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Your effective opponents are not in the least frivolous:
The Mess in the Middle East
Chas Freeman October 27, 2011 Arab, Cyber, Economics, Iran, Islam,
Israel, Middle East and South Asia, Palestine, Speeches, U.S. Foreign
Policy, x
The Mess in the Middle East
Remarks to the 20th Annual Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference
National Council on U.S. -Arab Relations
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
27 October 2011, Washington, D.C.
When John Duke Anthony asked me to kick off this two-day meeting by
talking about recent events and what they might mean for US-Arab
relations and U.S. policy, I was greatly honored. I was also reminded
of the words of a famous expert on the Middle East who, many years
ago, was asked to describe U.S. policy there. He replied, “We don’t
have a policy in the Middle East; but that’s just as well because, if
we did, it would be the wrong one.”
Recent events suggest that this was a major and memorable insight.
The more that “change we can believe in” unfolds in the Middle East,
the more things stay the same or retrogress. The more policy we have,
the more perverse the results it seems to produce for our country.
Over the year since we last met here in this hall, there have been
momentous events in West Asia and North Africa. Some Arab regimes
have fallen to popular uprisings. Others appear to be at risk of
doing so. Throughout the broad expanse of the Arab world incumbent
governments of all kinds must now be much more deferential than before
to the will of their people on both domestic and foreign affairs.
This is good news for those who favor more accountable government, as
I’m sure everyone here does – at least for foreigners. Americans
concerned with the capacity of the United States to shape events in
the Middle East should, however, hold the elation. Self-determination
is, by definition, a rejection of subservience. This means, among
other things, that Arab rulers are considerably less inclined to do
America’s bidding than in the past. They are starting to do things
they see as in their interests even when these things are not in ours.
This is especially the case with regard to the Israel-Palestine issue,
which remains central to our relations with the region. Given our
unbreakable bonds with Israel, it is not at all helpful that that
country has now – as some of us feared it might – alienated those few
of its neighbors with which it once enjoyed normal ties. American
policies have long put sustaining Israel’s military dominance of the
region ahead of encouraging it to make peace with Palestinians and
other Arabs. Shielded militarily from the need to deal respectfully
with its neighbors and those over whom it rules, the Zionist state has
progressively segregated itself both morally and politically from the
region and most of the international community, including a growing
number of Jews here and elsewhere in the West.
Israel has nonetheless also demonstrated that its hold on domestic
U.S. politics remains unbroken. This past year, it was able to compel
our president to swear allegiance to expansive Zionism and to
repudiate policies endorsed by his own and previous administrations as
well as the international community. By contemptuously overriding the
views and interests of the United States in this way, Israel and its
American claque debased and discredited American international
prestige and regional credibility. As a consequence, the world has
come together in a series of ever firmer votes of no-confidence in
U.S. leadership and diplomacy on the Israel-Palestine dispute.
American military might remains unchallengeable, but the power of the
United States to protect Israel from the political and legal
consequences of its policies, statements, and actions has been gravely
impaired. This is a perverse result for an Israeli government and its
supporters to have engineered.
For their part, after decades of bitter frustration with a feckless,
fraudulent, and ultimately fruitless American-led “peace process,” the
Palestinians have concluded that they cannot count on the United
States. They have ended their deference to what they (and most of the
world) now see as America’s meretricious manipulation of their affairs
to their occupier’s advantage. They have taken the initiative to
rally regional and global support for their self-determination and
independence from Israel. They hope in this way to transform the
struggle for Palestinian independence into a more equal contest.
Theirs will no longer be a bilateral struggle between a strong, US-
backed Israel and a Palestine with no leverage. It will, they hope,
become a contest between Israel and the world’s conscience.
Ironically, political reactions here to these developments promise not
only to isolate the United States in international organizations but
to deprive us of our residual influence with the Palestinians. The
end of U.S. subsidies to the Palestinian Authority will force Israel
to assume responsibility for security and other services in the
Occupied Territories that it had successfully unloaded on Palestinian
collaborators funded by American and other foreign taxpayers. Instead
of facilitating the occupation by paying Palestinians to police it,
Americans and Europeans are now likely to face demands to pay Israel
directly to conduct it. Europeans, at least, are unlikely to take up
this burden.
