An interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal tries to place the present state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the context of the Bush administration's foreign policy goals.
A very interesting piece. It simply underlines what a terribly complicated place it is for US foreign policy. And notes, quite rightly, that the Bushies have not found their singular voice.
Violence in Mideast Is Testing
Limits of U.S. War on Terror
By CARLA ANNE ROBBINS, DAVID S. CLOUD and HUGH POPE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Six months after President Bush declared war on terrorism, the escalating conflict in Israel is aggravating one of his most urgent problems: figuring out who is and who isn't a terrorist.
Suddenly that quandary is proving to be more difficult than ever for the president. Monday brought the latest in a series of six Palestinian suicide attacks on Israeli targets in as many days: a car bombing that killed the bomber and seriously injured a policeman in downtown Jerusalem.
Speaking at the White House, President Bush condemned the suicide bombings as "simple terror." But he refused to label Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a terrorist because, Mr. Bush said, "he has agreed to a peace process."
In fact, after a weekend of harsh words for the Palestinians and expressions of support for the Israelis, Mr. Bush seemed to want again to pull back toward the more-neutral stance of a mediator. He called on Mr. Arafat to condemn the suicide attacks, but he also urged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "to keep a pathway to peace open."
Mr. Sharon uses the suicide bombings to equate the Palestinian movement with terrorism, and he has demanded that the U.S. break with the movement's leaders. Mr. Sharon defends Israeli actions in the Palestinian-controlled territories, saying there is a clear difference between suicide bombers striking at civilian targets, and using the army to strike at military and political targets, as Israel has done.
Yet Arab leaders -- whose support the U.S. needs elsewhere for its broader war on terrorism -- insist with equal vehemence that the Palestinians are freedom fighters trying to liberate their land from Israeli occupation, and that Washington should stop Israel from launching an all-out war against them. The Arab definition of terrorism doesn't include a Palestinian uprising.
The problem of how to define the enemy has been shadowing Mr. Bush ever since he decided to broaden his war on terrorism beyond Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. The U.S. has put Iraq at the center of an "axis of evil" because of that country's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the threat that they could be passed on to terrorists. But some of America's closest European allies have warned that they wouldn't support an attack against Iraq unless the U.S. could come up with clear proof that Baghdad was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
At the same time, leaders in countries as far apart as Macedonia and Colombia have rushed to brand their local enemies as "international terrorists" -- in hopes of obtaining U.S. aid or at least a tacit U.S. endorsement of any action they might take to suppress their opponents.
Other leaders are also finding themselves struggling with the definition of terror. At a meeting of Islamic foreign ministers Monday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad called on the group to condemn as terrorists anyone who attacks civilians -- whether Israeli troops or Palestinian suicide bombers. Dr. Mahathir said the Sept. 11 attacks had been a disaster for the standing of Muslims around the world. Even so, the group is unlikely to accept his definition. At the end of the conference's first day, it unanimously approved a resolution accusing Israel "of dragging the region toward an all-out war."
The escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians has complicated the Bush campaign against terrorism on multiple fronts. It has already slowed U.S. efforts to rally a new coalition against Iraq, and it could quickly make it politically more difficult for Islamic governments to cooperate in the pursuit of al Qaeda operatives who are on the run.
For the U.S., there also is the risk that its support for Israel may inspire some Palestinian radicals, or their sympathizers elsewhere in the Islamic world, to again zero in on American targets for terror attacks. In mid-February, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, leader of Hamas, the group that has organized roughly two-thirds of the suicide bombings, called for a jihad, or holy struggle, against American influence in the Middle East.
In recent weeks U.S. intelligence officials have begun to warn that Palestinian terrorist groups could turn their wrath against the U.S., both for its support of Israel and its crackdown on those groups' funding sources. "If these groups feel that U.S. actions are threatening their existence, they may begin targeting Americans directly," George Tenet, the U.S. director of central intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.
U.S. officials were so worried about that possibility that American intelligence agencies conducted an analysis of the Palestinian threat before they moved last fall against the Holy Land Foundation. The Texas-based charity is accused of helping finance Hamas. The agencies' analysis concluded that the threat of direct attacks against the U.S. was small, but that it was likely to grow if the U.S. campaign continued, according to a person familiar with the report's conclusions.
Some experts doubt that the Palestinian leadership would authorize any direct attacks on the U.S. Rather, they fear the impetus would come from rogue elements within one of the groups or an individual cell acting on its own.
The more subtle problem for the U.S. is that allies it has counted on since Sept. 11 may not think they enlisted in a war on terror that counted Palestinians in the terrorist category. In fact, the dangers of the U.S. choosing sides in the Israeli conflict are having an impact even in Turkey, a close U.S. ally and fellow member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization whose logistical support would be essential for any U.S. attack on Iraq.
In Turkey, the fury at Israel, and by proxy at the U.S., is growing daily, wiping out much of the sympathy generated by the Sept. 11 attacks, says political analyst Cengiz Candar. "Nobody buys the attitude of Bush. ... For many Turks, terrorism is what is being done by the Israelis ... so any American claim that it is leading the global war on terrorism is losing its appeal."
In Istanbul Monday, 500 Turkish leftists mounted a rare anti-American demonstration, shouting "Murderer Sharon, Murderer U.S." and "Damn America." Similar pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place in the capitals of U.S. Middle East allies Jordan and Egypt, as well as in Libya, Sudan and Lebanon.
