building and that he managed to fire 500-600 bullets over the course of 10 minutes before he was killed.

[...]

The incident occurred when at least one terrorist entered the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in the neighborhood of Kiryat Moshe carrying weapons. The terrorist was not wearing a suicide-bomb belt as earlier reported.
The gunman entered a dining hall where about 80 people were gathered, witnesses said, and opened fire. "There are at least seven killed and 10 people wounded," said Eli Dein, director of Israel's rescue service.

A spokesman for PA President Mahmoud Abbas said he condemns the attacks, whatever that's worth: "President Mahmoud Abbas condemns the attack in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of many Israelis and he reiterated his condemnation of all attacks that target civilians, whether they are Palestinians or Israelis." CNN's Ben Wedeman, who was in Gaza when the news broke, reports that Hamas members took to the streets to celebrate the massacre. This is, unfortunately, something of a post-massacre tradition with Hamas.

Imad and Me

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:29:00 EST

A couple of things struck me about the New York Times coverage of Hezbollah leader Imad Mugniyah's assassination. First of all, in this publicity shot from the Hezbollah Media Office, Mugniyah looks like a an older, pudgier, camouflage-wearing version of me:

I gather this picture was taken before the plastic surgery he supposedly had. Despite his Semitic looks (I know, I know: Arabs are Semites too!), this was a guy who considered blowing up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires a legitimate tactic in a war with Israel. In his view, killing any random Jew, anywhere in the world, was just retaliation for wrongs committed by the Israeli government. Yet I was still surprised to see the Times unambiguously call Mugniyah, who headed Hezbollah's Islamic Jihad Organization, a terrorist.

The headline over the main story about Mugniyah's death, "Bomb in Syria Kills Militant Sought as Terrorist," equivocates a bit, but the text calls him "one of the most wanted and elusive terrorists in the world." A sidebar summarizing his murderous career calls him "perhaps the world's most feared terrorist" before 9/11 and notes that "the list of those who might seek justice or revenge against him was a lengthy one." By contrast, the Times usually calls Arab terrorists who target Israelis "militants." The Times story about last week's suicide bombing at a shopping center in Dimona, for instance, called the Fatah-affiliated Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which initially claimed responsibility for killing an Israeli woman at the shopping center, "militant groups." (It also called the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades a "militia.") Later, when the Qassam Brigades took credit for the murder, the Times described that organization as "the military wing of Hamas," which it called a "militant Islamic group."

So what exactly does it take for a "militant" to be recognized as a "terrorist" in The New York Times? Evidently he needs to target Jewish civilians not only outside Gaza and the West Bank but outside of Israel, preferably on a different continent. I think it also helps if he attacks Americans, as Mugniyah repeatedly did. The Times does not seem to be squeamish about calling Al Qaeda "a terrorist group." If Osama bin Laden had crashed a plane into a building in Tel Aviv instead of New York City, would he be merely a militant?

In Stable Condition

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

For months, we've been hearing the presidential candidates promise American voters "change." But as the U.S. primaries move beyond their half-way point, here is a prediction: Whoever becomes president in 2008 will pursue the same policies as the Bush administration in the Middle East, because there is little latitude to do otherwise.

Iraq is the rare regional issue about which one sees some sunshine between the candidates' positions. On the Republican side, John McCain's view is similar to that of the Bush administration. The war has to be won, and the military "surge", which McCain backed, has been a success. For the Republican frontrunner, "a greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success ... [and] give Iraqis the capabilities to govern and secure their own country." McCain prefers honesty to deadlines, and believes Americans need to be told that the war will be a long one, because "defeat ... would lead to much more violence in Iraq, greatly embolden Iran, undermine U.S. allies such as Israel, likely lead to wider conflict, result in a terrorist safe haven in the heart of the Middle East, and gravely damage U.S. credibility throughout the world."

Mike Huckabee's chances of being nominated are so slender as to make a rundown of his Middle East policies unnecessary. But on the whole, his approach to Iraq is little different than that of the administration. He too supports the surge, opposes establishing a withdrawal schedule, and sees the war in Iraq as part of the war on terror.

The Democrats, in contrast, have focused their Iraq strategy on setting a withdrawal timetable. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton promise to begin an immediate pullout of troops after their election. Obama wants to do this at the rate of one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of 2009. Clinton is less specific, but promises to direct the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the defense secretary, and the National Security Council "to draw up a clear, viable plan to bring our troops home starting with the first 60 days" of her administration.

Both candidates leave themselves wiggle room in the event they win the presidency. As Clinton understands, drawing up a plan to remove troops is different than setting a deadline for finalizing a withdrawal. The senator also intends to stabilize Iraq as American soldiers head home. But that link between stability and withdrawal can cut both ways. If a pullout generates instability, this would undermine the logic of Clinton's plan, justifying a delay. Indeed, both she and Obama have waffled on whether they would go ahead with a withdrawal in such a case. When the Illinois senator was asked by 60 Minutes whether he would stick to his timetable even if there was sectarian violence, he replied: "No, I always reserve, as commander in chief, the right to assess the situation."

The candidates also differ over whether to engage Syria and Iran in assisting to normalize Iraq. Obama has often said he would talk to the two countries, while Clinton vows to "convene a regional stabilization group composed of key allies, other global powers, and all of the states bordering Iraq." McCain disagrees, refusing to enter into "unconditional dialogues with these two dictatorships from a position of weakness." He insists that "the international community [needs] to apply real pressure to Syria and Iran to change their behavior."

Much of this is bluster. For Obama, the rationale to talk to Syria has declined since Iraqi tribes began defeating Al-Qaeda in Anbar province. The Syrian card in Iraq is much weaker than it was when the senator first formulated the idea, making the political cost of opening up to Damascus—at a time when it is actively undermining Lebanese sovereignty and is isolated in the Arab world—significantly higher. Clinton's proposal, meanwhile, is mostly old hat. Iraq's neighbors already meet periodically to discuss the situation in the country, and the U.S. too has participated in these gatherings. As for McCain, his instincts are right, but he has no good reason to abandon the current dialogue taking place between Iran and the U.S. in Baghdad. The Iraqis back it and it might calm the situation on the ground.

In the shadow of Iran's growing power in the Gulf, there is no realistic withdrawal option in Iraq. The United States fought a war against Saddam Hussein's army in 1991 to deny Iraq hegemony over the oil-rich region after the invasion of Kuwait. That goal hasn't changed with respect to Iran. Washington is boosting arms sales to its Gulf allies, but knows that without a U.S. military presence such assistance only has a limited impact. The U.S. also continues to warn of Iran's nuclear ambitions, with even Russia openly questioning why Iran needs intercontinental ballistic missiles if it doesn't seek a nuclear military capacity.

There is also the matter of Israel. All the candidates loudly support the security of Israel, which regards Iran's nuclear capacity as a strategic threat. To cede ground to Iran in Iraq could harm Israeli interests, justifying the candidates' eventually backtracking on withdrawal.

In the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, don't expect much new either. All the candidates support negotiations (who wouldn't?) and Israel's right to live in peace and security. Depending on who gets elected, the president might push a bit more or a bit less for a se ttlement. But the U.S. has limited scope to do very much, because, more than ever before, the dynamics of the process are much less Washington's to manipulate.

