THE SKY IS FALLING, THE SKY IS FALLING...AGAIN :

Lost in the Wilderness : The Middle East gets worse and worse for the administration. (William Kristol & Robert Kagan, 04/12/2002, Weekly Standard)

Right now the Bush administration seems to be lost in the wilderness without a moral or strategic compass. This is a stunning development, for less than three months ago the president set forth a grand and clear vision for American foreign policy. We would fight terrorism and the regimes that support and harbor terrorists. We would press for freedom and democracy around the world, but especially in the Muslim world. Above all, when we saw evil, we would call it by its name. Now look how far we have moved away from those noble aspirations.

1. NEGOTIATING WITH TERRORISTS

As this magazine went to press on April 12, Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Jerusalem, where Yasser Arafat's Al Aksa Brigades had just set off another deadly bomb. This was only a day before Powell's planned meeting with Arafat. Amazingly, though it postponed any meeting for at least a day, the Bush administration still seemed inclined to have the American secretary of state meet with this terrorist leader. We don't use that term flippantly, as hyperbole, or even as an insult to Yasser Arafat. We are simply being descriptive: Arafat is a terrorist. [...]

Does President Bush still believe Yasser Arafat is a man with whom we can do business? Can we fight a war on terrorism while we seek to appease this proven sponsor of terrorism? The president will not find a way out of the wilderness until he finally realizes that the answer is no.

2. "THE SOLUTION WILL NOT BE PRODUCED BY TERROR OR THE RESPONSE TO TERROR."

Secretary Powell made this statement in Madrid last week. It was his way of saying that the Israeli military operation against the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian territories could not succeed. But its ramifications go far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [...]

The Bush administration will not find its way back out of the wilderness until it remembers the key principles of the war on terrorism. The question is not whether terrorists claim to be acting on behalf of a legitimate cause. Do the Palestinian people have legitimate aspirations? Of course they do. And Islamic fundamentalists also have aspirations which might be called legitimate. They think their countries should be run according to Islamic law. They think the West is poisoning their culture. They wish the Saudi royal family were out of power.

The question, though, is not what people want; it is what they do. If they kill innocents, if they murder civilians, if they walk into hotels and blow up Jews celebrating Passover, or if they fly passenger jets into the World Trade Center--that is terrorism. And that is what we are fighting against. Unfortunately, in the interest of currying favor with the Arab states, the Bush administration has seriously blurred the purpose, the meaning, and the justification for our war on terrorism. Instead of demanding that Israel halt its war on terrorism, President Bush should be demanding a return to clarity by his own advisers.

3. SADDAM'S VICTORY

The big winner in the current fiasco will probably not be Yasser Arafat. We believe Arafat's days are numbered as a major player in the Middle East. No, the victor right now seems to be Saddam Hussein. Thanks in large part to the administration's mishandling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--which began with Vice President Cheney's trip to the region almost a month ago--the Arab states are much less inclined to be helpful in any effort against Iraq. Now, we've always believed that most Arab states will have no choice but to go along once President Bush makes his decision. We still believe that.

There's always been a key weakness at the core of neoconservatism : it isn't actually conservative, it's just a variant of liberalism that's hawkish where Israel is concerned. Their fetish for Teddy Roosevelt and their advocacy of "National Greatness" makes them the heirs of Nelson Rockefeller, not of Ronald Reagan. This tends to put neoconservatives and conservatives at odds more frequently than allies should be. Every time the rest of the Republican Party wants to do something conservative, particularly on social issues, the neocons distance themselves from the Party. (Mr. Kristol has sagely tried to remedy this somewhat with his recent crusade against cloning, which is fine, except that the neocon cloning position almost completely contradicts their generally pro-abortion position.) And any time a Republican does not put Israeli concerns at the forefront of his thoughts, he gets denounced. The tone of the essay above is fairly typical of these denunciations, with the neocons accusing the conservative of betraying everything he believes in if his views diverge from theirs on the issue of Israel at all.

What makes this all especially annoying is first of all their failure to comprehend that Christian conservatives, whom they seem to disdain, are generally fanatic pro-Zionists. A good measure of this comes from the fundamentalist belief that the Second Coming requires Jews to be in control of the Holy Land, but whatever its source it is quite real. Even worse, while the neocons feel free to jump ship on issues of importance to the conservative movement, you seldom hear conservatives accuse them of betrayal. Heck, they turned the Weekly Standard into a John McCain fanzine during the 2000 primaries, despite his naked pandering to the Left, but few voices on the Right were raised against them. And William Safire even voted for Bill Clinton in '92, but no one read him out of the movement. No, this is entirely a one way street--they feel no obligation to stand with us on any issue, but we have to ape their line on Israel, or else.

So then you read this column from the Weekly Standard and your eyes just glaze over. Every two weeks since September 11th they have to warn us that we're about to lose the war. First we were going to lose in Afghanistan, then we were going to fail to take on Saddam, now we're also going to stab Israel in the back. All of it is just idiotic.

I've made most of these points here already, so excuse the repetition, but :

(1) Negotiating with Terrorists : In the first place, Arafat should no longer be seen as a terrorist. He's the leader of Palestine. The bombings aren't acts of terrorism; they're acts of war. If Israel refuses to declare and wage the war, there isn't much we can do. So long as they claim to want a negotiated peace, we're stuck working for one with them. After all, it's not like we decided it would be great to sit down with Arafat and start negotiating. The Israelis needed us to broker a deal and we've tried, but these are fundamentally negotiations between Israel and Arafat; we're just the mediator. If the neocons have a problem with negotiating with Arafat, their quarrel is with Israel and its leaders, not with the administration.

(2) Powell on Israel's Response : He's right, of course; the Israeli response has been half-hearted and counterproductive. It is not we who need to learn from the Israelis, but they who need to learn from us. When we went into Afghanistan we took out not just al Qaeda but the Taliban too. If Israel seeks to take out individual bombing operations but to leave Arafat in place, their operation will achieve nothing except to further radicalize the already deranged Arab world. On seeing the fecklessness of Israel's response, what could an intelligent military man do but tell them to scrap it?

Until Israel gets serious, we, as their loyal ally, are pretty much stuck pursuing the incoherent policy that they've adopted. But make no mistake, the ambivalence stems from them at least as much as us.

(3) Saddam's Victory : If you can make sense of this point please feel free to explain it to me. First they acknowledge that Arafat is toast, which would seem to make all that went before rather pointless. They can only have been complaining about the pace of his demise, since they assume it's coming no matter what. Then they claim that Saddam is winning because Arab "allies" will be less eager to co-operate in the war against him, except that in the next breath they say these countries have no real choice and will go along anyway. If that's Saddam's big victory I think we can afford to give him one.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 14, 2002 8:03 AM