Last Sunday, King Abdullah of Jordan, a man in the thick of Middle Eastern politics since his birth, appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, saying, bluntly, “We could possibly imagine going into 2007 and having three civil wars on our hands.”
He’s right. And our fingerprints are on each of them.
First, of course, there is Iraq, which is, finally, broadly understood in this country as a catastrophe we have created. It continues to disintegrate on a daily basis. But we have also helped create catastrophes in the making in Palestine and Lebanon.
Palestine is the closest to ignition. There, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been in a gridlocked stalemate since last January’s election of a Hamas majority to the PA parliament. Israel immediately responded by stepping up its apartheid campaigns, not only in occupied territories but in Israel itself, and by laying siege to the Gaza Strip. Israel and the United States –- invoking its time-honored tradition of approving of democratic elections only when the preferred guys win -– launched an international economic blockade as well, also backed by the European Union, on the grounds that Hamas was an illegitimate, terrorist organization. It scarcely seemed to matter that Israel has been enforcing an illegitimate military occupation, internationally recognized as such, for nearly 40 years; or that when one is stateless and landless the only way to fight back is by definition labeled “terror”; or that it was the political wing of Hamas that was elected, not the military; or that even the military wing had at the time held a truce for 16 months even as Israel continued to repeatedly attack occupied Palestine and expropriate Palestinian land.
The strategy of the Sharon and Bush administrations was to force such overwhelming hardships on the Palestinian people that, to relieve the misery the Hamas majority would collapse and early elections would be called. This would surely usher the more “reasonable” (and corrupt) Fatah Party, the party of Yasser Arafat that Israel not so long ago swore could never be worked with, back into power.
That strategy accelerated after Sharon’s stroke and Israeli elections brought the government of Ehud Olmert to power. Israel used the pretext of dissident Palestinians firing inept homemade rockets across the border to launch a ferocious military assault on Gaza. That assault and the military and economic siege have continued through the summer and fall, buried in the U.S. by headlines on Lebanon, Iraq, our own elections, and the fact that “the Israelis and Palestinians are always doing that.”
As the assaults have continued, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has worsened dramatically, with the economy and infrastructure in even worse ruins than Iraq. But the U.S./Israeli strategy has backfired. Rather than forcing Palestinians to abandon Hamas, it has polarized Palestinians and rendered the PA all but useless as a governing body. As the PA was forced into insolvency, the PA civil sector, already loyal to Fatah, staged anti-Hamas demonstrations and crippling strikes. Meanwhile, Hamas loyalists have become radicalized, clashes with Israeli forces have increased, and there is now widespread talk of a third intifada. At several points, Hamas and Fatah leaders have reached compromise plans, only to see them collapse; at several other points, loyalists in the two camps have attacked each other and civil war seemed imminent.
If Palestinian civil war does occur, and as Palestine’s comprehensive collapse under siege continues it’s now looking more rather than less likely, count on Israel to intervene on Fatah’s side. And then count also on that third intifada to become reality. The U.S. is already neck-deep; a month ago, the Bush administration announced it was awarding $42 million to Fatah to help “build democracy,” ostensibly ahead of possible early elections. More likely, that money is going into weaponry. This month, the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution deploring the human suffering of Gaza Strip residents as they continue to weather both the siege and Israeli military attacks using U.S. weaponry. An explosion is only the strike of a match away.
Talk of a third intifada has also been greatly advanced by the widespread perception, in Israel as well as the Arab world, that Israel got its butt kicked this summer by Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Now, the Lebanese political ramifications of Hezbollah’s military performance are starting to clarify, and they are in turn threatening to plunge Lebanon, too, into civil war.
The immediate flash point in Lebanon has been the assassination last week of anti-Syrian Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel, scion of the Lebanese political family equivalent of the Kennedys or Bushes. Gemayel is widely assumed to have been murdered by Syrian or pro-Syrian elements, but, naturally, nobody really knows, and, naturally, there is context.