The Palestinian territories are physically and ideologically divided, with rival Hamas and Fatah governments ruling over Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas offers a menu of armed struggle, while the mainstream Fatah movement (the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas) defends peace talks. But Israel, wracked by its own internal divisions, will not significantly bolster Fatah's fortunes by ceasing settlement building until the Palestinians put their house in order. Palestinian moderates respond that unless Israel makes serious concessions, they will lose all credibility. It's a Catch-22, and U.S. pressure to force a solution would only exacerbate internal contradictions in both societies.

Facing such obstacles, a new administration can, at best, actively pursue the negotiating process in the hope that some breakthrough will take place. But that's what the Bush administration is already doing today.

A new administration is also as unlikely as the present one to subordinate political interests to defending freedom and human rights. President George W. Bush is as good as it gets on that front. He may be responsible for what, until recently, was a full-blown fiasco in Iraq, but his actions did overthrow a tyrant, while in Lebanon the U.S. played a key role in forcing the Syrians out of the country. But Bush's rhetoric on liberty notwithstanding, the deterioration in Iraq and Iran's rise have prompted him to again rely on autocratic U.S. allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan as a counterweight. This situation will only persist in a polarized Middle East, and none of the presidential candidates has expressed particular displeasure with Bush's conduct on this front.

Things are more likely to change, however, on the specific issue of how to deal with terrorist suspects. None of the candidates care for the Bush administration's "extraordinary rendition" policy, or its ambiguous position on torture. This will have a marginal impact on human rights in general in the region, but discontinuing such practices will be sold by a new administration as a sign that America cares, even as Arab regimes resort to their old habits by brutalizing their foes.

On Lebanon, expect little transformation as well. The country is not high on the list of priorities of any of the candidates, which means that no one feels strongly about altering the current approach. To quote a former U.S. ambassador in Beirut, Washington for once has a Lebanon policy. It is mainly focused on consolidating the gains of the so-called Cedar Revolution of 2005. This means that the U.S. will continue to block escalating Syrian efforts to return to Lebanon; it will pursue efforts to contain Hezbollah and limit its military activity, particularly through the United Nations; and it will press forward with the Lebanese-international court now being set up in The Hague to try suspects in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Though continuity is likely, candidates will sell this as difference. For example, recently Obama issued a statement on the occasion of the third anniversary of the Hariri assassination. The senator praised the Cedar Revolution, condemned Syrian actions in Lebanon, and backed U.N. resolutions seeking to prevent Hezbollah from rearming. However, he framed his proposals as a stark contrast with those of the Bush administration. But what Obama prescribed was almost exactly what the administration has been doing for the past three years.

That's very much a paradigm for how all the candidates approach the Middle East: they differentiate themselves from Bush without acknowledging that even his administration has been compelled in the last three years to behave like its predecessors, once the supposed neoconservative interregnum ended. The region has always been adept at imposing its rhythms on others as a means of resisting change. Barring something dramatic, none of the candidates will disturb that stasis.

Contributing Editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Next Year in Norwood

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:52:00 EST

Miriam Leberstein reads the New York Times wedding section so you don't have to:

"Did you see it? Did you? Go home and look!" she sputtered. "It starts out totally normal and boring, with the Chinese-looking bride graduating from some American university with a technology degree, and the wedding to the American at some trendy resort with a Baptist minister. But look further and it turns out the bride's father was a head of the People’s Liberation Army of China. Mao must be turning in his grave!

"I looked at the announcement," Miriam continued, "and said, 'This is it. The child of a commander of the Chinese People's Liberation Army makes it into Weddings in the New York Times. What else is there to say about The New World Order?'"

That piece of the Zeitgeist comes from the latest post on Debbie Nathan's blog, which also includes this choice cut of forgotten history:

Mordkhe spent many years in the 1940s and 1950s as a "Territorialist." He and his group did not think it ethically correct or politically wise to create a Jewish state in Palestine. They explored other places, including Australia, Liberia, New Jersey, and the Norwood section of the Bronx.

El-Haj Update

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:43:00 EST

Nadia Abu El-Haj is getting tenure. For those who came in late: El-Haj is a Palestinian-American anthropologist who teaches at Barnard College. She is also the author of Facts on the Ground, a controversial book that argues, to quote the publisher's description, that "archaeology helped not only to legitimize [Israel's] cultural and political visions but, far more powerfully, to reshape them." Many pro-Israel activists opposed giving her tenure, and it looked for a while like the debate might burst into a full-fledged Norman Finkelstein-style war. My small contribution to the ferment came in August, when I pointed out that the petition against El-Haj included at least two distortions of her views.

As I said in my original post, I'm not qualified to judge the quality of El-Haj's book and I have no opinion on whether she deserves a post at Barnard. She has some serious scholarly detractors and she has some serious scholarly defenders, and until I take the time to learn more than the bare minimum about Israeli archeology I'm going to leave it at that. The good news is that future arguments about her work will now have to center on her work, and not on whether some activists can gin up some outrage by yanking some lines from her book out of context.

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Either Imminent or Far Away. Maybe.

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:10:00 EDT

Covering a speech to the Knesset by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Reuters has some bad news about the prospects for a peace agreement with the Palestinians: "Olmert Says Palestinian Accord 'Far Away.'" Based on the same speech, the International Herald Tribune is more hopeful: "Olmert Says Palestinians Serious About Peace." Take your pick.

CBS News reports that Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon has indicated the Israeli government would be willing to cede Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem to a Palestinian state, while agreeing to "special administration" of the "holy basin" that includes the Temple Mount and the Al Aqsa mosque compound. (These are harder to divide, since they occupy the same physical space.) It has long been clear that something along these lines, together with withdrawals from Gaza and the West Bank, would be necessary for a final settlement. While Ramon's comments may be an important indicator of Israeli seriousness, they do not address the real question: whether the widely disliked Olmert, whose approval ratings make George W. Bush look like Ronald Reagan, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who does not even control the part of the future Palestinian state he is supposedly in charge of, are strong enough to make a deal that will stick. Both men seem to hope that reaching an agreement will make them popular enough to implement it. I hope they're right, but the history of Middle East peacemaking makes me think Reuters' take is more accurate.

Stalag NC-17

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 13:48:00 EDT

In The New York Times, a fascinating article about what sounds like a fascinating film:

In the early 1960s, as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers throughout the land.

Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors....

"I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women," said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film "Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel" had its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. "We were in elementary school," he noted. "I remember how embarrassed we were."

As is often the case, the shadow literature had a counterpart in the mainstream:

More provocatively, the movie contends that Stalag pornography was but a popular extension of the writings of K. Tzetnik, the first author to tell the story of Auschwitz in Hebrew and a hero of the mainstream Holocaust literary canon. K. Tzetnik "opened the door," and "the Stalag writers learned a lot from him," [Stalag publisher Ezra] Narkis said.

K. Tzetnik was a pseudonym for Yehiel Feiner De-Nur. The alias, short for the German for concentration camper, was meant to represent all survivors, a kind of Holocaust everyman. One of K. Tzetnik's biggest literary successes, "[House of Dolls]," published in 1953, told the story of a character purporting to be the author's sister, serving the SS as a sex slave in Block 24, the notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz.

Though a Holocaust classic, many scholars now describe it as pornographic and likely made up.

"It was fiction," said Na'ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. "There were no Jewish whores in Auschwitz."

