Better to Be Feared Than Loved, cont.
GERECHT, REUEL MARC
Better to Be Feared Than Loved, cont. Especially in the Middle East. BY REUEL MARC GERECHT IT HAS RAPIDLY BECOME accepted wisdom in Washington that the United States is in ever-worsening trouble...
...Untutored, the president may just ask: Why would America need Muslim or Arab cover for military action against Iraq...
...In the next few months, we'll all see where he leads us...
...Jenin, like the battle of Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut in '82, may make a real peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza someday possible...
...Some in the Foreign Office were deeply concerned...
...What moral sanction can dictatorial regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia possibly give us...
...On the contrary, the war, which the Arabs uniformly believed Washington had sanctioned, as they now believe it has sanctioned Sharon's incursions, demonstrated convincingly to all America's reach and power...
...Faithful Arabs, of course, never arose en masse, though most stayed quietly loyal to the Sublime Porte...
...Fortunately, President Bush has not been schooled in Washington's foreign-affairs establishment...
...The Bush administration ought to reflect on the Hashemite example when voices from within and critics from without suggest that America— vastly stronger than the British Empire in 1914—somehow requires the spiritual or logistical assistance of Arabian princes for a war against the ruler of Baghdad or a war against terror...
...Only the Bush administration has the capacity to undo America's eminence in the Middle East...
...As the Palestinian Authority was fond of broadcasting before Sharon decided to reverse the decade-old habit of Israeli restraint, the "final struggle" was at hand...
...But the reality is that Israel's repeated victories over the frontline Arab states have enormously increased Washington's coin from Morocco to Iran...
...Probably far sooner than most people imagine possible—a few years, not decades—the defeat of Israel through terrorism will become for most Palestinians what the conquest of Constantinople was for the medieval Arab world, an appealing image that no longer sufficiently inspires...
...If one recalls the relative supply-and-demand price stability in the energy markets throughout the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, it is very hard to take seriously all the talk on both sides of the Atlantic about the regional or international impact of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation...
...That would be very good, for only when Arafat is gone will there be a real chance for an adequate settlement of the differences among the denizens of the Holy Land...
...What they do not fear is the America that ran from Beirut truck-bombs in 1983 and from rocket-propelled grenades in Mogadishu in 1993...
...The president, more so than any since Reagan, has become the prime mover of history...
...Its standing in the Arab world, that is, its ability to achieve its strategic goals, has gone up, not down, because of Israel's recent military operations...
...As Al Jazeera unintentionally served America's interests in the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, it will do so again if the Bush administration remains firm in its resolve...
...The president's instincts may propel him to pop the myth that America must solicit an Arab coalition to defeat Saddam Hussein...
...In 1982, American diplomats and case officers abroad may have had a few unpleasant dinners and meetings with their Arab counterparts, but U.S...
...Not an insignificant achievement in the third-world conflicts that greatly determined the outcome of the Cold War...
...The fundamentalists understand that the United States will not become "evenhanded" toward the Arab Muslim world since liberal democracies align naturally with each other...
...The collapse of the peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians has, according to this Zeitgeist, left America bereft of friendly Muslims in the region, thereby jeopardizing both the Bush administration's global campaign against terrorism and its inchoate plans to topple Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq...
...They are in the near future...
...The reverse is probably closer to the truth: that America is actually now in a far stronger position to prosecute a war against the Baathist regime in Iraq than it was before the Israeli Defense Forces reoccupied the West Bank...
...Osama bin Laden and other Muslim militants, like the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and in his own profound way Arafat, are quite sensible strategists: They inspire the young with hope, not depression...
...The Hashemites from Arabia—soon to be the guardians of Islam's holy cities of Mecca and Medi-na—however, put their fingers in the air and determined that the British Empire was going to crush the Ottoman...
...It's America's base camp in the Muslim umma, the social, religious, and geographic sphere of Muslim sovereignty, where non-Muslims must be subordinated to a Muslim-controlled political system...
...American credibility among the Arabs, so the theory goes, is in tatters...
...BY REUEL MARC GERECHT IT HAS RAPIDLY BECOME accepted wisdom in Washington that the United States is in ever-worsening trouble in the Arab Middle East...
...larger war against terrorism rooted in Islamic militancy...
...And when you look at militant Islamic literature—the statements of Osama bin Laden and his holy-warrior organization al Qaeda are illuminating examples—you of course don't find Sharon's crushing military victories over Egypt in 1973 and the PLO in 1982 as evidence of the promise that Israel can be destroyed...
...This continuing misapprehension of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact on the U.S...
...Relations with the Arab states continued as before, which was not necessarily a good thing, since our tolerance of such regimes as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—the perpetrators of enormous anti-American mischief—has harmed the United States for decades in the region...
...The Camp David discussions of July 2000 will look then to the Palestinians like a mythical promised land...
...Their promises are not millenarian...
...Israel's house-to-house combat in Jenin will undoubtedly reinforce Arab awe at Israeli prowess...
...With accusations of "blitzkrieg" and slaughter in the print media and on both Arab and Western television (remember NBC's John Chancellor), the mythical Arab street did not rise...
...Furthermore, oil boycotts never developed...
...The Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat understood this well, which is why he decided to move away from the proSoviet, anti-American, and antiIsraeli camp...
