West’s strategic failure lit the fires in Middle East
West’s strategic failure lit the fires in Middle East
By Philip Stephens
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: July 20 2006 19:56 | Last updated: July 20 2006 19:56
Ten days ago, Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, visited Brussels for talks about his country’s uranium enrichment programme. The meeting with senior officials from the European Union, Britain, France and Germany went badly. Mr Larijani offered nothing resembling a reply to the latest international offer to break the impasse over Iran’s nuclear activities. Instead, he lectured his hosts for 45 minutes about alleged attempts to destabilise the Tehran regime. He knew that, in response, they would move to censor Iran in the United Nations Security Council.
Accompanied by an unusually large team of officials, including the head of the Iranian intelligence service, Mr Larijani travelled directly from Brussels to the Syrian capital of Damascus. The next day foreign ministers of the so-called EU3 and those of the US, China and Russia announced, as expected, plans to draft a new UN resolution. In between times, the Iranian-sponsored and Syrian-backed militia Hizbollah had launched their attack on Israel.
This sequence of events might well have been coincidental. The evidence is, as the lawyers say, purely circumstantial. One senior European official told me that Mr Larijani was not the natural point of contact between Iran and Hizbollah. Yet whatever the precise purpose of this particular mission to Damascus, it did say something about the depth of the alliance between the two regimes.
These are genuinely dangerous times. Israel is far from alone in believing that Hizbollah had Iranian and Syrian sanction for its rocket attacks and the abduction of two Israeli soldiers. Syria is still smarting from its enforced departure from Lebanon. From Iran’s perspective, Hizbollah has at once diverted attention from the nuclear dispute and reminded the west of its capacity to make serious mischief.
George W. Bush has highlighted Syria’s role. Tony Blair has laid more of the blame on Tehran. The British prime minister also talks of a rising extremist threat across the broader Middle East. The shared message is that, whatever the specifics of the present fighting, all this is about a much bigger threat.
President Bush has thus declined to restrain Israel’s military operations in spite of the feeling among US allies that they are disproportionate and, in significant measure counterproductive. Bombing the Lebanese army and weakening the government of Fouad Siniora will not drive Hizbollah from southern Lebanon.
European diplomats aver that the ferocity of the Israeli response owes as much to the weakness of Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, as to the traditional use of massive force as a deterrent against future aggression. Israel, though, has persuaded Mr Bush that Hamas and Hizbollah should be seen through the prism of his own war on terrorism. The terrorists, in this flawed but, for Mr OImert, useful analysis, are all the same.
As a simple description of the many fires smouldering in the region, there is something to be said for Mr Blair’s “arc of extremism”. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, Iran remains defiant about its nuclear ambitions, Iraq has fallen to sectarian civil war, Hizbollah threatens to destroy Lebanon’s fragile stability, Hamas is fighting Israel in Gaza.
Much more dubious is the attempt to draw through these conflicts a single thread of extremism. That is to ignore their complexities and the myriad grievances and rivalries. These set Sunni against Shia, Arab against Iranian as well as political Islam against the west. Al-Qaeda and Hizbollah are not allies.
The multiple threats, though, do hold up a mirror to the strategic failures of the US and Europe. The west is not to blame for al-Qaeda nor for the noxious regime in Syria. It has played its part in creating the conditions in which fundamentalism and extremism flourish.
The results of the unconscionable refusal in Washington to think beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein are painfully obvious in Iraq. That country now resembles Lebanon at the height of its civil war. The fighting in Gaza speaks to the abandonment by the US of sustained engagement to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Mr Bush has paid lip service to the two-state solution set out in the so-called road map. So, too, has the Israeli government. Condoleezza Rice’s US state department has shown occasional interest in reviving talks. But for most of the time Washington has endorsed Israeli unilateralism.
Even as Ms Rice prepares to travel to the region, officials with intimate knowledge of the diplomacy say that Israel is receiving two sets of messages from Washington. Ms Rice presses for Israeli restraint and urges diplomatic as well as military means. Elliot Abrams, the president’s Middle East adviser, offers Mr Olmert a presidential blank cheque.
Europeans cannot escape blame. As the initial promoters of the road map, they have stood more or less idly by as Israel has redrawn its 1967 borders in the West Bank with the tacit support of the US. So much for a European foreign policy.
Here lies the danger in casting the various conflicts as a grand struggle between the forces of modernism and reaction across the greater Middle East. Mr Blair’s arc of extremism becomes an excuse for inaction, a diversion from the tasks at hand. Exhortation replaces engagement, emotional rhetoric hard commitment.
What moderates – those in Iran and Lebanon as much as in Palestine – need from the west is a sustained and even-handed effort to secure a settlement that guarantees Israel’s security and gives Palestinians the state they have been promised.
Mr Blair used to understand this. There was a time when the prime minister used every conversation with Mr Bush to press the case for US re-engagement. All the while Israel was building its barrier deep in the occupied West Bank and Hamas was building support among Palestinians.
As for Iran, the US must recognise that diplomacy is not synonymous with appeasement. However unpalatable the regime, Washington cannot ignore the reality of Iranian influence – the more so as the debacle in Iraq has greatly strengthened that influence. Sometimes, as the US well understood during the cold war, you have to talk to your enemies. Ms Rice has moved the administration in that direction. Half a step is not enough.
There are no magic bullets, as Israel has learnt many times over during its various military excursions in Lebanon. But when messrs Bush and Blair talk of a crisis of extremism they must understand they are describing in part their own failure.