In an interesting post about the Times piece, Debbie Nathan ponders how people "often fantasize the darkest terrains of sexuality, including, sometimes, by using their own historical tragedy as grist." If you doubt that the process Nathan describes goes on today, consider the popularity of fictional "memoirs" filled with sadistic abuse. Tim Barrus managed to move from churning out straightforward S&M porn to writing rape-filled recollections of an imaginary Navajo childhood without changing anything but the name he wrote under, and thus moved from one of the most disreputable literary genres to enormous acclaim. It's like the shift from House of Dolls to the Stalags, but in reverse.

But Our War Crimes Were Heroic and Honorable

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:57:00 EDT

Hezbollah is angry about a new Human Rights Watch report that condemns the group's rocket attacks on civilians during last year's war with Israel. Since Hezbollah deliberately launched thousands of anti-personnel rockets into Israeli towns and bragged about doing so, it cannot very well deny that it committed war crimes. Instead, its leaders argue that Human Rights Watch should save its criticism for Israel, whose air attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon killed far more civilians than Hezbollah's crappy rockets did.

But Human Rights Watch, which plans to release what will undoubtedly be a scathing report about Israel's conduct during the war next week, insists this is not a numbers game and that two wrongs don't make a right: Deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians are always wrong. "The fact that more Israeli civilians didn't die is not a tribute to Hezbollah but a tribute to Israeli bomb shelters," says Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division. "The point we're making is that even though they say 'only 43 Israeli civilians were killed' that doesn't make it OK."

Israel's war with Hezbollah was disastrous in several ways, not least because of the many innocent people it killed. To the extent that the Israeli government could have reduced or avoided those deaths (by responding to Hezbollah's initial cross-border raid in a less dramatic fashion, for example), it is culpable for them. And even if the invasion and air campaign had made sense, there are reasons to question some of Israel's judgments about which targets to attack and how. But Israel was at least ostensibly attacking legitimate military targets and inadvertently killing civilians in the process, as opposed to deliberately targeting civilians, which strikes me as an important moral distinction. To put it another way, the IDF considers killing civilians a mark of shame, while Hezbollah wears it like a badge of honor, which is why its leaders are dismayed by the criticism from Human Rights Watch.

The Case of Nadia Abu El-Haj

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 14:12:00 EDT

Another day, another politicized tenure battle. This time the target is Nadia Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist who teaches at Barnard College. El-Haj is the author of Facts on the Ground, a controversial book that argues, to quote the publisher's description, that "archaeology helped not only to legitimize [Israel's] cultural and political visions but, far more powerfully, to reshape them." Her tenure is being challenged by Paula Stern, a pro-Israel activist whose petition against El-Haj has gathered more than 1200 signatures. The campaign has attracted some press coverage, and Stern's charges have been uncritically reprinted by the conservative pressure group Campus Watch.

I hold no brief for El-Haj's book. I have not read it, and even if I had I would be in no position to judge the quality of her scholarship. But I am in a position to judge the quality of Stern's arguments: They clearly, unmistakably distort the truth, and they do so in easily checked ways.

Richard Silverstein of Tikun Olam has already noted several potential problems with the petition, in a post based on correspondence with scholars familiar with El-Haj's work. Stern claims, for example, that El-Haj ignores a "truly vast body of written evidence" that the book in fact mentions many times; Stern claims the author does not speak Hebrew when in fact she does; and so on. Silverstein also wonders if the petition's quotes from the book are taken out of context. Stern writes, for instance, that El-Haj

asserts that the ancient Israelite kingdoms are a "pure political fabrication."

Silverstein asks, "Why wouldn't it have been possible to quote an entire sentence or paragraph to determine what El-Haj actually wrote and believes on this subject?" The answer: Because quoting the full paragraph would reveal that it does not, in fact, take the radical position Stern ascribes to El-Haj. Using Amazon Reader, I looked up the quote in question. Here's the original text:

While by early the 1990s, virtually all archaeologists argued for the need to disentangle the goals of their professional practice from the quest for Jewish origins and objects that framed an earlier archaeological project, the fact that there is some national-cultural connection between contemporary (Israeli)-Jews and such objects was not itself generally open to sustained discussion. That commitment remained, for the most part, and for most practicing archaeologists, fundamental. (Although archaeologists argued increasingly that the archaeological past should have no bearing upon contemporary political claims.) In other words, the modern Jewish/Israeli belief in ancient Israelite origins is not understood as pure political fabrication.

Pretty stunning difference, huh? Here's another carefully gerrymandered quote from the petition:

We are aware that Abu El Haj excuses herself from the expectation that scholarship will be based on evidence. In her introduction, she informs the world that she "Reject(s) a positivist commitment to scientific methods..."

Instead of using scientific standards of evidence, her work is "rooted in...post structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory...and developed in response to specific postcolonial political movements."

We reject the idea that Marxism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism or any other approach can nullify the obligation of scholars to base their work on evidence.

Here is the book's original text:

Questions concerning the relationship between interpretation and data and between theory and evidence have come center stage as increasing numbers of archaeologists are debating the politics of their own discipline, including its potential uses and the implications for their professional work. Rejecting a positivist commitment to scientific method whereby politics is seen to intervene only in instances of bad science, such critics have argued that archaeological knowledge (as but one instance of scientific knowledge) is inherently a social product. Rooted in multiple intellectual traditions (poststructuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory, a sociology of scientific knowledge) and developed in response to specific postcolonial political movements (specifically, demands for the repatriation of cultural objects and human remains by indigenous groups in settler nations such as Australia, the U.S. and Canada), this critical tradition is united, at its most basic level, by a commitment to understanding archeology as necessarily political.

Again, the phrases in quotation marks do appear in the text, but their meaning is distorted radically. While El-Haj obviously has sympathy for the intellectual tradition she's describing, there's a reason why her description is in the third person. There is an obvious distinction between listing the diverse roots of a scholarly movement and saying that you yourself embrace all (or any) of those roots. As for that "positivist commitment to scientific method" business, it sure reads differently when you specify that it's the view that "politics is seen to intervene only in instances of bad science" that's being rejected.

As I said before, I hold no brief for El-Haj's book. But if it is a work of sloppy scholarship, the petitioners are doing its author a favor. Rather than asking her to confront serious charges that might stick, they're firing a volley of easily refuted distortions. If this is the best they can do, I suspect she'll be teaching at Barnard for a long time.

Update: Winfield Myers of Campus Watch objects to my comment that his group "uncritically reprinted" Stern's charges. Myers points to a disclaimer at the bottom of the page in question: "Articles listed under 'Middle East Studies in the News' provide information on current developments concerning Middle East studies on North American campuses. These reports do not necessarily reflect the views of Campus Watch and do not necessarily correspond to Campus Watch's critique."

I think my phrase is accurate -- Campus Watch did reprint Stern's charges, and it did not criticize them -- but I appreciate the distinction Myers is drawing. I am pleased to hear that his group does not endorse the misquotes in Stern's petition. I hope that in the future it will be more selective when choosing articles to reprint.

Military Offsets

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:30:00 EDT

Foreign policy: It's a complex, multifactoral matter, often difficult for the layman to understand. From the AP:

The United States offered Israel an unprecedented $30 billion of military aid over 10 years on Thursday, bolstering its closest Mideast ally and ensuring the state's military edge over its neighbors long into the future. The package was meant in part to offset U.S. plans to offer Saudi Arabia advanced weapons and air systems that would greatly improve the Arab country's air force.

Link via Rational Review.

