Reason Magazine - Topics > Palestine

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.

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.

Mixed Bag in the Middle East

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:15:00 EDT

As usual, both good and bad news from the Middle East. The good news, from Gaza, is that Palestinians are fast losing patience with their fundamentalist government, with a majority saying that Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah Party is the "legitimate Palestinian ruling authority." Perhaps Israeli (and Western) assistance to Fatah has had its desired effect, though it seems much more likely that, as this Near East Consulting poll suggests, Palestinians simply don't like being bullied by government thugs ("58 percent of respondents said they are now afraid to express their political views following the Hamas takeover, and 60 percent say Hamas' paramilitary police, known as the Executive Force, has done a poor job respecting individual rights.) From the AP, via the International Herald Tribune:

Most residents of the Gaza Strip are afraid to openly express their political views following Hamas' takeover of the area in June, according to a poll released Wednesday, the latest sign of public discontent with Gaza's Islamic militant rulers.
The poll found that a majority of Gazans oppose rocket attacks on Israel, favor a peace agreement with the Jewish state, and do not consider the Hamas authority in Gaza to be the legitimate Palestinian government. It also concluded that Hamas would lose elections if a new vote were held today.

And now for the bad news: The AP reports that one year after the Israel's war with Hezbollah the Iran-backed fundamentalist group has "regained strength" and is now "solidly entrenched across southern Lebanon":

When 30,000 U.N. and Lebanese troops deployed across southern Lebanon at the end of last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the Islamic militant group's presence shrank in the zone bordering Israeli and its influence seemed likely to diminish as well.
But more than a year later, Hezbollah appears to again be solidly entrenched across Lebanon's south - looking, in fact, as if its fighters never really left but merely went underground.
The Shiite militia's banners hang everywhere, boasting of the "divine victory" over Israel and thanking its chief sponsor, Shiite-majority Iran, for helping with post-war reconstruction. Villagers report the militia's recruitment of young men is booming and its popularity is firm.

Full story here.

reason's Beirut-based contributing editor Michael Young James Joyner on why Israel failed in its 2006 war against Hezbollah.

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.

Simbanese Liberation Army

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:07:00 EDT

Fresh from successfully "negotiating" the release of kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston, Hamas officials in Gaza have now freed another hostage: a lioness named Sabrina, kidnapped two years ago by a local clan. The BBC reports:

Sabrina was kidnapped aged just three months, shortly after being brought to the Gaza Strip from Egypt.
Hamas militiamen say they freed her after a shootout with the clan members.
Zoo officials say Sabrina is in poor health and very tired, and shows signs of mistreatment.
"The thieves had cut off the end of her tail, the black hair that is considered to be the symbol of pride of African lions. I am very sad for her. She must have felt very humiliated," zoo veterinarian Saoud al-Shawa told the Reuters news agency.
He added that her captors were charging tourists to be photographed with her

There are tourists in Gaza?

And it's good to see that while the Gaza economy is in full collapse, the new Hamas government is focusing on the important issue of lion snatching.

(Hat tip to Rob)

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.

Unpromising Land

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 13:23:00 EDT

Earlier this week, the Palestinians looked close to civil war as rival gunmen from the Hamas movement and Fatah fired on institutions they associated with the other. This again highlighted that there is no solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict worth pursuing today. That's why the United States should tell Israelis and Palestinians that they are henceforth on their own, because the policies they are advocating can only lead to indefinite war.

The consensus view among Palestinians, at least on the basis of opinion polls, is that they should have a right to build a unified state in the entire West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Any settlement should also involve the right of return for refugees to their places of origin, or compensation for those who don't want to go home.

The Israeli consensus view is more complicated, because different Israeli governments have accepted different conditions for peace. In 2000, the Labor government of Ehud Barak agreed to discuss Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, and accepted significant withdrawals from the West Bank and Gaza, with the possibility of land swaps to compensate for areas remaining under Israeli control. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejected this approach and initially preferred to impose a long truce, before adopting the principle of unilateral Israeli pullouts from occupied territories. He implemented this in Gaza, and now his successor Ehud Olmert might do the same in the West Bank, though he refuses to place any part of Jerusalem under Palestinian sovereignty.

All political forces in Israel agree on one thing: that a right of return for Palestinian refugees to areas inside the pre-June 1967 border is a non-starter. Israelis see this as a demographic Trojan horse, an effort to eventually create an Arab majority inside the Jewish state. Ironically, Israel applied precisely that logic in July 1950 through its Law of Return, which offered citizenship to anyone who was Jewish.

Complicating the discussion are incompatible agendas and hidden intentions on both sides of the divide. Hamas stands outside the Palestinian majority in refusing to formally endorse a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines. All Palestinian political groups are vague when it comes to their interpretation of the right of return, knowing well that it is a deal-breaker for the Israelis. More disturbingly this vagueness has created false expectations among Palestinian refugees, though one much-touted poll suggested that their attitudes toward return were perhaps more complex than official Palestinian spokesmen have been willing to admit.

The Israelis have been equally ambiguous about whether their unilateral moves are really designed to make peace with the Palestinians, or just to swallow as much Palestinian land as possible while ensuring Jews will not become a minority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. The mechanism for this strategy, critics believe, is the "separation wall" that Israel is building in the West Bank--keeping Palestinian land inside but also large Palestinian agglomerations outside.

Faced with this intractable mess, the U.S. should say, "We're out of here!" The Bush administration can start by declaring that the "road map" plan is dead (not that it was ever alive) and that the Quartet endeavoring to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict--the U.S., the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia--should be dissolved. The policies and perceptions of both the Israelis and Palestinians are so far apart, the U.S. can then affirm, that it is up to them to find common ground on their own. Washington will be there to help, to criticize, to make its preferences known, but not to mediate or to engage in elaborate diplomatic initiatives.

The U.S. should also be clear about where it stands on a final settlement. The international consensus is for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, which would include East Jerusalem, and a solution to the refugee problem that does not threaten Israel's right to exist. The U.S. has leaned in Israel's favor on final West Bank borders, but President Bush has also supported a "viable Palestinian state," meaning one not chopped up into myriad areas isolated by Israeli settlements and roads. The most practical thing that Bush might do is return to the Clinton parameters of December 2000, which offered a much more consensual plan than what the administration proposed afterwards.

What the Americans should also say is that Israeli unilateralism might buy Olmert time, but it won't ever cure the cancer of Israeli occupation. The Palestinians will eventually go through, around, or under the wall, or fire over it with better weapons. The Palestinians must also accept harsh realities: a capital in Jerusalem is achievable; however the right of return can only mean a return to a Palestinian state, even if family reunification brings a handful of refugees from 1948 back to Israel proper. All Palestinian groups must level with their people and stop trying to have their cake and eat it too on the refugee issue.

What are the advantages of this? The U.S. has suffered unrelenting criticism for failing to resolve the Palestinian problem, no matter how much effort it has exerted. It has nothing to lose by pulling out of a no-win situation and making itself indispensable down the road, which would increase its diplomatic clout. It's also time for Israelis and Palestinians to see just where their declared positions lead them, without the luxury of drafting outside anxieties into their struggle. Most controversially, the U.S. should substantially cut military assistance to Israel, as the surest sign of its neutrality; but it must also reaffirm to the Palestinians that any government refusing to recognize Israel's right to exist within the 1967 borders will never enjoy vital foreign financial assistance.

