THE MIDDLE EAST: NEW REALITIES - OLD TRUTHS

June 7, 1997 

Introduction

The American victory in the Gulf War, now six years old, established the framework on which has been predicated  the Bush Administration’s Madrid  Conference peace initiative which has continued into the Clinton Administration.  However, dynamism in the region has altered the basic operating assumptions on which American policy in the Middle East has been grounded, necessitating a change in U.S. policy. 

The Gulf War Victory Effect  

At the close of that war in February 1991, the American-led Gulf War Coalition’s conventional victory over Iraq was complete.  Iran was still feeling the crippling effects of the Iran-Iraq War which it lost in 1988.  Iraq was divided into three zones with the government in Baghdad controlling only one-third of Iraqi national territory.  Its conventional force weapons were terribly mauled by Coalition forces.  Syria was estranged from Iraq and wary that of resurgent American power and prestige in the region especially in the wake of the collapse of its patron the former Soviet Union. 

Israeli security theory based on the concept of territorial "strategic depth" was exposed as obsolete by Iraqi scud missiles that struck in the heart of Tel Aviv despite even the deployment of American manned Patriot missile batteries on Israeli soil. 

These realities made possible, indeed compelled, the convening of the Madrid Conference as a  practical instrument for translating the Coalition military victory into an enduring political settlement that would inevitably serve Israel’s security, economic and political interests. Given the completeness of the American led victory over Iraq, as well as the recent demise of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to American power,  Israel’s  Arab neighbors saw no real immediate alternative to the American summons to the peace table. Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud government, though  an unwilling peace partner for the Arabs, nevertheless led Israel into the process sensing the necessity for an alternative security policy, or at least an interim in the policy of confrontation with the Arabs in the wake of the collapse of their long standing regional security strategy of maintaining territorial strategic depth.   

Thus there existed conditions which propelled each side to seek accommodation with the other in order to serve the mutual interests of both.  In such an environment, the United States need serve only as a catalyst.  Once log jams were broken, the natural flow of national self interest would propel the parties to peaceful resolution of their long term disputes.  The Oslo Accords became the paradigm of the  possible as old antagonists convinced of the futility of further confrontation and war as a means to achieve national ambitions finally turned to peace and diplomacy. 

Gradual Erosion of the Gulf War Effect           

The Madrid round of talks are now in their sixth year.  These years of protracted negotiation have not transpired in a vacuum.  The Middle East is a very dynamic region in which alliances that seemed improbable today are given assumptions tomorrow, as narrowly based dictators and oligarchs take measures to secure their survival in power.  That the United States has not able to quickly transform its military victory into a lasting political settlement is no coincidence.  Those who lost in the Gulf War, but survived it, took immediate steps to counter act the affects of the American victory which surely made less secure their ability to remain in power. 

King Hussein of Jordan made an incredible diplomatic recovery from the war.  Having sided with the Iraq and alienated himself from the wealthy Gulf State emirates, the Saudis and the United States, Hussein was nevertheless able to reverse his fortunes and join the peace process.  To date, only the Jordanian track has born the ultimate fruit of a peace treaty and normalization of relations.  With this has come increased foreign aid from the United States and its allies. 

Hafez al Assad of Syria who sided with the United States in the Gulf War, ironically has resisted the American diplomatic initiative to make permanent the results of the military victory.  Assad has collaborated with Iran and Iranian supported surrogate forces in Lebanon and the West Bank to retard and reverse the diplomatic advances of the United States. 

In Israel, Shamir’s intransigence brought Rabin to power in the 1992 Parliamentary elections.  Rabin campaigned on a platform that he could bring peace to Israel and make the American-led diplomatic effort work.  Rabin was truly committed to the fundamentals of Madrid, namely, that ultimate security for the Jewish state would lie in its existing at peace with its neighbors.  This was the goal of the earliest Israeli pioneers, to find acceptance for the Jewish state in the neighborhood in which it chose to exist.   Under Rabin there was real progress.  However, a right-wing nationalist backlash was generated in Israel against his policies which resulted in an extremist taking matters into his own hands and assassinating Rabin.  This act has proved to be a mortal blow to the process. 

All of the foot dragging, delaying tactics and finally the car bombers, truck bombers and just bombers have had their affect.  For every step that meticulous American diplomacy was able to take forward, those who opposed our efforts sent the region two steps backward.  Over the period of the past six years, the cumulative effect of these events have created a new reality in the region.  A reality that is hostile to American efforts to mediate peace.  By leaving Hamas and Hezbollah, the instruments of the Iranian/Syrian policy of obstruction, in place, these two states were left with the means to carry out their policy of defeating this peace initiative.  By sponsoring terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians coming on the

heels of advancement in the negotiations, these rogue states were able to break the will of the Israelis to go forward.  When the Israelis failed to see peace as being in their national security interests, they withdrew support for the process and expressed that withdrawal by the election of Netanyahu.  With his election,  there is now no one left at the table to engage in mediation except the American mediator.  Syria never seriously sat at the table.  Arafat, alone, whose political legitimacy is directly tied to the Palestinian Authority, a creature of this process, remains.  He, alone, is clearly not enough to justify continuation of the peace process. 

