Lurching
toward regional
war in the Middle East
By
Richard
Falk, TFF Associate
July 25, 2006
Israeli moves toward all out war in
Gaza and Lebanon seem linked to wider dangers of a
regional war with severe global consequences. By
interpreting these wider dangers it is not meant to
minimize the human suffering and regressive political
effects of current carnage in these two long tormented
war zones. Looking at this bigger picture is crucial for
its own sake, but also helps us understand the immediate
crises more fully than if as officially presented by
Israel, and unfortunately echoed by many governments
around the world.
Whatever else, this outbreak of
major two-front violence is not about Israel's right to
defend its against an enemy that is seriously threatening
its territorial integrity or political independence, the
only grounds for justifiable war. To treat border
incidents, involving initially a few military casualties
and the abduction of a single Israeli soldier by a Gazan
militia and two by Hizbollah in south Lebanon, as if it
were an occasion of war is a gross distortion of
well-accepted international law and state practice.
To justify legally a claim of
self-defense requires a full-scale armed attack across
Israeli borders. If every violent border incident or
terrorist provocation were to be so regarded as an act of
war, the world would be aflame. If India had responded to
the recent Mumbai train explosions that killed some 200
Indian civilians as a Pakistani act of war, the result
would have been a devastating regional war, quite
possibly fought with nuclear weapons. There are many
other flashpoints around the world that might justify
police methods in reaction to provocations, and in
extreme instances, specific military responses across
borders. If such occasions produced responses by way of
acts of war the consistent result would be catastrophe.
Recent Hamas/Hizbollah
provocations, even if interpreted through a self-serving
Israeli lens, were not of a scale or threat that
warranted large-scale military actions that are directed
at a wide array of targets unrelated to the specific
incidents and causing severe damage to civilians and the
entire civilian infrastructure of highly vulnerable
societies (water, electricity, roads,
bridges).
The exaggerated and excessive
Israeli response, together with circumstantial evidence,
suggests that Israel used the Hamas/Hizbollah incidents
as pretexts to pursue a much wider and long planned
security agenda directed at Palestine and Lebanon, and
beyond this, as an opportunity for embarking on a
political restructuring adventure designed to affect the
entire region in partnership with the United States.
In this regard, as George W. Bush's
comments at the St. Petersburg G-8 summit emphasized, the
real responsibility for the anti-Israeli incidents should
be attributed to Syria and Iran given their support of
Hamas and Hizbollah. It hardly requires a deep reading of
international relations to recall that both right wing
Israeli opinion and the neoconservative worldview that
has dominated American foreign policy during the Bush
presidency endorses a vision of world order based upon a
comprehensive political restructuring of the Middle East,
starting with 'regime change' in Iraq.
What Israel is undertaking is a
change of tactics with respect to the pursuit of this
regional vision. The initial plan for regional
restructuring seems to have been based on a decisive
military and political victory in Iraq followed by an
essentially diplomatic campaign to exert major pressure
on other problematic governments in the region, relying
on The Greater Middle East Project of 'democratization'
to do the heavy lifting without further military action.
Instead what has occurred has been
failure and frustration in Iraq, which has turned into an
American quagmire, but more seriously for the wider plan,
a consistent set of electoral outcomes throughout the
region that have discredited a political approach to the
regional vision embraced by Washington and Tel Aviv with
the goal of achieving compliant Arab governments that are
passive with respect to Palestinian aspirations, and
accepting of American hegemony.
These geopolitical disappointments
began to be revealed in the Iraqi sequence of elections,
which even under conditions of the American occupation
and a brutal insurgency, produced clear victories for
Islamic political forces and stinging repudiations of the
sort of compliant secularists that Washington backed, and
expected to prevail. Similar outcomes, with less dramatic
results, were evident in elections held in Egypt and
Saudi Arabia, which together with the election of Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad as President of Iran, apparently sent a clear
message that the more democratic the political process,
the more likely it was to produce an anti-American,
anti-Israeli leadership. The Hamas victory in the January
elections in the Palestiinian Territories culminated this
disillusionment with the democratic path to security, as
envisioned by Israel and the United States, for the
region.
But rather than abandon
geopolitical ambitions, it appears from recent
developments that Israel is testing the waters for all
out regional war, apparently with the encouragement of
the US Government: unconditional diplomatic support for
Israel's responses, including blocking widely favored
calls for an immediate ceasefire, and the provision of
large quantities of aviation fuel and a rushed shipment
of additional bombs. At the same time, with a stunning
embrace of inconsistency, the US and Israel insist that
Syrian and Iranian funding and arms transfers to
Hizbollah make them responsible for the war, not even
just the provoking incidents.
Of course, there are other factors
at work.
The Israeli leadership, especially
its military commanders, never accepted being pushed out
of southern Lebanon by Hizbollah in 2000, and Israeli
politicians and public opinion appear to hold the
Palestinian people responsible for the election of a
'terrorist' leadership, and thus deserving of punishment.
