The Problem
1.
The Arab/Israeli conflict, and its most intimate and intractable avatar, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, currently see two grand strategies visited upon them. The first says: solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict first, opening the way to broader engagement; while the second says: solve the whole problem of the Middle East, up to and including our confrontation with Radical Islam, and the ‘lesser’ problem of Israel and Palestine will become (relatively) easy. This latter is the Neocon strategy, and gave us the Iraq war.
Let’s examine the two. The second strategy calls for a great transformation involving 200 – 300 million people of different nationalities, ethnicities, and religious persuasions. All of these ‘differences’ have occasioned armed conflict in the past, and can be confidently expected to so incline well into the future. Further, the lands occupied by these 200 – 300 millions sequester the world’s largest known reserves of a vital natural resource – a resource of nearly incalculable value, well understood to lay the basis for wars. The first strategy, on the other hand, involves only a small fraction of the population in question, and virtually none of the oil lands.
So, which should we choose for a ‘likely’ path to follow?
Consider this ‘choice’ from another point of view. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is like a burr under the saddle. You may calm a situation with the ‘burr’ still under the saddle, but it wouldn’t it be MUCH easier if you extracted the burr first?
It appears, we have reached ‘nolo contendere’. The Neocon vision stands naked before its enemies, devoid of practical value. The movement of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict towards an equitable resolution will do more to compromise the appeal of radical Islamists within the Arab/Muslim world, and more to boost the prospects of moderate Islam, and the developed world’s hopes, than any other single practicable accomplishment
So how do we proceed.
First, be aware that the recent re-affirmation of the Arab offer of full recognition and acceptance for an Israel holding essentially to the borders of 1967 constitutes an admirable initiative, and provides a useful starting point.
Second, the whole developed world should commit to finding an equitable resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict where ‘failure is no longer an option’. To this end, it would propose:
1 – The integrity and viability of Israel is guaranteed by an unconditional commitment of all the moral, economic, political, diplomatic, and military resources of the developed world.
2 – The monitoring and policing of the peace would be the responsibility of a force internationally funded, mandated, assembled, and supervised.
3 – A referendum will be held in Palestine under international auspices in which the question will be: Do you favor a two state solution recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and accepting negotiation as the approach approved by the Palestinian people to resolve any outstanding contentions?
4 - It will be acknowledged that the establishment of the state of Israel constituted an act of aggression against the Arab/Muslim world, and, in particular, against the Palestinian people. Justice will be sought. Just – and even generous - compensation will be negotiated, and the costs will be borne by the developed world. The negations (including the question of compensation) will deal with, among many other issues, the extent to which a ‘right of return’ for Palestinians will be recognized.
Avenues of compensation to be considered for what Palestinians give up might be:
a. Low interest loans to start Palestinian enterprise guaranteed for 25(?) years.
b. A first class educational system [K -12] will be created for and by the Palestinian people, and funded at the expense of the developed world.
c. Access to a university education, anywhere in the world - room board, tuition, fees, books et al - will be guaranteed by the developed world for any Palestinian child born between 2000(?) and 2025(?). The only qualifications will be an ability to do the work, and a commitment to the effort.
I fully understand what is outlined above to touch peremptorily on controversial issues, and expect hard negotiation on these and other matters will need to take place. All of the diplomatic resources the developed world can make available will be made available. For too long we have indulged the irresponsibility of both parties to the conflict, and indulged our own failures as well. Failure is no longer an option.
2.
While a ‘failure is not an option’ confrontation with the Israeli/Palestinian question is the first strategic step we must undertake, the Bush administration has, perforce, confronted us with a more immediate tactical problem in Iraq. A stunning combination of idiocy and incompetence has reduced us to a choice between the frying pan and fire. There are no other practical alternatives. (1)
______________________________________________________
(1) One could, of course, propose a real surge – a la Shinseki – of however many boots on the ground it would take to stabilize Iraq. This would, additionally, have to be under a genuine international mandate, and under international supervision as well. Nothing less could hope to succeed. By success, I mean an Iraq understood to be on the road to prosperity, with governance in consultation with and by consent of the governed - governance competent, internationally respected, and able to command such coercive force as will assure civil order. But that ‘real’ surge – friends - isn’t practical.