The Passion of the Mouse

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 22:53:00 EDT

Farfour, RIP:

Hamas TV has axed a Mickey Mouse lookalike who made worldwide headlines for preaching Islamic domination and armed struggle to youngsters.

The station broadcast what it said was the last episode of a weekly children's show featuring the character named Farfour.

In the final skit, Farfour was beaten to death by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfour's land....

"Farfour was martyred while defending his land," said Sara, the teen presenter.

Or maybe it wasn't his land that was the problem:

Station officials said Farfour was taken off the air to make room for new programmes.

Farfour: the first known instance of a rodent killed because he had lousy ratings.

The Enemy of My Enemy

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:00:00 EDT

In the Gaza Strip last week, the Islamist Hamas movement mounted a successful military coup against the rival Fatah movement, led by the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. In a matter of days, Hamas took complete control of Gaza, so that now the Palestinians, without a state of their own, absurdly find themselves divided in two separate entities: a Hamas-led Gaza and the Fatah-dominated West Bank.

In light of that episode, consider two statements indicative of what is really taking place in the Middle East today. We can begin with what Awss al-Khafaji, a senior aide to Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told the Arabic daily Al-Hayat. Last Saturday, he accused Iran of turning into "the strategic depth of Al-Qaeda in Iraq", and added that Iran's "intelligence services are implicated in terrorist activities in southern Iraq."

Exhibit B is a statement to the press by Iraqi Shiite parliamentarian Abdul Karim al-Anzi, who was minister of national security in the previous government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Anzi observed that "Syria is implicated to the bone in what is happening in Iraq and Lebanon and Palestine", and that it has "a hand in the violence and explosions" in Iraq—by which he meant the bomb attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda affiliates. Anzi, rather optimistically, called on the Arab League to deter Syria.

What do these two statements from Iraq have to do with Gaza? They help dispel a pair of unshakable canards in some American academic circles and byways of punditry. The first is that there is no way a Shiite party or clerical regime, for example Iran's, would collaborate with the Sunni Al-Qaeda, because ideologically they are mutually hostile. The second is that there is no way the secular Baathist regime in Syria, led by a minority Alawite community once scorned by Sunnis, would collaborate with Sunni Islamist groups, particularly groups belonging to Al-Qaeda.

Ideology should never be underplayed, but Arabs, Persians, or Muslims can be as pragmatic and cunning as others when their political interests are at stake. Iranians and Syrians see American soldiers deployed on their borders, so they have no scruples about collaborating with Al-Qaeda, or anyone else for that matter, against what they deem to be the U.S. threat. But it's also about accumulating cards for the bargaining afterwards. In creating an Al-Qaeda problem in Iraq or elsewhere, Iran and Syria can help resolve that problem for a high price. The Syrian regime has been particularly adept at sustaining itself by strengthening Islamists, in order to say: "If you ever try to get rid of us, you will be left with them."

So back to Gaza. Very little coverage in the Western media discussed the regional implications of the Hamas takeover. Nor did anyone seem to understand the meaning of the telephone call made at the height of the Gaza fighting by Egypt's intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, to Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas' political bureau, who is based in Damascus. Suleiman, Egypt's point man on the Palestinian file, asked Meshaal to order his men to end their attacks—proof positive that the shots, figurative and real, were being called in Syria, not in Gaza. Indeed, Meshaal has long coordinated closely with his host, Syrian President Bashar Assad, and with Iran—which generously finances Hamas. The Gaza operation was a seizure of power that, plainly, received prior Syrian and Iranian approval, and that undermined the Saudi-sponsored Mecca Agreement that Hamas half-heartedly signed with Fatah. In that sense, it was a victory for the Iranian-Syrian axis and their Palestinian and Lebanese allies, against the pro-American Saudi-Egyptian axis and their Palestinian allies.

Hamas may be a Sunni Islamist group—it is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—but that has not prevented it from cooperating closely with Shiite Iran, Baathist Syria (which crushed the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in February 1982), and Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah. Does that mean ideology is meaningless? On the contrary. It just means that states or groups prioritize their ideological aims when necessary; and it confirms that Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, rather than immerse themselves in theological disputation, have regarded as their central and common objective the undermining of any peace settlement with Israel. They have done so because they think they can reverse by force what they view as the outrage of Israel's creation in 1948; but also because they see any peace process as a mechanism allowing the U.S. and its Arab friends to enhance their authority in the Middle East.

As for Syria, Assad is being opportunistic. His main concern is to save his regime from accusations that it assassinated Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, in February 2005. A mixed Lebanese-international tribunal is now being set up under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter to go after the culprits. With Syria the main—indeed the only—serious suspect, Assad is understandably anxious. That is why he has been destabilizing Lebanon in recent months, and that includes bolstering a hitherto unknown Sunni Islamist group calling itself Fatah al-Islam.

By allying himself with an Iran unambiguously aspiring to extend its sway throughout the region, Assad is gambling that he will be able to evade the tribunal's headlock; but also, and more vitally for him, to profit from a winning alliance with Tehran and Hezbollah that would break the international community's will when it comes to supporting a sovereign Lebanon, so he can re-impose Syrian hegemony over the country.

Anzi was correct: Syria, but also Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, are playing for keeps in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian areas. And they are mostly doing so in concert. Standing across from them is a U.S. gravely weakened by the Iraq fiasco, pallid European states peddling "engagement", only to watch as Iran and Syria contemptuously ignore them, and Arab states debilitated by regime illegitimacy, usually the result of an absence of democracy. The Iranians and Syrians have every right to feel confident.

Meanwhile, some in the U.S. described as Middle East experts spend an extravagant amount of time not seeing the forest for the trees. In claiming to know precisely who will not deal with whom for what obscure doctrinal reason, they ignore that ideology is usually there to serve power. If ideology becomes an obstacle to reaching one's primary political goals, then enmities tend to be reshuffled. Islamists, no less than ardent secularists or nationalists, will adapt to ensure they might succeed.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Discuss this article online.

When Democracy Disappoints

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 06:05:00 EDT

In November 2003, when he announced his "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East," President Bush declared that "the only path to independence and dignity and progress" for the Palestinians is "the path of democracy." He added that "the consistent and impartial rule of law" is one of the "essential principles common to every successful society."

Less than four years later, the Bush administration is backing the illegal removal of a democratically elected Palestinian government. This turnaround, along with the administration's continued solicitude toward authoritarian allies such as Egypt and Pakistan, shows Bush was either insincere or mistaken in promising that the U.S. would no longer have to choose between promoting democracy and promoting its interests.

It's not hard to understand why Bush prefers the West Bank–based "emergency government" of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to the Gaza-based regime of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. While Abbas' secular nationalist party, Fatah, has recognized Israel's right to exist, renounced terrorism, and committed itself to a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Haniyeh's Islamist party, Hamas, has done none of these things.

But the fact remains that Hamas took control of the Palestinian parliament as a result of apparently free and fair elections in January 2006, the first such vote permitted by the Fatah-run government in a decade. The fighting that culminated in Hamas' takeover of Gaza was sparked mainly by conflicts over control of the various security forces, which often resemble armed gangs more than police or soldiers, loyal to particular leaders rather than the government or the people it represents.

The rivalry between Fatah and Hamas was compounded by legal ambiguity. Under the Basic Law (the Palestinian constitution), the president, Abbas, is the "Commander-in-Chief of the Palestinian Forces." At the same time, the Council of Ministers, headed by Haniyeh, has "the responsibility to maintain public order and internal security."

