The Iraq Study Group has advised the
administration to try a few more tricks before getting our spent men and
materiel out of Iraq. Led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, the Group is
especially desperate to secure Iran and Syria’s assistance in reversing
Iraq’s fortunes. If its central thrust is accepted, “Enhanced diplomatic
and political efforts in the region” will, slowly, replace localized
brute force.
There is, however, a pesky problem with galvanizing the newfangled axis
of angels.
One of the aims of Bush’s disastrous occupation of Iraq was to
weaken—even collapse— the Islamic Republic. He has achieved the exact
opposite of what he intended. Iran has superseded the US as the most
influential power in the region. Syria is second. Both have collaborated
nicely in getting Zelzal-2 missiles and short-range Katyusha rockets to
Hezbollah. Israel, like the monkey-see-monkey-do country it has become,
followed the US’s bliss, as hippies would say, and leveled Lebanon. That
failed mission further entrenched the terrible troika— Iran, Syria, and
Hezbollah—as the region’s top dogs.
So how do the politically weak entice the strong? How does America
leverage influence over Iran and Syria? Promise not to invade them?
Threaten not to return their captured soldiers? “Allow” mad Mahmoud to
enrich Uranium? We’ve gambled away almost all our bargaining chips—bar
one.
We still have Israel.
“The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it
deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional stability,”
the pragmatists tell us. It is apparently necessary to tether the
staunching of violence in Iraq to Israeli concessions to the
Palestinians. Since this is a wild stretch at best, Baker et al. have
conjured a construct every bit as mystical as Bush’s
democracy-by-osmosis to shore it up.
“In the Middle East everything is connected with everything else,” The
Group asserts in its
160-page report. In this magically interconnected ecosystem, one of
the few known palliatives for Iraq is to compel Israel to return the
Golan Heights, divide Jerusalem, and allow every self-styled Palestinian
“refugee” the right of return to Israel proper.
Once America’s “Concubine in the Middle East” is prodded to make these
concessions, Iraq may right itself—or so surmise the realists. There
are, of course, plenty precedents for such magical thinking, the last
being Gaza. Israel gave
Gaza to the dogs of war under the “land for peace” pie-in-the-sky.
That apparently has worked out just fine.
The canonical Group has made one particularly fateful faux pa—they’re
recommending negotiations with the wrong Palestinian leader.
Mahmoud Abbas is not the head honcho in the Palestinian Authority; the
Palestinians ousted Abbas and elected Hamas democratically
earlier this year. Doesn’t The Group know that Hamas and Jimmy Carter
now legitimately represent the Palestinians? My, my; Hamilton, Baker,
Meese, Eagleburger, Jordan, O’Connor and the rest risk infuriating this
ever-fulminating people.
Abbas did sign an accord with Hamas in support of armed action and
terrorism against Israel. Called the “Prisoners’ Document,” the accord
did not restrict the good old “resistance” to areas “occupied” by Israel
in 1967. This collaboration aside, I’m unaware of any coup d’état
returning Abbas to power. And by this I don’t mean to undermine the
Palestinians’ serious comparative advantage in the area of violence—it’s
almost as impressive as the Iraqis’.
Indeed, mainstream media, which in every other instance adheres to the
“if it bleeds it leads” axiom, has been unsurprisingly silent on the
perpetual civil war in the Palestinian territories. To read the BBC’s
dispatches, you’d think that the chaos is recent, or part of the
rough-and-tumble of a fledgling democracy. Or that the warring
gangsters, aka the “security forces,” engage in no more than the odd,
slightly boisterous “clash.”
Most reporters have capitulated to the PA’s campaign of intimidation
against anyone who tells the truth about what goes on in that
hell-on-earth. Not Khaled Abu Toameh of The Jerusalem Post. “The dead
form an endless daily procession in his stories,” writes Stephanie
Gutmann, in The Other War. “They were members of feuding Arab
tribes, rival factions and warring families. They were wives deemed
immodest, girlfriends deemed treacherous, daughters deemed disobedient,
and always, always there were those executed in gruesome ways for having
collaborated, in some loosely defined way, with Israel.”
This bucolic reality sounds remarkably like Iraq, where every potential
for conflict, however small, is fully realized. Arabs and Turkmen feud
with Kurdish irredentists; the Badr Brigade battles the Mahdi Army, even
though both are Shia. But why dwell on the negative? All this will be
behind us once Israel cedes more territory to those plucky Palestinians.
© 2006 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
December 8
DIGG IT |
