[My two-part commentary published in today's Asia Times.]

In the early stages of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Adlai Stevenson, JFK’s notoriously dovish UN Ambassador, suggested that the US offer Moscow a non-confrontational trade to stave off a nuclear exchange: we withdraw our missiles from Turkey, and the Soviets withdraw their missile components from Cuba.  Upon hearing his advice, President Kennedy and every member of his secretive ExComm group (assembled to troubleshoot the crisis) scolded Stevenson for recklessly forgetting the obvious lessons of Munich, when Britain and France appeased Hitler prior to the Second World War.  Only a fool, they said, would reward the aggression of tyrants like Hitler and Khrushchev with diplomacy.  But then, lo and behold, under cover of absolute secrecy, President Kennedy went ahead and made nearly the exact same ‘appeasing’ trade that Stevenson recommended.[1]

It would seem, then, that if Kennedy handled the situation well—and there is a virtual consensus that he did—then appeasement is appropriate so long as no one knows about it.  Ironically, the only party with whom we ever felt a need to be secretive was the USSR, and they were the only ones privy to the deal.  The subterfuge, then, was apparently for the sole benefit of the American people, who would have likely seen this trade as a sign of capitulation and weakness, even if it came (as it eventually did) on the heels of a forceful blockade of Cuba.  Kennedy knew that Americans were just as likely as anyone to mistake the feeling of humiliation for the presence of weakness, and proceed to throw him under the bus.  But why?

With enemies ranging from empires to nation-states to terrorist organizations, the policy of appeasement has been scorned for the last 70 years to rouse the rabble out of its comfortable apathy and confront unadulterated evil. Unsurprisingly, however, our disdain in the West for any scent of appeasement has led to a widespread and knee-jerk tendency to identify and dismiss any policy of restraint or conservation, frequently at the expense of grounded foreign policy.  Not only, then, is appeasement wildly over-diagnosed, but even when accurately identified, the policy is quickly discarded as a tool of the weak.  And with the Obama Administration making numerous overtures of reengagement with Syria, Iran and other controversial parties, a close examination of both the legitimate and delusional perils of appeasement is long overdue.  Anti-appeasement rhetoric and survival instincts run amok have clouded our judgment, and it is time to right the ship.

Appeasement 1.0

In September 1938, after Adolf Hitler annexed and occupied part of Czechoslovakia for the ostensible purpose of taming ethnic conflict, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement that allowed Hitler to keep the territory, despite a previous French security guarantee protecting Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty.  In return for this concession, Hitler promised not to seize any more territory, but he soon invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and Poland, forcing Britain and France to declare war.

By the close of the war, the appeasement lesson had been drawn quickly and fiercely, leaving behind a legacy with a seemingly eternal shelf life.[2] Barely beneath the surface of every subsequent history textbook, the parable of Munich is loud and clear: the longer we wait to stand up to a bully, the more the bully will take by force—and the weaker we will be when war inevitably ensues.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to exploring the nuances of appeasement is that the approach of the British and French toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s is widely regarded as perhaps the most catastrophic example of appeasement on record.  As a result, it would have been impossible for us not to forge a nearly unbreakable association between raw appeasement and cataclysmic disaster.  Nor has anyone really resisted this impulse.

Before Munich, however, the policy of appeasement was almost institutional in its prevalence and application, both in Britain and elsewhere.[3] Yet while historians in recent decades have been reconsidering just how abnormal or scandalous British and French decisions were, the popular package of appeasement today is still painted thick with cavalier weakness, much in accordance with the policy’s notable detractors.

“It is precisely when the vital interests are bartered in return for minor concessions, or none at all, that appeasement has taken place,” says Frederick Hartmann.[4] Chamberlain’s mistake, then, was his assumption that Hitler would keep his promise not to demand more territory when nothing had been asked of Hitler to begin with.  “Appeasement is a corrupted policy of compromise, made erroneous by mistaking a policy of imperialism for a policy of the status quo,” according to Hans Morgenthau, the father of realpolitik.[5] Chamberlain and Daladier thought Hitler would settle for the status quo, when really it turned out that he would settle for nothing less than world domination.  In other words, Morgenthau argues, the appeaser’s error is the failure to see that “successive demands are but links of a chain at the end of which stands the overthrow of the status quo.”[6]

In the case of the Second World War, Britain and France hoped to avoid war by appeasing Germany on several occasions, but both eventually recognized that war was unavoidable, given the unlimited nature of Germany’s demands.  Britain and France, the thinking goes, should have known in Munich—if not earlier—that neither Hitler’s character nor his ambitions could be trusted, and that appeasement would only whet his appetite.  Accordingly, Hitler should have been confronted as soon as possible to prove Europe’s resolve, to mitigate the costs of war, and to ensure victory.

Much of this surely sounds like common sense. When confronted with such a threat, the most common response is to close ranks and project as strong an image as possible.  After all, weakness is not just bad for a nation’s ego.  “The lesson of Munich,” writes Steve Chan, “is that appeasement discredits the defenders’ willingness to fight, and encourages the aggressor to escalate his demands.”[7] But appeasement does so much more than that.

Given the tight fit between appeasement, the Second World War and the Holocaust, it is critical to note that any defense of appeasement need not defend all appeasement—no more than defending one war requires a defense of all wars.  To date, our very powerful psychological association between appeasement and Hitler’s behavior has prevented us from considering alternatives to our understandable gut feeling that appeasement will always lead to a Holocaust.  Such a fallacious assumption is based not on sound public policy, but rather on the sensation that “doing something”—or anything, for that matter—is always better than “doing nothing,” which leaves us feeling impotent.

Rhetorical Baggage

The most difficult hurdle inevitably facing any advocates of negotiated settlement is the thin line between compromise and appeasement, but their vague differences do not merely point to word games.  Technically speaking, Munich was a compromise; it assured Germany that it could keep its annexed territory, and it assured the British and French that they could avoid a war.  Hitler had to make a concession, as did the British and French.  Granted, it quickly became clear that Hitler’s promise not to claim any more territory was completely insincere, but it was still promised in a compromise.  Believing Hitler’s pledge may have been a disastrous mistake, as most people believe, but the way this mistake and others like it are framed actually points to an important distinction.

At the time, before Hitler had violated the agreement, Winston Churchill—then only an outspoken figure in the British opposition—denounced Munich as appeasement. “It is not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced,” Churchill noted in September 1938, nine days before Munich, “but also the freedom and security of all nations.  The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”[8] Hitler was known for breaking promises, so in Churchill’s eyes, the futility and danger of appeasing Berlin with part of Czechoslovakia should have been patently obvious.

Yet if appeasement is simply what happens when we are fooled into trusting a liar, then Churchill (and anyone else) could only determine if Munich was appeasement after Hitler violated the agreement’s terms. Appeasement, in other words, is an entirely retrospective phenomenon, and if decried during a negotiation process, the label is simply a moral judgment and a prediction.  From a historical perspective, however, to be fairly labeled ‘appeasement,’ an agreement—implicit or explicit—has to backfire; one party has to violate the agreement’s terms and make a fool out of the other party. Otherwise, we would still view the agreement as a ‘compromise’ rather than ‘appeasement’.

Even still, because the doom of Munich has been seared into virtually every political decision-making process in the West, we have come to assume that foolish appeasement can be easily diagnosed and discredited before the allegedly unreliable party even violates the agreement.  Still, given Hitler’s propensity for breaking promises, we cannot imagine how anyone could fall for his tricks.  But this fallacious notion demonstrates that hindsight is not only 20/20, but blindingly so.  Put differently, why do we never hear about successful appeasement?  Is it because appeasement never works, or because we merely call it something else entirely?

Appeasement 2.0

In 1978, US President Jimmy Carter brokered a landmark peace treaty at Camp David between Egypt (led by President Anwar Sadat) and Israel (led by Prime Minister Menachem Begin).  In what was called a ‘Land for Peace’ treaty, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt—which had controlled the land before Israel captured it during the Six Day War of 1967—and in exchange, the Peninsula would be completely and verifiably demilitarized to give Israel the reassurance of a strategic buffer and retain its vital early-warning defense system.

At the time, Egypt was Israel’s most powerful and dangerous enemy—one that had (in the eyes of Israel and its Western supporters) mounted 4 strategic assaults on the Jewish nation in the previous 30 years.  To put it mildly, then, the Israelis did not trust the Egyptians.  Cairo had broken numerous previous agreements with Israel, including several acts of war. Between the two most recent wars, Cairo had warned Jerusalem that Egypt was preparing for war to regain the Sinai, but Israel only began listening to these warnings in the wake of the 1973 war, which naturally gave Israel reason to believe that the Egyptian military could still inflict enough pain to warrant plenty of attention, even if Cairo no longer posed a threat to Israel’s existence itself.[9]

Although many of the details (and obviously the outcome) of this treaty are quite different from those of Munich, the principal arguments remain just as potent.  Both Berlin and Cairo were allowed to hold on to territory to which each claimed a strong national connection.  The fact that Berlin succeeded (while Cairo failed) to secure that land by force is nearly irrelevant because the messages coming from Cairo and Berlin were the same: if you concede this territory, we will stop fighting you.  Israeli, British and French leaders all traded land for the promise of peace.  We merely insist that Camp David was smart (and not appeasement) because Egypt has held up its end of the bargain, while Hitler did not—despite comparable evidence at the time that made each likely to violate their respective agreements.[10]

In fact, while there is a near consensus in theory that it is unwise to reward aggressors by negotiating with (or appeasing) them, every White House and virtually every contemporary foreign policy analyst hails the Camp David Accords as a monumental success.  Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said that he was wrong to have questioned and undermined Begin’s efforts at the time and wrong to vote against the ratification of the Accords in the Israeli parliament.  Olmert even went so far as to say that Begin was “smarter than I was” for having made such a wise decision.[11]

Nevertheless, the Israel-Egypt treaty that followed the Camp David Accords had the same public policy implications and sent the same messages to tyrants that Munich did: first, if you are aggressive enough, rest assured that powerful countries like Israel will be forced to listen and make concessions (though probably not surrender); second, if you are able to get those concessions through a compromise, then that compromise will likely give you a tactical advantage, enabling you to easily take the modest reward for your aggression (as Egypt did), or go double-or-nothing for the jugular, as Hitler did.  Aggression, according to Camp David’s lessons, will give you options, credibility and power.

Some could argue that Egypt’s power paled in comparison to Germany’s, so appeasing Egypt was not as risky as appeasing Hitler; but thousands of dead Israelis and their families certainly felt otherwise in 1978.  And besides, it would be a fantasy to think that Jerusalem ever negotiates with powerless parties; Israelis only negotiate when they have to, and frequently not even then.