Once the argument between Fatah and Hamas became an armed conflict verging on a civil war, Abbas had the authority to declare a state of emergency, which allows him to rule by decree. But under the Basic Law, the state of emergency elapses after 30 days unless it's renewed for another 30 days by the Hamas-controlled parliament, which also has the right to review the president's decrees.

Likewise, the Basic Law gives Abbas the authority to remove the prime minister, but the new government has to be approved by the parliament, and until that happens the current ministers retain their offices. Although Abbas claims to have suspended the provisions requiring parliamentary approval, the Basic Law can be amended only by a supermajority of the parliament.

By supporting Abbas, then, the U.S. government has chosen peace and stability over democracy and the rule of law—just the sort of tradeoff Bush said we'd no longer have to make. In Iraq, meanwhile, the administration continues to insist, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that democracy will bring peace and stability.

There may actually be more grounds for hope on that score in the West Bank and Gaza. Although Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament last year, its edge in the popular vote amounted to just two percentage points, and polling indicated that its supporters' main motivation was disgust at Fatah's corruption, as opposed to support for terrorism.

In fact, while a large majority of Palestinians tell pollsters that Israel has no right to exist, most also say Hamas should abandon its goal of destroying Israel. According to a March poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, most Palestinians continue to support a two-state solution.

Furthermore, a May survey by Near East Consulting found that nearly 70 percent of Palestinians favored early elections, which Abbas is now promising. That finding suggests an argument the Bush administration can use if it refuses to admit its support for democracy is conditional: We sacrificed democracy to save it.

Discuss this article online.

Olmert Gaffe: Israel's Got Nukes

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 11:41:00 EST

What everyone knows but no one admits has been, apparently, admitted to by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (as well as our new Defense Secretary Gates):

In an interview with a German television station broadcast Monday, Olmert appeared to list Israel among the world's nuclear powers, violating the country's long-standing policy of not officially acknowledging that it has atomic weapons.
Asked by the interviewer about Iran's calls for the destruction of Israel, Olmert replied that Israel has never threatened to annihilate anyone.
"Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map," Olmert said. "Can you say that this is the same level, when you are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"
Israel, which foreign experts say has the sixth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, has stuck to a policy of ambiguity on nuclear weapons for decades, refusing to confirm or deny whether it has them.
The comments came days after incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in testimony to a Senate committee, identified Israel as a nuclear power.

His political opponents are calling for his resignation over this. He insists he was merely trying to characterize Israel as responsible, not necessarily nuclear.

Market Orthodoxy and El Al

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 12:46:00 EST

A possible boycott is brewing from haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews over El Al, the Israeli airline's, policy that it, and not a rabbi, can decide when it's OK for them to fly on shabbat. The Jersualem Post report.

To their credit, "haredi businessmen in the U.S. have expressed interest in setting up a haredi-owned airline, said Monday Rabbi Yitzhak Goldknoph, secretary of the Rabbinic Council for the Holiness of Shabbat" to compete with El Al. Unnamed Israeli businessmen, however, say that Goldknoph is talking through his yarmulke and could never get a competitive airline off the ground. Still, nice to see boycott and competition offered as a solution to conflicts with a dominant market player.

Out of Iraq, In to Iran?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:14:00 EST

Great to see the Democrats are beginning to think hard about the hows of getting out of Iraq. It seems they also need to think hard about ways to stay out of Iran, with Israeli Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu telling the United Jewish Communities General Assembly at their annual meeting that "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bomb. Believe [Iranian leader Ahmadinejad] and stop him. This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this. He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state."

Ahmadinejad for his part announced today that in his estimation the world has "finally agreed to live with a nuclear Iran, with an Iran possessing the whole nuclear fuel cycle," and that he hoped "to hold the big celebration of Iran's full nuclearization in the current year." I somehow doubt much of the Western world will be happy partyers at that "big celebration."

How might the new congressional majority react to events unfolding in Iran? New House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at least back in May 2005, took a pretty tough line against Iran's nuclear ambitions, saying in a speech to AIPAC:

"The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran. For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology.
"Proliferation represents a clear threat to Israel and to America. It must be confronted by an international coalition against proliferation, with a commitment and a coalition every bit as strong as our commitment to the war against terror.

"The people of Israel long for peace and are willing to make the sacrifices to achieve it. We hope that peace and security come soon - and that this moment of opportunity is not lost. As Israel continues to take risks for peace, she will have no friend more steadfast that the United States.

"In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel 'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.'

The United States will stand with Israel now and forever. Now and forever."

The "strong as our commitment to the war against terror" part certainly makes it sound as if the next Speaker of the House has no problem with a military response to a potentially nuclear Iran. Both parties may well have their own quagmires to deal with (tho the Dems don't entirely deserve a pass on the Iraq one either) come 2008.

Hoodwinked by Hezbollah

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:52:00 EDT

Hezbollah beat Israel in the latest war in Lebanon, and if you have any doubts, listen to what a certified expert on defeat, Syria's President Bashar Assad, had to say:

"We tell [Israel] that after tasting humiliation in the latest battles, your weapons are not going to protect you—not your planes, or missiles, or even your nuclear bombs... The future generations in the Arab world will find a way to defeat Israel."

Some pundits agreed. This unqualified, air-punching evaluation is from one Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese-American University and author of a book on Hezbollah: "In military terms this is a victory that the Arabs haven't tasted in decades by Israeli standards even. Hezbollah is fully aware that it has emerged victorious. The Lebanese government has called it a victory and it is a victory that is unprecedented and if anything it is going to change the balance of power here."

Iran's ambiguous response on Tuesday to an international request to cease uranium enrichment, underscores the regional dimension of the recent Lebanese conflict. The author of a New York Times story on the Iranian counteroffer, Helene Cooper, offered up this assessment: "Iran has emerged stronger from the Lebanon crisis by showing the world that it is capable of wreaking havoc through its support of the Hezbollah militants"—a view echoed by George Perkovich, the director for nonproliferation at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Well, since it's all settled that Hezbollah has won, let's just open a six-pack of non-alcoholic beer and drink to the health of the party's secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, the Arab world's latest Che Guevara.

But what kind of victory is this that, even by Hezbollah's unexacting standards, must qualify as a major setback? In its public appraisals of the conflict, Hezbollah has ignored what Israel did to those parts of Lebanon the party cannot claim as its own. Its cries of triumph have been focused on the stubborn resistance put up by Hezbollah combatants in south Lebanon. Nothing has been heard from party leaders about the billions of dollars of losses in infrastructure; about the immediate losses to businesses that will be translated into higher unemployment; about the long-term opportunity costs of the fighting; about the impact that political instability will have (indeed has already had) on public confidence and on youth emigration; and about the general collapse in morale that Lebanon faces.

Let's forget such trifles for a moment and use Hezbollah's own benchmark. Even there, the evidence points to a net loss for the Shiite militia.

Take the rationale for Hezbollah's rockets. For some time it has been obvious that the weapons, estimated to number between 10,000 and 15,000, were mainly there to help deter an American or Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear facilities. Nor did the Iranians distinguish between aggressors. Last May, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Rear Adm. Muhammad-Ebrahim Dehqani stated, "We have announced that wherever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel." He didn't mention Hezbollah or Lebanon, but it didn't take much discernment to see that Iranian retaliation would at least partly come from across Israel's northern border.