The perceived need to counter Israeli and American policies is already
throwing together some strange diplomatic bedfellows. It is also
marginalizing American influence on other issues of concern in West
Asia and North Africa. The regional clout of non-Western powers like
China, India, and Russia will surely grow concomitantly.
If this sounds grim, I apologize. I cannot promise that, as is the
case on Saudi Channel One, amusing cartoons will follow the sermon. I
must leave it to those who follow me to provide comic relief. I’m
happy to do that. Years ago, Ronald Reagan told me: “you know, they
say that hard work never killed anybody. But why take a chance?” He
delegated as much as he could to experts who were smarter than he
was. He set a good example I plan to follow.
This conference has been convened to weigh the implications of the
trends and developments I’ve outlined. As I look at the agenda, I see
that it will also consider other legacies of past and present US
policies in the region, like Iran’s resentful anti-Americanism and
assertive search for regional hegemony, the cancerous growth of
sectarianism in the Arab world, the deepening Iraqi strategic
alignment with Iran, the proliferation of vengeful anti-American
radicalism, and the likely fallout from the failing US-led
pacification effort in Afghanistan. In the past, denial that these
are urgent problems may have sufficed to evade uncomfortable but
necessary dialogue. Neither silence nor inaction is now a viable
option for Americans, Arabs, Iranians, Israelis, or others with a
stake in the future of the Middle East.
Three decades after Iran’s revolution, some or all of the world’s 340
million Arabs are following Persians into a repudiation of foreign
tutelage. The Iranian upheaval of 1979 marked the end of any notion
of Iran as the political or cultural ward of Britain, Russia, or the
United States. Country by country, whether under new or existing
governments, Arabs too are now asserting the right to their own self-
determined national identities and policies. Arabs are not Persians;
Sunni political culture is not that of Shi`ism; and the histories of
the diverse parts of the Arab world differ significantly from those of
Iran. It’s unlikely that any Arab country will follow Iran into
uncompromisingly theocratic forms of governance that derive their
legitimacy from broad confrontation with the West and its values.
Still, the Arab uprisings of 2011 have made it politically impossible
for rulers to put the agendas of Western patrons ahead of the views,
interests, and religious traditions of their own publics.
This shift in mind set and popular expectations has huge strategic
implications. It foretells Arab governments and policies that seek
the authenticity that only the consent of the governed and respect for
their values and views can provide. The colonial era was over
elsewhere five or six decades ago. As the Arabs insist on
independence under popular sovereignty, whether exercised through one
ruler or many, the last vestiges of neo-colonialism are vanishing in
West Asia and North Africa as well. In the new era, relations between
Middle Eastern states will be determined by local judgments about what
is right, proper, and to the national advantage, not what is
ordained, championed, or paid for by an outside power, patron, or
overlord. That has been the case for Israel. It will now be the case
for Israel’s Arab neighbors as well.
Arab rulers have just had it driven home to them that they cannot rely
on Americans to protect them from domestic backlash to unpopular
policies. They’ve also learned that they cannot look to America to
constrain Israel. The strategic utility of the United States to Arab
governments has been correspondingly devalued. As a result, Israel
can no longer count on U.S. alliances, aid programs, or patron-client
allegiances to exempt it from the consequences of its dysfunctional
relationships with its neighbors.
Israelis played a major role in creating the adverse circumstances in
which they now find themselves. They must now make their own peace
with Turkey, sustain their own relations with Egypt and Jordan, and
find their own basis for coexistence with Iran, Iraq, and Saudi
Arabia, among others. They must craft their own modus vivendi and
achieve their own reconciliation with Palestinians and Lebanese, whom
they have heretofore treated with contemptuous cruelty and disrespect.