Nor did the US push this peace summit because Israel would be just as safe without the buffer territory.  Israel’s strategic interest in keeping the Sinai was just as “vital”[12] as Chamberlain’s interest in stopping the spread of fascism, and far more vital than his interest in the actual Czech territory ceded at Munich.  Likewise, trading such a vital interest for what was essentially a mere promise of peace had no bearing on Cairo’s decision to stick to the deal.  For whatever reasons, Cairo did not exploit the concession and go for Israel’s jugular.  Therefore, while many accused the Israeli government in the late 1970s of trading vital interests in exchange for “minor concessions, or none at all,” that paradigm has proven to be completely unfounded.  In fact, Israelis have now recognized and come to value Egypt’s promise in 1978 and its legacy of peace—albeit a cold one.[13] And in retrospect, few would call Egypt’s promise of peace a “minor concession”—one that led to Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab League and widespread celebrations in the Arab World when Sadat was assassinated in 1981—though Sadat’s promise was little more than what Hitler offered.

Remarkably, then, even by the loose standards of the most vehement anti-appeasers, Camp David should have backfired, just as Munich backfired.  Every simplistic red flag that we have been taught to look for as a result of Munich should have prevented Camp David from ever taking place.  But we somehow ignored those red flags.  We let it slip through, and ironically, the Camp David Accords is likely the only blessing the Middle East has seen in the last half century.

Strangely, despite discrepancies like this one—where the behavior of leaders should be consistent but is not—we still seem to insist that it is easy to identify and reflexively dismiss the policy of appeasement; the Holocaust’s legacy is simply too powerful to deny.  Yet these inconsistencies hardly mean that appeasement is always wise or always foolish; they simply show the fallacious assumptions we make about what it takes to prevent or end wars.  Simply put, there are no rules to this game.  After all, if people we deem equally trustworthy or untrustworthy at the time of negotiations frequently surprise us by pursuing entirely different agendas, then isn’t there something wrong with our barometer?  And if only history can prove our judgments right or wrong (and those judgments frequently turn out to be very wrong indeed), then why the moral self-righteousness?

Without a doubt, some of our enemies have unlimited demands that we simply cannot and should not indulge, but sometimes—contrary to what they publicly say to us and even to their own communities—our enemies will actually settle for concessions that we could tolerate losing.  In the meantime, however, the fact that we have little predictive power to discern the pathological bullies like Adolf Hitler from the hideously opportunistic and practical ones like Kim Jong-Il, Robert Mugabe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has left our foreign policy a tattered patchwork of improvised disaster.

Reputational Wars

Beyond appeasement’s rhetorical and emotional barriers, however, just how dangerous is the policy itself in practice, and when?  After a modest inquiry, most of the oft-cited liabilities of appeasement lack the kind of argumentative support that should always accompany such a widespread and knee-jerk assumption that dominates our policy discussions.

For instance, integral to any argument against appeasement is the assumption that appeasing—before or during a conflict—wreaks havoc on the appeaser’s reputation and (therefore) vital security interests.  Hand-in-hand with any discussion of appeasement is how we want others to see us—usually as a force to be reckoned with—because that perception is said to affect our enemies’ behavior.  In particular, if we demonstrate our strength with a consistent refusal to appease our enemies, then those same enemies will be less likely to misbehave or try to call our bluff.  Unfortunately, by focusing almost exclusively on how others view us, we have lost our grounded sense of reality and mistaken the phantom of weakness for the real thing.

In the years since Munich, our political discourse has relied on war as a tool to bolster our reputation, and remarkably, this justification seems to be resonating more as the years go by.  Such rhetoric, for instance, has played an instrumental role in the public justification and private rationalization of every US war and most of its conflicts.[14] Even before the end of the Second World War, President Roosevelt was already saying that America’s readiness to fight would show (and is showing) aggressive nations that their hostile policies would not be indulged.[15]

Ever since, image maintenance has been at the center of our foreign policy discussions, and perhaps even more so since the end of the Cold War.  During the Gulf War, President Bush (41) was intent on making up for Vietnam’s legacy of American weakness, while President Clinton had his own foreign policy demons to exorcise in Kosovo, after years of being excoriated for avoiding tragic wars in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda.  “If you don’t stand up to brutality and the killing of innocent civilians,” Clinton warned, “you invite them to do more,[16] but “action and resolve can stop armies and save lives.” After the NATO bombing campaign successfully expelled Serbian forces from Kosovo, Clinton noted that

I believe what we did was a good and decent thing, and I believe that it will give courage to people throughout the world, and I think it will give pause to people who might do what Mr. Milosevic has done throughout the world.[17]

President Bush (43) drove the point home even further in the traumatic wake of the 9/11 attacks, when he argued that it was his predecessor’s transient appeasement that had enabled al-Qaeda to escalate its methods and successes.  In a September 2006 speech, for instance, President Bush framed America’s resolve in the context of al-Qaeda’s understanding of American weakness:

Bin Laden and his allies are absolutely convinced they can succeed in forcing America to retreat [from Iraq and Afghanistan] and causing our economic collapse. They believe our nation is weak and decadent, and lacking in patience and resolve. And they’re wrong.  Osama bin Laden has written that the “defeat of… American forces in Beirut” in 1983 is proof America does not have the stomach to stay in the fight. He’s declared that “in Somalia… the United States [pulled] out, trailing disappointment, defeat, and failure behind it.” And last year, the terrorist Zawahiri declared that Americans “know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet.”[18]

According to this logic, then, the only way to undermine al-Qaeda’s hope for success was to prove that it would be impossible to compel any kind of American withdrawal—militarily, politically, economically, or ideologically.  Even disregarding the fact that it was al-Qaeda’s express intention to draw the US into a war, President Bush was so eager to avoid the appearance of weakness that he disregarded the implications of what it might mean to actually be weak.  And it is this distinction that has haunted appeasement’s detractors for the last 60 years.

To be sure, weakness is certainly a strategic liability, but it should come as no surprise when public officials err on the side of overkill.  Whether our leaders cite the threat of appeasement to garner support or because they actually believe what they say, game theory research has come to illustrate that anti-appeasement rhetoric frequently leads us to dismiss available and effective policy options.[19] Once we recognize and unpack the complexities of our understandable aversion to appeasement, only then can we harness and control that aversion—rather than be controlled by it.  To that end, when we are trying to determine how our behavior will deter or encourage certain behaviors among our current and future enemies, there are a number of key factors to consider and several misconceptions to abandon.

The Stakes Game

Brand management is at the heart of public diplomacy, especially for a superpower.  And as in the business world, it is important to discern the differences in the brand’s interpretation.  When President Reagan withdrew American forces from Lebanon in the wake of a 1983 car bombing that killed 241 American Marines, bin Laden claims he saw that withdrawal as a weakness, and President Bush (43)—at least in retrospect—saw it as appeasement.

Yet even if one believes that the 1983 withdrawal from Lebanon was appeasement, our reflexive disdain for appeasement prevents us from asking the much-needed follow-up question: “Was the appeasement worthwhile?  That is, did withdrawing do more for our reputation and national interests than staying would have?”  And the answer is yes.  For perspective, consider why it took so long for the US to pull out of Vietnam, while only a few substantive attacks by Hezbollah compelled a US withdrawal from Lebanon?

Simply put, victory over communism in Vietnam was considered to be a strategic necessity.  For years we thought we had to win, no matter the costs.  Adding more pressure, we knew the Soviets were scrutinizing American resolve for weak points, learning how we coped with losing a war that we regarded as a strategic necessity.  Granted, after we finally withdrew from Vietnam, it seemed that the vaunted ‘domino theory’ of contagious communism had been discredited, but our civilian and military leadership believed otherwise at the time.

In contrast to Vietnam, however, Lebanon’s civil war was dangerous, but in the grand scheme of things, the Lebanon effort was regarded by the US as little more than a humanitarian mission gone awry in a woefully chaotic region.  The same dynamic could be said for Somalia.  Again, from a strategic perspective, the US mission in Somalia was not nearly important enough to continue beyond the loss of 19 soldiers, especially after such a public and gruesome spectacle like the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident televised on CNN.

In other words, only if we abandon high-stakes missions does it cause significant damage to our reputation.[20] Merely because we feel humiliated—as we did in the wake of our withdrawals from Lebanon and Somalia—does not mean others will doubt our resolve when the stakes are high.  After all, sizing up your enemy when that enemy is fighting a mere nuisance does not provide even moderately reliable intelligence as to how that enemy might behave if confronted by a strategic threat.  Vietnam gave the Soviets a reason to doubt our resolve; Lebanon did not. By leaving Lebanon and Somalia, the message we sent was not that we had no resolve; the message we sent was merely that we had no resolve on relatively unimportant missions.[21]

Admittedly, learning that we had no resolve on these two unimportant missions was apparently sufficient to convince bin Laden that we were weak enough for his purposes, and this should certainly be taken into consideration when determining foreign policy, even the humanitarian kind.  Yet solely because bin Laden used these withdrawals to convince others that the US was weak was not enough to actually make us weak.  As countless investigators, analysts and journalists have revealed, bin Laden knew he could not truly weaken the US unless he lured America into a larger war that rallied the support of millions of Muslims who were traditionally indifferent to his war cries.  If Lebanon and Somalia were so instructive, then bin Laden would have devoted all his resources towards duplicating those relatively small-scale incidents, forcing our piecemeal military withdrawal from Muslim lands.   But he didn’t.  He went big.

The mere fact that he cites those two withdrawals should point to the limited threat he knew he could pose—short of a wider war that he needed us to start.  Both then and now, Al-Qaeda’s leaders are not counting on our hasty retreats; they are counting on our over-reaction.  Bin Laden needed to make us feel so humiliated and vulnerable that we would forget our powerful place in the world, rashly take his bait, and continue warring with the Muslim world until our military and economy broke from the strain.  In terms of policy-formulation, however, this distinction has been entirely ignored in Washington.

The Humiliation of Appeasement

Though counter-intuitive, even the painful withdrawals from important missions have a certain degree of ambiguity as to the lessons learned by our enemies.  When we withdrew from Vietnam, the costs of the conflict had simply become too high to justify staying.  In the end, however, the same judgment and cost/benefit rationalization that compelled us to withdraw was also employed by the Soviets, thus mitigating our reputational fallout.  Similarly, when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in the late 1980s—after nearly a decade of disastrous occupation and insurgency—we questioned their resolve to a certain degree, but we also knew from our Vietnam experience that occasionally even vital missions become too costly to continue.  And it hardly meant the Soviets were weak.

Ultimately, the relevant difference here is between words and actions.  If the bulk of US forces soon withdraw from Afghanistan with anything remotely resembling defeat, hostile observers in Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba and China will undoubtedly rub it in our faces.  (We certainly rubbed it in the Soviets’ faces when they withdrew from Afghanistan.)  Our enemies and geopolitical competitors will insist that our withdrawal from Afghanistan proves that we have become a pathetic, sniveling mess.

But they will not attack us as a result.  In fact, they are most likely to employ aggressive tactics at a time (like now) when our military is too preoccupied to retaliate effectively, if at all.  So like any country or nation with self-confidence and an investment in the status quo, we see any verbal insistence that we are weak as a sign that we are, in fact, weak—even if no one acts on those claims.  To be sure, our most basic tool for gauging our weaknesses should be the prevalence of force used against us—not the extent of our enemies’ teasing.  But we are human, and a sense of humiliation seldom inspires productive or even rational behavior.