Does that deterrence option still exist? Yes and no. Hezbollah is believed to have many more rockets in storage and its network of bunkers in south Lebanon is probably mostly intact. However, it cannot initiate a conflict without facing the political fallout of imposing new suffering on its already traumatized Shiite community. Almost a million Shiites were thrown into the streets by Israeli bombardments between July and August. Hezbollah has started distributing money to the community, but that won't pay for much of the horrendous suffering—lives lost, profitable businesses closed, self-respect gone for those without homes or livelihoods, and much else that cash handouts cannot remedy.

Nasrallah would likely obey an Iranian request to attack Israel once again if the Tehran regime deemed that to be necessary. However, Shiites making up Hezbollah's base of support may not be so eager to be turned into cannon fodder for a country thousands of miles away. That's why the party's deterrence capacity has suddenly become very costly.

It has also become more costly because the month-long fighting brought the Lebanese Army into south Lebanon, after an absence of several decades—soon to be accompanied by an expanded United Nations force. Nasrallah, in order to protect Hezbollah's autonomy in the south, has sought in recent weeks to empty those deployments of their meaning, even as he has pretended to welcome the army. That is hypocritical. Hezbollah had repeatedly refused to allow the army to go south, and only agreed to do so because this was seen by an increasingly impatient Lebanese public as a means of ending the Israeli onslaught. If Hezbollah brings out the rockets again, however, it will mean not only confronting the Lebanese consensus, but also the international community, and that's before a shot is fired in anger against Israel. Again, the party's deterrence capacity, while still there, will be much tougher to revive.

Nasrallah also has accounts to settle with Iran. The regime in Tehran has not only seen its main reason for supporting Hezbollah go up in smoke in a largely futile endeavor, but must now dole out large sums of compensation money to Lebanese Shiites so the party can hold on to its base of support, even as Iran's poor complain their regime has left them by the wayside. Iran will probably pay out the money (though I've heard unconfirmed reports of delays), but of what value is this if Hezbollah cannot fire on Israel in the event of an attack against Iran's nuclear facilities? Or, to the contrary, of what value is the compensation if, by firing on Israel at Tehran's behest, Hezbollah only brings new destruction down on the heads of Shiites, who might then turn against Nasrallah?

Some analyses suggest Iranian officials are livid with Nasrallah for having squandered massive Iranian investment in Hezbollah. Missing from this, however, is that the party has also managed to turn the Lebanese consensus squarely against the party. Despite Saad-Ghorayeb's assertion that the balance of power will change in Lebanon, in the past week the opposite seems to have been true, as both the government and the parliamentary majority, made up of the so-called March 14 forces hostile to Syria and critical of Hezbollah, have worked to curtail any effort by Nasrallah to transform his so-called victory into political gains. Indeed, as the costs of the war are tallied, there has been a noticeable lack of enthusiasm in Lebanon to see the war as anything but a calamity. With the party itself deeply occupied with the Shiites' rehabilitation, it has not been able to reverse this mood.

So perhaps a victory it is, but in that case Hezbollah's victory is no different than most other Arab victories in recent decades: the "victory" of October 1973, where Egypt and Syria managed to cross into Israeli-held land, their land, only to be later saved from a thrashing by timely United Nations intervention; the "victory" of 1982, where Palestinian groups were ultimately expelled from West Beirut, but were proud to have stayed in the fight for three months; the Iraqi "victory" of 1991, where Saddam Hussein brought disaster on his country but still held on to power. Now we have the Hezbollah "victory" of 2006: the Israelis bumbled and blundered, but still managed to create a million refugees, to kill over 1,000 people, and to kick Lebanon's economy back several years. One dreads to imagine what Hezbollah would recognize as a military loss.

Bombing to Lose

info@reason.com (James Joyner) — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:50:00 EDT

Just hours after the cease-fire with Lebanon took effect Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave a speech to the Knesset acknowledging "deficiencies" in the way the war was conducted. Buffeted by critics on the left and right, he added that, "We will have to review ourselves in all the battles" and pledged, "We won't sweep things under the carpet." At the same time, though, he proclaimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had crippled Hezbollah as a "state within a state as an arm of the axis of evil" and that the "strategic balance" in the region had shifted against Hezbollah. President Bush agreed, proclaiming, "There's going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon."

Like O.J. Simpson's search for the real killer, however, Olmert's review begins with a false premise. By any meaningful measure, Israel lost this war. Wars, Clausewitz tells us, are fought to achieve political objectives. Intermediate military objectives—targets destroyed, enemy personnel killed, and so forth—are merely a means to an end. Reasonable people can debate whether the offensive created more terrorists than it killed, but it is beyond dispute that Israel ended up accepting a truce that falls far short of its original war aims.

Olmert and his planners appeared oblivious to the asymmetric strategic environment. Ralph Peters, a retired intelligence officer deeply sympathetic to Israel's cause, noted early in the conflict that, "All Hezbollah has to do to achieve victory is not to lose completely. But for Israel to emerge the acknowledged winner, it has to shatter Hezbollah." Unfortunately, as the editors of New Republic pointed out, "Israel can cripple Hezbollah, but it cannot destroy it, since Hezbollah is a movement with a social and philosophical foundation in its country; and Hezbollah will certainly never renounce its power or its philosophy, since it regards both as holy."

That proved prescient. The evidence continues to mount that Hezbollah has emerged emboldened and with increased respect in the Arab world. The group was lauded as "The Best Guerrilla Force in the World" in a front page story in Monday's Washington Post.

Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has claimed a "strategic, historic victory" and the group's standing in Lebanon has been buoyed by its having stood up to the vaunted Israelis. Syrian President Bashar Assad said the region has changed "because of the achievements" of Hezbollah, and U.S.-supported political changes were "an illusion."

Kuwaiti actor Daoud Hussein, appearing on al Jazeera television, proclaimed, "If there was just one Nasrallah in every Arab country—one person with his dedication, intelligence, courage, strength and commitment—Arabs would not have had to suffer stolen land and defeat at the hands of Israel for 50 years." Anecdotal evidence suggests that view is widely held.

While even some moderate Arab governments initially conceded that the war was provoked by Hezbollah, Israel's response was almost universally condemned as disproportionate and every civilian casualty was touted by the international media. From the beginning, as Williams College Middle East scholar Mark Lynch reported, scores of photographs of maimed children were filling the front pages of the region's newspapers and "shaping Arab views towards the Lebanon crisis—particularly in the key anti-Hezbollah Arab states (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt)."

Politicians faced with the pressure to "do something" about terrorist strikes but unwilling to commit ground forces early or the risk a prolonged fight ignored the realities of panoptic war and appeared genuinely dumbfounded when they got hammered in the press for their tactics. By bombing civilian infrastructure, being indiscriminate in their targeting, and just being generally ham-handed, they played into the jihadists' hands.

The Qana fiasco likely ended permanently any chance Israel had of winning the propaganda war, which, as conservative pundit Tony Blankley rightly noted, was crucial to winning the larger war: "[T]o the extent that defeating radical Islamism is enhanced by winning the hearts and minds of so far non-radical Muslims, corrosive world opinion against us only deepens the deep hole in which we currently find ourselves."

Powerful states simply can not combat terrorists using the same tactics they would apply to a conventional war with a traditional enemy. Massive aerial bombardment and armored invasion are excellent for, say, toppling Saddam Hussein's regime, but they're actually counter-productive in counter-terror/counter-insurgency operations.

