Learning from Israel: Even a superpower can't cure what ailsthe Middle East
Grossman, Edward
"Learning from Israel" Even a superpower can't cure what ails the Middle East BY EDWARD GROSSMAN, Edward Grossman has written for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, The New York Times, The Wall...
...It opened the gate to the first intifada, and in the mid-'90s to the era of civilians blown up by Sunni Palestinian martyrs in the streets, buses, restaurants, and discos of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem...
...Kites and boomboxes...
...Iran will be interested in Iraq's Shi'ites...
...Fouad Ajami grew up a Shi'ite in Lebanon, close to the Israeli border, moved to the U.S., and became a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins...
...And it certainly would have been excellent if peace had been made with a newly peaceful Lebanon...
...The killing of 241 U.S...
...Any such event—not hard to imagine after 9/11—really would tear the fabric of global order, the web of civilization...
...As a rule he writes knowledge-ably, valuably, pessimistically...
...Nobody had very much in common with anybody...
...Others are reported to have blueprints for a post-war, long-term occupation of Iraq, with an American general supervising the country as Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan and the Allies did Germany following World War II...
...is—well, the U.S...
...Call 800-358-3507 ext...
...How will the U.S...
...4 4 Every tribe organized a militia...
...The UN had a presence called UNIFIL...
...But some units fight, as the Palestinians fought and slowed the IDF in 1982...
...Hopeful thinking isn't for everybody...
...Once again the experts can't agree on whether Saddam has toys capable of hitting Israel...
...Known as the Arab world's sole democracy, home of its sole halfway genuine university, its sole halfway genuine newspaper, Lebanon col-lapsed bloodily into enclaves of its various tribes—Maronite and other Christians, Sunni Moslems, Shi'ite Moslems, Druze...
...Ronald Reagan sent in the Marines to "keep the peace...
...Contributing to Ha'aretz is Shlomo Avineri, who may be tagged as a dove mugged by reality...
...whereas now if there's a war—and most people here consider it inevitable—George W. Bush's goal will be to remove Saddam altogether...
...Sharon had to resign...
...Yet instead of giving Lebanon up as hopeless, instead of declaring victory and getting the IDF out, succeeding governments until Ehud Barak's in 2000 let the army linger on the wrong side of the border...
...It was useless...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 — J E R U S A L E M eelings of deja vu run strong here these days...
...It reminds you of the last months of 1990 and the first two weeks of 1991, when the Americans and British were gathering their armies in case Saddam defied the UN and refused to quit Kuwait...
...It might have benefited everyone if Arafat had literally been taken out, instead of being sent packing to Tripoli and then Tunis...
...What peace...
...From here, Jerusalem, it looks like a close call...
...Thanks to the PLO, it became a "failed state...
...But remember that most of the Lebanese were happy to see the Jews in 1982...
...The Phalange took its revenge with a massacre in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, and the international media, blaming Israel, went from disapproval to absolute outrage...
...from going to war...
...Under the noses of U.S...
...Some of these persons are thought to belong to the War Now party, some not...
...The professor may be right...
...Saddam is described by Western experts as a man of secular outlook, bin Laden as a God-fearing man, but on the Moslem "street"—including Saladin Street in East Jerusalem, named for the great anti-Crusader—the two are neck and neck in popularity...
...A bloody collapse into tribal enclaves or statelets as in Lebanon is a definite possibility...
...It's a challenge in 2002 to think how doing nothing in 1982 would have led to a worse outcome...
...Would it be as the UN dithers, as the UN inspects, or as the United States and Britain attack and he feels himself going under...
...In a way, Saddam and Iraq were made for each other...
...In no time, West Beirut and south Lebanon became Arafat's Kingdom...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 and Barak at Camp David and greenlighted Intifada II...
...There's nothing resembling an antiwar party, however, a fact bemoaned by those who do oppose it...
...Or Tel Aviv...