Missed Opportunity for Peace

From the prospective of hindsight, it now appears clear that the greatest opportunity to truly make the process irreversible came on the heels of the Rabin assassination in November of 1995.  There was tremendous sympathy in Israel for the peace process for which Rabin had given his life.  Peres had the power and the support within the Israel electorate to make the necessary concessions to the Syrians on the Golan in order to secure a treaty.  This would have achieved the critical mass to solidify the process and complete the final status talks with the Palestinian Authority.   

Instead, at that critical juncture in December 1995 and January 1996 during the Wye Plantation round of discussions between the Israelis and Syrians, the Syrians blinked.  Assad refused the offer that Rabin’s death had made possible.  From that point forward, the process slid as car bombs went off in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in February 1996, a mini Gulf War was fought in Lebanon in April and finally Netanyahu came to power in May 1996.  Netanyahu had campaigned on a promise not to make the necessary compromises with the Syrians. 

Netanyahu’s alienation of the Palestinians is now complete.  On any pretext, Netanyahu has suspended and continued the suspension of talks with the Palestinians.  The latest cause for suspension is the murder of three Palestinians suspected of selling Arab land to Israelis.  Netanyahu has said that "we must consider carefully if we should continue talks with people who represent such fascist theories." 

New Realities

The Israeli-Turkish Military Alliance. The United States no longer has a willing Israeli party to the negotiations.  Within the counsels of the Netanyahu cabinet there appears to have formed a new consensus on an alternative security strategy.  Rather than seeking security through peace with her neighbors, Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership, seems bent on seeking security through military means.  He has cultivated a military alliance with Turkey and conducted joint military exercises with their forces in the Eastern Mediterranean.  

Reactionary Syrian, Iranian, Iraqi Alliance. Israeli flexion of military muscle is never lost on Damascus.  Israeli military maneuvers on the Golan last year triggered immediate response from Syrian forces in Lebanon.  The Turkish alliance has created a counter move among the Arab states in the formation of a military alliance between Syria, Iraq and Iran.  The Turkish Army is now 200 kilometers into Iraqi national territory pursuing PKK Kurdish insurgents.  The Turkish commander has said that he will maintain his forces in northern Iraq until the Barazani faction of the Kurds is in control of all northern Iraq.  This latest military operation has seen Turkish warplanes bomb and strafe PKK forces as they have fled west into Syrian national territory and east into Iranian national territory.  The Turks have spoken quite plainly of the necessity to deal militarily with the PKK and those who support them.  It is no secret in the region that Assad has protected and assisted the PKK in Occupied Lebanon where the PKK has training facilities and access to hard currency with an allocation of drug profits derived from opium processing laboratories located in Syrian Occupied Lebanon.   

It would appear that Netanyahu is determined to break the deadlock in the peace process by radically changing the status quo in a way that only decisive military victory can.   

A Region Poised for War not Peace.  These are the new realities and the new facts that Netanyahu has created on the ground.  The region is poised for war, not for peace.  It has been the position of the

National Alliance of Lebanese Americans (NALA) that real peace can not come until all the parties have forsworn  all other options, especially the military option, and find peace to be in their mutual national interest.  To this time, only Syria seemed blinded to the need to surrender the military option as they pursed that option through surrogates in Lebanon.  Now, it seems, that Israel, too, has been blinded.  While it is true that the actual conduct of war may so exhaust the parties that they will turn to peace, it is also true that such a war with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the arsenals of the antagonists could well result in a peace that would only be ashes in the mouth of the victor.  Turkey is, after all, a NATO ally, to which is owed a treaty commitment from America and all of Western Europe to defend.  

Continued American mediation efforts taken in light of these realities is illogical and harmful to the sustaining of American power and prestige in the region.  The United States must take note of the fact that the necessary framework and policy assumptions that had made peace seem inevitable a mere 18 months ago  no longer exist or are no longer valid.  The independent course that Netanyahu has taken in the pursuit of policies consistent with his nationalist ideology and to appease that faction of his governing coalition has set in motion necessary and rational counter measures among Israel’s regional adversaries which they deem necessary for their survival.   