Consider, for instance, that after the Israeli Air Force bombed a Syrian nuclear facility in the fall of 2007, it seemed that every analyst of Middle East affairs said that Israel had re-asserted its dominance, warned Syria and Iran, and regained the respect it lost after the Second Lebanon War against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.  Yet if Israel were so vulnerable and weak, then Hezbollah would have launched another war as soon as its arsenal was restocked several months after that war ended.  But it didn’t, and it hasn’t.

In fact, if Israel were actually more vulnerable after the Second Lebanon War, it was only more vulnerable to teasing and gloating.  As is frequently the case when any top dog gets a bloody nose, Israel felt the need to retaliate to reassure itself, not the rest of the world, of its staying power. And to that end, Israel succeeded.  But humiliation is a feeling, not a state of military readiness, and accordingly, countering a sense of humiliation is a bizarre method for ensuring adequate defenses, though boosts in morale are always helpful.

Ultimately, if we cannot distinguish between taunts and threats, then we cannot distinguish between humiliation and genuine vulnerability.  More than anything else, the obstacle of humiliation is emotional in nature, and our insistence that appeasement, by definition, is necessarily weakening is frequently the product of a bruised or threatened ego, nothing more.  There are times, in fact, when “appeasement from strength,” as Churchill (of all people) once noted, can be “magnanimous and noble, and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.”[22]

Looming Threats and Limited Resources

In the early stages of the Vietnam War, Robert Kennedy insisted that no one would believe we could take on communism in Berlin if we did not do so in Vietnam.[23] Yet not only were the stakes drastically different in Berlin and Vietnam—as discussed above—but going to war to preserve or bolster our image was risky given our limited resources.[24] That is, while proving to the world that we had the stomach to fight proxy wars with the Soviets, we also spent valuable resources that were needed to convince the Soviets that we could and would actually take Berlin, if and when the time came to do so.  As in any war, proving that we have the stomach to do something is irrelevant if—in the process—we spend all of the resources and capital vital to actually doing that something.  Fortunately, the Soviets never pushed us so far that we felt compelled to try to take Berlin.  In our new wars, however, we might not be so lucky.

Appeasement 3.0

For the last six years, the US has been so consumed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that any and every threat we issue to our current and potential enemies has been a laughingstock.  When the Iraq War started, Russia was preoccupied with domestic matters, North Korea was only dabbling with nuclear technology and Iran was trying to accommodate the US effort in Iraq as best it could.  But as it became clear that the US would be allocating far more time, soldiers, money and attention to Iraq than Washington had anticipated, Russia, North Korea and Iran have all turned to increasingly aggressive tactics in countless public and private arenas.

After all, what reality are the Iranians, North Koreans and Russians more likely to base their policies on?  That the Americans are unpredictable cowboys who must be feared?  Or that these same unpredictable cowboys have spent their gunpowder, starved their horses, and earned the democratic wrath of the Cherokee, Navajo, and Apache nations?

In this way, avoiding appeasement or going to war to preserve/bolster our reputation is just as likely to backfire as appeasement is, if not more so.  The war in Afghanistan was a direct challenge to the people who attacked us on 9/11 and thus was not predominantly focused on frightening our other adversaries.  First we had to take out our immediate enemies, and then focus on deterring our potential ones. But after Afghanistan, we lacked the resources to simultaneously attack and invade Iraq, Iran, North Korea and (perhaps) Libya and Syria, so Washington hoped to use a successful image-maintenance invasion of only Iraq to scare the other regimes into terminating their WMD programs and cooperate fully to root out the terrorists whose activities they had traditionally overlooked.

As intended, Libya caved, but the others only mildly cooperated until they saw impending disaster in Iraq.  They waited to see how serious and reckless we were—which is what we wanted them to do—but more importantly, they waited to see how competent and powerful we were. Being serious and “unpredictable”—as urged by Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—is frequently helpful when confronting an enemy, but that approach loses its value if all of your unpredictable options are equally weak.[25]

And this is the danger of fighting wars in an effort to avoid appeasement. When the primary (if private) justification for going to war is sending a message, then you have to win and win big; no war at all is better than even an ambiguous victory.  Yet today, not only is our military overwhelmed, but there is no way to hide this reality from our enemies, as we are operating at full capacity.

After 9/11, we had enough power, clout and flexibility for a limited war that aided American interests more than it undermined them.  Had the US not intervened in Iraq, our success in the war in Afghanistan might have demonstrated US resolve without using the bulk of America’s armed forces—thus maintaining America’s reputation as a force to be reckoned with, willing and ready for deployment. But for whatever reasons, the invasion, occupation and overthrow of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was not enough—in Washington’s eyes—to solicit a sufficient degree of security- and WMD- cooperation from Pyongyang, Riyadh, Tehran, Damascus, Tripoli and certainly Baghdad.

Six years later, we now we have the worst of both worlds: our military is preoccupied in zero-sum nation-building when it should be preparing for increasingly credible threats in Moscow and Tehran, and exponentially more terrorists than before 9/11.  Meanwhile, America’s domestic tolerance for misadventure abroad is plummeting, and there is little we can do about any of these developments.  A war to bolster our reputation has been instrumental in overthrowing it, and in the process, we have revealed our immature grasp of what it means to be strong.

With simplistic ‘anything-but-appeasement’ policies, we forget that strength is more than simply appearing strong, and far more than simply feeling strong.  Strength is anticipation and longevity.  And while weakness and humiliation sometimes overlap—as weakness is often humiliating—usually they do not, especially not for a superpower.  It does not take much to humiliate us, but it takes an awful lot to weaken us.

Unfortunately, even though President Obama seems more likely to discard his predecessor’s myopic concept of strength and anti-appeasement insecurities, the problems Obama has inherited deny him the freedom Bush possessed to set America’s agenda.  So re-thinking appeasement might only be possible when we face a new set of challenges abroad that allow us to spend more time acting and less time reacting.

Either way, however, this means we must resist the temptation to grant our primordial instincts exclusive domain over the formulation of our foreign policies. Hitler’s legacy is overwhelming, much as it should be.  But whether we like it or not, and regardless of what we call it, the idea of appeasement is little more than a compromise that we come to regret.  And because we consistently fail to accurately predict who will stick to our deals and who will not, the corrosive compromises only become distinguishable from the successful ones after the negotiation is over.  By focusing so heavily on how strong we appear to others, it is easy to forget how strong we actually are, and how easily we crack the ice beneath our feet by recoiling from appeasement.

It is time, then, to develop a more accurate method for gauging the likelihood that an enemy will abide by the tenets of any given agreement, or if war must be declared or continued.  This new gauge would likely pivot on the axis of geostrategic interests, rather than on how ‘evil’ a leader or government may be.  The first step, no doubt, is to recognize that appeasement is no more crippling to our national security than war is, and appeasement should be regarded in the same light—no better, no worse.  Just another tool in the toolbox.  We have restricted our own policy options for far too long, and only now has the cost truly become unbearable.

[2] Every US President since Munich has cited various enemies, who, presidents insist, should never be appeased—including North Korea, Vietnam, the USSR, Libya, Iraq, Serbia, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Iran.  For a detailed analysis of Munich’s impact on US foreign policy during the last 60 years, see Joseph Siracusa’s chapter, “The Munich Analogy,” in the Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (Simon and Shuster, 2002).

[3] See Paul Kennedy, “The tradition of appeasement in British foreign policy 1865-1939.”  British Journal of International Studies, 2(1976), p.195-215.   See also, Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 16, 39, cited in Jeffrey Record, “Retiring Hitler and ‘Appeasement’ from the National Security Debate”, Parameters, Summer 2008, pp.91-101. See also Arnold Offner, “Appeasement Revisited: The United States, Great Britain, and Germany, 1933-1940.”  The Journal of American History, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Sep., 1977), p.373-393.  See also Paul W. Schroeder, “Munich and the British Tradition.”  The Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No.1 (1976), p.223-243.  See also Donald Lammers, Explaining Munich, (Hoover Institution, 1966).

[4] Frederick Hartman, The Relations of Nations, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p.96.

[5] Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 4th ed. (New York:

Knopf, 1967), p.61.

[6] Morgenthau, p.247; see also, Ralph Dimuccio, “The Study of Appeasement in International Relations: Polemics, Paradigms, and Problems,” Journal of Peace Research, 35(2): 245-259.

[7] Steve Chan, International Relations in Perspective: The Pursuit of Security, Welfare and Justice (New York: Macmillan, 1984), p. 88-89.  See also, J.L. Richardson, “New Perspectives on Appeasement: Some Implications for International Relations,” World Politics, 40(3): 289-316.

[8] Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol.1: The Gathering Storm, (Mariner Books, 1986), p.273.

[9] See John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s), p.163-73

[10] See Lammers, Explaining Munich, 1966.

[11] Jeffrey Goldberg, “Is Israel Finished?” Atlantic Monthly, May 2008.

[12] See Hartman, The Relations of Nations, 1967, p.96.

[13] One 2001 poll put the portion of Israelis who support Israel’s treaty with Egypt at well above 85%.  See Jerusalem Post, 7 June 2001.

[14] Social psychology research has suggested that US presidents frequently employ anti-appeasement rhetoric to sell wars to doubtful constituencies, but equally often—the research suggests—presidents and their administrations privately believe very strongly in the necessity of confronting the enemies of their time.  See Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Cornell UP, 1991).

[15] In a fireside chat on December 24, 1943, President Roosevelt said that so long as our allies remained united “there will be no possibility of an aggressor nation arising to start another world war.” Cited in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, p.446.

[16] See CNN, “Clinton: Serbs Must be Stopped Now,” 23 March 1999.

[17] NewsHour Interview with Jim Lehrer, PBS, 11 June 1999.

[18] Presidential Speech, 5 September 2006.

[19] As a literature review and original contributor, the best analysis of this game theory research and its implications is Daniel Treisman, “Rational Appeasement,” International Organization, 58(2): 345-73.

[20] Because nearly every military mission is framed as ‘high-stakes’ to rally support for the cause, the best indicator for what actually is ‘high-stakes’ is the level of our investment in the mission—militarily, politically, and economically.  Under this lens, Somalia and Lebanon pale in comparison to Vietnam.

[21] See Treisman, “Rational Appeasement,” p.360.

[22] Speech in 1950, cited in Daniel Moran, “Appeasement,” Strategic Insight, 1 April 2003; Center for Contemporary Conflict, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California.

[23] See Treisman, “Rational Appeasement,” p.361.

[24] With an enemy as vast as the Soviet Union, it would be virtually impossible to argue that our political, financial, and military resources were, in fact, unlimited.

[25] Washington Post, 1 May 2008.

[Note: an abbreviated version of this commentary was published by Le Monde Diplomatique]

It’s no surprise that President Obama’s foreign policy challenges are unsavory, diverse and numerous, but what makes them most worrisome is the degree to which they overlap in the worst ways possible.  Our allies’ concerns, our enemies’ threats and our victims’ pleas are inextricably tied to one another—if not by nature, then by the hand of political leaders and institutions across the globe.  Solving one problem seems impossible without solving the rest, or at least pretending to do so.  And ‘pretending’ may be what it comes to, though it’s difficult to imagine just whom we’d fool.  The world seems to be knocking at every American door, imploring, cajoling or threatening us to do (or not do) something.  And whenever no one’s knocking, we can’t help but wonder where everyone went.