The disadvantages are many. It will not be easy for the U.S. to ignore a conflict that might at any moment spin out of control. However, that is what the administration has effectively done in the past two years, and the positive shock of announcing a formal break in American mediation will make up for the unwillingness to get involved in doomed negotiations. The U.S. will also have to contend with the fact that, while Arab regimes are fed up with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Arab publics are angrier than ever. This will only translate into more antipathy for the U.S. However, this is so pervasive in the region anyway, and has been for a long time, that the marginal cost of telling Palestinians and Israelis to go it alone may be small.

Most difficult to ignore for the administration would be the reaction of Israel's supporters in the U.S. Israeli-Palestinian peace-making is an industry closely tied in to American relations with Israel. To abandon the former means reassessing the latter, which will not be easy. However, Israel is strong enough to defend itself. As for the weaker Palestinians, veritable auto-emancipation means they can reunite around a common platform of peace, or war. But they won't achieve their goals through violence, just as the Israelis cannot enforce enduring peace. In this mutual helplessness lies a final settlement.

Next Beer in Jerusalem

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Fulfilling half of Frank Zappa's rule that you're not a country until you've got your own beer and airline, Palestine's ruling party now has its own (unofficial, nonalcoholic) brew. Taybeh Brewery owner Nadim Khoury is introducing a new 0.0 percent beverage with the brand name "Hamas" on an Islamic green label.

Khoury, who already markets a variety of real beers, notes that nonalcoholic brews are widely popular in the Gulf states; he hopes Hamas will look with favor on his new venture. (Taybeh's other beers are not sold in Gaza, and one of Khoury's distributors was burned down a few years ago.) But the brewer also sees his new drink helping Palestinians in their "unified goal," stating, "Every time we sell a bottle of beer it goes toward building the state of Palestine."

This isn't the first time Levantine suds have been served with a foamy head of national unity. Syria markets the government-owned Al-Sharq ("The East") medium malt, while Lebanon's Almaza advertises itself with the unbeatable slogan "One People, One Beer." But the arrival of Hamas brew reminds us of one encouraging tendency in the Middle East: the ability to make a buck during the grimmest of times.

Consider Gaza shop owner Ahmed Abu Dayya, who stocked up on flags of Denmark just before the riots against depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper hit the occupied territories. Interviewed by Reuters while flag burners were buying out his stock, Abu Dayya said Danish flags had temporarily been outselling his usual product—flammable flags of Israel. Most intriguingly, he noted that his supply of Israeli flags comes from a distributor in Israel. Who says international cooperation is dead?

Bombs' Sway

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 16:01:00 EDT

Creators' Syndicate

The day after I visited my niece in Tel Aviv, a young man named Sami Hamad blew himself up at a restaurant there. I had no particular reason to think my niece was anywhere near Mayor's Falafel at 1:30 p.m., but I called her anyway, just to make sure. She was on her way to a concert in Jerusalem.

Others calls that day resulted not in reassurance but in concern escalating to panic and culminating in grief. Hamad, who was from the West Bank village of al-Gharakah, killed nine people who were working in the restaurant, waiting in line for falafel or shwarma, or passing by when he detonated his bomb, including a 47-year-old security guard who stopped him at the entrance, a 29-year-old from Holon whose wife was about to give birth to their third child, and two foreign workers from Romania. The bomb injured about 70 people, including two children, a 60-year-old French tourist, and a 16-year-old American who was critically wounded.

A spokesman for Hamas, the party that controls the Palestinian legislature and cabinet as a result of January's parliamentary elections, blamed the attack on "the Israeli occupation," saying, "Our people...have every right to use all means to defend themselves." The Hamas-run Interior Ministry called the bombing "a direct result of the policy of the occupation and the brutal aggression and siege committed against our people."

The "occupation" to which Hamas refers is not the one that occurred after the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza (which it left last year). Hamas is talking about the "occupation" that resulted from the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

The position of the Palestinian Authority, which was created as a result of negotiations aimed at achieving a lasting settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, is clear: All Israel must do to stop the terrorist attacks--excuse me, the perfectly legitimate acts of self-defense--is cease to exist.

Not a lot of room for negotiation there. But what of the moderate Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, left over from the Fatah-led government Hamas defeated in January? "These kinds of attacks harm the Palestinian interest, and we as an authority and government must move to stop it," he said. "We will not stop pursuing anyone who carries out such attacks."

I believe him. You can't stop what you haven't started, and even when Fatah was in charge the Palestinian Authority showed little enthusiasm for cracking down on terrorism. Now that the terrorists themselves are running the show, the Palestinian leadership is experiencing what The New York Times calls "tension": Abbas wants to pursue terrorists, and Hamas wants to pursue terrorism.

Since words are all Abbas has to offer, it would have been nice to hear something about how murdering people at random is, you know, wrong, not just imprudent. But since the Fatah-affiliated Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade not only praised the bombing but (according to Reuters) tried to take credit for it, I guess Abbas is going out on a limb even by suggesting it was not a smart move.

In fact, with Fatah's terrorists and Islamic Jihad (the group that actually sent Hamad to Tel Aviv) continuing their attacks, perhaps it's Hamas, which has not carried out any in the last year, that counts as moderate these days. Many Fatah members think their route back to power is paved with body parts.

Although this situation seems untenable, it can continue indefinitely. The terrorists can cause Israel pain, but (unlike, say, a nuclear-armed Iran) they do not pose an existential threat. The Israeli government can continue its program of unilateral separation, which has wide popular support, and maybe someday Hamas, like Fatah before it, will pronounce itself ready for negotiations. Give how that scenario worked out the first time around, maybe it doesn't really matter.

Grit Your Teeth, Embrace Arab Democracy

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:00:00 EST

Almost as soon as Hamas had won a majority in Palestinian legislative elections last week, politicians and publicists began spinning the results to buttress their agendas on Middle Eastern democracy. Not surprisingly, the arguments tended to gravitate toward absolutes, though much about regional democratization forestalls this. What works in one society may be a calamity in another; what an election victory shows about a group's popularity may have nothing to do with that group's criminal behavior. Democracy will continue to be cacophonous because that is its nature, and the nature of the Arab societies in which it is supposed to take root.

Take the two broad arguments greeting the Hamas victory. One side argues it was generally a good thing, because Palestinians had managed a peaceful transition of authority, permitting voters to settle their scores with a corrupt Fatah movement that had led the Palestinian Authority into chaos. Palestinians did not really vote in an Islamic state, this narrative continues, but sought an alternative to the despair of the moment. That's why Hamas' greatest challenge will be to satisfy the public's expectations for an amelioration of socio-economic conditions, making less likely a resort to violence. Deep down, advocates of this line suggest, Hamas is pragmatic and will accept a settlement with Israel along the 1967 borders, if East Jerusalem is made the capital of Palestine.

The other side retorts that such optimism is ludicrous. Hamas may have been ambiguous during the election campaign, but never renounced its objective to regain control over the whole of geographic Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. It did not delete from its charter the aspiration to destroy Israel, even though it recently saw a tactical advantage in not highlighting this. Elections were a mistake, proponents of this line of reasoning continue, because Hamas is much stronger and now has a national platform to pursue its destructive policies. At a wider level, the fetish of democracy has thus been proven detrimental, because true democracy has no business bringing to power fundamentally undemocratic, indeed terrorist, groups.

It's difficult in Hamas' case to agree with one of the sides while ignoring the protests of the other. The movement is hardly a bearded version of, let's say, the Christian Democrats (indeed it's not even a bearded version of Fatah), and violence will continue to be at the center of its endeavors. It will not soon renounce its ambition to recapture all of Palestine, because it will not soon reject its deeply held beliefs that Israel is illegitimate, that the Oslo process was a terrible mistake, that Palestinian refugees from 1948 have a right to return to their towns and villages of origin, and that killing Israeli civilians is acceptable because Israelis do the same.

