April 3, 2002
THE FENDER BENDER OF CIVILIZATIONS :
The Hard Truth (Thomas L. Friedman, April 3, 2002, NY Times)A terrible disaster is in the making in the Middle East. What Osama bin Laden failed to achieve on Sept. 11 is now being unleashed by the Israeli-Palestinian war in the West Bank: a clash of civilizations. In the wake of repeated suicide bombings, it is no surprise that the Israeli Army has gone on the offensive in the West Bank. Any other nation would have done the same. But Ariel Sharon's operation will succeed only if it is designed to make the Israeli-occupied territories safe for Israel to leave as soon as possible. Israel's goal must be a withdrawal from these areas captured in the 1967 war; otherwise it will never know a day's peace, and it will undermine every legitimate U.S. effort to fight terrorism around the globe.What I fear, though, is that Mr. Sharon wants to get rid of Mr. Arafat in order to keep Israeli West Bank settlements, not to create the conditions for them to be withdrawn.
[...]
"The only solution is a new U.N. mandate for U.S. and NATO troops to supervise the gradual emergence of a Palestinian state ¯ after a phased Israeli withdrawal ¯ and then to control its borders," says the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen.
People say that U.S. troops there would be shot at like U.S. troops in Beirut. I disagree. U.S. troops that are the midwife of a Palestinian state
and supervise a return of Muslim sovereignty over the holy mosques in Jerusalem would be the key to solving all the contradictions of U.S. policy in the Middle East, not new targets.
So let's see if I have this straight : even Mr. Friedman now acknowledges (either seven months or thirty years or fourteen hundred years after the fact, depending on how you measure) that we are involved in a Clash of Civilizations. But Israel, which is a part of modern Western Civilization, should gradually cede control over the West Bank to Palestine, which is a part of the medieval Islamic Civilization with which we are fighting a twilight battle? And the Palestinians won't attack the troops involved in an American transitional force, even though America is obviously the leader of Western Civilization?
Clash of Civilizations? Mr. Friedman seems to think it's more like a glofified misunderstanding. Hard Truth? Mr. Friedman seeks to declare war and to beg for a truce, all in the space of one column. Sounds more like soft delusion to me.
The term "Clash of Civilizations" comes from the essay and book by Samuel P. Huntington, wherein he argues that this kind of clash will be an intractable feature of geopolitics for the forseeable future. Though Mr. Friedman has borrowed the muscular metaphor, he seems not to have comprehended Mr. Huntington's point at all.
UPDATE :
Patrick Ruffini has posted his review of Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? and
my review is here.