Iraq and Afghanistan seldom wonder far from our doorstep for obvious reasons, but with Obama’s focus on renewing old alliances and engendering newer convenient ones, many others are requesting an audience.  Unfortunately, it is mathematically impossible for President Obama to address each or even most of them.  And inevitably, the process of prioritizing is going to get ugly.

Here are just a few of Obama’s more important foreign policy goals:
•    Eradicating (or rendering impotent) al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
•    Securing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and some modicum of democracy there.
•    Withdrawing US forces from Iraq and preventing the Iranians from filling the void.
•    Derailing and/or deterring Iran’s development of a nuclear (weapons) technology program.
•    Spreading democracy across the globe, especially in Muslim and formerly Soviet states.
•    Reaching a final settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
•    Mitigating the heavy spillover from the drug wars in Mexico into America’s southwest.
•    Limiting the social and political upheaval of a global recession.

If only these goals could be divided on a chopping block.  But instead, they are all connected in an interminable run-on sentence.  To defeat al Qaeda, we have to remove its support structure along the Afpak border.  To do that, we have to (implicitly) convince Pakistan that it does not need an Islamist buffer in Afghanistan to ensure its own survival.  To do that, we have to ensure the economic development of southern Afghanistan.

To rebuild Afghanistan, we will need supplies, and those supplies will soon be guaranteed only when transited through Russia’s backyard.  To get that access, however, Russia is insisting that we abandon our plans to install anti-ballistic missile shields in Eastern Europe.  Meanwhile, Obama seems happy to do this as long as Russia stops supplying Iran’s nuclear development.  But for that concession, Russia is also demanding that we abandon our efforts to integrate Russia’s former satellite states (Ukraine and Georgia, specifically) into NATO and other western institutions.

We might be in a position to refuse this last Russian demand if only we could know for sure that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.  But to obtain that reassurance from Iran, Tehran itself is looking for carte-blanche in its consolidation of Shiite influence in Iraq, Iran’s greatest historical enemy.  We might be willing to make a trade—nukes for Iraq—but the US is slated to withdraw most of its forces anyway, so we have little to offer Tehran that it won’t get by merely sitting on its hands.

Perhaps, then, the gridlock will dissipate if we manage to break off Syria from its alliance with Iran, but that requires Israel’s willingness to negotiate with Syria and other enemies—a practice which Israel’s new prime minister is apparently refusing to do until after President Obama defuses Iran’s nuclear ambitions, in one way or another.

If you are confused, join the club.  No one knows where this negotiation starts or ends, who the parties really are, and what concessions they are prepared to make.  So far, the only real sacrifice President Obama has asked of the American people is economic.  He has not asked us to tolerate an Iranian Bomb; he has not suggested we send our sons and daughters into northwest Pakistan; and he has not indicated just how far he would go in a confrontation with Russia.  After all, reset buttons might inspire a respite of amnesia, but just how far back does he expect that button will take us?  To the Yeltsin days when Russia slept in every morning?  Or to the Cuban missile crisis, when no one slept at all?

The one thing that is clear is that Russia, Iran and Pakistan are at the center of nearly every obstacle we face abroad, and we lack the military, financial and political resources to address more than one of them at a time, if that.

Virtually nothing about this conflict was changed with Israel’s military operation in Gaza.  Nothing on the surface, nothing lurking in the shadows, nothing for the history books.  Yet the fundamentals of this conflict that have existed since 1967 are somehow becoming more obvious and less accessible every day.  As rhetoric bleeds into strategy, sobering arguments are polluted by perverse distortions and the only thing that makes sense is confusion.  As a humble remedy, perhaps, the following conversation is a synthesis of hundreds of hours of candid discussions (and screaming matches) between Israeli and Palestinian colleagues and friends.  It offers no solutions or common ground, but only pain. Until we get through the meat of this war, the bones will never heal.  Here is how these enemies think and argue.

Ahmed: Why do you humiliate us every day, with your checkpoints, your raids, and your occupation?  Why won’t you leave us alone?

Avi: Because we believe that you would continue terrorizing us even if we give up the West Bank.  If you were eager to kill Israelis long before any of us ever lived in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, how could we possibly believe that you would be satisfied by anything short of our expulsion from the region?  You can talk about peace accords, but at the end of the day, which occupation do you want to end?  The one in that started in 1967, or the one you say began in 1948 when the State of Israel was established?

Ahmed: Well, I’ll answer that question with another one: You always talk about how important it is for Palestinians to recognize Israel, but which Israel do you want us to recognize?  The Israel with pre-1967 borders?  Or an Israel that occupies the West Bank and controls our movement with nearly 500 checkpoints on any given day?  Or maybe an Israel that has been “converged” behind the “security barrier” wall/fence, which would almost guarantee a permanent separation between a Palestinian homeland and our most sacred religious sites?  But to answer your question honestly, yes, your suspicions are correct: it is the 1948 occupation that we want to end, just like the Jews would love to have the West Bank as well.  But we know Israel is here to stay, and we can tolerate you as much as you can tolerate us.  But what we cannot tolerate is your occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Avi: Look, we don’t enjoy occupying the West Bank any more than you enjoy being occupied; it puts our soldiers at risk, it’s a drain on our military and it hurts our image abroad.  We continue the occupation because we want to be safe from terrorism.

Ahmed: But you are creating more resentment and terrorism with the occupation.

Avi: That’s definitely true, but we know that if we withdraw from the West Bank, the terrorism will not stop and is likely to get worse.  After disengaging from Gaza nearly 4 years ago, the only thing we got in return was strengthened resistance in Gaza.  And now, because of the continuous barrage of Qassam rockets, we are evacuating our homes inside of Israel itself, not just in the territories.  Gaza was your test.  You proved that when given the chance to function peacefully on your own, you failed miserably.

Ahmed: Of course we failed in Gaza. You still control our airspace, our coastline, our borders and our economy.  You pretended to take the moral high road with your “test,” but you did it for strategic reasons and with no follow-through.  And it has nothing to do with Hamas.  Our economy was already dead before you made Gaza a giant outdoor prison. For years you have made Palestinians dependent on the Israeli economy so you could control us as much as possible.  Even before Hamas took over Gaza, farmers were stuck at border crossings for days, watching their vegetables rot while your soldiers closed border crossings at random just to frustrate us.

Avi: So you take no responsibility for your inability to promote peace in Gaza?  And what difference does it make if we evacuated Gaza for strategic reasons?  You should want to prove to the world that you can function peacefully.  Granted, we set the terms for the pullout, and you can only do so much with severe sanctions and closed borders, but we gave you Gaza—we gave you something—and you failed to take advantage of it.

Ahmed: You did not “give” us anything.  You returned it.

Avi: Fine, we returned it.  It was a public relations coup for us.  We should have negotiated Gaza back to you, but we didn’t; we evacuated it, and we ruined the credibility of the moderate Palestinians.  But it was still something.  Why aren’t you openly furious with the Gazans who confirmed everyone’s suspicions when their first response to our evacuation was a whole-sale pillaging of every building in sight and an increase in rocket/mortar attacks against southern Israel?  Don’t you want to persuade us (and the rest of the world) that you are not just another group of thugs and terrorists?

Ahmed: Why should we?  Palestinians have gotten almost nothing from negotiating with Israelis, and we cannot imagine why it is we who have to prove anything to anyone.  The real question is: How can you persuade us that you are serious about peace when you took those uprooted settlers from Gaza and gave them new homes in the West Bank?  Is that what you call a “confidence-building measure”?  No, of course not—your unilateral evacuation was a public relations stunt.  Gaza is not strategically important to Israel, and Sharon knew that abandoning it could ensure an even tighter grasp of the West Bank, which is really what you wanted all along.

Avi: Look, I think it was a terrible decision to transfer any of the Gaza settlers to the West Bank, and I think the settlers should not be in the West Bank or Gaza at all.  But occupying the West Bank militarily is strategically important because it protects Israel’s dense population centers.  Heavily occupying East Jerusalem (and a few other parts of the West Bank) provides a crucial buffer zone protecting our vulnerable spots from terrorists.  So even if we stopped being hypocritical in every way you claim we are, then, as the more powerful party, we still have to be convinced that a free and shared Jerusalem will actually be a city of peace, and that the fighting will stop.  If we had any sense that you would actually stop resisting once we ended the occupation of the West Bank or even East Jerusalem, most Israelis would gladly hand it over everything except the Old City.

Ahmed: The fanatical Jews in Hebron would never consent to that.

Avi: Of course not, nor would Islamic Jihad ever disarm for any negotiated settlement.  The difference between us, though, is that the Israeli government has the power to force a negotiated settlement upon Israelis.  We hated uprooting Gaza’s 8000 Jewish settlers; they spit on our own soldiers and called them Nazis.  But it had to be done, unilaterally or otherwise. But can Palestinian leaders and institutions exert the same legitimate, authoritative control over its own people, including the radicals?

Ahmed: If most Israelis would hand over Hebron if they thought doing so would make them safer in Israel proper, then the same is true of Palestinian resistance: in the late 1990s, Fatah cracked down on Hamas so much that only 8 Israelis were killed by Palestinians between the summers of 1997 and 2000, compared to more than a thousand during the 2nd Intifada.  We were promised at Oslo that if we delivered security, you would reverse settlement growth (or at least freeze it!); but the “dovish” Ehud Barak oversaw the development of more settlements than any other Israeli prime minister.  You had your deal; you were getting virtually everything you asked for, and in return, all we got back was Jericho. You got greedy and thought you could enjoy your settlements and your peace.  We controlled our radicals then, and you’re still complaining that you don’t have a “credible partner for peace.”  And now that may be true, but only because you humiliated those of us who had faith that you would deliver.  Now everyone thinks you suckered us, including me.

Avi: Okay, you’re right on this one.  We wanted to have it both ways, and it cost us both a lot.  But now the 2nd Intifada has compelled us to start building trust again, and we have created so many new terrorists that we are now faced again with the same problem: even in the best case scenario, it’s not the vast majority of Palestinians that we worry about.  We are worried about the one percent that will simply never give up killing Israelis until we move to Alaska or Uganda or wherever.  And among a population of 3.5 million, one percent is still 35,000—all of whom could exploit a peace settlement by launching rockets and mortars from ideal strategic positions on top of the hills surrounding East Jerusalem.  Currently, we have the authoritative legitimacy to neutralize our own rabid one percent, but do you?  Believing you is an incredible gamble for us.  As terrifying as Gaza’s Qassam rockets are to Israeli residents of Sderot, Israel’s low-density population in the Negev make those rockets far less worrisome.  But within the fantasy of a negotiated settlement, imagine how easy it would be for Hamas to launch these same Qassams from the hills of Abu Dis, just east of the Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries.  Terrorists could kill hundreds or maybe thousands of Israelis in a single afternoon.  And when they do, no matter how we respond—air strikes, invasions, doing nothing—not only would our options be severely limited by international scorn, but any and every one of those options would make our population significantly more vulnerable as a result.  So even if we believed you were sincere, we have excellent reason to believe that you would lack the capacity to eliminate the militants operating on the ideological fringes of Palestinian society.

