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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| The Mideat's Munich |
| 2006-08-16 |
| War with the mullahs is coming by Arthur Herman Historians will look back at this weekend's cease-fire agreement in Lebanon as a pivotal moment in the war on terror. It is pivotal in the same sense that the Munich agreement between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain was pivotal in an earlier battle against the enemies of freedom. The accord in October 1938 revealed to the world that the solidarity of the Western allies was a sham, and that the balance of power had shifted to the fascist dictators. Resolution 1701 shows that, for the time being at least, the balance has likewise shifted to the terrorists and their state sponsors. Like Munich, it marks the triumph of the principle of putting off until tomorrow what needs to be done today. Like Munich, it will mean not peace in our time, but a bigger war in our future. In that sense, the cease-fire may be even more momentous than Munich, and a greater blunder. In 1938 Chamberlain and other appeasers had the excuse that they were trying to prevent an armed conflict no one wanted. Today, of course, that conflict is already here. Historians will conclude that by supporting U.N. Resolution 1701 and getting Israel to agree, the Bush administration has in effect declared that its global war on terror is over. We have reverted to the pre-9/11 box of tools, if not necessarily the pre-9/11 mindset. From now on, the worst Iran, Syria, and North Korea will have to worry about are serial resolutions in the United Nations. Terrorists will be busy dodging Justice Department subpoenas, not Tomahawk missiles. Our enemies know better. They know the war is only entering a new stage, and they know who the winners and losers were last weekend. The clear losers were the United States and Israel. Israel has sacrificed lives and treasure, and had its honor dragged through the mud of international opinion, for no purpose. America squandered its political capital at the start of the crisis by getting moderate Arab regimes to condemn Hezbollah instead of Israel. They did so because they thought Hezbollah was about to be annihilated. However, they soon realized their mistake. They now know Tehran and Damascus will set the agenda in the Middle East, not Washington. The Arab League's support for this U.N.-brokered deal is just one more measure of our strategic failure. The other loser is Lebanon. The price of peace in 1938 was de jure dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, as Germany annexed the Sudetenland. The price of Resolution 1701 is de facto dismemberment of Lebanon. A large, well-armed terrorist army acting at the behest of a foreign power now controls the southern half of Lebanon, and pulls the strings in the other half. The facade of Lebanese self-government has been preserved. As a territorial state, it may even last longer than Czechoslovakia did (Hitler gave the Czechs five months before he annexed the rest of their country). But other states in the region will have learned their lesson. Faced by an internal terrorist organization, especially one with links with Tehran, they will have to make accommodations. No white knight in the guise of U.S. Marines will ride to their rescue; no Israeli tanks and F-16s will do their dirty work for them. Appeasement will be the order of the day. That includes Iraq. The disarming of Sunni and Shia militias, the necessary first step to ending sectarian violence there, will be postponed - perhaps for good. On the contrary, this crisis has taught Iraq's Shia minority that extremism pays, particularly the Iranian kind. For everyone in the Middle East knows Iran is the clear winner. Only the diplomats and politicians, including the Bush administration, will pretend otherwise. Iran has emerged as the clear champion of anti-Israeli feeling and radical Islam. The Iranians have their useful puppet in Syria; they have their proxy armies in place with Hezbollah and Hamas. They have been able to install missiles, even Revolutionary Guards, in Lebanon with impunity. Sunni regimes in the region will move to strike their own deals with Iran, just as Eastern European states did with Germany after Czechoslovakia. That includes Iraq; the lesson will not be lost on Russia and China, either. And all the while, the Iranians proceed with their nuclear plans - with the same impunity. Finally, the other winners are the conventional diplomats at the State Department, especially Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns. In a narrow professional sense, appeasement is their business. They never saw the point to a "war on terror they are delighted to take back the initiative from the hawks at the Pentagon and the White House. The war in Iraq has clearly sapped the moral strength of the Bush administration. The men of Munich acquiesced to Hitler because another world war like the first seemed unthinkable. The Bush administration clearly feels it cannot face another major confrontation even with a second-rate power like Iran. Yet by calling off the war on