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COMMENTARY
April 30, 2003
Arafat lives
President George W. Bush who came to office sceptical about U.S. "nation-building" exercises in foreign countries now has three of them on his table. Afghanistan remains very much a work-in-progress; Iraq is just begun. In both countries we may see the reasons for Mr. Bush's initial scepticism. The third country will be called "Palestine" -- which against all odds and in defiance of sad history Mr. Bush is now determined to drag kicking and screaming into bourgeois post-modernity. He has no choice or he wouldn't be trying. The world has become too dangerous a place too small and tightly wired to do otherwise. That was the lesson of 9/11: that monster regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere had become a U.S. domestic issue. Winning the wars will prove to have been much easier than "winning the peaces" in Afghanistan and Iraq: all uncharted political territory. But winning the peace in Israel and Palestine will be harder still. For the people of those first two countries were liberated from totalitarian dictatorships whose fall was almost universally welcomed. This can be only half-true of the West Bank and Gaza. A generation of Palestinians seem at least half-convinced that their problems are exclusively caused by Israel and that there is nothing they can do to help themselves that does not involve the destruction of Israel. It is an attitude problem shared quite possibly by a majority right across the Arab world: the dreaming excuse for failure. Moreover prospects for peaceful mutual accommodation between Jew and Arab were almost irretrievably set back by the Madrid and Oslo agreements of the early 1990s. From cynical motives on all sides -- including those of Israeli Labour politicians -- the terrorist Yasser Arafat was put right at the black heart of the "peace process". He had left nothing but a trail of destruction behind him in Jordan Lebanon indeed everywhere he'd been. From the moment he arrived the West Bank and Gaza began to be transformed into a terror network. And he has now outlasted Saddam Hussein as the Middle East's consummate survivor. Under U.S. pressure and only U.S. pressure he has been partially sidelined. Mahmoud Abbas a.k.a. Abu Mazen became the Palestinian prime minister but leaving Arafat still pulling the strings of Fatah and complicit in Hamas Hizbullah and Islami Jihad. Arafat has grudgingly accepted Abu Mazen as the "clean face" that fresh negotiations will require. The U.S. Britain and Israel's Likud government appear convinced that Abu Mazen will within the limits of his power suppress Palestine's terror operations and drain a deep cesspool of corruption. (In a speech yesterday he declared unambiguously both ambitions.) We will see if he can both deliver and survive. To my own view Israel's long-term interest is unquestionably to find some workable and enduring peace agreement that will be recognized throughout the region; and the larger Arab interest can only be served in the same way. A sovereign placid Palestinian state seems the inevitable meeting place of the two interests. I think Israel failed to advance those interests when succumbing to international pressure including the pressure of successive U.S. administrations threatening to withhold crucial civil and military aid she failed to destroy Arafat. It was something that just had to be done like the Israeli bombing of Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 -- universally condemned but later privately applauded. Arafat lives today as the principal impediment to any workable peace agreement. Keeping him sidelined and gradually disarming his terror brigades will distract much creative energy from a main task which itself cannot be easy. It will be like trying to come to some agreement with an Iraq in which say Tariq Aziz were nominally in power while Saddam Hussein continued to sit glowering beside him at the cabinet table. There is necessarily an element of farce in the spectacle. Whatever the "roadmap" says progress will require the imposition on the West Bank and Gaza of an international probably American force to replace the Israeli. For there is no conceivable Palestinian civil force that can stand up to Arafat's multiple networks of goons and suicide bombers. Such a force will have to be prepared to take casualties for it will itself become a target. Under these circumstances the Europeans are likely to find an excuse to leave the whole burden upon the Americans. At the same time the U.S. will have not only to put tremendous pressure on the Syrian government of Bashir Assad -- which has been integrating Iranian-sponsored Hizbullah terrorist units into its own army command -- but maintain this pressure. Syria has never acknowledged Israel's right to exist and is ruled by a Ba'athist tyranny whose intransigence to Israel is its chief raison d'etre. To succeed in winning Syrian "cooperation" the U.S. must therefore never remove the implicit threat of direct military action from the table. In the end the Syrians themselves must be persuaded to destroy the Hizbullah perhaps with U.S. assistance; and eventually to dismantle the Syrian apparatus of occupation in the Lebanon. With this accomplished strong-arming Ariel Sharon or any mainstream Israeli politician will not be difficult. Mr. Sharon or any other will have to face down Israeli domestic opinion in removing Jewish settlements from what is after all the heartland of ancient Zion. But he and they will do it if they believe it will bring an end to more than half a century of listening for the sirens. As I say none of this is in any official "roadmap". But it is most certainly in the cards if Mr. Bush is going to achieve what millions have so longed for -- a free self-governing Israel beside a free self-governing Palestine and open roads from Jerusalem to Mecca. He has said he will do it by 2005 come what may; and after Afghanistan and Iraq we should be prepared to believe him. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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