Ahmed: You don’t get it.  We’ve already proven that to you, and you blew it.  Whenever Palestinians feel hopeful about the peace process, the government has more than enough legitimacy to confront our extremists.  And your talk of security concerns is a joke compared to ours; you’re worried about losing hundreds of Israelis in a day, and we lost more than 200 Palestinians in as many seconds at the beginning of your latest escapade in Gaza.  And then you have the nerve to tell us that we shouldn’t be allowed to have a military even after a negotiated settlement.

Avi: If you want to talk about ethics, that’s fine.  You are suffering far more than we are, and I wish I could make it stop.  And even if you think Israelis are sadistic land-grabbers, at the end of the day we still have genuine security concerns that have nothing to do with cruelty, imperialism, or Zionism, and these concerns have to be addressed.  Too often these legitimate security concerns are hijacked by Israeli fanatics who would feel lost if they had no one to hate.  And we don’t do enough to distance ourselves from them, much as we feel you don’t do enough to distance yourselves from Palestinian extremists.

Ahmed: But if most Israelis are not sadistic land-grabbers, then how can you explain the settlement growth in the West Bank—a blatant violation of international law and everyone’s common sense?  Why not merely occupy the West Bank with soldiers for security reasons like any victor of war? And why are there 500 checkpoints in the West Bank when everyone knows that at least half of them have no strategic significance?

Avi: The Israeli government has always supported the isolated settlements in the West Bank in order to have more bargaining chips if we start negotiating again.  The same goes for the excessive checkpoints.  But the settlements between the security fence and the 1967 border are very relevant to the security of Jerusalem, to the dense populations just west of the 1967 border, and to Ben Gurion airport.  Again, these security concerns are not legitimate justifications for permanent occupation and settlement growth, but they are unquestionably the most accurate explanations—regardless of what any militant Jews on the fringes of our society will tell you.

Ahmed: Even if our failure to govern would make you more vulnerable, then why not put your faith in the UN or the EU to monitor and enforce whatever negotiated settlement we conceive?  You would be protected by legitimate international forces present in the West Bank.

Avi: We did that in Lebanon last summer, and right now the UN is literally watching as Hezbollah re-stocks its arsenal, helpless to do anything about it.  The UN even criticizes us for our reconnaissance flights over southern Lebanon to monitor what the UN fails to monitor and prevent.  UN forces abandoned us in the Sinai before the 1967 war, nearly clearing a path for the Egyptian army.  Likewise, until Hamas took over Gaza, the EU was “monitoring” the Rafah Crossing between Egypt and Gaza, and they were not even required to prevent known terrorists from entering Gaza; besides, the swiss-cheese Philadelphi crossing between Gaza and the Sinai reduced the EU operation the status of a charade, and rockets rained down on us all the same.  That’s why we launched Cast Lead a few months ago.  Nothing else worked.  But Cast Lead didn’t help much either.  Regardless, Jews have been burned by the international community so many times that it is nothing short of amusing when people still urge us to rely on them.  Even still, we all know that, in the end, we Israelis will have to depend on others if we ever hope to find peace.  We make plenty of mistakes, and at the end of the day, even when we are extremely professional and courteous occupiers, we are still occupiers.  Our frustration with Palestinians is only matched by our desire to correct our mistakes.  But the risk of doing so is undeniable.

Ahmed: Undeniable but not insurmountable.  How long can you continue justifying future mistakes by citing ones you’ve made in the past?  How do you ever hope to control of your future if you are forever bound by the mistakes of your predecessors?  And what good is recognizing your mistakes if you refuse to break free from their legacies?  Damage control is not a policy; it’s a reaction.  It is time to start acting.  It is time for a paradigm shift in Israel.

Avi: Sure thing.  You first.

As usual, Mark Perry puts rumors like these to bed with a healthy dose of logic and insider information, as he is known for his expertise on and relationships with Hamas’ leaders in Gaza and Damascus. So why, I asked, is he the only voice insisting that Hamas is battered but hardly divided? Essentially, because the Israeli government is playing us for fools, he says. (Hyperlinks added by me).

The reason people don’t believe me is because they believe what is printed in the Israeli press. That is to say, no one seems to ask Hamas, the primary source of my material, for their position. What is interesting about this is that reporters and analysts on the telephone with me talking about the differences in “the Gaza leadership” and the “Damascus leadership” of Hamas. They tell me that the Hamas leadership in Gaza represents the moderate wing of the party and that Khalid Meshaal represents the “radical” wing of the party.

If that is true, I ask, why did Israel invade Gaza — why didn’t they try to kill Meshaal and negotiate with the “moderate” wing of the party? And if that is true, why do Israelis (like Mark Regev) describe the Hamas leadership in Gaza as nihilists? The head of the political/military bureau of Hamas is Khalid Meshaal, who has been on the telephone constantly with the senior leadership in Gaza telling them to take more practical steps with Israel.

Are there divisions in the leadership of Hamas? Certainly there are. They have disagreements, it’s not the politburo of the communist party. There are differences and debates in the Democratic Party also. Does that mean there is a split?

Israeli officials would like us to believe that they really know what they’re talking about when it comes to Hamas. In fact, they don’t have a clue. And so they repeat what they did in the 1980s: they told the world that the Tunis leadership of the PLO represented the terrorist wing of the organization, while the insiders were more moderate. It was bullshit: the inside people were much more radical — as you might expect if you live under an occupation. The Tunis leadership as it turned out was moderate: and Israel made a deal with them.

Let us suppose for just one moment that Israel is right — the moderates rule in Gaza. Let’s take it as a given — even though it is not true. What do you suppose the leadership in Gaza thinks now? Does Israel think they are even more moderate? Was the late great Said Sayyam a moderate — in comparison to say, Khalid Meshaal, Mohamed Nasser, Usamah Hamdan, or Mohammad Nizzal? Do we now, as a result of Israel’s line about a split in Hamas, suppose that their own reports that the Gaza leadership had been taken over by radicals is false, and that their new report is true?

There is one truth about a lot of media reports on Hamas in Israel. The truth is that the media gets their information from Ehud Barak and Yuval Diskin. They are fools. Their intelligence services, highly respected by the US public, are dismissed by intelligence service people here [in the US]. And for good reason.

No matter who is to blame for the recent escalation of violence in Gaza—no matter which side is morally righteous—it should be obvious to everyone that Hamas is now even less likely to abandon violent resistance any time soon.  Even if Operation Cast Lead will make Hamas think twice about attacking Israel in the future (doubtful), Hamas will still do whatever it takes to prepare for the day when it is ready.  And the 18-month blockade of Gaza—put in place by Egypt and Israel after Hamas’ localized coup—has only made Hamas more protective of its arsenal.

As a result, Jerusalem believes that the only way to protect Israelis is to secure the Philadelphi Corridor, the nine-mile border between Gaza and Egypt, beneath which lie an estimated 300 makeshift tunnels used by Hamas and entrepreneurial Palestinians to smuggle (among other things) foodstuffs, cigarettes, livestock, gasoline and (in the case of Hamas) enormous amounts of explosives, firearms, ammunition and well-trained teachers/students of militant resistance.  Without these tunnels, Israel insists, Hamas would not be able to stockpile and fire rockets and mortars against Israel with impunity.  And with talk of a ceasefire in the air, Jerusalem has made the permanent monitoring and destruction of these tunnels a key sticking point to ending its assault.

But what would that effort require, and would it actually make Israelis safer?

The ideas are neither new nor particularly promising, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) explored and discarded most of them throughout the years it occupied Gaza.  One suggestion was to build a moat filled with seawater that would drown any smuggler who breached it, but the proposal was abandoned due to the threat of contaminating the aquifer beneath Gaza.  An underground wall was also considered, but unless it is made of titanium, Hamas would need only a chisel and a little patience.  Another idea was to destroy all the buildings within a kilometer of the border (houses frequently conceal entrances and exits to the tunnels), but this could smell an awful lot like ethnic cleansing, and without a heavy occupation, the houses could always be rebuilt.

Last year, the US Department of Defense allocated $23 million to train and equip Egyptian border guards to find and destroy the tunnels, but the effort has been widely described as a failure, despite the recent deployment of “a form of ground-penetrating radar,” rumored to be on loan from the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Even with the help of technology, however, the provisions of the 1979 Camp David Treaty between Israel and Egypt places a tight cap on the number of Egyptian soldiers allowed near that border with Israel, and even if that were somehow bypassed, it is unclear how much Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak could help.

After all, Cairo has been struggling with its own militant Islamist problem for decades; as the ideological birthplace of al-Qaeda and home to the spiritual forbears of Hamas, Egypt has spent years turning a blind eye to Palestinian weapons smuggling to ensure that Hamas continues to see Israel as their primary enemy, rather than Cairo.

On the other hand, Mubarak has had to balance this interest with a primal fear that Gaza’s jihadi hotbed might spill over into Egypt.  For this reason it has been particularly surprising these last few weeks to see Mubarak and his foreign ministry blame Hamas for the violence and subsequently refuse to allow healthy Gazans fleeing Israel’s air strikes to seek refuge in Egypt—a decision for which he has been excoriated in the Arab world.   Amidst the fallout, it is still unclear if Mubarak will resume his balancing act or if he will risk dismembering the vast networks of smugglers and corrupt officials in the Sinai Peninsula.

Given Cairo’s previous failings to curb smuggling, Israel has been insistent that whatever force patrols the border should be “international” and have a clear mandate to find and destroy these tunnels, and to capture any operatives caught in the act of smuggling.  But Egypt is weary of violations to its sovereignty, and deploying the force on the Gaza side of the border is a deal-breaker for Hamas.

Besides, as impractical as a moat or an underground wall may be, an international contingent of soldier-archeologists might be even worse, as any force tasked with destroying—not just “monitoring”—these tunnels will likely find themselves in Hamas’ crosshairs.  And what competent military would volunteer their services for such a task?

Well, it seems the IDF would.  With as much at stake as Israel claims to have, there is good reason to think Jerusalem already has something in mind for this border, though the Israelis have been coy on the matter so far.  More specifically, Israel’s primary ceasefire negotiator, Amos Gilad, rejected the prospect of an international force because it would be “devoid of intelligence, devoid of an ability to penetrate those doing all of this smuggling, devoid of an operational capability.”  In nearly the same breath over the weekend, Gilad also rejected the prospect of an Egyptian force because “the Egyptians are great at making efforts, but not at achieving results.”

Granted, this could be a negotiating tactic to secure as good an outcome as possible for Jerusalem, especially given that both of these statements are accurate.  But precisely because they are accurate, Israel is unlikely to entrust border control to international or Egyptian forces.  To that end, one idea making the rounds in hawkish Israeli circles is to make all Gazan territory within three kilometers of the Corridor a “closed military zone” and to ask Cairo to do the same on their side of the border—forcing any future tunnel to be at least six times longer than today’s average length of one kilometer.

This would require not only destroying all the buildings in a given area, but also a massive population transfer in one of the most densely populated places on earth.  The southern city of Rafah alone, with a population exceeding 150,000, would fall in a zone that extended only one kilometer into the Strip.

