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.

The latent racism, the assumption that the Arab is inferior and must be shown his place in the scheme of things

Nice try, but I caught you moving the pea between the shells.

Do I believe that Arabs are biologically inferior? Nope; that's racist clap-trap.

Do I believe that the prevailing culture of the Arab Middle East is inferior to the prevailing culture of the West? Damn straight.

You know, the Arabs are a proud people. Their civilization once surpassed the West's.

Yes, but we have to deal with their culture as it exists now (degraded by causes you correctly identify).

Our role should be to usher them out of their feudal world into the 21st century, not by force as the neo-cons suggest, but by diplomacy and trade relations.

That would be preferable. Unfortunately, the people who rule most of the Arab world now are determined to prevent that, because their rice bowls would be broken if their people got some education and political sophistication. If they weren't attacking us directly, we could just wait them out until their control broke down; however, that is not the case.

Machiavelli Time Line

1469	May 3, born in Florence the son of a jurist.
1494	The Medici expelled from Florence. Machiavelli Appointed clerk to Adriani in the second chancery.
1498	Adriani becomes chancelor and Machiavelli succeeds him as second chancellor and secretary.
1499	Sent to Forli to negotiate the continuance of a loan to Catherine Sforza.
1500	Sent to France where he meets with Louis XII and the Cardinal of Rouen.
1502	Marries Marietta Corsini. Sent to Romagna as envoy to Cesare Borgia where he witnessed the events leading up to Borgia's murder. Machiavelli's political philosophy was highly influenced by his study of Cesare Borgia.
1503	January, returns to Florence.
1504	Second mission to France.
1506	December, submits a plan to reorganize the military to Pierre Soderini, Florence's gonfalonier, and it is accepted.
1508	Sent to Bolzano to the court of the Emporer Maximilian.
1510	Sent once more to France.
1512	The Medici returns with a Spanish army and Florence throws out Soderini and welcomes the Medici. Machiavelli dismissed from office and retires to San Casciano.
1513	Imprisoned after accused of participation in a conspiracy. Is tortured and then released upon Giovanni de Medici's election to the papacy. Returns to San Casciano and writes The Prince.
1515	Writes La Mandragola.
1519	Consulted by the Medici on a new constitution for Florence which he offers in his Discourses.
1520	Appearance of The Art of War and The Life of Castruccio Castracane. Commissioned to write the History of Florence.
1526	Clement VII employes Machiavelli first in inspecting the fortifications of Florence and then sending him to attend the historian Francesco Guicciardini. He meets Guicciardini in Bologna later in the year as well.
1527	June 20, dies in Florence.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

However, there can be no doubt that the material conditions for the existence of Jewry as an independent nation could be brought about only by the proletarian revolution. There is no such a thing on our planet as the idea that one has more claim to land than another.
The establishment of a territorial base for Jewry in Palestine or any other country is conceivable only with the migrations of large human masses. Only a triumphant Socialism can take upon itself such tasks. It can be foreseen that it may take place either on the basis of a mutual understanding, or with the aid of a kind of international proletarian tribunal which should take up this question and solve it.
Leon Trotsky
On the Jewish Problem (1934)

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