“New Middle East” Out of Control
By Jim Lobe
TomPaine.com
Friday 11 August 2006
Mideast: Veteran policy-makers fear disaster in US course.
Alarms are definitely on the rise here.
And it’s not just because the British police arrested 21 people who were allegedly plotting to bomb up to 10 jetliners between London and the United States in mid-flight over the Atlantic Ocean. Although that probably didn’t help.
It’s more the sense that the growing number of crises in the “new Middle East,” proudly midwifed by the administration of President George W. Bush, is rapidly spinning out of control with potentially catastrophic consequences for the entire region and beyond.
The ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah-not to imminent expansion of Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon if it does not get a United Nations Security Council resolution to its liking-has, by virtually all accounts, inflamed and radicalized the Islamic world and rendered a larger regional conflagration much more likely.
At the same time, Wednesday’s report that an unprecedented 1,815 bodies, 90 percent victims of violence, were brought to the Baghdad’s morgue last month-eclipsing the previous record established in June by some 250 corpses-appeared to confirm the increasingly widespread view here that Iraq is moving headlong towards civil war, if it isn’t already in one, as many regional experts have contended for some time.
“Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency,” noted Washington’s former U.N. Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, in an uncharacteristically alarming column in Thursday’s Washington Post.
The column’s title, “The Guns of August”, was a reference to a book about the diplomatic follies and indecisive battles that launched Europe into a devastating world war in 1914.
“A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay,” Holbrooke warned. “…The combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history’s only nuclear superpower confrontation.”
Among other things, noted Holbrooke, a top candidate for secretary of state if Democrats had won the presidency in 2000 or 2004, Turkey is threatening to invade northern Iraq; the world’s largest anti-Israel demonstrations are taking place in downtown Baghdad; Syria may yet be pulled into the Lebanon war; Afghanistan is under growing threat from a resurgent Taliban; and India is threatening about punitive action against Pakistan for its alleged involvement in the recent train bombings in Bombay.
Particularly alarming to Holbrooke, as to a steadily growing number of Republican realists and other members of the traditional U.S. foreign policy elite, is the apparent complacency of the Bush administration in the face of these events.
Indeed, since the outbreak of the Lebanon crisis four weeks ago, a succession of former top Republican policy-makers-including Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to former presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush; the younger Bush’s former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage; and Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass-has called publicly for a major reassessment of U.S. Middle East policy and its conduct of the “global war on terror.”
Their common message is the necessity of pressing Israel for a quick ceasefire in Lebanon, engaging directly with Syria and Iran on both Lebanon and Iraq, and restarting a serious peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. It has been echoed by leading Democrats, including former President Jimmy Carter ; his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski; and former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, as well as by Holbrooke himself.
To these appeals, however-as well as to the worsening of the twin crises themselves-the administration has appeared largely deaf. “There is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognise how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions,” Holbrooke noted.
The one, at least partial, exception has been Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice whose State Department, a bastion of realism, has been under almost constant attack since the outset of the Lebanon crisis by the same coalition of neo-conservatives, assertive nationalists, and Christian rightists led by Vice President Dick Cheney that led the drive to war in Iraq.
In the early stages of the latest war, Rice, who is also the only senior administration official who has been in constant communication with European and Arab leaders, was most outspoken about the importance of Israel exercising restraint and not attacking civilian infrastructure in Lebanon. She was reportedly infuriated when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert failed to follow through on a pledge to suspend aerial attacks for two days late last month.
Rice, a Scowcroft protégée, has supported talks with Syria on the crisis, and, according to an account published this week in Insight magazine, a publication of the right-wing Washington Times, has also argued in favour of engaging Iran.
Before the Lebanon crisis, Rice appeared to be successfully moving U.S. policy gradually, if fitfully, towards a more realist position, particularly with respect to Iran. But she has now run into a brick wall in Bush himself, according to Insight.
“For the last 18 months, Condi was given nearly carte blanche in setting foreign policy guidelines,” it quoted one “senior government source” as saying. “All of a sudden, the president has a different opinion and he wants the last word.”
Her problems, however, may not be confined to Bush, according to another report in Thursday’s New York Times, which suggested that Cheney – and his mainly neo-conservative advisers – has become increasingly assertive in the latest crisis in support of Israel’s efforts to crush Hezbollah. (In fact, some of his unofficial advisers, such as Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, have called for expanding the war to Syria and even Iran.)
In that respect, the current situation recalls the humiliation of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s who in early 2002 sought to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to halt Israel’s military offensive in the Palestinian territories – only to be undercut back home by Cheney and, ironically, by then-national security adviser Rice herself.