Though extreme, from the IDF’s perspective, without widening the Corridor in this way, reoccupying only the Gaza-Egypt border—and not the entire Strip—would make the IDF contingent along the border more vulnerable to attack from Hamas and other militants.  Already obsessed with Israel’s lack of “strategic depth,” Jerusalem would need to ensure that its new formation, protruding like a twig out of southern Israel, could be reinforced quickly and thus able to withstand a sustained rocket/mortar assault from both directions.

But whoever or whatever patrols the border, indulging Israel’s tunnel vision will not keep weapons out of Gaza, no matter the success of any anti-tunneling campaign.  Because an end to the blockade will be integral to any ceasefire, Hamas will merely return to the days when it smuggled weapons from Egypt and even Israel itself through legitimate border crossings into Gaza.  Both then and now, nearly all of Hamas’ rocket propellants and explosives are homemade from vast quantities of sugar and potassium nitrate, which can be disguised as just about anything.  Likewise, with the right instruction, even the military-grade rockets (donated by Iran) that Hamas smuggles into Gaza can be broken down into smaller pieces, packaged as “humanitarian equipment,” and then reassembled on the other side.

In the end, if Hamas wants to acquire weapons, it will acquire them.  And if Israel wants to stop the attacks on its country, it has to concede that in the long term, only a brutal re-occupation of all of Gaza or a negotiated final settlement could ever make it stop.  Everything else is politics.

[View this article at the Asia Times]

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Something had to be done in Gaza.  Something.  Anything, really.  So why not a Hail Mary?

Since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, more than 8000 rockets and mortars have been fired into southern Israel from Gaza.  And who could blame Jerusalem for trying to put an end to it?  After all, as every single Israeli security expert reminds anyone proffering an alternative to F-16s, would any other country tolerate attacks on its civilian population with the patience and dexterity Israel has shown?  What if Houston or Atlanta were being attacked like this?

Even Israel’s President and ‘elder statesman’ Shimon Peres found himself wondering, what does Hamas hope to accomplish by constantly firing rockets? “What do they expect, that we won’t respond?”  And it’s a great question, but it’s also painfully simplistic.  This is not merely a matter of broad principle about patience in the face of incessant attack.  There’s a reason Israeli talking points this past week have focused almost exclusively on the big picture of the last seven years—because the last seven months have demonstrated a painfully inconvenient fact: whatever its demerits (and there are many), Hamas has discipline.  Period.

Far more so than the PLO ever did, when Hamas pledges to reduce tensions, it does just that.  One need not believe that the group’s leadership is virtuous or courageous simply to admit that their ranks follow orders.  In the months that followed the June 19 “lull” (tahadiya) in fighting between Israel and Hamas, the number of rocket and mortar attacks plummeted and stayed down for nearly five months—creating the very climate that the IDF now claims to seek with Operation Cast Lead.

If Hamas had no discipline, this argument wouldn’t fly and a Hail Mary like Cast Lead might be strategically worthwhile, but the best case scenario by any metric is a long-term version of the lull that put Israelis at great danger only after Israel launched an attack on Gaza on November 4th, effectively ending Hamas’ restraint.

While the explicit goal of this latest operation is to cease all rocket and mortar attacks on southern Israel, senior IDF and intelligence officials have privately signaled in a disparate chorus that this goal is unrealistic anyway, even with a ground invasion.  Israelis couldn’t even prevent rocket/mortar fire when they occupied Gaza before 2005, and back then Hamas was plagued by Fatah’s rivalry and amateur rocket technology.

‘But nevermind that,’ Jerusalem insists.  ‘Details will only confuse you. Would you or would you not just sit by and do nothing in response to rocket fire on your homes?’  Apparently, it’s that simple.  It’s irrelevant that Israel was benefitting tremendously from the lull and the near-deafening silence (.pdf) it produced in the southern Negev desert.

Source: Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (Israel)

Rocket fire alone was reduced from a monthly average of 179 to less than 3—with the remainder attacks being attributed (according to Israeli intelligence) to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, no less.

Yet like any country, when Israel launches a military operation, especially a controversial one, the public relations and propaganda offensives rely on any and every rhetorical ploy to garner support, even when Israeli security officials are privately saying—usually “on background”—that the southern Negev will not be completely calm until Hamas wants it to be completely calm, and the closest Israel has ever come to that was during the above lull.

Here’s another example.  During previous lulls or ceasefires between Israel and Palestinian militants, it’s always remarkable to listen to Israelis decry their enemies for “exploiting” the ceasefires to dig in and prepare for the next battle, as though Israelis spend that same time on holiday, hoping for the best.  In fact, in the past week, the Israeli press has reported on the abundance of self-congratulation in Jerusalem over how much intelligence had been gathered for this operation, how many stockpiles and weapons caches had been tracked (and subsequently targeted), and how much disinformation it had spread to confuse the enemy.

So it seems that when Israelis plan for the worst, it’s because they’re competent warriors who scorn the unprepared, but when Palestinians plan for the worst, it’s because they’re drooling for martyrdom.  (Rest assured, some certainly are.)  And it was this apparent drool that prompted Israel to terminate its obligation to the lull on November 4th by attacking Hamas’ tunnels burrowing beneath Gaza towards Israel.  (It was through a cross-border tunnel like this one that Hamas captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in the summer of 2006.  So understandably, it’s a soft spot.)

For perspective, it is normal for Hamas to dig such tunnels, and equally normal for Israel to destroy them, though in a lull—and for a tunnel that had not reached Israeli soil yet—the killing of six Hamas militants in the operation doesn’t quite compute.  If preparing for the next big fight is considered a violation of the lull, then it is endlessly ironic that Israel’s surveillance of Hamas’ tunneling was itself just as preparatory as the tunneling itself—like an indignant student insisting his classmate was cheating, and citing as visual proof, “Because I was cheating off of him too.”  Woops.

But here’s where strategy becomes dangerously indistinguishable from propaganda.  Israel has every right to defend itself; it has done so superbly and honorably on many occasions.  It can prevent every attempt by Hamas to develop weapons and tunnels, as it did on November 4th.  It can even feign surprised outrage whenever Hamas retaliates, as any competent foreign ministry would in the days before a powerful military operation.  Perhaps Barak thought he was playing the old time-in/time-out game, but one IDF official even tried to tell the NY Times that because this was a “pinpoint” operation aimed at a specific “imminent” threat, the op shouldn’t be considered a truce-breaker, and Israel remained committed to the truce.  Water under the bridge, right?

But the same common sense that compelled Shimon Peres to wonder about Hamas’ expectations surely compels Israel to consider if Jerusalem’s own attacks could actually go unanswered.  Naturally, that thought process is utterly absent in the foreign ministry’s outreach of outrage because their goal is to recruit as much support as possible.  And to that end, the MFA seems to be playing with graphs on its website in order to paint the lull as worthless.

But more ominously, while propaganda usually serves as a tool to support a nuanced and methodical military operation, Cast Lead seems to have been launched by a simplistic caricature of Israeli self-defense itself, blossoming in the foreign ministry’s press releases.  Talking points are being confused with chokepoints, and with a caricature calling the shots, it’s no wonder that what seems to pass for “strategy” is actually just a target list mixed with a little cloak and dagger.

Instead of talking about whether the smuggler’s paradise beneath the 9-mile Egypt-Gaza border could be countered without (or even with) a long-term Israeli occupation, Jerusalem is talking about the need to “retrieve the power of deterrence” and to teach Hamas a “lesson.”   Yes, we heard you the first ten times.  But what is your plan?  What will prevent Hamas from re-arming once you deftly destroy all of its arms depots?  An “international force”?  A moat or underground wall along the Egypt-Gaza border?  Or perhaps a giant trench-digger to excavate the tunnels.  Have you thought that far ahead?  A 500+ body count in Gaza and a 300% increase in attacks on southern Israel better have a silver lining.

Either way, in its public justification for the operation, by focusing so much on the last seven years (and not the lessons of the last seven months), Jerusalem indicated that raw principle was all it dared to employ in determining the appropriate strategy for Gaza.  Right when Olmert and Barak needed to sift through the fine print—which demonstrated that Hamas, as evil and wicked as it is, has discipline—it longed for neat and simple principles that begged equally blunt instruments.  After all, ‘something’ had to be done.  Something that matched our fury, something that vindicated our failures in Lebanon, something that deterred our enemies, something that taught them a lesson, and something that didn’t make us feel suckered and alone.

These are completely understandable and justifiable feelings for Israelis to have, but the somethingness of Israel’s resolve has hijacked its strategy.  And the propaganda machine is not along for the ride, but revving at the wheel of a Merkava.

[View this Commentary at the Huffington Post]

[Syndicated by the Middle East Times, Beirut's Daily Star, Egypt's Daily News and Al Arabiya]
[Read this column in Arabic, Urdu, French and Indonesian]

Negotiating with our adversaries is a tricky business, and with President-elect Barack Obama on the way in, most observers of US foreign policy are confident that negotiating is about to become the predominant foreign policy approach — for better or worse. They are mistaken, however, if they think this approach will be a drastic change.

In fact, in the last two years, though it is sometimes difficult to discern from White House press releases, President George W. Bush has actually been relying more and more on the very tactics that most observers have come to associate with Obama. In fact, in terms of broad foreign policy strategy, when it comes to opening the channels of negotiation and dialogue, four more years of Bush could have been alarmingly similar to those of Obama’s upcoming ones.

Consider, for instance, that after six years of refusing to negotiate with “rogue” governments or liberally labelled “terrorist groups”, the Bush administration has, since 2006, negotiated a long-lasting alliance with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, many of whom are held responsible for killing thousands of American soldiers between the summer of 2003 and the fall of 2006. In addition, Washington led successful multilateral negotiations with North Korea to ensure a verifiable dismantling of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme, which produced and successfully tested a nuclear device in 2006.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Bush administration has negotiated with Iran in order to reduce Tehran’s military and financial support of the Shi’a militias in central Iraq, and Washington has expressed increasing openness to negotiating with the non-Al Qaeda elements of the Taliban.

To claim, however, that Bush has been rectifying his disastrous policies is hardly absolution. Without a doubt, Bush has spent the last half of his second term unravelling the fabric of much of his foreign policy because his previous methods were failing at every turn.

Yet, change he has.

After all, the Bush administration is well into negotiations — on one level or another — with numerous declared “enemies” of the United States, with particular emphasis on the “axis of evil”.

Obama’s policy of pro-engagement might feel visionary and new, but only because Bush has been so quiet in his engagement with these parties, unlikely to celebrate a policy that was dead last on his initial list of priorities.

In order to provide a clean roadmap for his own foreign policy, Obama essentially ignored the seemingly pro-engagement tactics in the final two years of the Bush presidency on the campaign trail. However, it is no coincidence that Obama decided to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Pentagon. For much of the last two years, Gates and Obama seemed to be virtually quoting each other’s policy speeches, especially regarding the importance of renewing US focus on Afghanistan/Pakistan in the so-called “war on terror”.

While most of us were distracted with how the presidential candidates framed their campaign objectives, Bush was busy creating the momentum for a series of negotiations that he never had the talent or political capital to finish.

