Democrats Jumping Towards Israel

[Annie]

Very astute piece, in of all place, TNR:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=28676

What is The Plank?


PROBLEMATIC PEACE PROPOSALS:

Sir Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, is a very wise man, deeply knowledgeable about military matters and how they affect and constrain diplomacy. He also is very learned about the Middle East. Read anything he had written and you will find it not only rewarding but challenging. Among his books are The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Deterrence, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, and (with Efraim Karsh) The Gulf Conflict: 1990-1991. In an op-ed column in Wednesday's Financial Times, Freedman addresses the current war between Israel and Hezbollah, complicated by the material presence of Syria and Iran in the confrontation.

He recognizes that, "Prior to the current conflict, a new and moderate Israeli approach was evolving, reflecting its inability to occupy hostile territory. Yet though the Israelis left southern Lebanon in 2000, Gaza last year and are constructing a West Bank security fence that implicitly concedes the territory on the other side to the Palestinians, their old enemies will not leave them alone." He also understands that the region "has become the focal point for an ideological struggle of global significance." While his column proposes a multilateral force in southern Lebanon to deal with present situation, he does not--I think--grapple enough with the problems intrinsic to this formula. It is no deus ex machina. The fact that this has, indeed, become an ideological struggle of global significance implies that a deterrent calculus doesn't apply. The men of Hezbollah are soldiers of God.

Still, if it works and actually removes an armed Hezbollah from rocket and missile access to Israel (which I deeply doubt), it could be a model also for the border with Gaza and with the parts of the West Bank which Jerusalem had been prepared to relinquish before this war. Something of that model (a U.S.-led military force in the Sinai) is what separated Egypt and Israel from each other. The Sinai is sovereign Egyptian territory. But its military presence is severely restricted. Jordan and Israel patrol their border just fine. So is the multi-lateral force a paradigm also for a border between Israel and Palestine, as Freedman suggests? On Palestine, he is brutally honest and appropriately so: "As a self-governing entity, Palestine is a failure. It must not be governed by Israel, so perhaps a more drastic policy shift is needed." Here Freedman becomes a bit jittery, "It might at least be worth considering setting it up as a United Nations trust territory, with the UN responsible not only for internal security and economic reconstruction but (with a strong local input) for final negotiations with Israel." He doesn't actually say whether the United Nations is up to the job.

Now, more than 58 years after the British surrendered their mandate in complete disarray, when the high commissioner lowered the Union Jack in Haifa bay, after which the Jewish community declared itself a state in the territories allotted to it by the U.N. Partition Plan, another mandate--which is what a trusteeship amounts to--is being proposed for the Arabs. How humiliating for them. And how degrading. So are the Palestinians a real nation? Never mind. You don't have to be a nation to have a state. At the same time, it helps to be a nation to have a good state.

Nancy Soderberg was a significant figure in the foreign policy of the Clinton administration, serving in the National Security Council and as an (but not the) ambassador to the United Nations. Since being out of office, she has spent her time criticizing the Bushies, not a difficult chore. Even Jon Stewart, however, felt that she was enjoying that work a bit too much. She has also done a book, The Superpower Myth. Yesterday (that is, Wednesday), she published a column in The New York Times, "Peacekeepers Are Not Peacemakers," a very shrewd analysis of why the Kofi Annan-Jacques Chirac idea of bringing peace to Israel and Lebanon won't work. "[N]o cease-fire will hold unless the root cause of the current crisis is addressed: the continuing presence of armed Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon." It's more or less President Bush's view and also that of Condoleeza Rice, at both of whom she takes a gratuitous parting shot in her last paragraph. "Success will take more sophisticated diplomacy that we have yet seen from" the two of them. I suppose the Clinton administration's diplomacy on the White House lawn in 1993 (the big jamboree celebrating the Oslo accords) or the Camp David and Taba negotiations in the dying days of the Clinton presidency are instances of "sophisticated diplomacy." But let's be frank. Nancy Soderberg is the epitome of a liberal, anti-Bush international affairs hand. If she and Chris Dodd and Joe Biden agree with Bush on this, very few Democrats are against him on this defining issue. And those who are come from the Cynthia McClintock-Dennis Kucinich-Michael Moore wing of the party.

--Martin Peretz