INTERESTING TIMES: Unfinished business
By Saul Singer
(April 22) In his parting press conference, Secretary of State Colin Powell kept referring back to President George Bush's "enough is enough" speech as if it was a lifeline leading to the fresh air above the muck he had sunken into.
Powell clung desperately to that April 4 statement as if to say, "look, I'm not freelancing here, it is the president who sent me on this feckless mission."
Powell is right to treat April 4 as a red-letter day for US policy toward the region, but it is red in the more ominous connotations of that color.
That was the day that Bush stumbled in the war on terrorism. On Wednesday, with his speech at the Virginia Military Institute, Bush began to pick himself up, but he still has not fully dusted himself off and found his bearings again.
April 4 was when Bush started pretending that there was a functional, if not moral, equivalence between Israel's fight against terrorism and terrorism itself. He defended Israel's right to self defense, but imposed arbitrary limits on the exercise of that right, which rendered his defense of it close to meaningless.
In doing this, Bush opened himself up to the charge of hypocrisy and of holding Israel to a double standard. But those who treat Bush's April 4 stumble as if it is mainly a question of treating Israel unfairly, or breaking a sort of campaign promise, miss its full significance.Likewise, the stakes in the war on terrorism itself are generally underestimated.
To call it the "war on terrorism," as Daniel Pipes has pointed out, is to pretend that this is a war against a tactic. What this war is really about is reshaping the world order as dramatically as did Western triumphs in World War II and the Cold War. More precisely, it is the unfinished business of America's Cold War and Gulf War victories.
JUST OVER a decade ago, a wave of freedom swept over Central Europe and the former Soviet Union as 70 years of communist tyranny imploded. That wave stopped abruptly at the end of the Gulf War when the United States, having just liberated Kuwait in a spectacular fashion, stood by as Saddam Hussein crushed the popular revolt against him.
In 1991, the United States was not ready to say that freedom mattered in the Arab world. At that time, freedom and stability were seen to be in conflict, and stability won out.
It took September 11 to make America realize that what had passed for stability in the Middle East was not just an affront to American values, but a profound challenge to her security. While some may think that Bush is being melodramatic by railing against the "axis of evil," in some ways he has understated the magnitude of the threat.
To say this is merely a war against terrorism is like saying that World War II was a war against kamikazes and not the Japanese. It is a war against, as an editorial in the National Review succinctly put it, "the Ba'athist fascism of Iraq; the Shi'ite radicalism of Iran; and the Sunni radicalism of Saudi Arabia." Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, of course, is presiding over a mini-cauldron of all three of these allied ideologies.
These three forces, which can be lumped together as "militant Islam," are an enemy as ultimately dangerous as European and Japanese fascism and Soviet communism were. Just because the threat does not come in the form of Panzer divisions or ICBMs does not mean that it is less great. It does not take a great degree of imagination to see how terrorism, if allowed to spread and intensify, could force the West to sue for peace.
Bush instinctively understands this. Less consciously, he seems to understand that the real difference between before and after September 11 is two words: regime change. As the Twin Towers fell, the idea that stability was the cornerstone of American security fell along with them. The cadets at VMI may have missed it, but it is no accident that Bush spoke of the Taliban as the "first" regime to fall in the war against terror.
On April 4, Bush decided for tactical reasons to blow a bubble around Israel and the Palestinians and declare this particular branch of the war a regime change-free zone. There was and is no chance that this would work, because militant Islam immediately recognized that, by fiddling with the flames of terror and the smoke screen of peace plans, there was the possibility of expanding the bubble to include Iraq. An entire rogues' gallery is banking on Arafat to prove that harboring terrorism is not a crime punishable by regime change.
Bush will get back on track when he realizes that saving Arafat, far from helping oust Saddam, is Saddam's last best hope. |