The editor of the Defense and the National Interest website explains "As important as finding and destroying the actual combatants, for example, is drying up the bases of popular support that allow them to recruit for, plan, and execute their attacks. Perhaps most odd of all, being seen as too successful militarily may create a backlash, making the opponent's other elements of [4th generation warfare] more effective." Robert Pape noted in his 1995 masterwork Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War that aerial bombing usually "generates more public anger against the attacker than against the target governments."

Commando raids, which have the advantage of minimizing non-combatant casualties, and other precisely targeted strikes are simply much more reasonable and effective options in this environment. They of course take away some of the force multipliers enjoyed by modern armies and, ironically, make the fighting far less asymmetrical. Such tactics, too, may well mean more friendly casualties in the short term. They are, however, the only proven way of defeating insurgencies and terrorist groups.

Assigning Blame in the Middle East

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 15:03:00 EDT

Who is to blame for the bombings and deaths in Lebanon in the past couple of weeks?

Let's consider the suspects:

The Israelis. Certainly, many have taken this position. The first unsophisticated thought that might come to mind when considering who is to blame for a blameworthy action is, those performing the actions. In this case, we have the nation of Israel. Or, to notch it down a level of abstraction, the Israeli army. Or even the specific human beings whose names are not generally reported in the media ordering the attacks, and the even less-likely-to-be-named people actually triggering the bombs and missiles.

States get cut moral slack that individuals never do. No individual would be forgiven for carrying out a private grudge, against even the most evil of people, by blowing up his entire neighborhood—not even after giving 24 hours' warning. Much of the world nods understandingly when such acts are acts of state.

Even hewing doggedly to moral individualism can lead to a defensible argument that every individual Israeli service member causing every individual act of destruction or death is fully justified, regardless of any assumed prerogatives of Israel; Israelis as individuals have their lives and property threatened by Hezbollah actions and likely future Hezbollah actions. By this thinking, if Israel or Israelis are the relevant actors, then "blame" is the wrong word—Israel's actions, death and destruction notwithstanding, are perfectly proper.

Which leads us to number two on the obvious list of suspects:

Hezbollah. Israel's actions did not arise in a vacuum. They were a response to both a specific action of Hezbollah (or specific Hezbollah members—I'll cease spelling out these individual/collective distinctions pedantically, but I think it best not to forget them entirely) and to a pattern of past behavior and likely future behavior of attacking Israeli soldiers and bombing Israeli civilians. The current fighting alone has taken the lives of 40 Israelis.

Samir Franjieh, a Christian member of Lebanon's parliament, expressed this viewpoint clearly (as have more people than I could link to with all the pixels on the Internet), while also limning the moral difficulties with such assignment of blame: "Hezbollah took two Israeli prisoners, and the result now is that 3.5 million Lebanese are being held hostage... It's the political path chosen by the Hezbollah and its allies that led to this situation."

That raises the important moral issue of proportionality. Is Hezbollah's perfidy, past and present, sufficient moral excuse to blame it and not Israel, for 400 Lebanese deaths? Most of us don't treat all violations of a moral code as deserving of any level of retaliation.

If all punishment fits any crime, then the only appropriate role for any of us in this life, to be truly moral, is to spend it brutally killing as many other human beings as we can, since most assuredly we have all committed moral crimes. This becomes especially tricky when failing to act to stop the moral crimes of others is seen as being as blameworthy as committing the act itself.

Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times thinks that all talk of proportionality regarding this conflict is a moral dodge. What is relevant is the sufficiency of means toward the end goal of crushing Hezbollah, not their proportionality to the specific Hezbollah provocation this month. In other words, the end justifies the means when the end in question is stopping a terrorist gang.

Option number three in the blame game:

Everyone else. The rogues' gallery of potentially responsible third parties is long and comprehensive. Let's start big:

* Don't we have a United Nations to help in situations like this? Shame on you, UN! UNIFIL, we hardly knew ye!

* Despite all the initial excitement over the Cedar revolution-turned-fizzle and the departure of actual Syrian troops from Lebanon, President George Bush knows that it's still Syria's fault that Hezbollah hasn't been hobbled.

*But while Bush wonders scatologically why Syria can't contain its satraps, shouldn't he examine the U.S.'s patron relationship to Israel? Blame America First!

* But where has Hezbollah been getting some of the weapons with which it set this tragedy in motion, and continues it with every house hit in Haifa? None other than Iran, which thus wins its fair share of the blame.

* One of the more controversial blamings has been: the Lebanese people themselves. Haven't they, softened to uselessness by all that democracy-whiskey-sexy, dropped the ball on their own responsibility to rid themselves of the viper in their midst? The Cedar Revolution has rotted in short months, Hezbollah has infiltrated normal Lebanese civilian life to the point that there is no way to separate the guilty from the innocent; but then how innocent are the "innocent" who didn't act to beat back Hezbollah, either through politics or arms? This is a country where Hezbollah makes up nearly a fifth of the elected Parliament. It's too late to complain when the bombs drop.

And what are the principles at stake dictating these assignments of blame?

If we start with the assumption that killing people and destroying things is wrong and stop there, we have Israel in our sights. If we complexify it with some uncontroversial utilitarianism—that we are concerned with the long-term greatest good for the greatest number, and some apparent crimes are justified in accomplishing this, as per Chait in his dismissal of proportionality—then we can give Israel a bye, on the presumption that without strong action on its part its enemies in the Arab and Muslim world will continue killing Israeli innocents.

Complexifying that is the empirical observation that no amount of Israeli toughness seems ever get us to where they've successfully killed people to prevent future killing, rather than just laying the groundwork for the next wave of killers. Hezbollah's very existence is a product of Israel's last get-tough-on-terrorists incursion into Lebanon in 1982.

OK, if Israel succeeds in crushing Hezbollah after a few more weeks of bombing and death, 20 years from now (as is likely) we'll have The Avenging Hammer of Allah (or its snazzy Arabic-to-English equivalent). And who will be to blame for its actions? Will it be the fault of the active members of that group, then? Or will any blame accrue to the Israelis acting to destroy Hezbollah now? Indeed, given the history of Israeli/Arab relations dating back decades, might not some of Hezbollah's actions that triggered Israel's reaction this month be Israel's fault for its past actions in Lebanon—which were in Israel's mind of course a just reaction to Palestinian actions, which were in the Palestinians' mind a just response to past Israeli actions...

Which brings us to the moral question of proximity, of both space and time. How long are the crimes of the collective to rain down on its members, and how wide are our obligations to act? Why shouldn't a Lebanese have been allowed to enjoy a latte rather than hang Hezbollah? Unless you believe that it is everyone's moral obligation to expend their life's blood righting all possible wrongs—in which case the blogger who bitches about Hezbollah from Santa Monica is just as culpable as the latte-sipper in Beirut for failing to uproot them from Lebanon—moral obligations to fight evil have some limits based on proximity. We are responsible for our own back yard's evils, but not necessarily the whole world. But maybe not. Indeed, the moral philosophy that seems to animate Bush administration foreign policy comes from that great philosopher Ben Parker, Peter Parker's sainted uncle: "with great power comes great responsibility."