Hamas will surely have to address the day-to-day worries of its countrymen, but that hardly diminishes the fact that the movement feels it can deal with Israel in a far more successful way than the Palestinian Authority (PA) did. This means shaping a different approach than that of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who sought, but could never deliver, Palestinian disarmament in exchange for Israeli concessions.

But should such realities cast doubt on the need for Middle Eastern societies to embrace democracy, even if Islamists use this to come to power? No, at least not in principle, though there will be many occasions where one's worst doubts are confirmed. Democratization cannot come with illusions: for certain groups it will be an instrument of leverage into positions of leadership, followed by subsequent efforts to empty democracy of its meaning. But that's where societies, but also the international community, must show there is a high price to be paid for reinforcing intolerance.

Why insist on democracy? First, because the stalemate imposed by autocratic Arab regimes, particularly secular regimes, will give at some stage, and may lead to Islamists' seizing authority anyway, without a pluralistic system in place to create social power centers offsetting them. Even in secular states such as Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Islamists have strongly infiltrated the system, so that the despots, eager to buy legitimacy through Islamic credentials, have ceded much by way of secular values. Rather than limiting the ambitions of Islamists, this behavior has only bolstered them. Elections may indeed represent a final stepping stone for Islamists to take power, but a controlled, genuine democratic opening beforehand would allow alternative groups to gain strength.

A second reason making the pursuit of democracy worthwhile is that it instills, at least in some societies, a notion of systematic accountability and transfer of authority. Iraq's Shiites may vote Islamist, but they also have had the opportunity to be asked about their views three times in 2005. It would be very difficult for an autocratic leadership to deny them this prerogative in the future. And with the habit of free elections comes the public's growing aggressiveness in evaluating its leaders.

Even in Iran, a country where elections have kept conservatives in power for two decades, voting is bound to lead to the emergence of more liberal forces once the system has had time to find an equilibrium and judge the merits of the revolutionary generation embodied by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It may take time, but the mechanism of accountability is there, and was already twice used as a platform of protest against the system when Iranians voted for Mohammad Khatami as president.

A third reason is that democracy imposes transparency. When parties are obligated to clarify their positions to an electorate, they have to live with the consequences. Hamas' haziness on its pursuit of terrorism is disturbing, but the implications are also clear for everyone to see. The movement cannot forever hide its intentions, and voters, but also those pouring billions of dollars into Palestinian society, now have a paper trail to assess. Palestinians, in turn, can determine where their interests lie, and force Hamas in one direction or another.

Finally, there is the march of history. Democracy must reach Arab societies at some stage, after decades of debilitating authoritarianism. The Islamist wave is partly due to the abject failure of secular Arab nationalist states to let their peoples breathe. Denying a process to transcend these circumstances makes no sense. The road will be bumpy, and will be made bumpier by Arab regimes' refusing to ease their societies into a slow process that can absorb the contradictions inherent in democratization. Nor can counterfeit democracy substitute for an authentic opening.

Islamists may well win the first round in many places, and in some they might even try to ensure no second round follows. That's why domestic and foreign democratic barriers preventing this must be enhanced. But simply insisting that Arab states should perpetuate the deadlock of today not only ensures Islamists will gain strength by counter-reaction; it also displays remarkable contempt for the desire of Arabs to be counted.

�

Hamas of Contradictions

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST

Last Saturday, The Washington Post published an article on how an office of the U.S. Agency for International Development had spent some $2 million to increase the popularity of the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) in the period leading up to the legislative elections that took place yesterday in the West Bank and Gaza. With the Islamist group Hamas making a strong showing in pre-election polls, the U.S. government essentially tried to buy support for its rival, the secular Fatah movement that runs the P.A.

This hapless undertaking, which reportedly provoked debate inside USAID, only served as a reminder of how the Bush administration—which made the Middle East a cornerstone of its endeavors after 9/11—has had no effective policy on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since taking office. Instead, it advanced a "road map" to peace that was virtually dead on arrival, allowed the scheme to be exploited to justify unilateral actions, and now finds itself in a quandary with the ascendancy of Hamas, which will soon dominate the P.A. and will very probably pursue the armed struggle against Israel.

Thursday's results showed that a revolution had taken place in Palestinian politics, with Hamas winning 76 seats in the 132-seat parliament. That means Hamas will form the next government, although it will probably do so in coalition with Fatah (which took 43 seats) and others. At the least, the Islamist movement has ended the 40-year domination of Palestinian politics by secular parties. But beyond that, Hamas is now in a position to overhaul the way Palestinians deal with Israel. And that is where the uncertainty comes in, because Israeli officials have already made it clear that they will not negotiate with Hamas if it doesn't renounce violence.

How responsible is the United States for all this? An innovation of the administration was to argue that its ambitions in Iraq did not first require reconciling Palestinians and Israelis. In the buildup to the Iraq war, there was a resolute murmur from a coalition of liberals, Palestine sympathizers, some political realists, and even prominent politicians like British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who insisted that the fate of the Palestinians was at the very heart of the Middle East's tribulations. Each side sought to address this for separate reasons: Blair thought it would neutralize Arab distaste for military action in Iraq; others thought that Israeli-Palestinian peace would make an American invasion redundant, since the region's longstanding cancer would go into remission, regional amity would blossom, and radicalism would shrivel up like a rose in mid-winter.

President George W. Bush disagreed, arguing that the central problem in the Arab world was an absence of liberty. He was right, but he overstated his case: Iraq never had much to do with the Palestinians; but the Palestinians are on the verge of inheriting a failed state in the West Bank and Gaza. A satisfactory end to their problem may not be as indispensable to regional harmony as some might think, but it is necessary, and the U.S. has offered precious little by way of new ideas to achieve this.

One can trace the American poverty of ideas back to two events: First, the May 1, 2003 road map, sponsored by the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia. The plan built on a June 24, 2002 Bush speech calling for an independent Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel. It proposed an interlocking "performance-based" process of mutual measures that was supposed to lead to comprehensive peace between Israelis and Palestinians by 2005. The second event was the growing refusal of the U.S. to deal with P.A. President Yasser Arafat, culminating in his complete cutoff from the administration in early 2003, and his appointment, under outside pressure, of Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian prime minister in July of that year.

The combination of these developments ensured the road map would swiftly become irrelevant. Neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian leadership saw any real stakes in the plan. Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, had already made clear that his preferred solution to the dispute with the Palestinians involved Israel's giving up less occupied land than the road map would have brought about. Sharon sought a long truce in lieu of peace, so that he could create facts on the ground and impose a territorial settlement benefiting Israel. He shrewdly embraced the road map, since it would have been impolitic to do otherwise, but he then used it as a smokescreen to take unilateral action, building his "separation wall" throughout the West Bank, along a path he saw as the semi-final contours of separate Israeli and Palestinian states.

Sharon had much help from the Palestinians on that score. Arafat was both unwilling and probably unable to end Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel, and had no incentive to endorse a peace plan preparing his political elimination. Though the U.S. naively placed all its hopes in Abbas, he was easily outmaneuvered by the PA president, and resigned only two months into taking office. This inaugurated an extended period of disintegration in Palestinian areas, where an increasingly secluded Arafat presided over a corrupt and discredited administration until his death in November 2004.

