Where
Saddam Hussein
and Ariel Sharon Interconnect
By JONATHAN
POWER
February 14, 2001
LONDON - There are three great current fault lines
running through the Middle East: the unsettled, no longer
negotiated, issue of the Israeli possession of the Syrian
territory of the Golan heights; the now suspended
negotiations over the future and nature of a Palestinian
state; and the long unresolved threat from Saddam Hussein
to both the peace of the Middle East and to the world. By
electing Ariel Sharon the Israeli public have in effect
decided to tough out all three of these issues, confident
that military might will contain them and that even a
worse case scenario of a rejuvenated Saddam Hussein with
weapons of mass destruction can be kept in its box by
Israel's preparedness, if all else fails, to unleash its
nuclear weapons. It is an almighty gamble and the cost of
losing is indescribable.
If there were a war in the Middle East involving
weapons of mass destruction civilization would probably
be set back 100 years. Not only would it involve the
physical destruction of millions of innocents, it would
destroy the heartland and homeland of three of the
world's great deistic religions and have repercussions
that would tear at the soul of both Europe and North
America, not least because they are now home themselves
to millions of adherents to the Jewish and Islamic
faiths.
All this is to say the obvious. Yet it is clear that
the efforts of outsiders, not least Bill Clinton's
rigorous, time-consuming, commitment, have not born
fruit. Israel has elected as prime minister a
right-winger whose bloodstained history is the living
embodiment of the unforgiving, unreconciling,
uncompromising, avengeful, Jew. At the same time it has
become more than ever apparent the last year that neither
the allied war against Iraq a decade ago, nor the
aggressive sanctions that have followed it have succeeded
in undermining Saddam Hussein's regime, despite being
responsible in their ham-fisted application for reducing
to penury ordinary Iraqis leading, as Unicef claims, to
the unnecessary deaths of over half a million children.
As for Syria, earlier hopes that with the passing of
Hafez al Assad his son's regime would be more open to
compromise have proved unrealistic.
Arab governments themselves feel that their own
investment in the peace process has been totally
undermined by the election of Sharon and their reticence,
already on a fast ebb, about making life easier for
Saddam Hussein, is all but diminished.
For ten years, since the defeat of Iraq and the
commencement of the Oslo peace process, the Middle East
has lived on hope. That is gone, and in its place is a
vacuum in which almost anything, including the very
worst, could happen. No bigger problem is on the desk of
President George Bush. Yet all the indications are his
new Administration has not absorbed the fullness of the
change of mood and, in as much as it understands a part
of it, is depending on its old reflexes- as with last
week's decision to increase funding for Saddam's
ineffective opposition in exile- to see it through.
If years of negotiation have produced so little it is
perhaps the time for some unilateralism, both by the
protagonists themselves and also by the heavyweights in
the Security Council. The place to start is Iraq with a
joint decision by the Western powers to re-write the post
war sanctions regime against Iraq. The economic ones
should be thrown away and, stripped to the essentials,
there should be a tight embargo on military hardware,
remembering that it was under the benign era of Reagan,
Thatcher and Mitterand that Saddam purchased most of his
formidable arsenal. This would not solve the problem of
the potential for aggression of Saddam Hussein but it
would limit the damage his still broken-backed military
can inflict and it would clear the air and work to keep
Arab opinion on the side of the Palestinian peace
process.
Second to this should be a joint announcement by the
three western powers that they consider the Oslo
negotiations, with its concept of incremental
step-by-step withdrawals of Israel from Palestinian turf,
dead. Instead of Israel seeking a formal peace agreement
that will make Israel's withdrawal from the occupied
territories possible, they should make it clear that in
their opinion Israel should announce that it was deciding
unilaterally to withdraw so that a peace treaty should
become possible. Yes, it would doubtless be done on
Sharon's minimalist conception of what to forego, yet if
it is coupled with a preparedness to recognize a
Palestinian state on what territory they have so far
acquired it would be psychologically a big step forward.
If Sharon is not prepared for this step and instead
elects for the status quo and military confrontation then
Europe and the U.S. should make it clear that Israel is
on its own, even to the point of winding up the hefty
amounts of American aid.
As for the Golan Heights, Syria will only negotiate
once it feels the tide of Arab opinion has turned; it
will not negotiate in order to improve that climate.
The Middle East "order" of the last decade is gone. A
new way of approaching old problems has yet been devised.
But time is very short and the fuses lying around are
even shorter. Sometime in the next month, two at the
most, some big new decisions have to be made.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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