...Since being elected, and especially since a massacre of Israelis by a suicide bomber on Passover eve six months ago, Sharon has been doing what any prime minister would do: rip apart the Palestinian Authority and the gangs it harbors...
...Smart bombs hit residential complexes, with video of the results played instantly around the world on CNN and al-Jazeera...
...This would greatly stress Iraq's unnatural borders...
...Arafat sailed away only when the "crazy" Sharon showed everybody he might destroy what years of civil war hadn't yet destroyed of West Beirut...
...Simultaneously, and from the same just-deceased empire, the British thought up Iraq, roping in Kurds, Sunnis, Shi'ites, Turkomans, Assyrian Christians, Jews...
...to act...
...Shimon Peres had vowed Oslo would generate a "New Middle East...
...What then...
...Long before Saddam, the cement holding Iraq together was little more than fear of torture, hanging, shooting, disappearance...
...A professor at Hebrew University, director-general of the Foreign Ministry when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister, an early advocate of the PLO option, he was chastened by Arafat's "no...
...There's an interesting thing about wars, however: while they may seem to repeat themselves, in fact they never do, not exactly...
...Mostly implicit, sometimes explicit, is the hopeful belief that, after disposing of Saddam, the United States will twist the arm of the man Arafat made prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon...
...The circumstances were as follows: Lebanon, a nation-state invented after World War I and the deconstruction of the Ottoman empire, had kept a quiet border with the Zionists until the Palestine Liberation Organization showed up in the '70s...
...Rather than wait for Arafat to junk the deal when it suited him, Begin and Sharon did it themselves...
...If the occupied Japanese and Germans were cured of their national sicknesses, if they were taught civilization and democracy, so—it is hoped and expected—will the people, or tribes, of Iraq...
...Will removing Sad-dam hasten the kicking upstairs of Arafat...
...It could be at any time...
...UN inspectors...
...They meant to expel Arafat, destroy the PLO, and call into being a Lebanese government ready to sign a peace treaty...
...Sharon, this thinking goes, won't compromise, no mat-ter what he says, and so the hope is that—like G. H. W. Bush, who twisted Yitzhak Shamir's arm following the Gulf War, driving him from office—George W. Bush can do the same to "Arik...
...Of course, the full consequences of that cannot be known ahead of time...
...Everybody knows Bush the Younger has bigger plans than his father...
...A siege of Baghdad develops with units NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 37 of the Republican Guard and ragtag, ad hoc Islamic factions armed by a desperate Saddam hunkering among civilians, as the PLO did in Beirut...
...Rounding out the lesson, the Oslo "process" has taught Israelis that bestowing on the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization a statelet with half of Jerusalem as its capital won't get them the peace they yearn for either...
...Democracy, free trade, holiday weekends, and shopping in romantic, nearby places...
...And remember that the U.S...
...Saddam torches his oil fields, poisoning the air and water, as he did in Kuwait, and rocking the world's energy markets...
...With a blend of luck and intelligence, and a dash of the sort of "crazy" pitilessness which characterized the Americans who fought World War II, many complications and temptations should be avoid-able...
...There were other even more unfavorable results...
...But these were genuine nations...
...The Jewish state is tiny and the U.S...
...But unlike 1978, this time Begin and especially Sharon didn't intend stopping halfway...
...Not the Lebanese, not the Iraqis...
...No doubt when and if the Yanks materialize, some Iraqis will be delirious...
...But how naive it sounds...
...Post-war, post-delirium, if not in a matter of weeks, then of months, American soldiers get targeted by suicide bombers from this or that disappointed, resentful Kurdish or Arab, Sunni or Shi'ite, Islamicist or secular group...
...It's also mistaken to imagine that if the Israeli left had backed the government to the hilt, things would have gone quite differently...
...Otherwise, Lebanon proved a maze, a Pandora's Box, a quagmire...
...The old British imperial method of navigation worked under Queen Victoria, but can it work for the U.S...