The Bush administration, taken up with the situation in Iraq, continued adhering to the fiction of the road map, even as Sharon extended Israel's wall, arguing that he was merely defending Israeli citizens. That the route of the wall failed to follow the 1967 borders, which the U.S. considers the boundary line between Israel and occupied Arab territory, and actually cut deeply into the West Bank, underlined how Sharon was being permitted to single-handedly delimit Israel's borders. The U.S. protested, but never put any muscle into its dissents. The flip side of Sharon's strategy was to get rid of areas he felt Israel could not control indefinitely, particularly Gaza, with its large Palestinian population, but also parts of the West Bank.

Acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who inspired Sharon's "unilateral disengagement" concept, reaffirmed its underlying philosophy on Tuesday, declaring in Herzliya: "The choice between allowing Jews to live in all parts of the land of Israel and living in a state with a Jewish majority mandates giving up parts of the Land of Israel. We cannot continue to control parts of the territories where most of the Palestinians live." Olmert also noted, "Israel will keep security zones, main settlement blocs, and places important to the Jewish people, first of all Jerusalem, united under Israeli control."

Sharon's coup was that he gave the international community, particularly the U.S., something to applaud at a time of deadlock in the peace process, even though, once finished, Israel's withdrawals will undermine the principle of mutuality implicit in the road map, but also in the previous Oslo Accords. And now the price tag has come: Sensing that they will have no say on their future state because Israel will impose its dimensions, discouraged with the mediocrity of Fatah's secular leadership, fed up with their grinding poverty, many Palestinians yesterday voted for Hamas, which they see as combining nationalism, military effectiveness, and Islamic morality.

The rise of Hamas may momentarily prove right those Israelis who insist there is no Palestinian partner to talk to, allowing people like Olmert to continue unilateral withdrawals in the West Bank. But at the end of the day, the nature of a neighboring Palestinian state will be as important to Israelis as the amount of occupied land they manage to retain. A truncated, suffocated Palestine will be one where popular dissatisfaction will surely lead to more violence being directed against Israel—if only as a means Palestinian parties will use to compete with each other for power in their budding entity. Optimists argue that participation in decision-making may make Hamas more moderate. But isn't the movement much more likely to stick to the armed militancy that won it such popularity?

This doesn't bode well for Israeli-Palestinian relations. You should certainly blame the Palestinians for supporting suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, and wonder how Israelis can believe that forcibly assimilating occupied Palestinian land into their state will lead to a permanent settlement. But what of the Bush administration? It is guilty of undermining the very principles it advanced to resolve the quarrel between Israelis and Palestinians. It helped create a Palestinian wasteland and desperately wanted to call it peace. Now Hamas is calling the shots.

One Democracy, Hold the Invasion

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

Like it or not, America's foreign policy is hostage to an ambitious and difficult nation-building effort in the very heart of the Arab world. The demise of a corrupt, authoritarian, and incorrigibly violent leader has led to a power vacuum that American foreign policy must fill with a stable government that is internally democratic and externally peaceful.

Working against American interests is a loose coalition of violent nationalists, Islamic extremists, and opportunistic gangs. They have little in common but a willingness to use violence to prevent the establishment of a democracy. Even if they cannot finally take over the country, they calculate that their interests would be better served by chaos than by a strong central authority that would put them out of business.

For its part, the central government is pitiably weak. Its security forces are numerous but ill-trained and unreliable, more apt to flee or switch sides than to fight. But the government and its American friends have a plan: Use elections and the lure of politics to co-opt many militants while isolating the rest. Meanwhile, provide enough calm and prosperity to give wary moderates, who fear the extremists but mistrust the authorities, a stake in the fledgling government's success.

So there it is: a footrace between democratization and destabilization. As of now, it's touch and go. What is clear is that the outcome will figure centrally in U.S. foreign policy and in the politics of the Arab world, if not the whole world, for years to come.

I speak, of course, of Palestine.

A year ago, Yasir Arafat died. His passing brought new hope for progress toward peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also brought a subtle but important change in America's realistic aims in the region. With Arafat gone, the emergence of an accountable Palestinian government became possible. What had been primarily a peacemaking effort became primarily a nation-building effort. Like Iraq—only, perhaps, more hopeful.

Hopeful? In the Middle East? Surely in that region, hope is the province of fools. In a September poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Palestinians expressed optimism that Israel's recent pullout from Gaza would lead to improved economic conditions for Gazans and better prospects for peace, but almost two-thirds said that a political settlement between the two sides will be possible "never" or "only in many generations to come." No rose-tinted glasses there.

As for Israelis, they are digging in behind a security barrier and drawing what amount to de facto boundaries, the better to hunker down and decouple their fate from what they see as intractable chaos among the Palestinians. "I remain convinced that there is no real chance, for the near future, to have central authority established among the Palestinians," says Yossi Shain, the dean of the school of government at Tel Aviv University (and a professor of government at Georgetown University). "This means, as [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon himself said [in late October], that unilateralism will be the name of the game."

The Palestinian Authority remains rife with the corruption and incompetence that Arafat nurtured, but the PA's rival is Hamas, a violent Islamist group that seeks to destroy Israel and smother Palestinian secularism. In October, during a Rose Garden press appearance with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, President Bush acknowledged that his goal of a democratic Palestine might not be realized during his presidency. "I can't tell you when it's going to happen," he said.

Yet Bush was not wrong when he remarked on "how much things have changed in the Holy Land." First, in January, Palestinians elected a president—Abbas—who believes that the violent Palestinian uprising that began in 2000 was a mistake. "Abbas is the un-Arafat," says David Makovsky, the director of the Middle East project at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Arafat focused on being a revolutionary leader, and Abbas has made reconstruction a centerpiece of his tenure." Arafat exploited the conflict; Abbas wants to resolve it. "The time has come to put an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict," he said at the Rose Garden session last month.

Another milestone came in August and September, when Israel unilaterally removed its settlements from Gaza. To accomplish this, Sharon—architect of the settlement movement—used military force against his own people in a traumatic confrontation that gambled his government. He won. Sharon is now politically stronger than ever, and not only are the Gaza settlements gone, but so is the implicit veto that the settler movement formerly wielded over any land-for-peace swap.

This month, Makovsky notes, Israel took another risk by agreeing to yield control over Gaza's outer perimeter. Under U.S. pressure, Israel agreed to let the European Union control a key security checkpoint between Gaza and Egypt. "It sounds technical to people," Makovsky says, "but it's a far-reaching move." Palestinians will now have the opportunity to show whether, with foreign help, they can secure their border against an influx of arms and contraband.

Meanwhile, Martin S. Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel who is now the director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, notes two helpful changes in public opinion. Israelis have decided that they need to "get out of the Palestinians' lives." Polls, he says, show that "a strong majority of Israelis have left the West Bank already, in their minds." At the same time, Palestinians have decided that they are exhausted by violence, even if it works. They want calm and a restoration of normal life. It was largely this shift in the Palestinian mood that led Hamas to curtail its attacks on Israel.

Hamas and other militant groups, however, are no friends of Abbas, and Abbas lacks either the means (as he claims) or the will (as Israel insists) to disarm the militants. The highest obstacle remains in place: confronting the militants and bringing them under the rule of law. Doing so might spark a Palestinian civil war. Or it might produce Somalia-style chaos.

And so Abbas has put his chips on Palestinian parliamentary elections set for January 25, in which his Fatah faction and Hamas will field candidates. If support for Hamas comes in relatively low—below, say, 30 percent, Makovsky says—Abbas will win the expectations game. The election will give new legitimacy to his demand for "one authority, one law, and one gun," and the new parliament will pass laws disarming the militants, many of whom will respond by deciding to pursue their aims politically instead of violently.

That, anyway, is the plan. It's plausible, but it's a long shot. Hamas might do well enough in the election to stalemate Abbas, or it might undercut him by launching a new war on Israel. On the other hand, this shot is perhaps not as long as the one America is taking in Iraq.

