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Mideast instability? Bring it on
MARK STEYNIn the summer of 2002, Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, issued a stern warning to the BBC: a US invasion of Iraq would "threaten the whole stability of the Middle East." As I wrote at the time, "Heâs missing the point: thatâs the reason itâs such a great idea." I thought about Mr. Moussa a lot this past week. I was invited to speak at the United States Naval Academyâs foreign affairs conference, a great honor for a foreigner. I wasnât the star attraction â that was Condoleezza Rice; I was merely a warm-up act. Anyway, I was struck by a phrase in Dr. Riceâs address that I donât believe Iâve heard her use before. She was talking about the fourth plane on September 11th, Flight 93, the one that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania en route to destroy either the Capitol or the White House. If it had reached the latter, that would have been the "money shot" that day, as it was in the alien-invasion flick Independence Day â the center of American power reduced to rubble. What happened on 9/11, said Rice, was an attempt to "decapitate us." If not for quirks of flight scheduling and al-Qaida personnel management, the headlines would have included "The Vice-President is still among the missing, presumed dead" or â if theyâd got really lucky â that the presidency had passed to the president pro tem of the Senate, octogenarian West Virginia Democrat, porkmeister and former Klansman Robert Byrd. In other words, if youâre wondering why this administrationâs approach to terrorism is so focused on regime change, itâs because the terrorists came so close to changing Americaâs regime. Theyâve since managed to change Spainâs. So why should the traffic be all one way? About two weeks after 9/11, I came to the conclusion that almost anything was better than Moussaâs much-vaunted "stability." The fetishization of stability was a big part of the problem. Falling for the Moussa line would give us another 25 years of the ayatollahs, another 35 years of the PLO and Hamas, another 40 of the Baâathists in Syria and Iraq, another 70 of Saudi Wahhabism. Even another 20 years of Mubarak doesnât have anything to commend it. All stability means is that the most malign Middle Eastern tyranny â Saudi Arabia â has wound up being the wealthiest and thus is able to export its toxins around the world, via the madrassas it has built in Pakistan, South Asia, the Balkans, and North America. WASHINGTON APPARENTLY reached the same conclusion â that anything was better than the status quo. Or, as Thomas Friedman put it in The New York Times this weekend, "President Bush has stepped in and thrown the whole frozen Middle East chessboard up in the air." Thatâs why Moussa is so discombobulated. The Arab League (set up in a typically devious move by the British which, just as typically, backfired on them) was the preeminent body of regional stability. Its most recent meeting, scheduled to be held in Tunis, had to be scrapped because of irreconcilable divisions between the old-school thug regimes and the more enlightened members who wanted better relations with America and Britain. Now itâs the EU Arafatistsâ turn to be discombobulated. In supporting Ariel Sharonâs planned Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, President Bush said last week it was time to recognize "realities on the ground" and "unrealistic" to expect a return to the armistice lines of 1949. What this means is that, after half a century of formal neutrality on the issue, the US has stated the obvious: The "sensitive issue" of the Palestinian "right of return" is sensitive mainly because itâs a lot of hooey thatâs never going to happen. Tough, but thatâs the reality on the ground. There is no point entering into negotiations predicated on not disturbing the fantasies of one side. Iâve never been to Gaza, but I have mooched around the West Bank and, compared to such nascent nations as Slovenia or East Timor, itâs all but impossible to detect evidence of any plausible nationalist movement. Everywhere you go, you see the glorification of the martyrdom movement and the Jew-killing movement, and evidently those are such a hit that Palestinian nationalism has withered in their wake, except insofar as when all the Jews are gone, whatâs left will by default be Palestinian. Ariel Sharon has decided that one cannot negotiate with a void, a nullity â and even sentimental European Yasserphiles might, in their more honest moments, acknowledge that the only way the Palestinians are ever going to get a state is if theyâre cut out of the process. So the Israelis are building their wall, and whatâs left over on the other side will either be a new state, the present decayed Arafatist squat, or an ever more frustrated self-detonation academy. But it will be up to the Palestinians to choose because theyâll be the ones living with the consequences. BUSH HAS gone along with Sharon because it accords with his post-9/11 assessment of the Middle East: The biggest gamble canât be worse than Moussaâs stability. Indeed, the Israeli governmentâs new Hamas Assassination-of-the-Month program usefully clarifies the bottom line: A high rotation of thugs is better than the same thug decade in, decade out. Poor Rantissi, killed this weekend, seems unlikely to get the glowing send-off from European obituarists they gave to his predecessor, the "revered quadriplegic spiritual leader," Sheikh Yassin. Already, bigshot terrorists in Gaza are said to be reconsidering their applications for next monthâs vacancy. Thatâs the bottom line elsewhere, too. If all else fails, then a modified Sam Goldwyn philosophy will do: Iâm sick of the old despots, bring me some new despots. But it wonât come to that. In Iraq, Libya, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere, the old Middle East is dying, and what replaces it can only be better. Posted by: tipper 2004-04-21 |
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