INTERESTING TIMES: Arafat vs. the Bush Doctrine
By Saul Singer
(December 24) Question: Who is the nemesis of the war on terrorism? A: Osama bin Laden, B: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, C: Militant Islam or D: Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat?
The answer is E: All of the above, but the division of labor is not what you might think.
To rank these villains, a distinction must be made between terrorism itself and the legitimacy of terrorism in international relations. For his role in September 11, bin Laden has earned the title of world's No. 1 terrorist. But no man has done more to delegitimize terrorism in the eyes of the world. The enormity of September 11 has led the world to understand, as President George W. Bush said at the United Nations, "No national aspiration, no remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent."
Instead of the war he was trying to launch - that of the Islamic world against the United States - bin Laden succeeded in launching an American war to eradicate terrorism. Crushing bin Laden was an obvious opening step in this war, but now that his Taliban protectors have fallen and his days are numbered, his status will soon be downgraded from top terrorist to former threat.
With bin Laden on the run, Iraq's Saddam Hussein looms as the primary must-defeat target of the war on terrorism. As the icon of state-supported terrorism, everyone understands that Saddam must fall if this war is to mean anything. A strong case can be made that his fall is not enough, but there is no plausible definition of victory that leaves Saddam in place. And now the Afghan war has revealed the road map for how to do it: Support the local opposition to the hilt and watch as the tyrant's forces abandon him in droves.
After Saddam falls, a corner will have been turned in the war against state-supported terrorism, because the fall of two regimes will go far toward scaring other governments out of the terror business. A string of American victories will also dampen the attraction of militant Islam, but the US will also have to insist that Saudi Arabia stop funding schools across the Muslim world that incubate jihad against the West.
Over the longer term, winning this war requires addressing its real "root causes" - not poverty or the lack of a Palestinian state, but dictators who attempt to diffuse domestic dissent against themselves by fomenting hatred of the US and Israel.
All of the above is rapidly percolating into the post-September 11 conventional wisdom. But what is Arafat doing on this list? Arafat is a big problem for Israel, but what challenge does he present to the war on terrorism?
The answer is that Arafat is the most serious threat to Bush's courageous goal of not just crushing terrorists, but ending the utility of terrorism in international relations. Arafat is mounting the most brazen and credible bid to carving out an exception to the global unacceptability of terrorism.
The most succinct statement of the Bush Doctrine is, as he told a Thanksgiving gathering of US troops: "if you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist." Arafat is setting out to prove not only the possibility of harboring terrorists and holding power, but of reaping diplomatic rewards through terrorism.
This is not surprising, because Arafat has achieved everything in his life either by terrorism or by promising to refrain from terrorism. Arafat is a poster boy for the proposition that terrorism works.
Terrorism made him the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" in the eyes of the world (and ultimately of Israel). It even allowed him to turn down an offer of a Palestinian state over 97% of the West Bank and Gaza because he would have had to give up on destroying Israel demographically through the "right of return." US and Israeli leaders are fond of saying that violence has not gotten the Palestinians anywhere. The truth is it has gotten them a voucher for a state that they have so far chosen not to redeem.
Israel obviously cannot return to negotiations at gunpoint, whether that gun is still shooting, or just cocked and loaded. It seems to be less obvious, however, that if Arafat succeeds in making himself an exception to the Bush Doctrine it is not just Israel's problem but the first Western defeat in the global war on terrorism. The implications of such a defeat would be far reaching, and could substantially undermine the positive reverberations from victories in Afghanistan and (potentially) Iraq.
In some ways, Arafat represents the greatest threat to the war on terrorism, because he has the best chance of poking a gaping hole in the Bush Doctrine.
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