The dominant political forces in Iraq are centrifugal, as the country fissions along Shiite-Sunni-Kurdish and secular-Islamist lines, whereas Palestinian sentiment seems to be coalescing into something like a common national identity—a polity. Iraq is bedeviled by foreign jihadis who are immune to politics, whereas Palestine's militants are homegrown and usually responsive to popular opinion. In the outside world, nation building in Iraq is widely seen as an American project; by contrast, Europe and Russia, moderate Arab states (especially Egypt), and the United Nations are all engaged in Palestine and genuinely want success there.

Above all, there is this: If a successful democracy emerges in Palestine, it will not be at the point of an American gun. In the very shadow of Jerusalem, an Arab people will have found their own path to democracy, and the government's legitimacy will be unassailable. The echo throughout the Arab and Muslim world might be thunderous. Indyk argues that it is Palestine, not Iraq, where investment in democracy-building is most likely to pay off. The road to Baghdad may lead through Ramallah.

How much outsiders can do is unclear. It would certainly help if Western and, especially, Arab countries made good on their pledges to support Abbas with generous economic aid. And Abbas, a man who seems to lack the confidence to command, needs foreign prodding to consolidate and professionalize his security forces, a nettle he has yet to grasp, much to Israel's frustration.

Still, the ball is now in the court of Abbas and the Palestinian people. "It's up to the Palestinians to get their act together," says Indyk. January's Palestinian elections bear close watching. The December 15 vote for an Iraqi parliament will be only the second-most-important Arab election this season.

Saturday the Rabbi Went Nuts

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Boston Globe

The expectation that a commentator's views must be in lockstep with his or her ethnic, religious, or sexual identity is always distasteful—particularly when blacks, women, gays, or Jews are labeled "self-hating" when they refuse to toe the perceived party line.

Then again, maybe the "self-hating" label is justified on occasion. That's what I found myself thinking when I read a stunning recent commentary by author and pundit Eric Alterman on the British Muslim Council's decision to boycott the ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The reason given for the boycott was that the commemoration of Nazi death camp victims did not include the Palestinian victims of Israeli "genocide."

On his blog at MSNBC.com, Alterman sneered at critics of the boycott. "I'm a Jew, but I don't expect Arabs to pay tribute to my people's suffering while Jews, in the form of Israel and its supporters—and in this I include myself—are causing much of theirs," he wrote, suggesting that one might as well expect gays to honor "the suffering of gay bashing bigots." Alterman noted that "the Palestinians have also suffered because of the Holocaust. They lost their homeland as the world—in the form of the United Nations—reacted to European crimes by awarding half of Palestine to the Zionists... To ask Arabs to participate in a ceremony that does not recognize their own suffering but implicitly endorses the view that caused their catastrophe is morally idiotic."

One hardly knows where to begin. There is, for instance, the way Alterman not-so-deftly conflates Muslims with Arabs and Arabs with dispossessed Palestinians, and then declares Jews responsible for "much" of the suffering of Muslims everywhere. Not the brutal theocracies such as the Taliban, which have tried to impose a medieval form of Islam through terror; not the equally brutal secular dictators of the Arab world such as Iraq's now-deposed Saddam Hussein, or the corrupt monarchies. No, it's the Jews—all lumped together, including long-dead Holocaust victims.

By Alterman's logic, every Muslim is justified in viewing every Jew as the enemy. Alterman frets that his words will be "twisted beyond recognition," but it's hard to see how they can be twisted into something more indecent than they already are. (While he counts himself among Israel's supporters, he seems to regard the creation of Israel itself—not just the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza—as an Arab "catastrophe.")

Call it self-hatred or something less psychoanalytic; the bottom line is, this is the kind of rhetoric that, coming from a non-Jew, would be clearly seen as anti-Semitic. This is not exclusively a phenomenon of the pro-Palestinian left. Ironically, in the same blog item, Alterman castigates a conservative Jewish commentator for giving aid and comfort to anti-Semitism—and, ironically, he's right.

The commentator is Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of a group called Toward Tradition, who has been in the forefront of the alliance between conservative Jews and the Christian right. Rabbi Lapin recently unleashed a bizarre tirade in The Jewish Press against "the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture." His target is the movie Meet the Fockers, in which Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand play a sex-obsessed Jewish couple, as well as radio sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, "shock jock" Howard Stern, and trashy daytime talk show host Jerry Springer.

Rather shockingly, Lapin quotes Adolf Hitler, who accused Jews of spreading "literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical idiocy" in pre-World War II Germany. His ostensible point is that the Jewish community should confront and criticize Jewish perpetrators of cultural degeneracy, to avoid giving ammunition to Jew-haters. But he provides such ammunition himself when he misleadingly singles out Jewish entertainers for blame—as if Jewish contributions to art and culture were limited to the "coarsening" kind.

Such tactics are not new for Lapin. During the controversy over Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, he wrote that it was hypocritical for Jewish groups to protest what many saw as the film's anti-Semitic themes, given that Jewish Hollywood executives had been involved with allegedly anti-Christian fare such as the 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. Never mind that The Last Temptation was directed and scripted by gentiles.

We live at a time when anti-Semitic rhetoric is creeping into the respectable mainstream: on the left, in the form of Israel-bashing; on the right, in assertions that Christians own this country and should "take it back." I'm not sure whether such rhetoric is any more reprehensible when it comes from Jews. But it is certainly no better.

Blogger, Bush-Basher, Bin Laden

Brendan.ONeill@spiked-online.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Osama bin Laden's latest message to the world, broadcast by al-Jazeera last Thursday, provoked the same sense of déjà vu as has Messages to the World: the Statements of Osama bin Laden, recently published by the left-leaning literary publishing house Verso. The book is a collection of every public utterance made by the al-Qaeda leader between 1994 and 2004, and according to one excitable reviewer it shows that he is a "charismatic man of action, an eloquent preacher, a teacher of literature and a resilient, cunning, wonderfully briefed politician." To me, however, there was something irritatingly familiar rather than surprisingly eloquent about his tone and turns of phrase.

Then it struck me: Bin Laden is a blogger. Not literally, of course, but he certainly speaks in the language of the blogosphere. He references Robert Fisk and Michael Moore, those darlings of the anti-war Web. In his latest statement, he recommends that people read Rogue State by leftist author William Blum, another favorite of the leftwing blogosphere whose email newsletter, "Anti-Empire Report," is frequently republished and discussed. Bin Laden also repeats conspiracy theories about 9/11 and lines of attack against Bush that I have read a thousand times on a thousand blogs.

It is often said that the blogging explosion was a byproduct of the 9/11 attacks, as people launched online diaries to try to make sense of those shocking events. Here's a thought: Perhaps bin Laden himself turned to the blogosphere after 9/11, in search of theories and arguments with which he might justify his murderous assault.

The latest statement reveals the extent to which bin Laden borrows from Western discussions of the Middle East. This seems less a man with a clear religious or political agenda than someone who is parasitical on the fear and loathing of his enemies. Indeed, bin Laden has scolded President Bush for ignoring "U.S. opinion polls which [indicate] that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq." He seems a little obsessed by opinion polls. Shortly after the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, he cited "opinion polls showing that most people in Europe want peace." What kind of warrior for God needs to conjure up the authority of opinion polls—rather than, say, the authority of Allah—to justify himself?

This latest message also talks about the "psychological pressure" on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, criticizes the news media for not showing the truth about the war, and cites humanitarian reports on conditions at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. It contains very little about religious or political first principles; instead bin Laden leaps upon Western doubts about Bush's venture in Iraq and makes them his own.