The Need for America to Reassume Control of Events.  The United States, which controlled the flow of events in the region in 1991, has now lost control of events.  This is not to say that we can not reassume control. America is, after all the only remaining global power.  However, in order to reassume control of events, our policy must first acknowledge that these events are taking place.  They are not an aberration from an otherwise sound set of policy assumptions, but have made past policy assumptions obsolete and have created a new set of policy assumptions which demand the evolution of a new policy.  Peace should and must remain as the objective of our policy.  But first, the framework for peace must be reestablished.  The building crescendo toward a destructive war must be reversed and defused.  At the close of the Twentieth Century surely we have learned that it is not necessary to actually experience the death and destruction of war in order to know it futility.  Our collective Twentieth Century experience should be deterrent enough.  

New Conditions Call for New Policies

What should that policy be?  To simply allow a new war to break out pitting Syria, Iraq and Iran against Israel and Turkey would be the height of abdication of American power.  Driving the momentum toward war is the Israeli - Turkish alliance.  It is driven by classic common interests centered on a common animosity toward Syria.  Netanyahu needs a militarily reduced Assad with which to negotiate peace and the Turkish military wants to end the PKK as a threat to Turkish security.  Assad is the common enemy.  Lebanon, as training ground for the PKK and operational theater for the Syrian supported Hezbollah, is the likely battleground for this pending war.  However, such a war would not be limited to Lebanon as has been the case since 1974 when Lebanon became the venue for all regional military conflicts.  Long range missiles possessed by all sides would quickly be employed and spread the conflict into the national territories of the principals.  The actual execution of such a war should not be an option. 

Restoration of a Proper American-Israeli Relationship.  A new policy must include the restoration of America’s senior status in its relationship with Israel.  Netanyahu’s defiance of American interests is without precedence in the long history of American-Israeli relations.  An American President’s request to an Israeli Prime Minister has never been as cavalierly dismissed as Netanyahu dismissal of  President Clinton’s request that he halt progress on the Har Homa construction project.  This rivals only Assad’s dismissal of Secretary Christopher’s attempts at a meeting in 1996 during the April War in Lebanon.  Assad said he was too busy meeting the representative from Pakistan to meet with the American Secretary of State.  Assad’s and Netanyahu’s dismissive attitude toward American diplomatic overtures are symptoms of the passive policy that the United States has pursued over the course of the past several years going back to Secretary of State Baker’s expressed position to then Prime Minister Shamir that "if you want to talk peace, you know what number to reach me".  This is the Middle East. The absence of peace means war.  The United States must make clear to Netanyahu that we do not and will not support a war that he gets himself into without prior consultation with the United States.   

Preemptive Action in Lebanon. However, Netanyahu may well have circumvented the necessity for prior consultation with the United States that other Israeli leaders have deemed a prerequisite by engaging Turkey, a NATO partner, as its ally.  America is treaty bound to assist. It is for this reason that the United States must adopt a policy that would preempt war by removing the casus belli.  For both Israel and Turkey, activities that persist in Syrian Occupied Lebanon are the common impetus toward war.  The Lebanese Army, is capable of disbanding the PKK training camps in the Bekaa Valley and the Hezbollah militia in south Lebanon from which Assad draws his strength to resist a peaceful settlement with Israel.  An American policy directed toward encouraging the already reemergent independent political decision-making apparatus in Lebanon that can act to deploy the Army to accomplish these objectives and thus remove the justification for war would seem to be the sound, proper and least destructive course to follow.  Absent the Israeli-Turkish mobilization, the odd bedfellows of Assad and Saddam would not exist.  They have been driven to cooperation in order to defend against a common threat.  Remove the common threat and remove the necessity for alliance and cooperation.  The combined armies of Syria, Iran and Iraq can be formidable indeed. A rational American policy would keep these forces separate and thus lessen the threat of their deployment. 

New Realities in Lebanon

John Paul II in Lebanon. The Papal visit to Lebanon of one month ago has had a significant impact on the country.  The Maronite Patriarchy, once a respected symbol of national unity had been relegated to a limited parochial institution that failed to command the respect of even the Maronites.  The Pope’s message of unity and peace that was well received by Christian and Moslems alike has been conferred upon the Maronite Patriarch, bringing Bkerke back as a center of national power.  This has given voice and clout to opposition elements, Christian and Moslem,  in Lebanon to the Syrian clique and its stranglehold on political decision-making in Lebanon.   