Furthermore, the anti-Syrian Lebanese response to the
assassination of Hariri on February 14, 2005 was hoped to
result in a more congenial Lebanese political leadership
that would effectively disarm Hizbollah in accordance
with Security Council Resolution 1559, and thereby
enhance Israeli security. When this did not happen, but
rather Hizbollah acquired more potent weaponry, as well
as a place in the Lebanese cabinet, it was obvious that
the relatively soft Israeli option had failed.
Even such a prominent mainstream
supporter of Israeli policy as Shlomo Aveneri observes
that the real objective of the Israeli attacks on Lebanon
is to install a Quisling government in Beirut, which was
after all a main objective of the 1982 Sharon-led
invasion of the country along with the destruction of the
PLO. It turns out neither goal was achieved, and now in
some respects this represents a second try some 24 years
later.
In relation to the Palestinian
conflict, Israel has set for itself a unilateralist
course ever since the collapse of the Camp David process
in 2000. The Sharon approach, based on Gaza
disengagement, the illegal security wall, and the
annexation of substantial Palestinian territories to
incorporate the main Israeli settlements was always based
on moving toward a 'solution' without the agreement of
the Palestinian leadership and over the heads of the
Palestinian people.
But to move in such a direction in
a politically palatable manner required the absence of a
Palestinian negotiating partner. First, Arafat was
humiliated by direct military attacks on his
headquarters, almost killed, and confined to virtual
house arrest; then Abbas was marginalized by being
declared too weak to exert political weight; and now
Hamas has been repudiated as unfit to govern the
Palestinians or represent their interests. Against this
background Sharon/Olmert unilateralism appears to be the
only option, a worrisome conclusion as it sure to keep
the conflict at boiling point for the indefinite future.
A further factor is the
confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. Here
again Israel and the United States are at the forefront
of an insistence that Iran not pursue its legal right to
possess a complete nuclear fuel cycle under its sovereign
control, although subject to inspection by the
International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that
enriched uranium and plutonium are not diverted for
military purposes.
Whether this unfolding crisis,
abetted by the inflammatory language of Ahmedinejad, is
part of a deliberate strategy of regional tension devised
by Washington and Tel Aviv cannot be determined at this
point. What is clear is the selective enforcement of the
nonproliferation regime. Several parties to the
nonproliferation treaty (Germany, Japan) have complete
nuclear fuel cycles under national control; India is
being assisted in developing its nuclear technology
despite its nuclear weapons program and refusal to become
a party to the treaty; Israel itself disallows a nuclear
weapons option to other states in the region while
maintaining and developing its own arsenal of these
weapons; and of course the United States flexes its
nuclear weight muscles as it wishes, including developing
new categories of nuclear weapons ('bunker-busters' and
'mini-nukes') that are apparently being integrated into
battle plans for possible future use.
This adds up to an alarming
picture, but with clear threats of a regional war
spiraling out of the present situation, given the
Israeli/American vision of security, and the degree to
which the control of this region is vital for the energy
future of the world as well as decisive in the struggle
to withstand the challenge of political Islam.
There are some factors that are
working against such a dismal future: the
political/military failure in Iraq; the likely
devastating economic and political effects of engaging
Iran in a war; the rising oil prices; and the opposition
of European and Arab countries to such Israeli/American
militancy. But can we be reassured at this point? I think
not.
Israel tends to view its security
ambitions in unconditional terms that are oblivious to
wider detrimental consequences or to adverse world public
attitudes. The current United States leadership remains
wedded to its grand strategy of regional restructuring,
and is not encountering political opposition at home or
even media criticism as a result of either its support of
the Israeli offensives in Gaza and Lebanon or of its
efforts to widen the arc of conflict by doing its
diplomatic best to pull Syria and Iran into the fray.
I fear that what we are witnessing
is an extremely risky set of moves to shift the joint
Israeli/American regional game plan in an overtly
military direction. It always had a military centerpiece
associated with the Iraq War, but the basic strategy was
based on what was expected to be a decisive and
successful show of force against a weakened Iraq that was
ruled by a hated tyrant, followed by falling political
dominoes elsewhere in the Middle East.
Neither the UN, world public
opinion, nor regional opposition seem to have the will or
capacity to halt this slide toward regional war. We can
only hope that prudence somehow mysteriously remains a
restraining force, at least in Washington. Already there
are signs of blowback, with Hizbollah emerging as the
political winner, with Iran not far behind, given the
degree to which a central cleavage in the Middle East is
now shaping up as a contest between Iranian-led Shi'ias
and Saudi-led Sunnis.
In concluding, it is obvious that
there are wider implications for other countries in the
region, especially those faced with ethnic conflict and
transnational armed struggle. As tempting as it might be
for Turkey to follow Israel's lead by intervening in
northern Iraq to deal with the PKK insurgent elements
operating from there, it would magnify present dangers to
follow such a course.
It is rather revealing that Turkish
leaders are simultaneously condemning Israel for its
indiscriminate use of force in Lebanon and invoking the
attacks as 'an international law precedent' to justify
its own possible future cross-border military operations.
The US Government seemingly worried about an expanding
war zone has reassured Ankara that it would take care of
Turkish concerns making an incursion unnecessary.
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TFF & the author 2006
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