Other big-deal philosophers agree. Peter Unger of NYU has argued that the same moral intuitions or principles that dictate that it is wrong to pass by a drowning child in a pond without attempting to save that child's life also make us morally culpable for not giving everything we have above our own barest sustenance, including what we can cheat and steal out of others, to those who cannot survive without such help. To him, life ought morally to be simply about ensuring others can simply live. His most vivid example has to do with charity, but surely being bombed is as bad for children and other living things as poverty, or a too-deep pond. Could it be that, if we wouldn't pass a drowning child in a pond, we ought not pass up an opportunity to take up arms and blow up some terrorist bastard whose actions might kill a child—or cause Israel to kill a child?

To bring the blame game back home, for those who can blithely excuse either side of this conflict—who think the life of an Israeli civilian is justly forfeit because of the actions of the Israeli state, or that of a Lebanese civilian because of its sort-of state's failure to curb Hezbollah—could you admit, even to your self, in the deepest most secret part of your blog, that any bomb dropped or missile shot by the U.S. government anywhere—Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Japan, Panama, Grenada—could possibly have been the moral equivalent of the ones Hezbollah lobbed at Israel, or Israel at Hezbollah, and suck it up and admit that you are to blame as your home and families are killed when someone decides to retaliate on our territory?

It might be that in a truly just world, we all are getting exactly what we deserve for moral crimes of commission and omission, for letting evils be committed by states in our name, for failing to stop whatever wrongs we could stop, or die trying. And in the face of recent Lebanese events, dithering online about who is to blame might seem morally suspect itself. But moral thinking about blame and responsibility (and attempts at finding such moral arguments that are convincing beyond national, ideological, or religious communities of affinity) is important even when the grim realities make morality seem the most ineffectual of phantasms: There will be many living aggrieved victims, and families of dead ones, of what is happening in Lebanon now.

And while some of them will just try to go on with life as best they can, some of them will want answers, and justice, and vengeance. And in the year 2025, if blogs are still alive, if armchair commenters still thrive, we will find another maddening, conclusionless, muddled discussion of morality and blame regarding a fresh series of bloody attacks and counterattacks in the Middle East.

Rah-Rah IDF!

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Put away your straw men. We won't hash out some sort of moral equivalence between Israel and Hezbollah, nor endlessly chew over what a "proportionate response" to Hezbollah might be.

The goal here is merely to start thinking about the idea that whatever Israel accomplishes in Lebanon (and we still do not know the actual aim), it might not be completely and unquestionably in the United States' best interests.

A selfishly American foreign policy need not stand in opposition to Israeli aims. It would simply recognize that the United States might, on occasion, need to look to its interests and merely be indifferent to how securing those interests might impact Israel.

For evidence that the Bush administration is reluctant to do this, look no further than Washington's oddly delayed—if not criminal—one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi effort to get American citizens out from underneath Israeli airstrikes. Sweden, using the new superpower assets of cell phone text messaging and chartered cruise ships, managed to get 5,000 Swedes out of Lebanon before the U.S. even had a plan to evacuate its citizens. Sweden did this without the benefit of an embassy in Beirut.

By contrast, it took nine days to get the Marines ashore to rescue Americans.

Days into the fighting the Bush administration seemed reluctant to embarrass the Israelis by suggesting, let alone confirming, that Israel's attacks against Hezbollah just might produce threats to the civilian population in Lebanon. If someone wants to argue that that reluctance was merely gross incompetence by the State Department, your call for Condi Rice's resignation needs to be part of that particular appeal to be considered serious.

But giving Israel the "atta-boy" treatment creates other serious problems for legitimate American interests. Already Turkey is explicitly citing Israel's unrestrained move into Lebanon as a precedent to move into Kurdistan. Turkey's Hezbollah is the Kurdish Workers Party (PPK) and Turkish forces have had running gun battles with their long-time foe in recent weeks.

The Turks are basically demanding that U.S. forces take out the Kurdish guerillas or the Turks will. But Kurdistan is the one corner of Iraq that is relatively peaceful and shows signs of one day becoming a functioning society that respects the rule of law, a rarity for the region. Even though the PPK does not enjoy widespread popular support among Iraqi Kurds, U.S. moves against it might complicate U.S. aims for Iraq.

The Kurdish angle alone, then, is solid footing upon which to craft a U.S. policy that is something other than, "Whatever Israel wants." It is also worth noting that nascent links between Kurdistan and Israel did not stand in the way of Israel doing what it thought it had to do to secure its aims. But there is more.

Part of Britain's reluctance to go as far as the U.S. in backing Israel without reservation no doubt stems from the placement of 7,000 British troops in Shiite-dominated southern Iraq. Were there to be some sort of sympathetic Shiite response to Hezbollah's fight against Israel, the area around Basra would be one of the first places in the region you'd look for it.

Sure enough, the past few days have seen clashes between the Mahdi army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and British forces. The British foreign ministry has strenuously tried to beat back any linkage between the two conflicts, but has been tripped up by the issue of Iranian involvement in both.

As cable news analysts and The Weekly Standard never tire of pointing out, Iran is up to its eyeballs in Hezbollah. And the British have cited Iranian fingerprints in aiding Shiite militants in Iraq. The British press then put two and two together and deduced that Iran is calling the shots in both cases. "No" came the answer from the Blair government, an odd denial that nonetheless points exactly at a central question of this burgeoning conflict.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page almost gets the question right, but lets its obsession with removing the mullahs from power in Tehran blind it to the best U.S. response. The paper correctly sees the regional strategic implications of the fight in Lebanon, but assumes it is "Iran's first strike" in a bid to secure nuclear capability for itself. Consequently, the Journal prescribes the wrong solution, a free hand for Israel against Hezbollah:

The question going forward is whether the Bush Administration will acknowledge this Lebanon conflict as the strategic threat it is and fight back accordingly. That means at a minimum allowing our ally in the region, Israel, the time and diplomatic support to deal Iran's Hezbollah proxies a heavy blow.

But what if Iran has decided to cash its Hezbollah chips? What if it is counting on an all-out Israeli effort to destroy those elements? There are at least two very good reasons why Iran would do this: One, the Shiite population and militias in Iraq offer a better, improved opportunity to spread mayhem not against a U.S. ally like Israel, but against the U.S. itself. If Iran is truly Terror, Inc., think of it as closing down one aging if profitable product line while introducing the next big thing.

And second, the Israeli operation in Lebanon may create more terrorists than it destroys, or at least create opinion in the Muslim world more useful to Iran strategically than an ongoing low-level conflict along Israel's border. There is certainly historical precedent for a Hezbollah-Israeli clash in Lebanon inspiring Muslim terrorists the world over.

Back in April 1996 Israeli artillery hit a U.N. compound in Qana crowded with Lebanese refugees;106 people were killed. Israel said it was trying to hit a nearby Hezbollah mortar site and mistakenly used old maps; a U.N. investigation found the attack was "unlikely" to be completely in error. Take your pick, but that is what happens in war fought among civilians—murderous mistakes. By August of that year Osama bin Laden cited "the massacre of Qana" prominently in his first fatwa against the U.S government.

The current round of fighting is certainly grim, horrifying even, for the civilian population, but there has been no singular Qana-like incident. Yet.

We are left then with two distinct areas where U.S. interests might diverge with those of Israel. First, it makes U.S. goals in Iraq harder to achieve. Second, it may give Iran something more valuable than a guerilla force in Lebanon while increasing the total population of persons motivated to do harm to do Americans and American interests.

These things are not certain to transpire and may, in any event, be considered second-tier concerns when weighed against the chance to take out Hezbollah as a military force. Fair enough. But it is past time to put down the pom-poms and think hard about what comes next.