New Economic Leverage in the Hands of the Opposition. This comes at a time when Rafik Hariri’s government is suffering through its most significant economic downturn since his coming to office in 1992.  The Lebanese reconstruction effort which has been financed with high interest debt issues has run out of steam as the government approaches the limits of its lending power.  The Lebanese national debt is now at 83% of the gross domestic product.  There is a liquidity crisis in Lebanon that only a fresh infusion of capital can cure.  Prime Minister Hariri is aware of this and invited Pope John Paul II to Lebanon as a sign that expatriate Lebanese Christians, who fled Lebanon and took their capital, should feel comfortable with returning and repatriating that capital in the Lebanese economy.  This new found economic power in the hands of those opposed to Syrian control in Lebanon also militates for a return of independent political decision-making in  Lebanon.   

Syrian Concern With the New Center of Power.  In the month since the close of the Papal visit, Bkerke, the home of the Maronite Patriarch has received as many foreign visitors and government officials as the President at Baabda.  The threat to the Syrian controlled government has become so acute that on June 5 the Syrian troika that controls Lebanon, Deputy Syrian President Khaddam, Syrian Foreign Minister Shareh, and the chief of Syrian Security forces in Lebanon, General Gazi Kenaan paid a joint visit to Baabda to meet with President Hrawi and Prime Minister Hariri.  In doing so they made the explicit point Syria deals with governments not religious leaders.  Discussions reportedly focused on the Israeli-Turkish alliance and the possibility of establishing an Arab economic bloc to counter it. 

Fact are Stubborn Things.  Cold economic facts, however, can not be ignored.  Hariri’s recovery is out of gas and unless he can win a quick infusion of capital, he stands to lose a fortune.  Expatriates have the capital needed to continue his programs, however their cooperation is at a price. They oppose his having subordinated the Lebanese government and policy decisions to the Syrian troika and are not likely to bail him out unless he concedes more power to Opposition elements in Lebanon and eventually breaks Lebanon out of the Syrian death grip.  Hariri has responded by overturning 4 elections of Deputies from the last Parliamentary elections held last September.  However, this is merely a token gesture.  More will be needed.  An accommodation of Opposition demands for political power to be returned to the Lebanese will be the only means by which they will agree to repatriate their capital.  Hariri is in the crucible and must make a choice. 

Factors in Place Empowering Independence for Lebanon.  The point is that sound economic factors have given Opposition elements in Lebanon political leverage to win back Lebanese independence.  The Papal visit has conferred international legitimacy to the demands of the Lebanese Opposition for the restoration of Lebanese independence.  The potential now exists for the reemergence of an independent Lebanon capable of executing policies that are in Lebanon’s national interests such as closing all terrorist training camps maintained on its soil and outside of its law and ending all military activity conducted on or from Lebanese soil outside of the chain of command of the Lebanese Armed Forces.  A Lebanon capable of just these to expressions of authority, while capable of serving Lebanese interests, would be serving American interests as well in preempting the gathering momentum for another regional war. 

Conclusion

NALA therefore urgently recommends that the United States reevaluate its entire strategy for the Middle East and the means necessary to bring the region into an era of peace with each state respecting the borders of the other, respecting the sovereignty of the other and each state integrated into the economic, diplomatic and political life of the region.  The United States must also come to the realization that comprehensive peace in the region, which is our stated objective, does not begin and end just with Israel and her neighbors.  The Iraq-Kuwaiti dispute should have taught us this.  There are other flash points that could trigger wars such as tensions on the Turkish-Syrian and Turkish-Iraqi  borders; The unresolved problem of the Kurds and their existence in four different states; and the Saudi Iranian rivalry.  None of these concern Israel, but any of them could adversely affect American interests in the region.   

It is unacceptable for the United States to forego an active policy in advance of its interests because regional allies are disinterested or are following their own agenda.  At the end of the day each nation is responsible for the protection and advancement of its national interests.  America has an interest in Middle East peace wholly separate from that or our regional ally Israel.  To suspend our pursuit of that interest because Israel has seen fit to follow another course makes the showing of deference to an ally a vice rather than a virtue.  It is an abandonment of national responsibility by the United States Government.    

A proper policy toward Lebanon and its reemergence as an independent state with its political decision making in its own hands, endures as the key now as before to the achievement of these objectives.  During the Cold War, Lebanon served as the venue for the region’s wars as every regional state had some presence in Lebanon or some group that identified with it and was thus willing to fight its surrogate wars.  Just as Lebanon’s pluralism weakened it and made it susceptible to serve as the region’s venue of choice for war, in this post-Cold War era, these same characteristics can make of Lebanon the region’s venue of choice for peaceful negotiation. John Paul II set the tone with his exhortation to the Lebanese to serve as the model to the world with its national vocation to peaceful coexistence of Muslim with Christian, and East with West.  There is no substitute for Lebanon in this regard.  Its unique national history as a place of refuge and sanctuary have prepared it for this unique role.  Rather than the cauldron from which spews the poison of war,  Lebanon can serve as the radiating fountain of peace.