...A glance at Ha'aretz tells the story...
...vice president and Saddam was an American ally, the Kurds in Halabja were gassed...
...It hasn't been in such a war since 1975 and hasn't won one since 1945...
...And if you think it's wicked for Israelis to pray that the Americans move in their behalf, a right-winger will tell you that sooner or later the enemies of the Jews—Arafat, bin Laden, or Saddam—reveal themselves as enemies of mankind...
...War crimes trials will be held...
...And when the IDF reached the capital, the Maronite Phalange elected to let the Jews do the work, as the operation turned into an unforeseen siege lasting two months and doing Israel much PR damage...
...Lebanon was to be put back together, advantageously for Israel...
...The U.S...
...In that year, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and defense chief Ariel Sharon ordered the Israeli Defense Force all the way to Beirut...
...F ew Israelis doubt that a war is coming and ought to come...
...More uncontrollable media coverage...
...LEARNING FROM ISRAEL Even a superpower can't cure what ails the Middle East B Y E D W A R D G R O S S M A N Edward Grossman has written for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Buzz...
...With the dead would go many of our civil liberties...
...See Halabja, 9/11, the Bali disco...
...But of course the analogy goes only so far...
...Begin, depressed, resigned voluntarily...
...Ha'aretz is more or less the New York Times of Israel, the voice of the doves, evenhandedly blaming Sharon and Arafat for the wreckage of Oslo...
...Saddam has been in violation of UN disarmament resolutions for years...
...It was an enterprise zone and rest stop for terrorists, sponsored by Arab regimes from Libya to Iraq, plus the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the IRA...
...Having put Saddam atop his Axis of Evil, he has no choice except to remove him and the weapons he could use or give to others...
...It would be best if it happened as Saddam was losing a war and going under...
...In this confusion, quantities of anthrax, smallpox, nerve gas, and maybe uranium or plutonium, cached by Saddam here, there, and everywhere, go missing...
...For this reason and others, it's predictable that if war comes it won't be a replay of the Gulf War—not for the world, not for the Middle East, and not for the Jewish state...
...That's to be expected from hawks and right-wingers...
...Nevertheless, the shelters and hospitals are being pre-pared and the gas masks have been given out...
...With or without the Israelis getting in, the Arab-Moslem "street" rises from Casablanca to Jakarta, while at home Ted Kennedy, Tom Hayden, Brent Scowcroft, Jesse Jackson, Robert Scheer, and Donahue come together with millions of ordinary, younger Americans under the banners, "We Told You So...
...If he is, then Israel's ordeal in Lebanon shouldn't keep the U.S...
...It's right about Saddam, who "truly constitutes a threat to the free world...
...The occasion was the June 1982 shooting of Israel's ambassador in London by the Abu Nidal faction of the PLO...
...Marines one Sunday morning in 1983 was followed by years of bleeding and diminishing the legendary IDF in the view of the Arab and Moslem worlds...
...What Israel can do is nothing like what the only superpower has the liberty and obligation to do, in preemptive self-defense and in defense of what Pedatzur of Ha'aretz calls "the free world...
...To this day, the grisliest drugs on sale in Tel Aviv come from Lebanon...
...In 2004, with the U.S...
...Not necessarily, and if it does it won't necessarily be good...
...But he also says such questions aren't vital: "For the world, the consequences of not removing Saddam were too great to live with before 9/11 and today are even greater...
...Already in 1978, responding to a massacre in northern Israel by the Lebanon-based PLO, the IDF had gone halfway to Beirut...
...They exemplify different faces of the same collective illness...
...The last twenty years have blown away many naive hopes...
...is the U.S...
...With Arafat gone, and under the barrels of Israeli tanks, a quorum of Lebanon's parliament chose the Maronite strongman Bashir Gemayel to be president...
...Happy to see the Jews at first, Lebanon's Shi'ites created Hizbollah, introducing the world to something new under the sun: the Islamic kamikaze...
