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COMMENTARY
February 9, 2002
Long way round
Ariel Sharon is a tactician with no idea about strategy; Yasser Arafat is a strategist with no idea about tactics; each thinks he is the opposite of what he is. They are not symmetrical however. Mr. Sharon is a politician a fairly hard example of what is thrown up by public opinion within a multi-party democracy. Mr. Arafat is a popular terrorist warlord. This is not a very fine distinction but it is too seldom made. Mr. Sharon who we learn from his friend William Safire thinks and speaks in numbered lists is much more on top of the situation in the West Bank and Gaza than press reports would indicate. (For each of the atrocities that Palestinian suicide bombers have been able to commit many have been prevented.) He has a mental schema that is essentially reactive: "If you do this I do that etc. -- but again, no idea where it's all leading. Standing right in the Oval Office, with President Bush on Thursday, he said that he accepts both 1. a Palestinian state, and 2. the existence of Mr. Arafat, without drawing a connexion between them. He is right not to draw one -- to believe there can be no peace between Israel and the Palestinians so long as Arafat has power -- but wrong not to seek another route to the goal. Mr. Bush is equally at a loss, but is looking for the way. Mr. Sharon is also sitting on a powderkeg of public opinion, within Israel itself. We speak of the despair" that drives Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza; but it is a more apt description of what seems to be happening in the Israeli body politic. The Israelis can see no way out of the horror. The Palestinians by contrast can see a way out: the eventual destruction of Israel. For the Israelis the destruction of the entire Arab world around them is not a practicable objective. And Israel sees that for all his countless tactical errors and defeats Mr. Arafat may be prevailing; that he can lose every battle and still win the war. There can be no serious question any more that he has been both directly and indirectly behind the suicide bombers and endless Intifada that bring terror into Israel's everyday life. But Israel can neither defend itself nor retaliate without feeding the murderous Palestinian hatred that Mr. Arafat and cronies have stoked and stoked. From the beginning when he emerged from the smoke of Black September onto the world stage Mr. Arafat has promised his people that Israel will be annihilated "in phases". He has left them in no doubt that each truce or ceasefire is merely a stage along the road to that final solution when the last Jew is driven into the Mediterranean Sea. There can't be one intelligent person left in Israel or Palestine who does not see this is his ultimate objective: a Palestine from the sea to the Jordan frontier. Nor one who does not grasp he has succeeded in persuading the majority of Palestinians that this is the long-term goal. Israel's present view includes a grim assessment of the regional reality. Both Mr. Sharon and Shimon Peres are obsessed not by Iraq but Iran. The interception of the Karine A at the beginning of the year was more than a revelation about the scale of the Palestine Authority's planned terrorist attacks. It revealed a coalescence between Israel's mortal enemies; revealed that the ayatollahs' regime in Iran had made a major commitment through its Hezbollah network to escalate the attack. It explained the fresh rain of Katyusha rockets on Israeli settlements from across the Lebanon border. It called attention to a huge recruitment drive by the Hezbollah in south Lebanon. It showed the Palestine Authority and the Iranians working hand-in-glove. Israeli interrogation of the crew of the Karine A revealed that the Hezbollah deputy leader Imad Mugniyah was in the thick of the planning. This name sends shivers down Israeli spines and ought to send them down American; he is perhaps the most brilliant psychopath at large in the world today (Osama bin Laden notwithstanding). Mr. Arafat trapped by Israeli tanks in Ramallah is playing martyr again. It plays well to his home audience where his stature has recovered from a recent low -- though he has squandered the patience of old regional allies including Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Even Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was not returning his calls. It would seem that his latest tactical accomplishment is to manoeuvre himself into dependence upon Iran. He may well now be in the situation he merely pretended to be in beforehand: unable to stop the terrorist strikes on Israel even if he wants to. From the perspective of Washington Iran is not yet in the crosshairs; Iraq continues to be. It makes sense that the U.S. will attack Iraq first after some months that are required to plan and prepare the mission. The thinking is that the Iranian regime is anyway on the brink of failure; and that there is a window of at least three years before Iran has nuclear weapons (which one of the ayatollahs Hashemi Rafsanjani has publicly declared Iran will use on Israel the moment they are available). But all reports from the ground in Iran are that the country is proceeding towards a counter-revolution -- one that will bring down the regime the ayatollahs installed in 1979. Moreover especially since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan the outlook of the new generation of Iranian students has become intensely pro-American. The Bush administration would not want to mess with that; and calculates that the fall of Saddam Hussein on the other side of Iran will be the final nudge to the students. Therefore the U.S. is half-deaf to Israel's protestations that Iran is the bigger enemy. Israel may be right and the U.S. may be wrong: time will tell fairly quickly. With the rapprochement proceeding between Iran and Iraq; with Iran the most likely candidate for having helped to conceal Mullah Omar and bin Laden; with signs that Iraq's Hamas and Iran's Hezbollah are also swinging their deals -- the best-laid U.S. plans might require some quick revision. It is for this reason that King Abdullah of Jordan was such a welcome guest in Washington the week before Mr. Sharon. He is emerging as a conduit between the White House and the more moderate Arab states. The U.S. is looking towards the Arab Summit in Beirut in late March to make alternative diplomatic breakthroughs. For the only way that now appears around Mr. Arafat is the long way. It would be a plan for peace between Israel and Palestine guaranteed by all the moderate Arab states -- who may fear the creation of an Hezbollah Palestine almost as much as the Israelis do. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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