terror, it has only postponed that conflict. "We have passed an awful milestone in our history," Winston Churchill said after the Munich agreement was signed. "Do not suppose this is the end . . . This is only the first sip, the first foretaste, of a bitter cup that will be proffered to us year by year." Despite the failure of appeasement, Churchill still believed the Western democracies would make the "supreme recovery" and take up the banner for freedom again. The United States and the forces of democracy will recover from this debacle - even with a Democratic Congress in 2006 and a Democratic president in 2008. The reason will not be because Bush's opponents have a better strategy, or a clearer vision, or even a Winston Churchill waiting in the wings. It will be because our enemies will give us no choice. Less than a year after Munich, Nazi panzers rolled into Poland. Instead of fighting a short, limited war over Czechoslovakia, the Western democracies ended up fighting a world war, the most destructive in history. The war with the mullahs of Iran is coming. It is only a question of whether it will be at a time or on a ground of our choosing, or theirs - and whether it is fought within the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Arthur Herman is the author most recently of "To Rule The Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World." He is completing a book on Churchill and Gandhi. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #6 isn't he the guy travelling with Totten? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-08-16 20:03 |
| #5 I really like that article, twobyfour. I hope it comes closer to the essential truth of the situation than the one I posted. It's the first well reasoned opinion piece I've read so far that gives some hope. Maybe there is a silver lining hidden in the looming black cloud. |
| Posted by: ryuge 2006-08-16 19:51 |
| #4 Way good 2x4. |
| Posted by: 6 2006-08-16 18:38 |
| #3 Almost always there isnt such thing has Grand Strategy. |
| Posted by: Clerert Uneamp2772 2006-08-16 11:01 |
| #2 A different take... One Cheer for Ceasefire An alternative explanation for why we — the U.S. and Israel — gave in. By Noah Pollak Jerusalem—To most Israelis, supporters of Israel, and especially to the IDF soldiers I spoke to on the border over the past few days, the cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah that recently went into effect is viewed as a cruel indignity, a dangerous projection of Israeli weakness and equivocation, and a plucking of defeat from the jaws of victory. These were my thoughts as well. The IDF was inflicting heavy, lopsided — one might even say disproportionate — damage on Hezbollah men and materiel. Stopping the war seems inexplicable, other than as an expression of total Western cravenness and appeasement to Islamic radicalism. But people like John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, have a proven track record of sobriety in these matters. It’s difficult to believe that Bolton would have thrown United States support behind a patently unwise agreement, or that Israel would have agreed to a resolution thoroughly harmful to its own interests. So herewith, in what may rightfully be construed as an exercise in wishful thinking, is an alternative explanation for U.S. and Israeli acquiescence to the U.N. cease-fire resolution. Undoubtedly, the most important and highest-priority U.S. and Israeli objective in the Middle East today is thwarting Iran’s nuclear-weapons project. It is likely that the confrontation with Iran will not be resolved diplomatically, and that in the decisive moment it will be America, not Israel, that dispatches its military forces to destroy the Iranian nuclear sites. This basic calculus is the context in which American and Israeli Middle East strategic thinking takes place today. Israel’s actions against Hezbollah thus must fit within the greater shared U.S.-Israeli strategy for the region. That strategy always must consider the danger of an Arab League or OPEC decision to curtail oil sales, as in 1973. An oil embargo is the Arabs’ secret weapon: Gas rationing and triple-digit per barrel oil prices would cripple the global economy, enrage the American public, and possibly engender anti-Israel popular sentiment in the U.S. Even the threat of an embargo would send oil prices skyrocketing. American support for Israeli military actions must therefore always be wary to the risk of Arab hostility to Israel uniting behind the cause of restricting the sale of Middle Eastern oil. The heart of the strategic conundrum thus becomes this salient fact: If the U.S. is to strike Iran, Israel must be deterred from being provoked into the conflict and jeopardizing the abstention of other Arab states from interference in the clean execution of the mission and its aftermath. Because Iran, in conventional terms, is largely defenseless against an American bombing campaign, Iran’s first objective upon being attacked will be to draw Israel into the conflict. This is almost the exact same scenario as in the first Gulf War, and then it took intense diplomatic pressure to prevent Israel from retaliating