The spectacle of members of Congress bouncing up and down like so many
obsequious yo-yos as Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke to them last May
is irrefutable evidence of Israel’s hammerlock on U.S. policy. But
U.S. policy no longer decides what happens politically or economically
in the Middle East. This has created a new and less certain political
environment in West Asia and North Africa. For the first time in
decades, Israel must manage its regional and international
relationships on its own. Judging from Israel’s recent handling of
incidents with the UAE, Turkey, and Egypt, neither its current
government nor its political elite understands the new environment or
is mentally prepared to cope with it.
Israel would be in difficulty even if American prestige in the Middle
East had not imploded. But it has. Our previous reputation was so
strong that Americans had to work really hard to do it in. With a
little help from our friends, we proved we were up to the task.
The factors that went into destroying our appeal and authority are
many. They begin with the disingenuous diplomacy of the now defunct
“peace process.” The major result of three decades of American
mediation has been to discredit American diplomacy. In effect, the
United States facilitated the ongoing seizure of territory by Israel
at the expense of a just settlement of differences between Israelis
and Palestinians and Palestinian self-determination.
The reputation of the United States for wisdom, truthfulness, and
competence was also gravely damaged by the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq. The course of events in both countries convincingly
demonstrated the limitations of U.S. military power. The strategic
fallout continues to spread. In Iraq, the U.S. ravaged a proud Arab
society. The resulting anarchy set off a widening firestorm of
sectarian violence in the Arab world. It also catalyzed a major – and
so far uncountered – extension of Iranian influence in the region.
Washington’s eager connivance in the maiming of Lebanon in 2006 and of
Gaza just before the Obama administration took office added to the
perception of the United States as indifferent, if not sadistically
happy about the suffering of Arab or Muslim populations. By
conservative estimate, U.S. policies and military actions in the post
Cold War period have directly or indirectly caused the deaths of
between 250,000 and a million Muslims and displaced at least ten
million from their homes. One does not need an advanced degree to
understand the origins of Muslim rage against America
America’s ideological appeal has also faded. The abuses at Kandahar,
Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo erased the international image of
America as a champion of freedom, fair play, the rule of law, and
human rights. Inconsistencies in the U.S. response to the popular
uprisings in various Arab countries seriously undercut the credibility
of American support for democracy. So has Washington’s willingness to
attempt the overthrow of freely elected governments it and Israel
dislike, like the Hamas-led government elected in Palestine in 2006.
There is little sympathy for Hamas in most of the Arab world, but
there is now universal outrage at U.S. collusion in the ongoing
Israeli effort to terrorize Palestinians in Gaza and permanently
ghettoize them. The blatant hate speech against Arabs and Muslims
that now pervades American political discourse further reduces the
willingness of people in the region to give a sympathetic hearing to
American perspectives on events.
So too, I am sorry to say, does the mounting global perception of the
United States as a country that can’t get its act together. In the
first few years of this century, many abroad came to see us as a
military bully. More recently, they have viewed our national
leadership as terminally uncivil, unable to set priorities or
otherwise address urgent national and international problems,
economically illiterate and fiscally incompetent, ignorant and
indifferent to foreign realities, and committed to the view that
threats, sanctions, and military intervention are the answer to most
foreign policy problems.
Of course, we’re not a bully. We’re just a superpower with
attitude. A friend of mine who works on Capitol Hill assures me that
foreigners seriously “misunderestimate” our politicians. Seen up
close, he says, they are without doubt the finest decision-makers that
political contributions can lease. If “that government is best which
governs least,” he boasts, the United States has now achieved a rare
perfection. We have attained a level of political gridlock in which
the people’s representatives celebrate their faith in God by leaving
it to Him to solve the problems their own previous misbehavior
created. We should be happy to be so thoroughly ungoverned, my friend
believes. But even he, a well-traveled French intellectual, admits
that, from afar, we don’t look as good as we once did.
The fact is that, even without the strategic albatross of all-out
support for self-destructive Israeli policies, the United States now
has less going for it than ever before to help it shape the strategic
contours of a changing Middle East. Yet it is in this highly adverse
context that we Americans must protect our interests. To do this, we
must acknowledge the multiple failures of our policies to achieve
their declared objectives.