Bin Laden's reliance on Western theorizing about the reasons for al-Qaeda's existence and actions is clear in Messages to the World. Reading his statements from 1994 to 2004 one can see clearly that he transforms himself from a religious crank obsessed by Saudi Arabia (circa 1994) to a self-described warrior for Palestine (around 2001 and 2002) to finally a fully-fledged Bush-basher (2004 onwards). His campaign is shaped less by his own program of ideas or aims than it is by the West's interpretation of that campaign.

In 1994 bin Laden's big concern was that his birthplace, Saudi Arabia, wasn't chokingly religious enough for his liking. By 2001, however, he was defining himself as a fighter for Palestine. When a quick-witted al-Jazeera journalist challenged him about that shift, bin Laden explained: "Some of the events of recent times might foreground a certain issue, so we move in that direction…." Here's a more plausible account: Numerous commentators in the West presumed (with little evidence) that 9/11 was payback for American policy in the Middle East, and especially its support for Israel against Palestine, and bin Laden, previously a Saudi obsessive, adopted those arguments as his own.

His justifications for 9/11 also changed in tune with Western theories. At first, in September 2001, he disavowed responsibility for 9/11, instead pinning the blame on some dastardly conspiracy within America itself. He talked about "a government within the government in the United States" which may have facilitated the attacks because "there are intelligence agencies in the US which require billions of dollars of funds from the Congress and the government every year." Such theories will sound familiar to anyone who happened upon conspiracy-theory websites or some of the wackier blogs in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. By October, bin Laden was celebrating 9/11's impact on America's economy and sense of resolve, talking about "the psychological shock of the attack," and how it cost the Americans an estimated "$140 billion" and led to 170,000 employees being "fired or liquidated" from airline companies. Here, he cherry-picked from reports of job losses and predictions of doom that were widespread in the Western media after 9/11 and claimed ownership of them, as if they were part of his plot.

Bin Laden's parasitical relationship with Western debate really came into its own from 2004 onwards. During this period he has sounded almost indistinguishable from various Bush-bashing blogs. In April 2004 he ranted about "big media," describing them as "agents of deception and exploitation." He said the war in Iraq "is making billions of dollars for the big corporations, whether it be those who manufacture weapons or reconstruction firms like Halliburton and its offshoot sister companies." Halliburton has, of course, become the bête noir of anti-war bloggers. Bin Laden also said, "It is all too clear, then, who benefits most from stirring up this war and bloodshed: the merchants of war who direct world policy from behind the scenes." This is also a popular idea in the blogosphere: that a wicked cabal led by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney (both of whom have big business links) is leading America to war. Indeed, in his latest statement bin Laden spells out who these "merchants of war" are, describing Iraq as "the ill-omened plan of the four—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz." He has also adopted the "war for oil" argument of various anti-war bloggers, arguing that the "black gold blinded [Bush]."

Bin Laden frequently namedrops the anti-war blogosphere's favorite authors and activists. In October 2004 he advised the White House to read "Robert Fisk, who is a fellow [Westerner] and a co-religionist of yours, but one whom I consider unbiased." In the same statement bin Laden chastised Bush for leaving "50,000 of his citizens in the two towers" because he considered "a little girl's story about a goat and its butting [to be] more important than dealing with airplanes and their butting into skyscrapers."—a clear reference to Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, which opens with footage of Bush reading My Pet Goat to a classroom of children on the morning of 9/11. Did bin Laden watch a pirate DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11, or did he read about it on the Web? And now he has recommended that Bush and Co. read Blum's Rogue State. Funny how this Islamist warrior never recommends that we read the Koran.

Who knows whether bin Laden has access to the Web? Who knows whether he reads blogs, or rather hears such arguments from supportive visitors from Pakistan or Afghanistan or Wherever-istan. But one thing is clear: His arguments sound remarkably familiar. Like bloggers he seems obsessed by media coverage of the Iraq war (and of himself) rather than by the substance of the war itself; and he certainly speaks in the shrill tones of some of the crankier left-wing bloggers. Bin Laden, it seems to me, is regurgitating the arguments of Western commentators and using them to justify his crimes. He is less the armed wing of a clear or coherent Islamist-imperialism or Islamo-fascism than he is the armed wing of the blogosphere, of the West's own fearful and tortured debates about war and terrorism today.

Burying Yasser Arafat

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

In the endless, turgid dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians, I take a third position: I'm pro-civilian. With that bias, I can't say I'm unhappy to see Yasser Arafat buried. The least appropriate claimant of a Nobel Peace Prize since Henry Kissinger, Arafat built his career killing civilians on one side of the conflict, and he capped it by multiplying the miseries of the civilians on the other side. The first half of that record is widely understood—the one thing everyone knows about Arafat is his history of terrorism—but the second deserves more attention.

I'm not referring to the collapse of the Camp David negotiations in 2000, an event for which Arafat is widely but probably unfairly blamed. (As Hussein Agha and Robert Malley pointed out two years ago in The New York Review of Books, there was plenty of culpability to go around.) I'm referring to his tenure atop the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), the brutal statelet he ran in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Before the Oslo accords created that body, Palestinians protested the iron fist with which Israel ruled the occupied territories: the detentions, the torture, the censorship, the everyday humiliations. Given a modicum of authority over the same people, what did Arafat do? Let me quote Amnesty International's 1999 report on the PNA—that is, its report from a year when the peace process was not yet dead, the second intifada was not yet launched, and Arafat was still sometimes regarded as a born-again man of peace:

At least 450 people were arrested on political grounds; they included prisoners of conscience. More than 500 political detainees arrested in previous years, including prisoners of conscience, remained in detention without charge or trial. At least two political prisoners were sentenced to prison terms after grossly unfair trials before the State Security Court. Torture and ill-treatment of detainees remained widespread. Three people died in custody in circumstances where torture or ill-treatment may have caused or hastened their deaths. Unlawful killings, including possible extrajudicial executions, were reported.

That same year, the Committee to Protect Journalists—an international press-freedom group that, like Amnesty International, does not shy from exposing misbehavior on the Israeli side—reported that "the PNA showed little tolerance for outspoken journalism. Throughout the year, authorities harassed local media by arbitrarily arresting and interrogating reporters and by closing private broadcast outlets." In exchange for this abuse, Arafat's subjects received...more abuse. Israel's restrictions on Palestinians' freedom to trade and travel persisted after Oslo, with hardly a peep from the man who was supposed to represent his people's interests.

Not content to be repressive, Arafat's regime was also corrupt: He and his cronies skimmed millions from the till. After a 1997 audit revealed some of the graft, the PNA responded by putting an end to public audits. Whether or not Arafat was essential for the creation of a Palestinian state, he clearly performed miserably once he had the rudiments of a state under his command.

Indeed, his misrule helped create the conditions that left many critics questioning whether Palestinian nationhood was such a great idea after all. In the last few years, figures from Tony Judt to the late Edward Said have revived the idea of a "one-state" solution to the conflict. This would not mean one big Israel cleansed of Arabs, nor one big Palestine whose Jews have been driven into the sea, but one binational country with federal self-government, equality before the law, and separation of church and state. This is of course anathema to those who are more interested in invoking God as a land-use planner than in achieving equal rights for Palestinians or physical security for either side. But from the pro-civilian position, it seems like the best possible outcome.

