Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Jordan's Turn in the Sun?





 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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