We have not persuaded Israel to accept the recognition and
reconciliation that all twenty-two Arab countries and thirty-five
additional Muslim states have offered. There has been no Israeli
offer of peace to the Palestinians or anyone else in the region, only
demands for unconditional acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state. Yet
contemporary Israel is a transplant in the region that needs mutually
respectful relations with its other peoples to assure long-term
survival. It is now clear beyond a reasonable doubt that we Americans
do not have the will or the self-confidence to help Israel achieve
this. Nor do we have the bona fides necessary to conduct the sort of
shuttle diplomacy we once did. Anyone who watched the U.S. Congress
clap, curtsy, and kowtow to Mr. Netanyahu understands why we now have
no credibility as a mediator.
We have not been able to end the increasingly brutal Israeli
occupation and siege in the West Bank and Gaza. Neither is compatible
with international law, Security Council decisions, Israel’s
undertakings in the Camp David accords, the spirit of the Oslo
agreement, the terms of the “Roadmap,” or other relevant doctrines and
decisions. We routinely deplore Israel’s policies and actions without
ceasing to fund them or to prevent anyone else from halting them. No
one takes what we say about Israeli or Palestinian behavior seriously
anymore.
We are now trying to scuttle our own longstanding approach to the
achievement of Palestinian self-determination and independence from
Israel. The only answer we have to others’ objections to this is the
power of the veto. But there is no reason to expect the Palestinians
or the vast majority of the international community that is now
aligned with them against us to restrict their challenges to the
Security Council or other arenas where we can block them. They are
pretty clearly ready to exclude and bypass us.
We do not know how to douse the spreading wildfire of sectarian
violence in the Muslim world that we inadvertently ignited by
thrusting Iraq into anarchy. We have no coherent answer to uprisings
and unrest in places as disparate as Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen or to
the success of rebellion in Libya. We do not know how to deal with
democratic Islamists. We have not come up with a way to counter
Islamist terrorists with global reach. Our current approach simply
intensifies their fervor, strengthens their base among the Muslim
faithful, and multiplies their supporters and copy-cats.
We have no strategy for countering Iranian inroads in the Arab world
or causing Tehran to abandon its presumed nuclear ambitions. Iraq is
aligned with Iran on issues from Syria and Lebanon to Bahrain. We are
about to withdraw from Iraq without reaching any strategically
advantageous understanding with Baghdad. We are conducting our
relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan in ways that maximize the risk
of protracted terrorist reprisal for our slaughter of civilians and
alienation of religious and tribal elements in both. We don’t know
what to do about the situations we have helped create in either or
both countries.
That’s a lot of “known unknowns.” It would be easy to become
depressed.
On the other hand, over the past year, like all right-thinking
Americans, I have learned to be happy and love national credit
rollovers. I count it a triumph that we have so far avoided a
government shutdown. And I’m confident that the “Super Committee” has
our fiscal situation in hand. According to my French intellectual
friend on Capitol Hill, the Supers are about to produce a
comprehensive nonpartisan resolution of our fiscal dilemmas. This
will contract the economy while creating jobs and slash budgetary
outlays while upping defense spending to produce the best of all
possible worlds. I really want to believe this even if it’s clearly
nuts. After all, if voodoo economics could get us into this mess, why
can’t it get us out of it?
But in the absence of fiscal sorcery and some serious changes in
policy, some or all of the following is very likely in our future.
Israel will be increasingly ostracized, boycotted, and prosecuted
internationally for its scofflaw behavior, racist policies, and daily
violence and intermittent pogroms against Palestinians. The United
States will suffer correspondingly from guilt by our continuing close
association with Israel. Over our objections, Turks, Egyptians,
Saudis, and other Gulf Arabs will make common cause on matters
relating to Palestine. (The good news is that the Ayatollah Khamenei
is aligned with Prime Minister Netanyahu and other yahoos in seeking
to block a viable two-state solution in Palestine. Iran will
therefore not make common cause with Arab countries. It doesn’t share
their current and our former belief that the way to bring peace to the
Middle East is through the implementation of United Nations Security
Council Resolution 242 by recognizing the division of the Holy Land
between Israel and a much smaller State of Palestine.