“She had as much to do with cutting his legs out from under him vis-Ã -vis the Middle East as anyone else – either through outright agreement with Cheney, or, at the minimum, complicity with his views so as to draw even closer to Bush,” according to ret. Col Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff at the State Department.
That experience, of course, confirmed the demise of realist influence in Bush’s first term, at least with respect to the Middle East.
That Rice may now find herself in a similar position, having to contend with a resurgent Cheney-led coalition of hawks who are not so much complacent about the course of current events in the Middle East as convinced that their strategy of regional “transformation” by military means will be vindicated, is what is perhaps particularly alarming about the present moment.
“This whole business is nuts – unless, of course, you believe what the rumor-mongers are beginning to pass around,” wrote Wilkerson in reference to the Lebanon war in an email exchange with IPS. “(T)hat this entire affair was ginned up by Bush/Cheney and certain political leaders in Tel Aviv to give cover for the eventual attack by the U.S. on Iran. At first, I refused to believe what seemed to be such insanity. But I am not so certain any longer.”
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Jim Lobe is Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service. Reprinted with permission.
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Some Israelis Criticizing War in Lebanon
The Associated Press
Thursday 10 August 2006
Tel Aviv, Israel – The first cracks in Israeli support for the war in Lebanon emerged Thursday, with leading intellectuals and mainstream politicians criticizing the government’s decision to send more soldiers into Hezbollah territory.
Every Friday for a month, anti-war activists have demonstrated against Israel’s retaliation for Hezbollah’s July 12 cross-border raid, but they never drew more than a handful of people. Opinion polls showed backing for the war at about 80 percent.
But some peace activists who had remained quiet or even supported the fighting now say it has gone on long enough.
Three of Israel’s most successful authors and intellectuals – Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua – on Thursday urged Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to focus on diplomatic rather than military initiatives.
“We are at a crossroads between the green light given for continuing military operations and explorations for a political solution,” Yehoshua said.
The nascent turnabout came after Olmert’s Security Cabinet voted Wednesday to extend the ground offensive to the Litani River, 18 miles from the Israeli border. It delayed the start of the operation to give diplomats a few more days to work out a cease-fire, officials said.
Earlier in the week, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora offered to deploy the Lebanese army along Israel’s border, reinforced by international peacekeepers positioned between Hezbollah and Israel.
Olmert called the plan “interesting,” but the Israeli government made no specific response, instead voting for an expanded offensive.
“Israel was right when it chose to respond with force to Hezbollah’s violent provocation,” said Oz, an eloquent voice of the Israeli left. He called Hezbollah an arm of radical Islam that would celebrate Israel’s annihilation, and said its defeat would be a triumph for moderates in the Middle East.
However, the Lebanese plan “was not only a turning point, it was a victory for Israel’s basic demand,” Oz said. Israel should have told Saniora his plan was a good basis for negotiation and halted its offensive.
“If they had offered this to us a month ago, we would have jumped at it,” said Grossman.
Continued warfare risks the gains Israel has made and could cause the collapse of the Lebanese government, with Hezbollah emerging as Lebanon’s predominant power, said Grossman.
About 600 people attended a rally in Tel Aviv on Thursday. Though small compared with the tens of thousands who protested Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, it marked a revival of Israel’s dormant peace movement.
Three of the 12 ministers in Olmert’s inner Cabinet abstained in Wednesday’s vote. Shimon Peres and Ofer Pines-Paz argued that diplomatic channels should be exhausted before expanding the war, while Eli Yishai wanted to rely on airstrikes rather than risk more ground troops, the Haaretz newspaper reported.
At 30 days, the Lebanon conflict is Israel’s longest war since independence in 1948. With more than 100 civilian and military casualties, the seed of discontent is growing over the army’s failure to dislodge Hezbollah and stop the hail of rockets on northern Israel.
Public sentiment mostly has called for more aggressive action, not less – a likely factor in the government’s decision to escalate military operations.
But doubts have been growing about whether Hezbollah can be destroyed, as Israel set out to do a month ago.
“We are getting lost in pursuit of a victory that is not there,” wrote mainstream columnist Nahum Barnea in the Yediot Aharonot daily.
“There is no point investing in a lost cause,” Barnea wrote, urging Olmert to “take what they’re offering you … and run.”
“Today the Zionist left has to express itself,” said Yossi Beilin, head of the dovish Meretz Party. “We gave a month and we held back in motions of no confidence, we held back in votes. We are saying, ‘No more. Go make an agreement, don’t go ask America for more time.'”
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