If Obama, in contrast, possesses the talent and the capital to engage our adversaries effectively and with follow-through, then his best chance resides in his ability to complement, not replace, his predecessor’s recent diplomatic efforts abroad.

Reaching an appropriate balance of introducing new policy approaches and building on those of the past administration is what Obama’s transition team is supposed to ensure, but Obama’s supporters are expecting the appearance of clean breaks and fresh policies come 20 January, if only because Bush’s belated progress was inspired and stained by a failed presidency.

Obama has the benefit (and foresight) of knowing on Day 1 what his predecessor learned in Year 6, which might mean fewer political and military mistakes, especially the hubristic kind. If they do not succeed, however, he too will have to know when to change course.

There is frequently a healthy dose of wisdom that accumulates after years of defeat, and learning lessons the hard way doesn’t mean the lessons are any less valuable; it simply means they came at an exorbitant cost. Obama stands to reap the benefits of Bush’s about-face. To fully benefit from this lesson, however, Obama must acknowledge that while he was campaigning for change, change was already under way.

[View this commentary at the Common Ground News Service]

There are certain fundamentals to an international negotiation that simply cannot be massaged or altered, even with the political momentum fostered by America’s incoming president, Barack Obama.

In the last five years, Tehran and Washington have jockeyed for influence in Iraq and occasionally negotiated with each other to shape the country’s democratic Shia majority to their own advantage.

And while Tehran’s nuclear weapons program has inspired greater international concern, Washington has kept any talk of nukes on the sidelines for years, hoping that the US could tackle that problem once Iraq stabilized—much as it has in recent months.

But two immediate obstacles threaten American stakes in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  The first is President-elect Obama’s repeated pledge to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq by the summer of 2010, and the second is the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which was approved by Iraq’s cabinet and parliament last week after months of acrimony in Baghdad.  The SOFA timetable requires all US combat forces to be out by the end of 2011, and for Iraqi authorities to control all military bases, cities and decision-making apparatuses by this time next year.

Yet however it happens, a unilateral US withdrawal from Iraq will leave Washington with virtually nothing of substance to offer Iran in return for the verifiable termination of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.

Control of Iraq is the most important card that Washington holds right now—a card, no less, that Tehran wants more than any other, and one that the US is about to give away for free.  Iran has a vital interest in keeping their fellow Shias in power in Iraq and in ensuring that the US is unable to use Iraqi bases to launch attacks on Iran.  Yet from Iran’s perspective, SOFA and the new administration’s pledge to be out in 16 months both provide Tehran excellent reason to sit on its hands and ample time to develop a nuclear weapon.

Granted, the US intelligence community believes that Iran terminated its nuclear weapons program in 2003, but simply taking Langley’s word seems a bit amnesiac, especially when Washington already has the leverage to solicit verified guarantees about a critical national security concern.

Once US forces pull out of Iraq, Washington will have no credible stick or carrot with which to persuade Iran to terminate its weapons program.  Sanctions will fail so long as Russia is a thorn in America’s side—providing Tehran with everything it needs—and Moscow is becoming increasingly thorny these days.  President-elect Obama says he wants to give far more weight to diplomacy than his predecessor did—which is a truly welcome development—but diplomacy is just a word when the US has nothing to trade. Welcoming correspondence and “interests sections” might grease the wheels (which need plenty of greasing), but at the end of the day, we want something from them, and they want something from us.  There is no honor system among enemies, so President-elect Obama will be unable to leverage the withdrawal from Iraq after the US departure.

Admittedly, for a number of reasons, it is vital to US national security that American forces withdraw from Iraq, but it would prove shortsighted if that withdrawal is conducted unilaterally or even bilaterally between Washington and Baghdad.  If Washington fails to trade influence in Iraq for a verifiable end to Iran’s weapons program—even if it was terminated 5 years ago—then the real meat and substance for an unprecedented rapprochement between the US and Iran will evaporate.  And when it does, if evidence surfaces that Iran is still pursuing a nuclear weapon, then an American air strike will become inevitable.

There are, however, two unlikely possibilities that would preclude the bombing.  First, if a renewed sectarian conflagration plunges Iraq into such misery that the SOFA and President-elect Obama’s withdrawal pledge must be reconsidered, then he will have the space and time to renegotiate the withdrawal on terms that include Iran’s nuclear transparency.   (The SOFA allows either side to dissolve their obligations with one year’s notice.)

Second, there is a chance that the very deal outlined above is already in the pipeline.  After all, it remains unclear exactly how the US was recently able to persuade Iran to tighten its leash on a number of Shia militias that were fueling Iraq’s civil war.  This Iranian concession could have been part of a far grander trade.

Yet pursuing such talks in the year leading up to pivotal presidential elections in both countries (Iran’s will be in June) would have been inherently risky for any government hoping to reach a sustainable agreement. If this deal is under way, however, then Obama is well situated to take the reigns and give the process new life with his reconciliatory streak.

After five years of negotiating from a position of dire weakness, it might not be too late to take advantage of the gains made in Iraq by cutting a deal with Tehran when Washington is strongest and ready to withdraw from Iraq anyway.

[View this Article at Al Jazeera]

After refusing to endorse the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations in December to negotiate with Iran and Syria about the fate of Iraq, Secretary Rice’s recent policy reversal was as startling as it was predictable. Only weeks ago, it had been staunch US policy not to submit to Iranian “extortion,” but, like it or not, there is simply no other way now to secure Iraq. If only it were that simple.

This is the moment Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been waiting for: US foreign policy will soon reflect the fact that the war in Iraq cannot be won with force, and that we will have to make concessions of some kind to salvage this failed mission. But at whose expense?

In the buildup to the US invasion of Iraq, the Israeli government quietly gave its blessing to the Bush administration, hoping, in return, that the US would extend the same courtesy to Israel when the time came to address the blossoming Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Naturally, any such implicit exchange depended entirely on the successful reconstruction of Iraq – by even the flimsiest definition of success. As many on the right and left predicted, the failure to replace the toppled Saddam Hussein with a leadership able to contain Tehran’s regional ambitions has hurt Israel far more than forgoing the invasion would have done.

Like Israel, the US had hoped invading Iraq would also intimidate Iran, in much the same way Libya was frightened. But the US military is utterly paralyzed in Iraq and, thus, unable to scratch Israel’s back with a sustained air campaign to delay, or destroy, Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Unable to protect both interests, the Bush administration has caved, and Condoleezza Rice will now have to plead with Israel not to antagonize Iran, fearing more Iranian pressure on US forces in Iraq. But with fears of a new Holocaust gaining momentum in Israel, the Jewish nation will be unable to make nice.

Worse still, not only does an exhausted and scattered US military currently preclude Washington from confronting Tehran, but now that President Bush intends to publicly engage Iran in talks about Iraq, the US will very soon be forced to make a burdensome choice: protect tangible, current US interests in Iraq, or address the far more worrisome, but later-to-be-fulfilled threat of an Iranian nuclear arsenal?

It is simply impossible for President Bush to address both concerns – it will be difficult enough to deal with either. Regardless, Tehran is eagerly waiting to cash in its chips, fantasizing about control over Iraq, or a nuclear deterrent. Either outcome would hurt US security interests, but both of them terrify our allies in the Middle East.

Of all the countries, it is particularly worrisome for Israel to be put in this position, given the common – and understandable – Israeli belief that the Jewish nation cannot rely on anyone but itself. And if history is any indication, whenever Israelis taste the bitterness of realpolitik, war inevitably follows.

To stave off such a disaster, a number of US legislators and presidential hopefuls have begun a campaign of damage control to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It is crucial to encourage American leadership to address these concerns in a very public, but also very precise, manner.

For example, employing deliberate and tactful rhetoric, Senator Hillary Clinton recently emphasized dialogue with Iran and Syria, but not for explicitly dovish reasons: “If we have to pursue potential action against Iran, then I want to know more about the adversary that we face. I want to understand better what the leverage we can bring to bear on them will actually produce.”

Likewise, Senator John McCain insisted that we recruit other nations to impose additional multilateral sanctions on Iran, outside the UN framework.

Unfortunately, neither tactic will achieve the desired goal, but such declarations still serve an important purpose: by emphasizing sanctions and Clinton-style reconnaissance, Western leaders, and especially US legislators, are giving President Bush the necessary time and political cover to quietly reach an informal arrangement with Iran. Secretary Rice’s latest initiative is only the latest installment in this process – inevitable in every way.

Specifically, Tehran would get more influence in Iraq, and the West would get verifiable termination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. At this point, even if Washington were willing to allow an Iranian nuclear program in order to ensure a peaceful Iraq, it is doubtful Tehran would accept such an offer. Regional influence has been paramount to Tehran for generations, and, regrettably, the Bush administration played right into it from the beginning.

It is equally tempting to hope that the recent rumors of division within the Iranian leadership will prevent us from even needing to negotiate a deal, but any foreign policy should be tethered to more than merely blind hope.

Rest assured, cutting a deal now will not feel good. We are Americans. We hate deals. It would have been better to negotiate with Tehran immediately after ripping down Saddam’s statue from its foundations. But adults cannot always get their first choice. We overreached, and it’s now consolation time.

[View this Op-Ed at Middle East Times]

There is a general tendency in the West to describe countries like Syria, and its regime in Damascus, in blanket political and (often) moral terms. Such analysis is an oversimplification in most countries but particularly so in Syria, which has an immensely complicated geopolitical position in the Middle East. To be of any use, Syria must be scrutinized.

More so than any other Arab country, Syria’s government and its power brokers are inherently secular and opportunistic, driven by good-old-fashioned survival instincts. When mixed with Syria’s distinctive geography, this opportunism has led the Syrian government to play a disproportionately large role in the numerous conflicts plaguing the entire region. Without question, Syria is at the physical and political center of Middle East politics.

To the southwest is Israel, the unwelcome Jewish neighbor who captured and annexed the Golan Heights after resisting Syrian invasions in 1967 and again in 1973.

To the west is Lebanon, serving as a Syrian playground and cash cow for nearly three decades, until Damascus over-played its hand and was dealt a very visible and painful defeat by reformists that still reverberates today.

To the east is Iraq, the hotbed of a failed US occupation—a failure, US officials say, thanks in large measure to Syria’s refusal to monitor jihadist movement across its 605km border with Iraq.

And beyond Iraq to the east is Iran, the Islamic Republic ascending to be perhaps the dominant Muslim player in Middle East politics—explicitly recruiting (and buying) the support of Syria and several extremist groups dedicated to Israel’s destruction.

*****

It is often tempting (especially from an American and post-9/11 perspective) to dismiss the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a blatant sponsor of terror—a role that he even admits openly, though framed in a different context.

Unsurprisingly, 9/11 has led most westerners to view terrorism in black-and-white terms, but given the tremendous complexity of Assad’s precarious regime and very precise interests, it would be a grave mistake to use the understandable western disdain for terrorism to justify a refusal to view Syria in anything but Manichean terms.

In order to engage Syria with any substantive or symbolic diplomacy, it is crucial to understand the nuances of what is important to the ruling Assad family and the tenuous balancing act that Syria must (and usually does) maintain. Only then can the obstacles to Syrian interests provide texture to the behavior of the Syrian government, and its role in the wider Middle East.