...Fortunately, this depiction of the United States in the Arab world makes no sense...
...They ought to seriously question the intentions of "moderate" Arab dictators who suggest that their regimes might be in danger because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...
...Recognized by millions of Muslims as both sultan and caliph, "the commander of the faithful," the Ottoman monarch and his warlords hoped they could rouse the faithful of the British Raj, where thousands of Muslims served as soldiers under the Union Jack...
...Israel made mincemeat of the PLO and Syria, which under Hafez al-Assad learned painfully and definitively the costs of war with America's closest Middle Eastern ally...
...They do not promise that Israel or the United States will be like ancient Rome at its height—that legion will follow legion until its enemies are crushed or scattered in an endless exile...
...His instincts, which produced in the Axis of Evil speech the clearest and most intellectually potent foreign policy since Ronald Reagan's, don't please the diplomats and intelligence professionals, who remain acutely uncomfortable with good-versus-evil as a roadmap for American action abroad...
...American and European liberals may loathe Sharon, who is a rampaging, politically incorrect expression of realpolitik, but his antagonists in the Middle East fear him...
...President Bush's moral clarity on terrorism, tyranny, and weapons of mass destruction is the best hope the Arab world has for rescuing itself from the moral abyss of suicide bombers and public sympathy for a totalitarian regime that rules through rape...
...Sharon is the Devil's right-hand man, the warlord who makes the battle between Good and Evil in the fundamentalist mind such a close, precarious struggle...
...When that happens, some kind of peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza will become possible...
...The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot diminish the United States unless President Bush pivots from an ahistorical understanding of the Arab Middle East...
...Washington needs to look back at Lebanon in 1982—the cerebral cortex of those who despise Sharon in the Middle East, Europe, and Ameri-ca—to see how the Palestinians' worst defeat failed to damage the United States's position in the Middle East...
...Wrapped up in the peace process are bureaucratic equities—primarily those of the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency—and analyses that span several generations...
...Muslim militants and fundamentalists, who see culture and religion in crystal clear terms, have never had any difficulty discerning this indissoluble power nexus...
...What they do not fear, and what has been the font of the militants' hopes, is the Israel under Prime Minister Ehud Barak that precipitously withdrew from Lebanon in the summer of 2000 and attempted through concessions to grasp permanent peace treaties with Syria and Arafat...
...Is the average Arab who hates us, for whatever reasons, going to hate us less because his rulers tell him to...
...For the militants and fundamentalists in Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and no doubt in many of the security and paramilitary organizations of the Palestinian Authority, Israel is the cutting edge of liberal Western civilization...
...The Lebanon war between the Israelis and the Syrians also demonstrated to the Soviet Union that its goose was cooked in both armor and aerial combat...
...position in the Middle East is distressing, though not surprising, 52 years after Israel survived its first Arab war...
...Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak, who has played a two-faced game with America, supporting Washington in VIP meetings while encouraging vicious anti-American propaganda in his controlled popular press, still understands the reality of American power and the unchallengeable ties between Washington and Jerusalem...
...Being allied with a victorious infidel seemed far better than being the brother of a loser...
...And Arab Muslim states (so fundamentalists fervently pray) can never become liberal democracies...
...What real aid can they give to the war on terrorism if they cannot call suicide bombers terrorists...
...This can only aid President Bush's Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...power and influence wasn't belittled in the region...
...No pro-American dictator went down in the Arab world in 1982...
...In World War I, the British had to confront an Ottoman sultan who declared a holy war against them...
...With his decisive victory on the West Bank—and it is decisive just because Sharon did it and everyone in Israel and the Arab world knows that he will do it again—Sharon is in the process of pushing the Arab idea of coercing and dominating Israel into the distant future, beyond the immediate passions of young Palestinian men and women, who live for the present...
...In the meantime, Ariel Sharon, bellicose brute that he may be, has done America a significant favor by having the guts to send the IDF back to the West Bank, where neither he nor his army wanted to go...
...Assuming of course the United States can neutralize the increasing interference of Iraq and Iran...
...The American-Israeli nexus has been for many, if not most, Arabs an inextricable part of the American mystique, the recurring reminder that Western power could not be overcome...
...The Arabs can't and most won't really even try...
...with victories, not defeat...
...In particular, Ariel Sharon's military incursion into the West Bank, which has reinvigorat-ed in the Arab mind all the awful imagery of General Sharon's drive to Beirut in 1982, has crippled Secretary of State Colin Powell's quest for "an integrated strategy" for the Middle East and humiliated the president, who'd urged an Israeli withdrawal "without delay...
...One look at Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat today—hyperventilating, shaking, stuttering in both English and Arabic, pathetically appealing to memories of "my brother" Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (as if that seasoned general wouldn't have pulverized the Palestinian Authority for its holy-warrior kamikaze attacks on Israeli civil-ians)—should tell us that we are probably at the dawn of a post-Arafat era in Palestinian politics...
...Broadcasting against the Israeli forces in the West Bank, and perhaps soon against American forces in Iraq, the Al Jazeera satellite television channel, which some say has completely reworked the popular dynamics and politics of the Middle East, will likely in the long term do the opposite of what its producers and reporters intend, by showing the hopelessness of opposing American power...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 32
