The Real Middle East
the weekly Standard THE Real Middle East We welcome (albeit skeptically) Friday's Israel-Lebanon-Syria cease-fire agreement, the latest interruption in the chronic violence that is international...
...Assad has always been least inflexible when he sees the world passing him by...
...The record of the last two Republican administrations was, at best, mixed...
...In a calibrated use of force worthy of Robert McNamara at his worst, the idea was to push Assad just enough to get results in southern Lebanon but not too much to kill chances for a future negotiated agreement with Assad on the Golan Heights...
...the strengthening of the burgeoning strategic relationship between Israel and Turkey...
...Yasser Arafat made nice in his public statements from the West Bank while Hamas terrorists set off bombs in Jerusalem...
...peace plans in 1990, Dole proposed cutting aid to Israel by 5 percent...
...Forget about whether or not President Assad is pleasant at a meeting...
...And the United States did more to help the peace process by smashing Saddam and presiding over the Soviet Union's downfall than it did by formulating any number of clever plans for bringing Arabs and Israelis together...
...the isolation of Assad...
...And therein lies a lesson for the future...
...An even more important lesson concerns the primacy of the peace process and the constant quest for a comprehensive settlement...
...And the real Middle East remains very different from Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres's sunny vision of a "New Middle East," full of warm economic and political partnerships between Arabs and Israelis...
...This desire undermined the effectiveness of the Israeli offensive in Lebanon from the start...
...Christopher's desperate visit proved that, especially in the wake of the tragic Israeli shelling of the Qana refugee camp, Assad was indeed exactly where he loved to be: holding all the keys to both near-term and long-term problems of the Middle East...
...The Clinton administration, with Republican holdover Dennis Ross calling the shots, has finally had the chance for which previous administrations yearned...
...But this has also been a source of weakness, because Clinton officials have been loath to let the historic opportunity of a Labor government slip through their fingers without making a try for the big prize...
...The real Middle East is, in short, a place where efforts to achieve that holy grail of American diplomacy, the "comprehensive peace," must sometimes be suspended-to give war a chance...
...support in order to appease angry Arab leaders...
...It may be a bit ironic that the normally dovish Peres and the normally squeamish Clinton administration both arrived at the conclusion three weeks ago that it would be better to "war, war" than to "jaw, jaw" for a while...
...It is where Iran arms guerrillas in Lebanon and finances terrorists in the West Bank committed to Israel's destruction...
...We were going to give the Israelis some running room...
...But let's not forget that much of that progress was the result of events that had nothing to do with the search for peace...
...Unfortunately, it did inherit from its Republican predecessors an infatuation with the search for an elusive comprehensive peace and a corollary affection for the Labor party's willingness to subordinate everything else to that glorious cause...
...But Peres was careful-too careful-not to cause very much direct damage to Assad's military position in Lebanon...
...When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to drive out the PLO, for instance, Secretary of State Alexander Haig was encouraging but Caspar Weinberger and other Reagan administration officials would have been just as happy to cut Israel off from all U.S...
...They made a mockery of Peres's rosy optimism and of Secretary of State Warren Christopher's assiduous courtship of Assad...
...All these aggressive acts were merely a predictable reassertion of the Old Middle East rules of the game...
...the continued assertion of American power in the Gulf-all these will prove more important in the long run than squabbles over the Golan Heights...
...The Clinton administration, by contrast, was unembarrassed about supporting Israel even in the face of international criticism and over 100 civilian casualties...
...The problem is that, despite their willingness to get tough, both Peres and the Clinton administration have been too mesmerized by the prospect of quickly garnering a peace agreement with Assad...
...Indeed, Arafat's fulfillment last week of his promise to change the language in the Palestinian national covenant calling for the destruction of the state of Israel should be viewed in this light, not in the hazy glow of the "New Middle East...
...The real Middle East is where the bloody-minded Hafez Assad holds court in Damascus and apparently prefers an ongoing state of belligerence to any imaginable peace with Israel...
...The Bush administration treated the more stubborn Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir with a distaste bordering on hostility...
...As one Clinton official told the Washington Post, "We did not want to be criticizing Israel for responding to aggression funded and directed by Tehran with the assent of Syria...
...And therefore he decided to turn up the heat in northern Israel by allowing hundreds of Iranian-supplied Katyusha rockets to flow into the hands of Hezbollah...
...The aim of the military campaign was to force Assad to curtail Hezbollah's activities by squeezing Syria's quisling government in Beirut...
...As David Bar-Illan reports in the May issue of Commentary, and as longtime Arafatwatchers will no doubt be shocked to learn, the strategies of the Hamas terrorists and the PLO leader were complementary...
...And so, by the way, did Bob Dole...
...Instead, they should keep their eyes on the broader strategic questions that are likely to prove even more important to the long-term security and stability of the region...
...Both Americans and Israelis should try to avoid the temptation to subordinate everything to the peace process...
...Syria's historic participation in the Madrid Conference five years ago was the result of the loss of its Soviet patron, not James Baker's cajolery...
...But at least the Clinton administration had the gumption to know when enough was enough...
...Jordan's compliance in recent years is the price King Hussein has had to pay to win back the goodwill of the Americans and the Saudis-and their money-after supporting Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War...
...With the world's attention drawn to the new complications in the peace process caused by the bus bombings, Syria's Assad seems to have felt himself ignored...
...If there is any chance for a New Middle East today, it is due in large part to the broad strategic shifts brought about by those two victories...
...Of course, both had the same dubious goal in mind: getting Peres reelected on May 29 so that the quest for the "comprehensive peace" could continue without disruption...
...When the Shamir government refused to go along with U.S...
...Then, as if to emphasize the fact of Assad's indispensability, Warren Christopher joined every other foreign minister in the developed world in flying to Damascus to seek Assad's help in ending the Lebanon crisis...
...The Gulf War and the end of the Cold War did far more to shape the current Middle East balance of power than the shuttle diplomacy of James Baker and Warren Christopher...
...Even fervent worshipers at the shrine of the comprehensive peace-like Dennis Ross-ought to have known that giving Assad so much control over the future course of events was precisely the wrong tactic...
...For the past few months, Israel, Peres, and the peace process itself had all become targets of a carefully orchestrated good-cop/bad-cop routine...
...It's hard to remember a time in the last 20 years when the United States was more appropriately supportive of an Israeli military action...
...The decision to give Peres the green light and then provide diplomatic cover while the Israeli military punished the Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon sent the right message to both friends and foes in the Middle East...
...No one ought to deny the gains that have been made, for Israel, for the United States, and for much of the Arab world, by the progress toward peace these past few years...
...That is just one lesson from the Old Middle East that policymakers in both Washington and Jerusalem ought to keep in mind as they strive toward the Valhalla of the New Middle East...
...And steady pursuit of these strategic objectives may help keep a lid on the over-exuberance of our devoted negotiators and their fantasies of a "comprehensive peace...
...The Reagan and Bush administrations spent years hoping to undermine the Likud party and bring Labor to power, all in the name of the peace process...
...The containment of Iran, including pressure for a change of regime in Tehran...
...It is where U.S.-sponsored international conferences on terrorism don't deliver much in the way of security for the citizens of Jerusalem and Kiryat Shmoneh, who live in daily fear of exploding buses and falling Katyusha rockets...
...the weekly Standard THE Real Middle East We welcome (albeit skeptically) Friday's Israel-Lebanon-Syria cease-fire agreement, the latest interruption in the chronic violence that is international politics in the real Middle East...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 33