[Continue...]

There are a number of important questions that must be addressed when analyzing and attempting to resolve the current war in Iraq.  First, why now?  Why is it that this same insurgency and civil war did not happen when Saddam Hussein was in power?  Second, to whom does this war belong? And finally, what has prevented the parties from reaching a political settlement?

It is important first to note that while the Bush Administration has certainly made plenty of mistakes, even if the execution of this war and its aftermath had been flawless, it is very likely that a civil war would have erupted nonetheless at some point during the post-war reconstruction.  The power balance disrupted by the invasion was simply too fragile and volatile not to explode into chaos.  But why and how did the US invasion invite resistance to grievances that seemed no worse—and in many instances, better—than under Saddam’s iron fist?

Hussein seemed to reinforce his own reputation as a merciless and savage ruler every chance he had.  He started an 8-year war in Iran in 1980 which cost nearly a million lives.  He routinely slaughtered thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq for seeking greater political autonomy, and any Shiite he arbitrarily deemed as seditious was summarily executed unless s/he was believed to merit torturing first.  He tortured and killed anyone (and their families) who disagreed with or doubted him.  And yet despite all this, it is because the US soldiers now occupying Iraq represent an entirely democratic society that Iraqi Sunnis have opted violently to resist the far-less repressive US forces.

[Continue...]

Israel’s conflict in the north with Hizbullah, Syria and (by extension) Iran is becoming increasingly ripe for a long-term resolution or containment, for the following reasons.

Why would Israel want to talk to any of its northern neighbors?

Hizbullah’s summer attack and continued ransom of two Israeli soldiers has led many Israelis to realize that the status quo is no longer automatically preferable to a settlement. And Israel’s inability to humiliate Hizbullah – as nothing less could be considered a victory – only reinforces the need to do something different.

How can Israel neutralize the northern threat?

Shiite and Hizbullah ministers in Lebanon are actively trying to force a collapse of the current anti-Syrian government by resigning in bulk, and possibly by killing popular anti-Syrian ministers. It is unclear if Prime Minister Fouad Siniora can weather this storm, but regardless, his government could never survive a political or military confrontation with Hizbullah.

Syria, on the other hand, is in the powerful position of being the only country (other than Israel) that shares a border with Lebanon. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has the wherewithal and lack of ideological constraints necessary to physically isolate Hizbullah in Lebanon. He merely lacks the motivation.

What would motivate Syria to cut off Hizbullah?

At its core, Syria is opportunistic. While Hizbullah is the ideological offspring of Iran, Syria merely serves as a channel between Iran and Hizbullah in the interest of money and power, not ideology and certainly not religion.

To ensure the operational capabilities of Hizbullah, Iran needs unimpeded access and supply lines through Syria and into southern Lebanon, which President Assad offers in order to get a free ride on Iran’s shoulders, as the popularity of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad only increases. And as always, Syria longs for a return of the Golan Heights, and the vast majority of Syrians are prepared to make sacrifices to get it back.

Neither the Israelis or Syrians are willing to put their big chips on the table (land and peace, respectively) until they have reason to believe they will not regret trusting each other. To this end, Assad’s diverse insecurities would give Israel the pretext to negotiate without immediately discussing the Golan Heights.

For instance, Damascus is facing a severe water shortage and needs billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure to transport water to Damascus, either from the Mediterranean Sea or the Euphrates River.

What’s more, Assad needs money (and a surge in international commerce) to strengthen his hold on power. Widespread resentment of his Alawite regime for its perceived corruption and ineptitude comes easily to a population that is nearly 75 percent Sunni and on the border with war-torn Iraq.

For various reasons, Arab nations have withdrawn their financial and political support for Syria, forcing Assad to become increasingly dependent on Iran—militarily, politically, and financially. This trend is not irreversible, but Assad has to embrace these trends or face a coup.

Or, the United States could step in.

Why would the United States engage Syria?

Constrained by a number of factors, President Bush could only engage Syria if it would benefit the US position in Iraq or limit the reach of Iran. Syria’s porous eastern border with Iraq is likely the easiest – and most used – method for Sunni fighters to enter Iraq and join the insurgency. The border is too long for the US forces to monitor, but Assad has the power to guard it, were he so inclined.

Furthermore, leading Syria away from Iran’s periphery would strike a blow to Tehran’s overall strides toward regional dominance. In fact, such a policy would be celebrated (and potentially rewarded) by the nervous Sunnis in Saudi Arabia.

By comparison, luring Syria should seem no more difficult than President Bush’s successful engagement with Libya and its leader, Moammar Qaddafi, who for decades was isolated for sponsoring terrorism.

Why would Israel negotiate with Syria?

Without a substantive mandate to disarm Hizbullah, the UN’s peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon will only delay an inevitable reprise, spurned by whatever new and deadly weapons Hizbullah acquires in the meantime.

No country would be more threatened by a nuclear Iran than Israel, especially if Syria continues to act as a liaison between Iran and Hizbullah. But if handicapped by Syria, Iran could only pose a strategic nuclear threat to Israel with conventional nuclear missiles. Though far from ideal – especially in Israel – limiting Hizbullah’s technological reach is preferable to nothing at all.

Short of a nightmarish US invasion of Iran, the best Israel can hope for is to neutralize and starve Hizbullah’s supply lines and ideology out of existence. The same could be said for Hamas’ operation in Damascus – a chip that Assad would gladly hand over if it meant internal stability.

Besides, even skeptics of engagement recognize that Israel has a substantial strategic interest in preventing the overthrow of Syria’s ruling family, as their replacement or (more likely) his usurper would almost certainly do far worse than arming Hizbullah.

Admittedly, the scenario painted by this analysis is exceedingly rosy. It glosses over the nearly unthinkable Israeli decision to give up the Golan and asks for dramatic changes in policy from both Syria and the United States.

But Syria is vulnerable. Assad is allying with Iran’s fiery leader out of necessity, and he knows that Tehran will discard him as soon as he outlives his usefulness. That moment is approaching, and direct engagement with Syria is necessary to ensure Israel’s long-term security and to protect American interests in the Middle East.

[View this Op-Ed at Ynet]

When anyone talks about resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, every argument seems to revolve around two crucial questions – one dovish and one hawkish – that neither side ever really tries to answer.

Doves essentially ask the hawks, “How do you know that the best protection against Palestinian terrorism is incessant occupation, raids, imprisonment, and assassinations?” Meanwhile, hawks ask the doves, “How do you know that the terror will stop if we give up the West Bank, the Golan, and/or Shebaa Farms?”

If either side could give even a semi-adequate response to these questions, then the other would willingly change viewpoints. The two camps have far more common ground than most will acknowledge; they simply disagree about which methods work and which don’t.

Despite their polarization, the doves are not doves because they are against killing per se; if there was any evidence that Israel’s heavy-handed counterterrorism efforts could actually reduce the long-term threat to the State of Israel, the doves would naturally migrate in droves to the right.

Likewise, if there was any indication that Palestinian militants really would finally end their resistance in exchange for pre-1967 borders, a Palestinian state, compensated refugees, and a shared Jerusalem, there would be an equally dramatic shift to the left across the board.

But there is no logical reason for either the hawks or the doves to be persuaded by one another. Every argument is fundamentally circular – only capable of persuading the already-persuaded.

In fact, there is so little basis for the positions of each side that both the hawks and the doves rely on each other to exhaust every possible path to peaceful security, if only because nothing has worked, for anyone.

Israeli and other Western leaders are relying on arbitrary policies in the hopes that someone might stumble on to a solution. And yet, rather than instilling humility in these leaders, their incessant failure has only led them to baseless certainty, exacerbated by partisan politics. So, when one side’s tactics fail, the other seizes the partisan advantage, essentially screaming to the world, “See? I told you I was less stupid than those guys!”

In the end, being the lesser of two evils is the best that either side can hope for in this conflict. As the doves will (accurately) tell you, never in the history of Israel’s dealings with Palestinians has oppressive hostility gone unanswered. In the current cycle, the doves are hoping to get the upper hand very soon.

If and when the hawkish Israeli freeze on Palestinian aid and tax revenue pushes the untamed tiger over the edge, into a Mad Max free-for-all, supporters of Palestine across the globe will be on top of their soapboxes, reminding everyone that they knew it would happen.

And they will be right to criticize the hawks for their overreach. But pay close attention to what the doves say next: they will tell us again that the conflict will end as soon the West Bank’s settlers leave occupied Palestine, and move into Israeli hotels. And just like the hawks did during the Oslo process, the doves will defend their own plan without any evidence to support its prospects for success.

After all, can Abbas or even Haniya promise that no katyusha rockets will be fired at Ben Gurion Airport from a “converged” or traded West Bank? Despite the best intentions, the answer is a resounding no. Granted, Hamas as an organization has tremendous discipline (remember the year-long ceasefire in 2005?), but Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) doesn’t even pretend to care about politics. And understandably, Israelis don’t care who or where the rockets come from – only that they are coming.

In this scenario, Israelis would be willing to tolerate such a threat (much like every other country does) if Israel knew it could hold an official Palestinian government responsible for any and all attacks that originated in a State of Palestine.

Otherwise, Israel has no viable response to the very likely PIJ attack: either the IDF can go after PIJ, and guarantee collateral damage, or it can go after an official Palestinian government, and invite defenses like, “It wasn’t us, it was PIJ.”

It would be truly wonderful to think that Palestinian statehood is the necessary ingredient, that Palestinians will be able to make such a guarantee as soon as they are given statehood and minimal infrastructure. But Israel’s July war with Hizbullah should bring us back to reality.

Not even Lebanon – a fully autonomous state, infinitely farther ahead on every curve than Palestine – could be held accountable for Hizbullah’s actions. Lebanon’s government and military were simply too weak to be considered responsible. If Israel cannot rely on the power of standard deterrence (which every other country on the planet enjoys), then there is no basis for a land-for-peace arrangement.

Again, if we had good reason to believe that any recognized Palestinian government with pre-’67 borders could, in fact, quell any leftover resistance, then all of us would embrace such a deal. Sadly, there is no such evidence.

But the hawks are no different. They were warning everyone about the Oslo process in the 1990′s, and their criticisms were just as prescient as the doves’ during the last six years. But again, the thought processes behind potential solutions are never flushed out; we never think to inquire about their most basic assumptions.

Sharon, Bibi, Shamir, Halutz – these men simply cannot shake the notion that sufficient oppression and humiliation can guarantee peace. To them, the only question is how much oppression. Yet can these men think of one instance in world history where a democratic nation was able to snuff out (not just delay) an insurgency or rebellion with the sheer use of force? As usual, the answer is a resounding no.

Regarding this conflict, the collective pride and ego of Israeli and Western leaders needs to take a severe blast to the face. Nothing has worked. Their plans have failed again and again. There is no need to accuse hawks of being “heartless” or doves of being “gutless.” None of them have learned a thing.

There is no quick fix to this conflict. It is immensely complicated and deserves humility. We all have faith in humanity, in our abilities to move the heavens with our minds and hearts. Running out of ideas is not the worst thing that can happen to us. Just acknowledge it and move on.

[View this Op-Ed at Ynet]