The Palestinian issue will move from meeting rooms where we are
present to conference rooms where we are not – or where our objections
to measures against Israel are opposed or ignored by large,
unsympathetic majorities. The defunded Palestinian Authority will
likely cease to function. Instead of being able to rely on continuing
Palestinian collaboration on intelligence and security matters, Israel
will try to deal with those parts of the Occupied Territories still
inhabited by Palestinians the same way it does with Gaza. Palestinian
and Arab politics will be further radicalized.
Some Palestinian factions, long quiescent, will resume operations
against Israelis in Israel as well as the Occupied Territories.
Others will return to terrorism against the soft targets represented
by Israel’s supporters abroad. Not a few Israelis will conclude that
the United States, not Israel, is the only secure domicile for the
world’s Jews. Jewish emigration from Israel will accelerate. The
United States will gain many desirable new citizens as a result.
The visible presence of U.S. troops on Arab soil will attract
escalating local protests as well as terrorist attacks. The U.S. will
step up assassinations of alleged proponents, planners, and
perpetrators of such attacks. Collateral damage will mount. So will
popular rage against the United States and pressure on Arab
governments to deny U.S. forces access to facilities and installations
in the region. Eventually, one or more Arab governments will decide
that having an American military presence on its territory or
facilitating transit or overflight by the U.S. armed forces is too
provocative to local opinion. Other Arab governments will follow.
The U.S. ability to rely on strategic lines of communication in the
Gulf to link Asia to Europe and to project power around the world will
take a big hit.
The Gulf Arabs, Iran, and Turkey will compete for the support of
previously uncommitted external powers, like Brazil, China, India, and
Russia. Gulf Arab governments will find it easy to buy arms from
these countries but impossible to persuade them to replace weakening
U.S. defense commitments with their own. GCC member countries will be
driven toward greater self-reliance and stronger cooperation with each
other. Some will ally with Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt. Others will
make their peace with Iran. Military training in the United States
and the ease of cooperation and habits of coordination that it fosters
will decline as U.S. budgets contract, military ties to the Gulf
attenuate, and the region’s military relationships diversify.
Now that I’ve cheered you up, let me turn briefly to what might be
done to avoid or mitigate developments like these. The writing may
be on the wall but nothing is certain until the ink dries. Other
speakers will have creative ideas about what is to be done. We need
some new ideas to end our current wars and to restore our domestic
security and tranquility. Before other speakers step up to this
challenge, let me venture a few thoughts.
In the Holy Land, it’s about time we recalled the Hippocratic oath.
This advises those with the power to intervene to “abstain from doing
harm.” To put it more realistically, we should abstain from doing
more harm than we already have. Foolishly encouraging Israelis to
indulge in a belief that they can enjoy security through eternal
reliance on American subsidies and protection and by sustaining a
perpetual state of war with neighboring peoples not only does them no
favor; it does Israel, the United States, and the Arabs great harm.
For a long time, we have acted as the enablers of self-injurious
Israeli behavior. This has made it possible for Israel to choose land
over peace, to corrupt its democracy, to deviate from the core values
of its official religion as understood by Jews abroad, to empower
racism and bigotry among its Jewish majority, and, most recently, to
humiliate the president of the United States while extracting twenty-
nine kowtows from Congress.
No one now harbors any real hope that America can either deliver peace
or help Israelis, Palestinians, and those with whom they share their
region to achieve it. We have shown convincingly that bilateral
negotiations between grossly unequal parties cannot produce an
equitable and sustainable result unless outside parties are willing to
intervene to redress the imbalances in power. Yet an equitable and
sustainable result is an imperative not only for Israelis and Arabs
but for Americans as well. The costs of no peace are becoming too
great to be sustained.
The essential objective of stated U.S. policy has always been the
achievement of acceptance for Israel in its region through self-
determination for the Palestinians in their own state. This is what
the Arab peace initiative of 2002 offered. Americans need to get out
of the way and let the international community work with the Arabs to
help Israel embrace peace.