By Philip Stephens
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: July 20 2006 19:56 | Last updated: July 20 2006 19:56
Ten days ago, Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, visited Brussels for talks about his country’s uranium enrichment programme. The meeting with senior officials from the European Union, Britain, France and Germany went badly. Mr Larijani offered nothing resembling a reply to the latest international offer to break the impasse over Iran’s nuclear activities. Instead, he lectured his hosts for 45 minutes about alleged attempts to destabilise the Tehran regime. He knew that, in response, they would move to censor Iran in the United Nations Security Council.
Accompanied by an unusually large team of officials, including the head of the Iranian intelligence service, Mr Larijani travelled directly from Brussels to the Syrian capital of Damascus. The next day foreign ministers of the so-called EU3 and those of the US, China and Russia announced, as expected, plans to draft a new UN resolution. In between times, the Iranian-sponsored and Syrian-backed militia Hizbollah had launched their attack on Israel.
This sequence of events might well have been coincidental. The evidence is, as the lawyers say, purely circumstantial. One senior European official told me that Mr Larijani was not the natural point of contact between Iran and Hizbollah. Yet whatever the precise purpose of this particular mission to Damascus, it did say something about the depth of the alliance between the two regimes.
These are genuinely dangerous times. Israel is far from alone in believing that Hizbollah had Iranian and Syrian sanction for its rocket attacks and the abduction of two Israeli soldiers. Syria is still smarting from its enforced departure from Lebanon. From Iran’s perspective, Hizbollah has at once diverted attention from the nuclear dispute and reminded the west of its capacity to make serious mischief.
George W. Bush has highlighted Syria’s role. Tony Blair has laid more of the blame on Tehran. The British prime minister also talks of a rising extremist threat across the broader Middle East. The shared message is that, whatever the specifics of the present fighting, all this is about a much bigger threat.
President Bush has thus declined to restrain Israel’s military operations in spite of the feeling among US allies that they are disproportionate and, in significant measure counterproductive. Bombing the Lebanese army and weakening the government of Fouad Siniora will not drive Hizbollah from southern Lebanon.
European diplomats aver that the ferocity of the Israeli response owes as much to the weakness of Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, as to the traditional use of massive force as a deterrent against future aggression. Israel, though, has persuaded Mr Bush that Hamas and Hizbollah should be seen through the prism of his own war on terrorism. The terrorists, in this flawed but, for Mr OImert, useful analysis, are all the same.
As a simple description of the many fires smouldering in the region, there is something to be said for Mr Blair’s “arc of extremism”. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, Iran remains defiant about its nuclear ambitions, Iraq has fallen to sectarian civil war, Hizbollah threatens to destroy Lebanon’s fragile stability, Hamas is fighting Israel in Gaza.
Much more dubious is the attempt to draw through these conflicts a single thread of extremism. That is to ignore their complexities and the myriad grievances and rivalries. These set Sunni against Shia, Arab against Iranian as well as political Islam against the west. Al-Qaeda and Hizbollah are not allies.
The multiple threats, though, do hold up a mirror to the strategic failures of the US and Europe. The west is not to blame for al-Qaeda nor for the noxious regime in Syria. It has played its part in creating the conditions in which fundamentalism and extremism flourish.
The results of the unconscionable refusal in Washington to think beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein are painfully obvious in Iraq. That country now resembles Lebanon at the height of its civil war. The fighting in Gaza speaks to the abandonment by the US of sustained engagement to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Mr Bush has paid lip service to the two-state solution set out in the so-called road map. So, too, has the Israeli government. Condoleezza Rice’s US state department has shown occasional interest in reviving talks. But for most of the time Washington has endorsed Israeli unilateralism.
Even as Ms Rice prepares to travel to the region, officials with intimate knowledge of the diplomacy say that Israel is receiving two sets of messages from Washington. Ms Rice presses for Israeli restraint and urges diplomatic as well as military means. Elliot Abrams, the president’s Middle East adviser, offers Mr Olmert a presidential blank cheque.
Europeans cannot escape blame. As the initial promoters of the road map, they have stood more or less idly by as Israel has redrawn its 1967 borders in the West Bank with the tacit support of the US. So much for a European foreign policy.
Here lies the danger in casting the various conflicts as a grand struggle between the forces of modernism and reaction across the greater Middle East. Mr Blair’s arc of extremism becomes an excuse for inaction, a diversion from the tasks at hand. Exhortation replaces engagement, emotional rhetoric hard commitment.
What moderates – those in Iran and Lebanon as much as in Palestine – need from the west is a sustained and even-handed effort to secure a settlement that guarantees Israel’s security and gives Palestinians the state they have been promised.
Mr Blair used to understand this. There was a time when the prime minister used every conversation with Mr Bush to press the case for US re-engagement. All the while Israel was building its barrier deep in the occupied West Bank and Hamas was building support among Palestinians.
As for Iran, the US must recognise that diplomacy is not synonymous with appeasement. However unpalatable the regime, Washington cannot ignore the reality of Iranian influence – the more so as the debacle in Iraq has greatly strengthened that influence. Sometimes, as the US well understood during the cold war, you have to talk to your enemies. Ms Rice has moved the administration in that direction. Half a step is not enough.
There are no magic bullets, as Israel has learnt many times over during its various military excursions in Lebanon. But when messrs Bush and Blair talk of a crisis of extremism they must understand they are describing in part their own failure.
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