...It's reported that persons in the White House, Pentagon, and State Department nurse expectations and have plans as optimistic as his if not more...
...Saddam's weapons—the biological and chemical arms that he has, the nuclear ones he's trying to get—are pointed at them...
...He's known to be listened to in official Washington...
...All this unhappy history comes to mind now as the post-9/ 11 world debates what to do about Saddam.e shall be greeted, I think, in Baghdad and Basra with kites and boomboxes...
...Who's more naive—those who believe the UN can disarm Saddam, or those who expect a U.S...
...Remove that fear, and what are you liable to get after the delirium wanes...
...The further hope is that this will resonate in Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Iran, across not only the Middle East but the length and breadth of the whole, dangerously sick Arab and Moslem worlds...
...Though it gives space to naysayers, overall Ha'aretz thinks the United States will and should attack Iraq...
...Or ofsmallpox in Berlin...
...In fact—and just as Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, and others warned—it has recreated West Beirut in the West Bank...
...They're inspired by the Israeli experience in Lebanon...
...Abu Nidal, whose death was reported this year in Baghdad, was under the patronage of Saddam...
...Of course, war is risky...
...The possible complications of a war and occupation are many: • Soon after troops cross the border, much of the Iraqi army surrenders, as it did in the Gulf War...
...When George H. W. Bush waged the last Middle East war, his goal was to remove Saddam from Kuwait...
...So any-body with a long memory is reminded not just of 1991, but 1982...
...Now is no exception...
...Hurd's books and subscriptions to The Living Resources Newsletter are available at www.DrHurd.conr Read The Daily Dose of Reason by psychologist and author Michael J. Hurd free—every day—a DrHurd.com Not online...
...Reeducating, civilizing, democratizing will have to take second place to navigating among the tribes and keeping the oil flowing...
...Thus proving that it's not only much, much bigger than its most faithful ally, but wiser...
...He's despaired of a negotiated peace and, like Barak, wants a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and most of the West Bank...
...soldiers, Iraqis in liberated areas massacre other Iraqis, settling accounts for a generation of horrors...
...Army of 1941-45 wasn't high-tech, wasn't all-volunteer, wasn't co-educational...
...But the post-war weeks, months, and years could be just as dicey: • Saddam is taken alive...
...From day one, things didn't go as planned...
...Lebanon taught Israel that violently improving the neighborhood is beyond it...
...The only Israeli goals achieved were removing Arafat from thegame—temporarily—and seizing quantities of weapons...
...He refused, the Allied bombing started, and a few hours later the Scuds were flying over this city and dropping on Tel Aviv...
...On the all-important psychological level, however, it would be best if it didn't come out of the blue, as a second 9/11...
...military acquit itself in a war involving real combat...
...It didn't work for the Israelis in Lebanon...
...Listen to the paper's defense writer, Reuven Pedatzur: Just because the Bush administration views the world "from the perspective of a cowboy . . . doesn't mean it is wrong about everything...
...Decades of experience have taught all Israelis mistrust for the UN...
...Not even a super-power is going to cure what ails the Arab and Moslem worlds...
...But a war now is judged less risky than one tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or the day after Saddam test-fires a nuclear device...
...THE LIV7\G RESOURCES \E\1SEETTER efta,tLtonhoe hL ulor, unpr000do.od, of ton Dr...
...and "Stop the War...
...Rightists and leftists note that for Bush, the 11th of September was a defining moment...
...A "New Middle East" is a bridge too far...
...Fight terror, but don't hurt noncombatants, and keep open the door to compromise—that's Ha'aretz's line...
...Yes, but no one taking his place will end the conflict," says Avineri...
...It just doesn't have the gas...
...Yet another martyr...
...War, especially war in built-up areas, is confusion...
...is blamed...
...Though most Lebanese greeted the invaders as liberators, Palestinians in the refugee camps on the way to Beirut fought back, delaying the IDF...