_______________________________________________________
The Iraqi people don’t much like our being in their land, but a majority of them, even now, appear to believe our leaving will place them in an even worse position. The principle reason they believe it lies in the fact they see nothing before them that yields confidence. Such post war governance as the Iraqis have seen has universally failed. We are at stasis: caught in the middle of a civil war American incompetence has done so much to mid-wife into being. Nothing plausible appears likely to change that reality. We have arrived at as good a description of 'being in a frying pan' as one might propose.
Leaving - leaping into the fire - seems to offer a way to get things moving. But any phased withdrawal/redeployment plan must be accompanied by an understanding that we will be in unknown territory, and will have to be ready to improvise. We can’t leave with ‘leaving’ becoming our only substantive initiative.
One improvisation which we might attempt would be, at long last, to try to enfold tribal structures explicitly into the game. Beyond the Baker-Hamilton recommendations for talks with Iraq’s neighbors – which surely must be attended to - we could explore a modified partition proposal. It would certainly help the current situation if Sunni, Shia and Kurd each had an area under their authority to which their people could repair for safety. We can, and should, assist in providing whatever is necessary to facilitate the attendant movement of people. Each region would be responsible for its own security and governance, and such international aid as could be mustered would be made available to promote stability and prosperity. There are two jokers in this pack: Baghdad and Oil. I would propose we internationalize both. The nature of the internationalization would be tricky, and unique to either ‘joker’. To ‘police’ Baghdad as an international city we would have to bring into being a ‘neutral’ force. This would ideally include a significant Muslim component, but not one with interests in the area. Indonesia, perhaps, would be a source. Internationalizing Iraq’s oil industry becomes necessary because, at this time, there is no prospect the various Iraqi sectarian interests will trust one another. The profits would accrue to all Iraqis according to a just formula to be negotiated. The set up, structuring, and control of the internationalized entity would involve, of necessity, all significantly interested parties, i.e. damn near everybody: Iraq, the U.S., Europe, the nations of OPEC, India, China and Japan. The international partners to this enterprise would be responsible not only for extracting the oil, but for the security of the oil infrastructure, including investment in modernization. While America would play a major role, in both these undertakings, the supervision would be genuinely international. Nothing less could succeed. By removing what are the most likely sources of contention from the mix, and asking the international community to help with specific limited responsibilities, perhaps we arrive at something that might actually work.
3.
While addressing the tactical problem in Iraq, and starting in earnest on the Israeli/Palestinian strategic problem as our first step, we must also engage the larger problem posed by radical Islam.
Two points to be made:
1 - In the end, there is no way we can be absolutely free of terrorism. This is a world that has engendered not only Osama bin Laden, but Timothy McVeigh. The most we can hope for is to reduce the likelihood of attacks to a minimum.
2 - For the moment, the threat of ‘terrorism’ lies with its most immediate and pressing incarnation through radical Islam. Ultimately this can only be dealt with by a great, continuing cooperative effort on the part of the whole world, but most especially the developed world. Its resources, moral, intellectual, economic, and military are overwhelming. There is no way radical Islam can hope bring these societies down. Only the developed world itself can bestow such power upon a mere faction, by making repeated poor, foolish, and even catastrophic choices. That faction is lethal to the very people they seek to enlist and enflame – and those people know it. Radical Islam has nothing to offer but pyrotechnic nihilism and stagnation in life closed to all of the opportunities that open to people in the modern world. The societies of the developed world enjoy the free and deep commitment of the vast majority of their people, people of enormous cultivated talents and abilities. Does any one propose that such societies, with such vast resources, both human and material, will simply fold their tents and go away when challenged? Anyone who does propose it – and it is a core Neocon propaganda fixation - should be made to defend it.
I have written before, and will repeat it now, that what we need to design is a Cold War like grand strategy. This engagement, like the Cold War, calls for a great collegial effort on many fronts: military, diplomatic, political, economic, and ideological. Like the Cold War it will extend for a long and indefinite period of time against a dangerous foe. The ultimate objective will be to enfold (now) prosperous Arab and Muslim worlds into the larger flow of developed world success - the enfolding explicitly to take place according to the desires, insights, and wisdom of the peoples involved. As a corollary, this is to be effected with as little recourse to armed conflict as possible. War, the exchange of murderous (often enraged) stroke and counterstroke – in a world that fights with Weapons of Mass Destruction - takes on the aspect of striking matches in a dynamite factory. You may get away with it for a while, but it’s not a good idea.