"The best possible outcome" does not necessarily mean "an outcome I'd like my country to fight for." The U.S. has a long history of failing to bring peace to this part of the world, and rather than watch it get behind yet another doomed proposal I'd be happy to see it disentangle itself and its funds from this tarbaby and let the locals sort things out themselves. But I'll say one thing for binationalism. Writing in The Boston Review, Lama Abu-Odeh has argued persuasively that the best route to the one-state solution is "a Palestinian civil rights movement based on a King-like strategy of long-term civil disobedience." The Palestinians are not strangers to such methods: The tactics of the first intifada, after all, included mass protests and a tax revolt. Gene Sharp, one of the leading theorists of militant nonviolent resistance, has pointed out that such a struggle is itself a "democratization experience" that, if it's successful, "diffuses power in the society."

That's a welcome alternative to any model that centralizes power, especially in the hands of a thug like Arafat. Anyone who pulled it off would actually deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

America Unbound...or Insolvent?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST

Two events last week that are inextricably linked instead crossed newswires like ships passing across different oceans.

First, President George Bush nominated his pal Alberto Gonzales to follow in the hallowed footsteps of John Aschroft and Janet Reno as United States Attorney General. Second, though it wasn't actually reported anywhere, the Defense Department's main "independent" advisory body for research & development issues, the Defense Science Board, had its September 2004 package of recommendations for combating America's abysmal image abroad made public.

What's the connection? Gonzales famously advised Bush in early 2002 that the Geneva Conventions covering prisoners of war and civilians captured during war were "quaint" and "obsolete" regarding America's campaign against Al Qaeda. The DSB, meanwhile, spent 103 pages dreaming up new band-aids to slap on Uncle Sam's hemorrhaging reputation, which it attributed directly to a combination of the White House's decisiveness and its palpable disdain for any international limitations on its ability to act.

"More than 15 private sector and Congressional reports have examined public diplomacy" since October 2001, the report states. "There is consensus in these reports that U.S. public diplomacy is in crisis... America's image problem, many suggest, is linked to perceptions of the United States as arrogant, hypocritical, and self-indulgent."

The report, unlike the Bush Administration, sees anti-Americanism as a pressing danger to U.S. interests deserving of immediate corrective attention.

"Negative attitudes and the conditions that create them are the underlying sources of threats to America's national security and reduced ability to leverage diplomatic opportunities," it warns (italics mine). "Terrorism, thin coalitions, harmful effects on business, restrictions on travel, declines in cross border tourism and education flows, and damaging consequences for other elements of U.S. soft power are tactical manifestations of a pervasive atmosphere of hostility."

Contrast that with Bush's response in the second presidential debate when asked by a citizen what he'd do to "repair relations with other countries."

"No, I appreciate that. I—listen, I—we've got a great country. I love our values. And I recognize I've made some decisions that have caused people to not understand the great values of our country," were the first words that came out of the president's mouth. He then went on to compare his European unpopularity with Ronald Reagan's, insist that going to war in Iraq and pressing for democratization in Palestine were the right things to do, and to reiterate his Jacksonian opposition to any foreign shackles on American action.

"I made a decision not to join the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which is where our troops could be brought to—brought in front of a judge, an unaccounted judge," he closed with. "You don't want to join the International Criminal Court just because it's popular in certain capitals in Europe."

That latter statement neatly highlights the Bush paradox of anti-Americanism: Sure, hostility toward the U.S. may cost the country ever-higher amounts in money, military manpower, and anti-American violence; but mocking foreigners makes for damned good domestic politics.

Republicans this November ran not just against Democrats, but the weaselly Europeans who sympathize with them. The Republican Convention was a four-day fuck-France festival; John Kerry was relentlessly (and falsely) accused of offering furriners a "veto" over American foreign policy, and the schoolyard taunts that he even looked French made the Massachusetts Senator pathetically defensive.

Anti-multilateral politics, of course, are successful in large part because multilateral institutions and treaties are so flawed. It does not take a brain surgeon to diagnose diabolical corruption and comical ineffectiveness at the United Nations, for example, and there are plenty of reasonable grounds for objecting to Kyoto and just about any other sovereignty-denting global treaty you can name.

But shaking off the shackles comes with a direct cost that the globe-changing Jacksonians rarely acknowledge. If there are few if any rules that the world's lone superpower will submit to, global public opinion will continue to rebel. Significant military coalitions will be that much harder to assemble, democratic countries will elect more anti-American governments, the U.S. Treasury will issue ever-more debt (putting further unholy strain on the dollar), and America's military manpower shortage will worsen.

President Bush claims to be confronting this problem by reaching out anew to the European leaders he ran against (even while selectively snubbing the weaseliest). But as long as he keeps stacking his Cabinet with people with contempt for international law, no amount of bon mots will paper over a gap that has become a chasm.

"Good strategic communication cannot build support for policies viewed unfavorably by large populations," the Defense Science Board found. "Nor can the most carefully crafted messages, themes, and words persuade when the messenger lacks credibility and underlying message authority... It will take decades to counter extremist terrorist recruiters and fully restore U.S. global standing and credibility."

How Important Is Iraq?

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 00:00:00 EDT

In Iraq, it appears, the United States is in for a long trial. Baathists and Islamists, bitter enemies in other contexts, have found common cause against the American occupation. In the wake of devastating bombing attacks on the United Nations' Baghdad headquarters and, in Najaf, on Iraq's holiest Shiite shrine, Western intelligence has grown increasingly confident that America faces not only remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime and local Islamic extremists but also a sizable influx of outside jihadis, for whom Iraq has become a magnet.

Then there is Afghanistan, where Taliban forces are mounting an organized, if still only sporadically effective, offensive in the south and east. The New York Times recently quoted an unnamed senior Western diplomat on the Taliban's strategy to turn its weakness into strength among the local population: "The mantra they use is that the Americans and the international community will leave someday, and we will come back."

Then there is Palestine, where hopes for any sort of progress toward peace or even toward calm have taken another beating. Although the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon could have done more to implement the so-called road map (an American-led peace effort), a more fundamental problem seems to be that both Yasir Arafat and Hamas want the moderate leadership of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to fail. To help him fail, militants blew up a bus full of Israeli civilians, detonating the road map's fragile cease-fire along with it.

After two years of embroilment against terrorists and thugs in three theaters, Americans are not yet weary but are increasingly wary. President Bush's approval ratings have softened, the Democrats are on his case for doing both too much and too little, and a July ABC News/Washington Post poll found 80 percent of the public saying they were "very" or "somewhat concerned" about the possibility that America will get "bogged down" in Iraq. (The plurality, 43 percent, said "very concerned.") A pointed cartoon in The Economist shows Bush in a tank, stuck in a muddy sinkhole. "We will not retreat!" Bush is saying. Sitting behind him, an anxious Uncle Sam says, "OK...but will we advance?"

A reasonable question, but one that can only be properly answered in a broader context. The engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and (to a lesser extent) Palestine are all parts of a larger engagement that may last more like 40 years than four, and that any Democratic successor to Bush would find himself equally compelled to fight, even if not in exactly the same way. Is this engagement important? Just think of it as World War IV.

Philip Bobbitt, a University of Texas law professor and the author of last year's book The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, conceives of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War not as discrete events but as phases in a single protracted conflict -- what he calls the Long War. How so? All were "constitutional" struggles, in which liberal democracy faced down a series of challengers for the right to govern. World War I brought an end to the dynastic empires but did not settle the question of what form of rule would succeed them. First fascism and then Communism staked their claims, and defeating them took until 1991. That left liberal democracy triumphant. The great constitutional conflict was settled.

