Think the unthinkable in the Middle East
Mark Steyn
National Post
Thursday, February 27, 2003
'War without the UN is unthinkable," declared Polly Toynbee, grande dame of Britain's Guardian, to Peter Cuthbertson of the Conservative Commentary Web site the other day.
But why? Why is it "unthinkable"? Why not try thinking about it just to see where it takes you? No doubt, to Polly's mind, September 11th was also unthinkable. But it happened nonetheless. Messrs. Bush and Blair are thinking about war without the UN. They've apparently told their fellow members of the Security Council not to regard this 18th Resolution as a vote for or against war -- that's already been decided; the war will happen; all the vote means is whether the other guys are going to go along with it.
These days, everything's thinkable, everything's up for grabs. But, once you recoil from the unthinkable, it's all too easy to slump back into the unthinking. Take Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, veterans of that golden age, the Ford-Carter era. They wrote a thing in The Wall Street Journal a week or so back arguing that we urgently need to get -- ta-da! -- the Palestinian "peace process" back on track. To this end, they propose several exciting new ideas that sound exactly like the same old ideas: a Palestinian state on the land occupied by Israel since 1967; a "100% Palestinian Authority effort to end violence"; a Jerusalem that will "accommodate two separate sovereignties" yet be "physically undivided" ...
Well, let's stop there before we all doze off. As my colleague David Frum put it, there is nothing quite so powerful as an idea whose time has passed. You'll note the usual formulations: an "effort" to end violence, even a "100% effort," is not quite the same as an end to the violence. Didn't Yasser claim to be making that "effort" right at the height of last year's Passover massacres?
What about this new Jerusalem? It sounds so easy when you're shooting the breeze at the Council on Foreign Relations: A city that accommodates two sovereignties while remaining physically undivided -- what could be simpler? Mr. Brzezinski was raised in Montreal before heading south to his present eminence, so let me suggest a modest analogy: The border I cross most often in the course of my travels is that between Derby Line, Vermont and Stansted/Rock Island, Quebec. Viewed from the air, Derby Line and Rock Island resemble not two countries but one small unified municipality: the frontier itself jiggles through the middle of town and, indeed, through the middle of buildings, including the municipal library, which straddles the border. Those on one side of the line are bound to those on the other by ties of commerce, culture, blood and marriage. It's a pleasant place, as border towns often are, and, if you pull off the highway to grab a last meal in Vermont or a first meal in Quebec, you often find as you cruise around the winding streets along the Tomifobia River that, after formally crossing into Canada, you've accidentally crossed back into the U.S., or vice-versa.
The border guards don't like it when you do that. Depending on how cranky they want to be, they'll accuse you of illegally re-entering the country when all you were doing is looking for a place to park and you didn't notice rue Lee had turned back to Lee Street. To the east and west are farmhouses with land stretching into both Vermont and Quebec. The U.S. government doesn't like those, either. It regards them as historical hangovers. There aren't as many as there used to be, because U.S. policy is to buy the properties and demolish them. The old North Country rite of passage played out on innumerable transnational bedsteads and creaky haylofts -- of simultaneously kissing in Canada and shagging in the States -- is fading into history. American policy is that there should be an uninhabited trench along the northern border.
No one in Rock Island wants to kill anybody in Derby Line; no one in Beebe or Stansted wants to strap on a Semtex belt and take out the Cow Palace on Route 5. But, if Brzezinski and Scowcroft were to propose that Derby Line/Rock Island -- or Niagara Falls or Windsor/Detroit -- should be made an undivided city accommodating two sovereignties, they'd be laughed out of court. So, if I were an Israeli, I'd want to know why America's wisest old foreign policy birds insist on coming up with arrangements they would never entertain for themselves and their closest neighbours. The problem with Jerusalem is not one of jurisdictional technicalities: it's that a substantial proportion of Palestinians see a two-state solution as an intermediate stage to a one-state solution. You may well agree with the jihadi on that: certainly many Europeans do. But there's no reason at all why Israel should go along with it.
By comparison with other countries, America takes a fundamentalist approach to these matters: At the border post in Derby Line, they divide the world into U.S. citizens and everyone else. In Europe, Belgian citizens living in Amsterdam can vote in Dutch elections. In Britain, Canadians, Bahamians and Papuans can be elected to Parliament and sit in the British Cabinet. But these privileges are expressions of a pre-existing closeness evolved over centuries: They reflect an underlying reality. The Brzezinski/Scowcroft proposals, by contrast, are a denial of reality -- the reality that, for Israel's enemies, the main benefit of every plan from Oslo to this latest one is that they offer easier access for Jew killing.
It's time America's foreign policy experts tried being more American, not just when it comes to secure borders but to what goes on behind those borders. That fine document, the Declaration of Independence, couldn't be plainer: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In other words, these aren't uniquely American rights but the rights of everyone on this planet. That doesn't mean demanding perfection of every fledgling entity across the globe, but it does mean, at a bare minimum, that Washington should not be in the business of midwifing thug states. If the Arafat squat on the West Bank is to be transformed into a fully fledged People's Republic, let some decayed cynic like M. Chirac or a useful idiot like EU satrap Chris Patten do it. Washington should be in the life-liberty-pursuit-of-happiness game.
When you encourage liberty and civil institutions, the technicalities -- like border lines -- tend to resolve themselves: the old Czechoslovakia partitioned itself peacefully; Slovenia has left Yugoslavia and remade itself as a modern Western democracy. Put the technicalities first, as Brzezinski and Scowcroft are doing, and disaster will follow. All the artful "plans" implicitly acknowledge this -- those strange territorial maps that look like groovy Austin Powers wallpaper designs showing "secure" corridors criss-crossing back and forth on which only one nationality would be allowed to travel. Wouldn't it be easier if all travellers could safely use the same highway? And, if they can't, is it worth concocting a structure designed to avoid that awkward fact?
The argument of the wise old birds and the EU and the Arab League is that a resolution of the Palestinian question is the key to a stable Middle East -- that somehow creating another backward repressive sewer state on a tiny sliver of the West Bank would transform the map from Algeria to Pakistan. Some of us think Brzezinski and Scowcroft are holding the plan upside down: Transforming the Middle East is the key to a resolution of the Palestinian question. Creating a functioning multi-ethnic confederation in Iraq is the first step. Regime change in Iran and Syria and dramatic reform in Saudi Arabia will come next. Removing the state sponsors of Palestinian terrorism, cutting off the suicide bombers from the Jew-killing bounty, isolating Hamas and Islamic Jihad as islands of depravity in a sea of liberty, ending the (at best lethargic, at worst complicit in terrorism) UN administration of the "refugee" "camps," all these are necessary -- not for a Palestinian state, but to wean the Palestinian people from their present dead-end death-cultism, without which weaning any new state is bound to fail. If the Palestinian people deserve liberty, why settle for Arafat?
Mr. Bush understands this. Brzezinski and Scowcroft, Polly Toynbee and Chris Patten are stuck in September 10th mode, chugging on the same woozy bromides. Fair enough. Israel has the right to live within secure borders. And Brent and Polly have the right to live within secure boredom. But these days, for the rest of us, a willingness to think the unthinkable is indispensable.
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