Better to Be Feared Than Loved, cont.

IT HAS RAPIDLY BECOME accepted wisdom in Washington that the United States is in ever-worsening trouble in the Arab Middle East. 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. In particular, Ariel Sharon's military incursion into the West Bank, which has reinvigorated 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." American credibility among the Arabs, so the theory goes, is in tatters.

Fortunately, this depiction of the United States in the Arab world makes no sense. 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. 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. Israel's house-to-house combat in Jenin will undoubtedly reinforce Arab awe at Israeli prowess. This can only aid President Bush's larger war against terrorism rooted in Islamic militancy. 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. 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 civilians)--should tell us that we are probably at the dawn of a post-Arafat era in Palestinian politics. 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.

This continuing misapprehension of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact on the U.S. position in the Middle East is distressing, though not surprising, 52 years after Israel survived its first Arab war. 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. But the reality is that Israel's repeated victories over the frontline Arab states have enormously increased Washington's coin from Morocco to 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 Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat understood this well, which is why he decided to move away from the pro-Soviet, anti-American, and anti-Israeli camp. 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.

Muslim militants and fundamentalists, who see culture and religion in crystal clear terms, have never had any difficulty discerning this indissoluble power nexus. The fundamentalists understand that the United States will not become "evenhanded" toward the Arab Muslim world since liberal democracies align naturally with each other. And Arab Muslim states (so fundamentalists fervently pray) can never become liberal democracies. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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; with victories, not defeat. 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. Their promises are not millenarian. They are in the near future. 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.

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. 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. When that happens, some kind of peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza will become possible. Assuming of course the United States can neutralize the increasing interference of Iraq and Iran. The Camp David discussions of July 2000 will look then to the Palestinians like a mythical promised land.

WASHINGTON NEEDS to look back at Lebanon in 1982--the cerebral cortex of those who despise Sharon in the Middle East, Europe, and America--to see how the Palestinians' worst defeat failed to damage the United States's position in the Middle East. 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. 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. 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.

In 1982, American diplomats and case officers abroad may have had a few unpleasant dinners and meetings with their Arab counterparts, but U.S. power and influence wasn't belittled in the region. 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. 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. (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. Not an insignificant achievement in the third-world conflicts that greatly determined the outcome of the Cold War.)

Only the Bush administration has the capacity to undo America's eminence in the Middle East. The Arabs can't and most won't really even try. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot diminish the United States unless President Bush pivots from an ahistorical understanding of the Arab Middle East.

Fortunately, President Bush has not been schooled in Washington's foreign-affairs establishment. 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. The president's instincts may propel him to pop the myth that America must solicit an Arab coalition to defeat Saddam Hussein. Untutored, the president may just ask: Why would America need Muslim or Arab cover for military action against Iraq? What moral sanction can dictatorial regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia possibly give us? What real aid can they give to the war on terrorism if they cannot call suicide bombers terrorists? Is the average Arab who hates us, for whatever reasons, going to hate us less because his rulers tell him to?

In World War I, the British had to confront an Ottoman sultan who declared a holy war against them. 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. Some in the Foreign Office were deeply concerned. Faithful Arabs, of course, never arose en masse, though most stayed quietly loyal to the Sublime Porte. The Hashemites from Arabia--soon to be the guardians of Islam's holy cities of Mecca and Medina--however, put their fingers in the air and determined that the British Empire was going to crush the Ottoman. Being allied with a victorious infidel seemed far better than being the brother of a loser.

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. 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. No pro-American dictator went down in the Arab world in 1982. 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.

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. 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. The president, more so than any since Reagan, has become the prime mover of history. In the next few months, we'll all see where he leads us. 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.

Cite?

Didn't think so.

Here is the origin of the quote which heads this article

Concerning Cruelty And Clemency, And Whether It Is Better To Be Loved Than Feared

COMING now to the other qualities mentioned above, I say that every prince ought to desire to be considered clement and not cruel. Nevertheless he ought to take care not to misuse this clemency. Cesare Borgia was considered cruel; notwithstanding, his cruelty reconciled the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty. And if this be rightly considered, he will be seen to have been much more merciful than the Florentine people, who, to avoid a reputation for cruelty, permitted Pistoia to be destroyed. Therefore a prince, so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the reproach of cruelty; because with a few examples he will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are wont to injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a prince offend the individual only.
And of all princes, it is impossible for the new prince to avoid the imputation of cruelty, owing to new states being full of dangers. Hence Virgil, through the mouth of Dido, excuses the inhumanity of her reign owing to its being new, saying:

Res dura, et regni novitas me talia cogunt
Moliri, et late fines custode tueri. ¹

Nevertheless he ought to be slow to believe and to act, nor should he himself show fear, but proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and humanity, so that too much confidence may not make him incautious and too much distrust render him intolerable.
Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women. But when it is necessary for him to proceed against the life of someone, he must do it on proper justification and for manifest cause, but above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Besides, pretexts for taking away the property are never wanting; for he who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner lapse. But when a prince is with his army, and has under control a multitude of soldiers, then it is quite necessary for him to disregard the reputation of cruelty, for without it he would never hold his army united or disposed to its duties.
Among the wonderful deeds of Hannibal this one is enumerated: that having led an enormous army, composed of many various races of men, to fight in foreign lands, no dissensions arose either among them or against the prince, whether in his bad or in his good fortune. This arose from nothing else than his inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valour, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect. And shortsighted writers admire his deeds from one point of view and from another condemn the principal cause of them. That it is true his other virtues would not have been sufficient for him may be proved by the case of Scipio, that most excellent man, not of his own times but within the memory of man, against whom, nevertheless, his army rebelled in Spain; this arose from nothing but his too great forbearance, which gave his soldiers more licence than is consistent with military discipline. For this he was upbraided in the Senate by Fabius Maximus, and called the corrupter of the Roman soldiery. The Locrians were laid waste by a legate of Scipio, yet they were not avenged by him, nor was the insolence of the legate punished, owing entirely to his easy nature. Insomuch that someone in the Senate, wishing to excuse him, said there were many men who knew much better how not to err than to correct the errors of others. This disposition, if he had been continued in the command, would have destroyed in time the fame and glory of Scipio; but, he being under the control of the Senate, this injurious characteristic not only concealed itself, but contributed to his glory.
Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I come to the conclusion that, men loving according to their own will and fearing according to that of the prince, a wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of others; he must endeavour only to avoid hatred, as is noted.

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