The last American with a valid claim to the status of peacemaker in
the Middle East is the much-maligned Jimmy Carter. He put the squeeze
on Menachem Begin to accept the peace that Anwar Sadat had bravely
offered. There is no prospect that any elected or appointed American
official could now act toward an Israeli leader with the determination
that President Carter showed in September 1978 at Camp David.
Conversely, as long as the United States fawns on Israel and uses
drones and hit teams to carry out extrajudicial executions in an
expanding list of Arab and Muslim countries, no president will have
any credibility with Palestinians, other Arabs, or the broader Islamic
community. The American-led “peace process” is over. We blew it.
The United States must now let the international community do for
Binyamin Netanyahu what Jimmy Carter did for Menachem Begin – make
Israel an offer of peace it will not let its prime minister refuse.
This means ceasing to block the diplomatic tough love for Israel that
only non-Americans can provide, and it means withdrawing U.S. funding
and other support for Israeli policies and programs that harm U.S.
interests or constitute obstacles to peace. The combination of
international pressure and diminishing U.S. support is necessary to
concentrate Israeli minds on the long-term choices before their
country.
Peace has long been available if Israel would only trade sufficient
land for it. The vast majority of Israelis favor swapping land for
peace. A succession of right-wing Israeli governments has worked to
obviate this possibility by creating adverse “facts on the ground.”
It is time instead to create circumstances that will empower the
Israeli majority to push their country’s recalcitrant politicians into
peaceful coexistence with the other peoples of the Middle East.
Most Americans would rather forget Iraq now that we’re leaving it.
But Iraq isn’t going away as an issue. Our invasion of Iraq left Iran
without a credible military challenger in the region. Our withdrawal
from Iraq leaves us with no strategy for countering Iranian
aspirations for hegemony in the Middle East other than keeping a large
part of our armed forces in the Arab countries of the Gulf. Such a
presence is a stimulus to terrorism. Sustaining it is also almost
certainly beyond our future fiscal capacity. Our usual response in
such situations is to ask for host nation support. Given the loathing
our policies in the Holy Land now inspire and the hatred our drone and
other attacks are stoking, it is uncertain how Gulf Arab governments
would respond to such a request. Subsidies to an American military
presence are likely to be highly unpopular even where exceptional
levels of citizen affluence prevail.
A better approach would be to adopt a more economic and less fatiguing
strategy, like backstopping security arrangements that the GCC might
contract with Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan as well, possibly, with
others, like a Syria that is no longer in the Iranian political
orbit. Among other benefits, this would share the burden of
guaranteeing Gulf Arab security between the United States and other
countries with an interest in the security of energy supplies,
regional stability, and a global oil patch undominated by a single
supplier. Such countries include all the great powers of Europe and
Asia. Why should those who benefit from global order not share the
burden of sustaining it by supporting the GCC?
In this context, the situation in Bahrain has much broader strategic
implications than many seem to realize. Bahrain is a fundamentally
decent society but there are serious injustices there, as many in the
Bahraini ruling family will admit. The Bahraini opposition is now
infected with the revolutionary Iranian ideology of wilayat al faqih,
a self-serving and self-righteous clericalism that rejects
accommodation with secular authority.
The issues are complex. Negotiation is difficult for both sides.
Yet, if there is no meeting of the minds, the disharmony in Bahrain,
already an ulcer on GCC security, will afflict more than just
Bahrainis. It will become an open wound that neither Iran nor Shi`ite
Iraq will be able to resist probing.
It is hard to see how the U.S. Fifth Fleet could remain ashore in
Bahrain under such circumstances. The island kingdom has become a
crucial arena for the widening sectarian struggle in the Gulf as well
as the contest for regional influence between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
A measure of order has now been restored in Bahrain. Substantial
reform must follow if domestic tranquility is to be sustained and
opportunities for external mischief-making contained.
The situation in Bahrain is an example of the strategic dangers posed
by injustice that is contaminated by sectarian division. In this and
other contexts, I have to say, it’s hard to understand what’s in it
for Saudi Arabia to continue to attempt to define itself by its Islam
rather than by its character as the heartland of the Arabs. Where
Saudi Arabia differs from Iran and resembles the Iranian-penetrated
states and societies of Bahrain, Lebanon, and Iraq is in its
“Arabness,” not its adherence to one or another school of Islam. The
assertion of an Islamic rather than an Arab identity was a rational
response to the challenge of secular Arab nationalism half a century
ago. It makes little sense today, when the threat emanates from
within the Dar al Islam and the objective must be to discourage other
Arab states from aligning with a non-Arab state against the Kingdom.