Only -- this is me now, not Bobbitt -- it was not settled. Away on the horizon, at first seeming too weak and eccentric to worry about, Islamic totalitarianism ("Islamism") was preparing its own challenge. Quite distinct from Islam as a religion, Islamism proposed a system of government that had imperial aspirations and that sought to abolish the private sphere and secular politics. First in Iran in 1979, then in Afghanistan a decade later, it showed it could defeat a modern secular state. It began to dream of driving "crusaders" and Jews and secularism out of all the Islamic lands, and even perhaps out of America.

As totalitarian ideologies go, militant Islamism is not one of the most appealing. It preaches asceticism, repression, and isolation. As a social system, it is largely parasitic, better at buying technology than inventing it, able to destroy with skill but much less adept at building. Its main allure is that, for many people living under the thumb of regimes that are authoritarian, incompetent, and corrupt, Islamism seems to offer the only hope of a passably honest, passably efficient alternative.

Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary Iranian regime, although repressive, at least seemed to root its repression in principles other than merely retaining power. The Taliban managed to impose order on Afghanistan. Hamas runs social service operations that win admiration from Palestinians who view the secular authorities as intractably crooked. In Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, and elsewhere, many ordinary people regard Islamism as the only way out and up.

For 50 years, America was complicit in presenting the Arab world with a false choice between corrupt authoritarianism and militant Islamism. Worse, the United States took the side of corrupt authoritarianism. In that limited sense, America was complicit in the rise of militant Islamism. But secular authoritarianism turned out to mean Assad's Syria, el-Qaddafi's Libya, and Saddam's Iraq, all of them dangerous to their own regions and to American interests.

What does any of this have to do with Iraq? I don't believe the Bush administration went to war in Iraq on a "neoconservative" mission to reorder the whole Arab world, although it certainly hoped for favorable side effects. I think the administration went to war because it believed that leaving Saddam and his sons in power for another 10 or 20 or 30 years -- with the U.S.-led containment effort already in tatters -- would be untenable and irresponsible. I think the administration believed that with 9/11 memories fading and a presidential election coming up, the chance to get rid of Saddam might never come again. So the administration took the chance.

In Iraq, what was a war of choice has now become a postwar of necessity. The jihadis filtering into Iraq perceive this even if some Americans do not. If the United States succeeds in proving that there is a liberal, moderate alternative to both the Baath Party and militant Islamism, the Islamists' false choice is exposed. The establishment of a reasonably competent, honest, and stable government in Iraq would be a staggering blow to the appeal of political Islam worldwide.

From the Islamists' point of view, this is a life-or-death struggle. America _must_ fail in Iraq. Ideally, America should also fail to establish a competent, honest, stable Palestinian state, and a competent, honest, stable Afghan state. But Iraq is the big one. From the jihadis' point of view, a victory over America in Iraq -- meaning the Americans go home without having managed to set up a viable, moderate government -- would be a twofer. American prestige and power would be wounded, and the false choice between Islamism and corrupt secular tyranny would be confirmed. "You see?" the Islamists would say. "It really is just us or the devil. The Americans won't stay and can't win."

What America is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine is best thought of not as nation building but as alternative building. It's hard. In the Cold War, the democracies could win by outlasting their adversary. Communism's surviving victims needed little persuasion to embrace Western-style politics and economics when they could. In the new conflict, by contrast, America needs not only to defeat and discredit two quite different ideologies (Baathist-style fascism and Islamic totalitarianism) but also to establish the viability of a third way. A few well-placed bombs can make this quite difficult.

In Afghanistan, our side is winning, but we're still in the first lap and the enemy is back on his feet. In Iraq, our side is struggling and the opponent is gaining. In Palestine, with Abbas undercut from both sides and too weak to enforce the road map, our side is not fully in contention.

If the situation looks discouraging, however, remember that World War I and World War II and World War III (the Cold War) all started out looking worse. In all three cases, the democracies proved stronger than they looked, and their opponents proved weaker. Remember also that many Iraqis and Afghans and Palestinians support what America is trying to do and will come forward when it appears we can win. As the jihadis must know, their movement could collapse as suddenly as Communism did.

Remember, finally, what we learned two years ago this Thursday. The other side is not going to go away and leave us alone. If the world's 200 million or more Arab Muslims are not given hope, they will lash out in fear. The Long War, alas, isn't over.

On To Amman!

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 15 Apr 2003 00:00:00 EDT

It takes a pretty stunted imagination to ask merely "Is Syria next?" The question isn't whether the self-described "Arab Republic" should become the next target of American liberation; it's why we should stop there.

Consider Jordan, another fake country carved out after World War I, and one that fits any number of the ever-evolving criteria for forcible liberation. If Syria's human rights abuses make the country worthy of decapitation, how do we square Jordan's abysmal human rights ranking by Amnesty International? Jordan's King Abdullah, like Bashar Assad a son of a forceful and long-lived potentate, has made even less progress toward freedom than Assad has. Freedom of the press, in fact, has moved backward since the ascension of the current monarch. Terrorist groups from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to the Abu Nidal organization have operations in Amman and continue to spew anti-American hate speech from there. The kingdom plays a complex game of footsy with Hamas—alternately cracking down on and freeing up that terrorist group, depending on the political winds. For all that, freedom of assembly is non-existent in the Hashemite Kingdom, and forced displays of loyalty are commonplace.

Am I saying that the kingdom needs to follow Syria down the path of changed regimes? That depends on whether you are a strict or loose interpreter of the war on terror's rhetoric. It's possible to read President Bush's mandate so tightly that even Syria does not qualify for an increasingly popular invasion. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the president committed the nation to a war against every terrorist group of "global reach." Of the vaunted group of terrorist organizations said to be headquartered in Damascus, not one represents a threat to anybody outside of the Middle East. Most seem to be on the list merely to fill seats: The outdated, unpopular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is not nearly so adept at car-bombing as at publishing nostalgic Marxist rhetoric under the feeble inspiration of retired philosopher-king George Habash (whose 2000 successor Mustafa Ali Kasam Zabirihas already been killed by the Israelis); calling it a terrorist organization of global reach is like saying the Symbionese Liberation Army is a lethal viper poised at America's jugular.

But what of the background rhetoric of the war, the part about how undemocratic regimes are the real breeding grounds of terrorism? Admittedly, this vision is largely pieced together from speculation and the reading of gnostic texts, but the outlines are fairly clear: The undemocratic Middle East needs radical surgery. Its leaders deflect the ire of their populations into anti-American and anti-Israeli chatter that ultimately comes back to bite the United States. The solution is to give real power back to the populations, a principle voiced most eloquently by former CIA director James Woolsey in the apostrophic money shot of his famous "World War IV" speech at UCLA: "[T]his country and its allies are on the march, and ... we are on the side of those you most fear: we're on the side of your own people."

This is a neat trick, given that the people of the Arab world, by all available evidence, hate the United States with a passion their leaders can never hope to match. But let's imagine that that is a temporary problem, one that a taste of real freedom would eventually solve. This still leaves us with the question of why a terrorist-harboring police state like Jordan is more qualified for leniency than any other terrorist-harboring police state. It raises the more critical question of why the police states in Saudi Arabia and Egypt—the countries that (Have you forgotten?) supplied the actual September 11 terrorists—should be spared. For that matter, why should any country in the Middle East be spared? The region as a collective generates and exports nothing but enmity, bitterness and violence, as efficiently as East Asia generates and exports electronic equipment. American friends and foes are equally responsible for turning the region into terrorism's breeding ground. Why should any of them be allowed to live?

Having ramped up the anti-Syrian oratory, the Bush administration now appears to be looking for non-martial solutions to the Syrian problem, and it was reportedly the President himself who nixed plans for an invasion against the Levantine goggle-smugglers. Does this mean President Bush has gone soft on terrorism?