The context is the tremendous domestic political boost the pro-Syrian Hezbollah took out of this summer’s war –- a boost that has continued to be stoked by the ongoing explosions of outdated, U.S.-supplied unexploded cluster bomblets intentionally dropped in the last hours of this summer’s war by Israel. That boost is coupled with the crippling blow Israel’s pummeling of Lebanon dealt to the elected pro-Western government that emerged from the so-called “Cedar Revolution” the Bush administration was claiming as a foreign policy triumph only last year.
Suddenly, a Lebanese government in alliance with the Americans had a lot to answer for, and a militia that (in Lebanese eyes) stood up heroically to Israel was a cause to rally behind. Syrian influence, on the wane after long dominance, is making a comeback. In that light, even if it was somebody else’s ploy to paint Syria into a corner, Gemayel’s assassination was a literal shot across the bow of Lebanese moderates and Christians. If anti-government forces were responsibl, it was likely intended to weaken or even collapse the current government. More likely, it moves Lebanon much closer to the sort of bloody multi-party civil war that engulfed the country from 1975-1990, and that engulfs Iraq now –- and that Hezbollah, and/or their Syrian backers, now may be calculating that they can win.
And there’s Iraq, for which getting the Americans out, now, and other international forces in, on our dime, is no solution. But it has the potential to mitigate the unfolding explosion, and virtually nothing else does. Otherwise, things could get a lot worse — like a proxy war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, the world’s two largest oil producers.
To these three powder kegs, let us add the ongoing U.S. and Israeli threats to attack Iran. Last May, at a White House meeting, President Bush gave Israeli Prime Minister Olmert the green light not only for an attack on Lebanon (which was then launched at the next available pretext), but also for an attack on Syria (which Olmert, thankfully, declined). It makes one wonder what Bush privately told Olmert when they met again at the White House ten days ago. Consider what they said in public. Olmert: “The US war in Iraq has brought stability to the Middle East.” Bush: “I would understand if Israel chose to attack Iran.” Understand, if not enable, if not orchestrate.
Meanwhile, Olmert, based solely on his statement, comes close to being clinically insane.
Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran. Maybe Syria on that U.S./Israeli hit list, too. Add to the mix the Taliban resurgence in neighboring Afghanistan, Turkey’s hostility to an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq (the Kurds have quietly all but assimilated oil-rich Kirkuk, a long-standing goal), the vulnerability of pro-Western regimes in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Gulf States (including Bahrain, where parliamentary elections last Saturday were marred by allegations of fraud by the ruling Sunni minority, including -– this will sound familiar –- rigged electronic voting machines), and the vital oil and other economic interests in the region held by the U.S., Europe, Russia, and China. This isn’t stability; it’s a Archduke Ferdinand-style perfect storm lining up for the very style of World War III both “bin Laden types” and America’s fundamentalist neocon Christians have been yearning for.
Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran. With Bush pledging anew this week not to leave Iraq, these main four existing and potential battlefields have three features in common. Each one has its own dynamics but can trigger a region-wide conflagration involving all the rest; the U.S. is either the direct cause of each conflict or has made it worse; and each nicely fulfills the desire of fundamentalists on both sides for a broad war between Islam and Judeo-Christianity. Yet lost in the headlines this month was a United Nations report that concluded that the current rift between practitioners of the world’s two greatest religions is not primarily due to some fundamental “clash of civilizations,” but a more pedestrian, and solvable, political conflict: Israel-Palestine, and the powerful symbolic and emotional resonance it has for some on each side of the Christian/Muslim gulf.
George W. Bush, in six years in office, has done the least to address or resolve that conflict, and the most to exacerbate it, of any president since at least 1967. If historians survive to assess it, that may rank right up there with Iraq as the greatest of Dubya’s foreign policy blunders. Everything else follows.
King Abdullah, in his ABC appearance, called for a comprehensive international effort to defuse and solve all of the Middle East’s concurrent crises. On the same day, in a Washington Post op-ed, Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel went farther than most Democrats by calling not only for immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, but a fundamental reassessment of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Wise words. Hopefully our leaders aren’t too far behind this curve. The alternatives are unthinkable.