against Iraq for its repeated missile attacks. It is almost unthinkable that Israel could be called upon again to summon such self-restraint. The way Iran would drag Israel into the war and dramatically complicate the U.S. mission would be through Hezbollah, which until recently was firmly entrenched on Israel’s northern border, fully armed and spoiling for a fight. Thus, even given Israel’s curtailed and incomplete war against Hezbollah, the U.S.’s — and arguably, Israel’s — primary objective in the conflict has been accomplished: creating a state of affairs in which Iran cannot use Hezbollah to drag Israel into the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, incite Arab opposition to the U.S., and threaten a global energy crisis. The partial war against Hezbollah has accomplished an important additional objective: what was previously a looming unknown — Hezbollah’s military capability on Israel’s northern border — has been engaged, partially destroyed, and is now a known quantity. Iran still has many other means to deter, complicate, and retaliate against a U.S. strike: International terrorism and an increased campaign of destabilization in Iraq are two of the most fearsome, but its most reliable and effective course of action would have been to use Hezbollah to rain down destruction on Israel. Assuming the ceasefire period prevents the re-arming of Hezbollah and the reinfiltration of Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border — two very big, and possibly foolish, assumptions — Iran’s most worrying means of retaliation against an American strike has been defeated. But why stop Israel now? Wouldn’t all of the benefits to the American-Israeli strategic position be even further solidified by a more complete destruction of Hezbollah? Perhaps. But there are complications: One is the unrest the conflict is causing in Iraq. The U.S. doesn't need Muqtada al-Sadr to feel any more emboldened than he already does. Moreover, American pressure on Israel to stop the war is likely a concession to Europe and the U.N. in advance of needing (or believing to need) those alliances to be healthy in anticipation of the Iran confrontation. Also, the Cedar Revolution and the partial wresting of Syria out of Lebanon are two of the most tangible victories of the Bush administration’s Middle East democratization project. A continued Israeli assault on Lebanon that is seen by Lebanon’s ostensibly pro-Western Christians, Druze, and Sunnis as being needless American-approved destruction threatens the sympathies of the nascent Lebanese moderates. In particular, France retains some prestige in Lebanon and can be useful in preventing the reversal of U.S. accomplishments there. Pressuring Israel is a way to give the Europeans and the U.N. something they want now in return for something the U.S. wants later, which is a basic level of unity and fortitude in dealing with Iran. Finally, one of the most surprising occurrences in the past month was the hostility expressed by the Sunni Arab world to Shia Hezbollah’s provocation. The importance of this should not be understated: Arab regimes like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia actually publicly condemned other Arabs who were fighting against Israel. Why? Because the Sunni regimes are worried about the ascendance of a Shia alliance comprised of Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran that could manipulate the region with proxy terrorist armies (such as Hezbollah) operating under the safety of an Iranian nuclear umbrella. The Sunni states dislike Hezbollah and Iran enough to condemn the “adventuresome” attack against Israel, but detest Israel enough — and are sufficiently aware of the contours of their own domestic public opinion — to oppose a protracted Israeli reprisal. Given their fear of a nuclear Shia Middle East, the Sunni states can likely be counted on to tacitly accept a U.S. strike on Iran. Hence, pressure from them to make their acquiescence to an Iran operation contingent on U.S. endorsement of the ceasefire, in the interest of pacifying their publics. Sober-minded observers are right to be wary of a new flight of fancy emanating from the United Nations, especially a U.N. led by the venal and treacherous Kofi Annan. The inclusion in the ceasefire deal of an open-ended, unrestricted weapons-inspections regime in Lebanon with pre-approved sanctions imposed on any country caught re-supplying Hezbollah would have been an important indication of seriousness. The failure to articulate such a premeditated penalty is a further indication to our enemies that the Western diplomatic community is devoted to toothless half-measures. The ceasefire has damaged Israeli morale, prevented a more thorough destruction of Hezbollah, and in the short term spared Syria and Iran from the humiliation of seeing their proxy military dismantled. But — and this again may be wishful thinking — it also may be tangible evidence that the Bush administration is taking Iran’s nuclear ambitions seriously. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2006-08-16 07:56 |
| #1 *Mideast's* D'OH! |
| Posted by: ryuge 2006-08-16 07:49 |