Conrad makes the argument pretty clearly here that the stage is now
set for a real settlement. As I posted yesterday, this can be led by
Jordan in particular who has the most to gain. Done properly
Palestinians can travel to jobs on the east bank and the west bank
can become a successful refugia rather than some war zone.
The Arab spring has made it abundantly clear that they will no longer
tolerate Islamo fascism and that they desperately need to get their
own houses in order. It has been a task literally put off for two
generations. It is a task that the rest of the world can support.
The creation of an east bank economic suburb in Jordan would in fact
soon make war itself unthinkable and also establish a focus for
regional development with Iraq.
Conrad Black: Forty
years of peace and war
Conrad Black
13/06/15
As this column will
attest, I continue to revel in my minority status as a comparative
optimist about the Middle East. Certainly, I believe that there now
is less likelihood of bloodshed between Jew and Arab than at any time
in the last 40 years.
Four decades ago,
Leonid Brezhnev and Andrei Gromyko correctly predicted imminent
Middle Eastern conflict during their June, 1973 visit to President
Nixon’s home at San Clemente, California. In October, just a few
months later, Israel fought off a surprise attack by the combined
armies of Egypt and Syria.
After the Yom Kippur
War (as it came to be called), Nixon concluded that this was the time
to try to impose a Great Power settlement on the region. He learned
from the Egyptian government, with which the United States had not
had diplomatic relations since the Six days’ War of 1967, that they
were going to expel the Soviets from their country. This signaled a
triumph of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s diplomacy, as Soviet influence
would effectively be confined in the region only to Syria. The United
States could drive a strong bargain with the Russians; and between
them, they could impose a settlement.
The Palestine
Liberation Organization had just recently succeeded to King Hussein
of Jordan as the spokesman for the Palestinians. And the more extreme
Islamist organizations — Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad (a member
of whom would assassinate President Sadat eight years later), and the
like — were either embryonic or unformed.
Nixon correctly
concluded that Sadat — having won Egypt’s military pride back by
successfully breeching the Israeli Bar Lev Line and crossing the Suez
Canal — was ready for peace. The U.S. president, who had
practically supplied Israel with a new air force in the middle of the
Yom Kippur war, and had defeated the Soviets in a competition to
resupply the respective sides by airlift, made it clear that the
United States could not simply withdraw and await another
Arab-Israeli war. He was determined to try to move toward a
comprehensive negotiated peace.
Meanwhile, Brezhnev
was realistic about the deterioration of the Russian position, was
amenable to a deal, and had said as much at San Clemente. Two weeks
into the Yom Kippur War, Kissinger had visited the Kremlin (the visit
coincided with the so-called October 20 Saturday Night Massacre in
Washington, when Nixon fired the special Watergate prosecutor and
other senior Justice Department officials). His aim was to get a
cease-fire in place in the combat zone and an end of the airlift
competition — and he succeeded. But in the intense atmosphere of
relations between the two powers, and with the crisis in Washington
and the war not entirely ended on the ground in Egypt, no full
regional peace settlement could be reached.
However, the rise of a
conciliatory regime in Egypt and the setback endured by the Soviet
mischief-makers, as well as the agile statesmanship of the Americans,
under Kissinger and the Carter and Reagan administrations, did
eventually produce comprehensive agreements between Egypt and Israel,
and between Jordan and Israel. Unfortunately, the rise of militant
Islam — in Iran and elsewhere — made further progress impossible.
Nixon had foreseen that local factions and interests would steadily
atomize, and be infinitely harder to deal with than the Russians
(grasping and treacherous though they had generally been). This was
what happened.
More than two decades
later, the Americans’ initial success in over-throwing Saddam
Hussein in the Iraq War of 2003 caused the Iranians to make (briefly)
civilized noises, with American and allied armies on Iran’s eastern
and western borders simultaneously (Afghanistan and Iraq). Then, 2005
brought an unwritten agreement between Israeli prime minister Ariel
Sharon and U.S. President George W. Bush, according to which Israel
would evacuate Gaza. Sharon had crushed the second Intifada in the
West Bank, which Yasser Arafat unleashed after rejecting former
premier Ehud Barack’s offer of, effectively, almost everything the
Palestinians asked except the right to inundate Israel with millions
of “returning” Palestinians, i.e. the outright end of Israel as a
Jewish state.
Back in 1973, as Sadat
evicted the Russians, and for a few years after, some Arab powers had
seemed to bring themselves around to accepting the right of Israel to
exist as a Jewish state, as the United Nations had created it in
1948. But the rise of a theocratic Iran, the co-opting of the
Palestinian cause by militant Islamist groups, and the surge of
Tehran’s influence through Hezbollah in the civil wars of Lebanon
and Syria, have eliminated any realistic possibility of progress in
this regard.
All these developments
beg the question of what possesses me to express optimism. Certainly,
regular readers will recall that I never expected the Arab Spring to
produce any worthwhile consequences
My optimism is based
on the fact that, from 1973 onwards, it was never going to
be possible for the great powers to impose a solution from the
outside (though the U.S. administrations that followed,
from Nixon to Clinton, all deserve varying degrees of credit for
their efforts). Nothing but the development of some local balance of
forces, such as exists or is developing elsewhere in the world, will
produce stability. And that balance will be brought into shape
through the tensions emerging within Muslim nations themselves.
The ancient contest
between Turks, Persians and Arabs will have to be resolved by Turks,
Persians and Arabs
In Egypt, the Muslim
Brotherhood shows no sign of being able to produce the economic
growth that alone can bring civil society and political stability to
that country. The lassitude of the Obama administration seems likely
to allow a quasi-Iranian victory in Syria, with some emaciated Assad
puppet-sate (as with Mussolini in German–occupied Italy after
1943). The Turkish premier, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, cannot impose
Islamist superstition and dictatorship after 90 years of secularism,
and his pursuit of grandeur will force him into rivalry with Iran.
Saudi Arabia, which is a joint venture between the House of Saud and
Wahabbi Islamist extremists, will have to work with the Turks and
Egyptians in an informal Sunni coalition to bar the way to the
Iranian Shiites. The Petro-states generally will have to live with
much less money as the oil price assimilates the recovery of energy
self-sufficiency by the United States, which gradually is sensibly
retiring to its own shores.
In short, only the
Middle East can sort out the Middle East. And the ancient contest
between Turks, Persians and Arabs will have to be resolved by Turks,
Persians and Arabs. If Iran becomes a nuclear power, so will Turkey,
Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The United States will only supply
anti-missile defences to those powers who behave responsibly, and
thanks to Ronald Reagan, they are the only country with those
defences. The dynamic among these nations will reach the point of
Mutual Assured Destruction. This struggle will consume the attention
and resources of these nations. And in the meanwhile, no one will
make war on Israel, and Hamas and Hezbollah will not be allowed to
provoke a nuclear conflict. The Muslims will sort it out eventually
and Israel will flourish.
As for the
Palestinians, they can have their state next week if they concede
Israel its long-established legal right to be a Jewish sovereign
state. In that respect, nothing much has changed.
National Post
cbletters@gmail.com
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