...Yet gas masks or no gas masks, they're also looking forward to a quick, effective invasion...
...The U.S...
...The French after World War I invented Lebanon from a piece of the Ottoman empire...
...Post-war, the Americans find them-selves having to play divide-and-rule...
...2 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 39...
...The United States, after all, deploys incredible firepower and technoloy...
...Once pounded into submission, the Japanese and Germans were ultra-docileand ready to learn...
...Quite unconnected to that, he explained to your reporter that the world's problem with Saddam is analogous to its problem with Hitler in 1936, when the German chancellor had trashed the Versailles Treaty by re-arming...
...Including the temptation of remaking the Middle East...
...Israeli leftists and doves feel uncomfortable identifying their country or themselves as Jewish...
...So many and so grim are the possible complications during and after a war that you have to wonder, first, if the antiwar party in America isn't right, and second, why there isn't one in Israel...
...Huge demonstrations seventy-two hours later in Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco reminiscent of a monster demonstration in Tel Aviv over the Sabra and Shatilla massacres...
...Anthrax, smallpox, or nerve gas is dropped on American troops...
...Instead of joining in, Iraq's Kurds sit and watch the American liberators fight...
...That's a quote from a man usually the opposite of naive...
...For example, Richard Cheney, a highly intelligent man, has spoken of a "pluralistic, democratic Middle East" after Saddam's removal...
...Hell is paved with good intentions, they say...
...Not that there's unanimity—"two Jews, three opinions," as the saying goes...
...From there it was mainly downhill and out of control...
...His term was short—a few weeks later, a bomb planted by Syrian agents killed him...
...The League of Nations—meaning France and England—could have legally prevented another world war by going to war, but didn't...
...The use of tactical nuclear weapons in response by the United States or Israel becomes dramatically less hypothetical...
...occupation of Iraq to usher in a "New Middle East...
...By 1981, the PLO's Katyusha rockets had made a ghost town of Kiryat Shemona in the Galilee, forcing Begin and Sharon to agree to a U.S.-brokered ceasefire...
...Once Saddam is gone, will the U.S...
...pressurize Sharon...
...Divide-andrule means favoring one tribe at the expense of another, then switching, then switching again...
...A border which as a result became porous to Lebanese heroin...
...the UN having failed to enforce them, it's right for the U.S...
...While Begin spoke of "forty years of peace," Sharon foresaw a "New Middle East" based on an alliance of minorities—the Jews, Maronite Christians, Iraqi Kurds...
...NATO member Turkey, with its own restless Kurds, will be super-nervous about the Kurdish statelet...
...What surprises foreigners is that doves and left-wingers, too, generally see a war as inevitable, necessary, and just...
...caught in the alley-ways of Baghdad and Basra, with al-Qaeda still in business and the economy not out of the woods, Al Gore wins the Democratic nomination and takes the White House...
...Picture if you will the release of nerve gas at a Washington Wizards game or on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange...
...Honest people disagree on when Saddam is likeliest to give out chemicals and biologicals...
...Father of the Lebanon venture, Sharon was unelectable before Arafat said "no" to Bill Clinton Sooner or later the enemies of the Jews reveal themselves as enemies of mankind...
...Defending him pro bono in a trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity—maybe in The Hague, maybe not—is Ramsey Clark, who subpoenas Bush the Elder to ask questions on how, in 1988, when he was U.S...
...should go in, kill the Butcher of Baghdad, scour the land for weapons, stand godfather to a new government of one kind or another, and then with all deliberate speed, leave...
...Al-Qaeda has the ingenuity, patience, and nonchalance to bring it off...
...Circumstances, actors, goals change—something intelligent politicians and generals never forget...
...number of grim wartime and post-war scenarios have been presented...
...And if the war is over in the hoped-for flash...
...When it left, the PLO returned...
Vol. 35 • November 2002 • No. 6
