Dueling Narratives of Outsiders

Josef Joffe, the editor of the distinguished German newspaper Die Welt, has a commentary (in the Wall Street Journal and reproduced at Real Clear World.com) in which he denies the centrality of the Palestinian issue to the Middle East. He claims that the Arab Spring unrest demonstrates that lack of democracy, poor governance, and oppression are the real central issues of the Middle East. He claims that the Palestine issue was really a red herring used to distract Arab publics from their appalling domestic situation by autocratic and corrupt rulers. I think this is true. Nationalism usually rests not only upon a common language, territory and past but also upon a common enemy or enemies. In the case of the Arabs these enemies were Israel and colonialism, often conflated together. Israel takes up about one percent of the territory of the region--maybe two percent with the West Bank and Golan. Yet before the American invasion of Iraq it took up about 80 percent or better of the Arab media's attention. In 2004 I regularly watched broadcasts of Al Jazeera's Arab broadcasts and two items always jointly occupied about 80 percent of the news--Iraq and Israel. Qatar, which owns Al Jazeera, used the network to disguise the fact that it is an American ally with an important American base on its soil.

Stephen Walt was at the same time going on about his pet hobby horse, Israel. Walt claimed that his criticisms of Israel had been oversimplified. He claims that he never said that Israel had no utility to the United States. And he claims that he never claimed that the Israel lobby is all powerful. But he did claim in his Foreign Policy article and in the subsequent book, written with John Mearsheimer, that the Israel lobby was responsible for the American invasion of Iraq. He again asserts that claim by arguing that pro-war editorials by Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak are proof that Israel wanted the U.S. to invade Iraq on its behalf. 

The truth is that Israel wanted the U.S. to invade Iran, which it perceived as a much greater threat to it than Iraq. Netanyahu and Barak probably placed the editorials in the American press as a way of currying favor with the Bush administration, which was determined to invade in any case. See Dan Fleshler's refutation of Walt and Mearsheimer's book in his own book on American Jewry and Israel, which can be ordered off of his website.

Walt is correct that Israel is much less of an American asset than it was during the Cold War. But so are America's other regional allies. It was Egypt and Saudi Arabia that produced the 9/11 hijackers with their political oppression and, in the case of the Saudi authorities, support for Wahhabi fundamentalism. The United States has few dependable regional allies without baggage. The peace process, used to circumnavigate the fact that Washington supported Israel while the countries of the region hated it, looks unlikely to actually produce peace anytime soon. See this interview with former long-time State Department official Aaron D. Miller for an understanding why this is so. (Or simply read the back posts of this blog.) 

This is why I advocate that we disentangle ourselves as quickly and expeditiously as possible from the region and leave Israel on its own with occasional sales of arms in order to preserve the military balance. This is basicly what Cato Institute fellow Leon Hadar advocates. Until we can do this I advocate vigorously pursuing the peace process whenever the situation appears ripe for success.

What are American interests in the Middle East?

In 2005 Palgrave Macmillan published a book by Leon Hadar, who like myself both has a doctorate in international relations and is a graduate of Hebrew University, called Sandstorm. The book appears to be largely a continuation of his earlier book, Quagmire, published in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War a year later. In Sandstorm Hadar argues that most of America's policies and difficulties in the region stem from a failure to reexamine the Cold War era Middle East Paradigm (MEP), which dominated from the time of the Truman Doctrine to the end of the Cold War. The MEP had three overriding American interests in the region: 1) Guaranteeing the supply of oil at a reasonable price; 2) combating Soviet expansion and influence in the region; 3) and ensuring the security of Israel. The only concession to reality since 1990 has been to substitute Al Qaeda and Iran for the Soviet Union.

Hadar reminded me of a fact that I knew but had forgotten: the United States gets ninety percent (90%) of its oil from outside the region. Protecting the oil flow from the region was largely a factor of the United States leading the anti-Soviet alliance during the Cold War. It allowed Europe and Japan to become free riders on the back of the American tax payer during the Cold War and has continued that policy since.

America's support for the peace process stems largely from an attempt to reconcile the incompatibility of the first two goals with the third i.e. American support for Israel hurts America's standing in the Muslim countries of the region. Hadar argues persuasively that it is really Europe and Japan (and South Korea) who have much more at stake in the region than the United States does. America's fixation with the region is really a symptom of Washington's imperial complex--its desire to function as a hegemon on the world stage. Europe is unwilling to back financially Washington's policies in the region without an equal input into determining those same policies. America's propensity to use military force and to back the policies of the Israeli Right in the occupied territories have been gradually causing a rift with Europe. The 2002-03 rift over the war in Iraq between "Old Europe" and America was almost a mirror image of the November 1956 Suez Crisis argument between Washington on one hand and London and Paris on the other.

I agree with Hadar that America can best reconcile its real opposing interests in the region by making a much smaller footprint. This can be accomplished through a gradual military withdrawal from the region. This would force the EU and Japan to play a greater role. It would also mean that Israel would have to make adjustments--funneling money away from settlements and into defense.

Now is a very opportune point to begin this process for two reasons. First, the publication of the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera demonstrates how incompatible the Israelis and Palestinians still are. A Kadima-Labor coalition government was afraid of making concessions to match major Palestinian concessions out of fear of the Right. A Likud-led government of the Right is unlikely to be even as forthcoming, while the approach of the Palestinian Authority has been to deny that it made any concessions to Israel. Internal politics on both sides combined with the power gap prevent an implementation of the two-state solution at this time and for some years to come.

Second, the Arab world is in upheaval with autocratic Arab rulers from Tunisia to Yemen being challenged. Washington can either opt to sacrifice democracy for stability in the hope of delaying a major upheaval or risk dealing with unknown forces taking over in possibly two or three Arab countries including important American allies like Egypt and Jordan. Either result poses considerable risks for America. Better to lower our identification with the local regimes.

My own research into the peace process in Northern Ireland pointed to imitating the Anglo-Irish dual mediation in the Middle East with a peace process co-sponsored by the European Union and the U.S. Brussels has been trying to get into Mideast diplomacy since 1980 with the Venice Declaration. It played an observer role during the Oslo process. By shifting some of the burden on to Brussels, Washington can hope to accommodate its interests as well as cancel its own pro-Israel bias. Brussels can offer Jerusalem a bribe that Washington cannot match--membership in the EU in exchange for peace. But this is for the future.