Religious ideology is Iran’s battleground of choice. One should
never allow one’s adversary to pick the field of battle. Only Saudis
can decide who they are, but, in terms of Saudi prospects for victory
in the struggle for the soul of the Arab world, Arab identity and
tradition would seem to be a more promising choice of terrain on which
to make a stand than religion. There is nothing Arab about the
concept of rule by mullahs embodied in the recent theological
innovation of wilayat al faqih. It is not a doctrine that Arab
Shi`ites should find appealing, any more than Arab Sunnis do. The
need to ensure that Shi`ite Arabs do not embrace it is an argument for
expanded religious dialogue and tolerance.
Iran’s hegemonic ambitions are a serious problem for its neighbors.
There is no magic bullet to put an end to this problem. Military
action is more likely to create new problems than to solve this one.
Dealing with Iran requires a comprehensive strategy and engagement
linked to a long-term effort by the GCC that is backed by the United
States and others. No such strategy or effort is in place. The
current cascade of sanctions, threats of air attack, and covert
actions against nuclear facilities does not add up to a strategy. The
sanctions impoverish ordinary Iranians and rally them against foreign
enemies. The threats emphasize to them how much safer they would be
if only they had a nuclear deterrent. The cyber attacks and other
covert actions against Iran retard its nuclear program but do not
address its motivations for the program or halt it.
There is no unity of purpose among those concerned about the various
dimensions of Iranian behavior. The GCC does not have anything useful
to say to Iran about its nuclear programs. Those in the region, like
Turkey, who have tried to speak to Iran on this issue have been
undercut rather than supported by the West. Iran’s roles in Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are unaddressed
by American diplomacy, which is entirely focused on eliminating the
presumed Iranian threat to Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly. It is
clearly time for all concerned about the diverse challenges Iran
presents to confer, to deconflict their disparate policy priorities,
and to cooperate.
Osama Binladin was finally apprehended through classic intelligence
and law enforcement work. He was killed by Navy Seals but it is hard
to argue that a military hit team was essential to arrest or execute
him. America seems wedded to a militarized approach to combating
terrorism despite the fact that this is widening our struggle to an
expanding list of Muslim countries – not narrowing it – while
deepening existing Muslim animosity toward the United States. We need
to rethink our approach. Decimating leadership structures can
demoralize and disorient armies. But we are not dealing with armies.
We are dealing with an enraged global community and an ideology that
tells individuals within it what targets are legitimate objects of
retribution and reprisal and that motivates them to act on their own
or to seek others of like mind to join them in acts of terrorism.
Unless the causes of Muslim indignation are mitigated and the deviant
ideology of those who exploit it is refuted, anti-American terrorism
will continue to flourish. The apprehension and execution of Osama
Binladin or other prominent terrorists punishes their crimes against
us but we should be under no illusion that it shakes either the
motivation or the rationale of those they inspire. To accomplish
that, we need the help of Muslim allies. We Americans are good at
killing our enemies. We are unqualified to refute Islamic heresies
and unsuited to persuading those who have embraced these heresies to
step aside from the path to terror. We need Muslim help to accomplish
both.
I am tempted to turn to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where many believe
it’s all over but the excuses for the retreat, but, fortunately, my
time has expired.
I want to close by affirming my faith in the adaptability and
resilience of the United States. With all the problems we have made
for ourselves and our friends in the Middle East, we have just about
run out of alternatives to doing the right things. Now we may get
around to actually doing them, insha’Allah. Bukra. Mumkin.
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Written by Chas Freeman
Ambassador Freeman chairs Projects International, Inc. He is a retired
U.S. defense official, diplomat, and interpreter, the recipient of
numerous high honors and awards, a popular public speaker, and the
author of five books.