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres warned Monday that suicide attacks such as those carried out by Palestinian militants now threaten to become a world-wide peril. "Our problem is not terror in the generally accepted meaning of the word," Mr. Peres told Israeli television. "There is a new type of terror, one of suicide bombings. We must warn the world that it can become an international phenomenon."
Many experts say that Hamas introduced the tactic of suicide bombings into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 1993, after the signing of the Oslo peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Sept. 11 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon brought the phenomenon home to Americans, caused thousands of casualties and underscored the difficulty of preventing attacks when those who carry them out are willing to go down with their victims. Recently, the use of suicide bombings against Israeli targets has been endorsed by some Islamic clerics in Egypt and Lebanon.
The tactic was on display again Monday in Jerusalem, when a Palestinian suicide bomber from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a group linked to Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement, blew himself up at a Jerusalem checkpoint. The attack came as Israel extended its four-day-old West Bank offensive. The operation, involving scores of tanks and armored vehicles and thousands of troops, is steadily moving beyond the key town of Ramallah, where Mr. Arafat is still besieged in his headquarters.
As Israeli armor moved into position in or around several more West Bank towns, including Bethlehem, Qalqilya and Tulkarem, troops went house to house searching for arms caches and conducting running gun battles with Palestinians. Outside Ramallah, Israeli forces attacked the headquarters of Palestinian Preventive Security, firing tank shells and machine guns. Palestinian security chief Jibril Rajoub had ordered the 400 men inside to resist, the Associated Press reported.
A Palestinian was killed and several injured in a gunfight in Ramallah, bringing the toll of Palestinian dead since Friday to about 25, by the Palestinian count. While closing in on Bethlehem, an Israeli soldier shooting from an armored vehicle at the feet of international peace activists injured several of them. Also in Bethlehem, a Palestinian sniper killed an Israeli. Palestinian sources say two U.S. citizens, Paul La Rodi and Zeid Faisal Khalil, were among the international peace activists injured by the Israeli fire. They were treated in a hospital and released.
The U.S. State Department criticized Israel's drive into Ramallah. "We are greatly concerned" about civilian casualties and Israel should "carefully consider the consequences" of its military actions, said spokesman Philip Reeker.
In addition, Secretary of State Colin Powell telephoned Mr. Sharon to urge him to pull Israeli forces back from Palestinian areas. "We're telling them that it's going to get tougher and things are in danger of getting out of hand," said a U.S. official. Mr. Sharon's response was that the military operation "was not wrapping up quickly," the U.S. official said.
Saudi Arabia is likely to keep cooperating with the U.S., but as in other Arab states run by pro-American elites, the price is expected to be further de-legitimization in the eyes of a pro-Palestinian population.
In Islamic countries that have been willing to stand up and be counted in Mr. Bush's corner -- such as Pakistan, Jordan, Yemen, Qatar and Egypt -- the pressure on those governments to back away from Mr. Bush is likely to grow as the Israeli reaction to Palestinian bombings intensifies. Indeed, even Iran has sometimes seemed sympathetic to the U.S. approach to terrorism. But Iran has carefully declared that it considers the Hezbollah organization that it supports to be involved in a war of liberation, rather than terrorism, when the group hits Israeli targets.
"Arab leaders will soon make one of two choices, to support the U.S. and [Israel's Mr.] Sharon and be completely discredited in the eyes of their people, or to opt to be with their people and the Palestinians," says Walid Kazziha, a political-science professor at the American University in Cairo.
There's no sign that Mr. Bush and his top aides are rethinking their fundamental assertions about the so-called "axis of evil" supporting terrorism or their plans for a broader war on terrorism. Speaking to reporters Monday at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld accused Iran, Iraq and Syria all of fomenting terrorism in the Middle East with arms, fighters and financing.
"There's no question but that the Iranians work with the Syrians and send folks into Damascus and down ... into South Lebanon so that they can conduct terrorist attacks. This is all well-known," Mr. Rumsfeld said. As for Iraq, he said, "I think the world ought to know that Saddam Hussein's idea of having a nice day is offering $10, $20, $30,000, whatever it is, to families of people who talk their children into going out and blowing up a restaurant in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem."
For now, the question facing Mr. Bush is how much more deeply he will get drawn into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In making his decision, the president will have to balance, on the one side, his own personal dislike for Mr. Arafat and warnings from his political aides against wagering too much of his personal prestige. He will also have to factor in the knowledge that even America's closest allies are unlikely to support a war against Iraq while the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is raging.
The fighting in Israel also has all but eclipsed what has been some genuine progress elsewhere in the U.S. war on terrorism. U.S. officials confirmed Monday that they have arrested Abu Zubaydah, a top aide to Osama bin Laden and the man believed to have been charged with reorganizing al Qaeda. U.S. officials also report that they have reached an agreement with Russia on what they call new "smart sanctions" against Iraq.
Until a few weeks ago, U.S. officials were predicting that once the new sanctions were in place Washington could begin whipping up international outrage over Baghdad's illicit weapons-of-mass-destruction program and its refusal to allow United Nations inspectors back in. U.S. officials say that's still the plan, but the timing, they admit, could slip for weeks or even months without some progress in Israel. |