Elements in the Strategy
1 - A Vigorous Point Defense employing intelligence communities around the world to track down clues, disrupt networks, interdict plots and frustrate terrorist attacks to the extent humanly possible.
2 – Know your enemy. We must not succumb to a dumbed-down infinitely inflatable bogeyman. That is a Conservative/Neocon creation, ideologically intoxicated and politically self-serving. We face a murderous maddened faction, lethal to its own people and offering little beyond nihilistic destruction and stagnation. The tip of the spear, suicide bombers and the fanatics who prepare and send them out, are likely beyond hope. But those figures have doubtless been down many paths and through many turnings to bring them to their present state. By discovering what such paths and turnings have been, we can disrupt them, anticipate others, and generally diminish the likelihood they will be followed by other young Muslims. The movement of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to an equitable resolution is clearly a highly useful first step. The Arab/Muslim world and its outliers in western Europe, are full of angry young men who find much in the world they see that inclines them towards radical Islam. Osama bin Laden sprang from such, and an incendiary reservoir of these young men remains - and is likely growing. Most are not yet committed (suicide bombing isn’t exactly a self-recommending proposition), and moving them to more constructive paths becomes a central objective for our efforts. We must seek to sever the maddened few from the reservoir they draw upon, sever the tip of the spear from its shaft.
3 – Engage Islam It is one of the world’s great religious faiths. It could not have appealed to so many for so long if it were essentially the creature of its most aggressive and destructive impulses. No deeply held and broadly practiced religion would be, or could be, relentlessly nihilistic. A failure to constructively engage the whole of a great religious tradition, to substantively discriminate the whole from its most extreme elements, cripples our effort. It also releases the passions of religious identification to become a driving force for ‘inflating the bogeyman’. How, in what ways, and by what paths we might bring the constructive elements in the Muslim world into play should be thoroughly explored. One thing to be attempted might be establishing a permanent entity for consideration of just this problem. It would be jointly funded by the Arab/Muslim world and the developed world. A chrysalis for the Arab component of this arguably already exists in the body of people who issue the Arab Human Development Reports for the United Nations Development Programme.
4 – Prosperity First. For the long haul, we seek to diminish the appeal of radical Islam to an absolute minimum. Providing young Muslims with alternative constructive outlets for their energies, ways to make a life for themselves and their families, offers the most creative and promising avenue for engagement. In a world that prospers by the educated creativity of its people, strong successful societies emerge from the conjunction of that creativity with the discoveries of modern science and technology. Over the last three hundred years those discoveries have yielded up a cornucopia of opportunity for human creativity, as both invention and enterprise, to feast upon, and feast it has. Mass prosperity has resulted. That sets the stage and eases the way for democracy. Promotion of such means as will produce broadly based prosperity throughout the Arab/Muslim world becomes the central element in our long term strategy. Just as a recovered and prosperous western Europe (think Marshall Plan), and a recovered and prosperous Japan were central to the eventual outcome of the Cold War, so broadly prosperous Arab/Muslin populations around the world will be absolutely central to success in this second Cold War. Both we, and those constructive elements in the Arab and Muslim worlds we seek to work with, must be acutely aware that the vast opportunities that open broadly to people in the modern world also mean vast (and destabilizing) transformation. The educated populations that drive this modern explosion of prosperity will not be content with little or no say in the direction of their societies. To fail to provide substantive governance in consultation with and by consent of the governed, cripples the effort and promotes failure of its purpose. Genuinely broad prosperity prepares and strengthens populations and the societies enfolding them for change. At the same time, government in consultation with and by consent of the governed is unquestionably the most difficult and complex organizational structure ever attempted by human societies. Nothing else is so moment-to-moment 'labor intensive'. For its part, the developed world must be ready to help mightily, and to understand the range and depth of difficulty our Arab and Muslim allies will be dealing with. What, together, we must seek to devise is utterly unprecedented as a purposed project, let alone for what will be, of necessity, a long, voluntary, profoundly collegial effort.
We are all in this together.
9:49:23 PM 
|
|
