You really can’t rely on these Arabs.
Take this fellow, Qaddafi. For decades he played the clown. The whole world laughed at him(except when he downed a French plane in Chad and the Pan-Am jet over Lockerbie.) His Libya was a”rogue state”, an international pariah. He was working on Weapons of Mass Destruction. TheAmericans hated him, and from time to time bombed him, killing his daughter on one suchoccasion.
You could rely on good old Qaddafi. He supplied us with an alibi for producing all kinds ofinteresting weapons. Everybody understood that with such people around, Israel needs thedoomsday weapon, and that it’s useless to talk about peace.
And then, suddenly…
Suddenly Qaddafi becomes the darling of the world. Look at him, in his Bedouin robes: a seriousman, a sober and pragmatic statesman. Pays a fortune to the families of the victims in theplanes he has downed. Invites the Americans along to see for themselves how he destroys hisstock of WMD. Flatters President Bush. Makes advances to Israel. Tomorrow – God forbid! – hemay invite Bush to mediate between himself and his dear colleague, Ariel Sharon.
If Bush starts to pamper Qaddafi, he will coddle Sharon less. He might get the idea that Israel,too, should get rid of its Weapons of Mass Destruction. Perish the thought!
Or take Iran. Well, they aren’t really Arabs, but they are Muslims, and all Muslims are thesame, aren’t they? Anti-Semites. Israel-haters. Plotting to destroy us.
One used to be able to rely on Iran. There is always somebody there shouting “Death to America!Death to Israel!” They are trying to produce nuclear bombs. They vow to bury the Great Satantogether with the Small Satan (us). True, we did sell them some arms, quite quietly, withAmerican blessing (see: Irangate), but that doesn’t count. President Bush even includedthem in his “Axis of Evil”. We were hoping that after the occupation of Iraq, the Americanswould deal with them. Between Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran sits like an almond between the jawsof a nutcracker.
And then, suddenly…
Suddenly Iran is dripping honey. They thank the Americans for the generous assistance sent tothe victims of the big earthquake. They invite international inspectors to check theirnuclear installations.
And the Americans – who can believe it? – let themselves be seduced. They emit conciliatorynoises. And there are already some people who expect us to behave like Libya and Iran, to openour nuclear installations to inspection. Perish the thought!
But all this is nothing compared to Syria.
If there was one Arab nation you could rely on without reservation it was the Syrians. BornIsrael-haters. Tough. Uncompromising. Stockpiling chemical and biological weapons.True, they respect the cease-fire line with Israel, but they use the Hizbollah against usinstead. And they play host to the headquarters of the militant Palestinian organizations inDamascus.
The Bush administration has officially labeled Syria a terrorist state. It has targetedthem. Our friends in the Pentagon, Wolfowitz and the other Neo-Zionists, promised us thatSyria would be the next candidate for an American invasion, right after Iraq. Our goodfriends, the Turks, were also to join in the party. After all, they have had an ongoing quarrelwith Syria since the late 1930s, when the French (who controlled Syria at the time) gave themthe Syrian Alexandretta region. And this conflict deepened even more when Syria begansupporting the Kurdish revolt in Turkey and demanded a bigger share of the Euphrates water.
And now, suddenly…
Suddenly this youngster, Bashar, changes direction overnight. Suddenly al-Assad (“theLion”) turns into al-Taleb (“the Fox”). Says he wants peace. Wants to help the Americans.Invites Israel to renew negotiations. Visits Turkey and forges an alliance with them againstKurdish independence in northern Iraq.
That is dangerous. Terribly dangerous. The Americans might pressure us to make peace withSyria and give the Golan back to them. True, up to now, the Americans have reacted coolly to theSyrian overtures, but that may change. As the American elections draw nearer, and Bush’sadversaries increasingly paint the Iraq war as one big fiasco, Bush will be keen todemonstrate that the war was actually an enormous success. To wit: It has created a New MiddleEast (alas, without Shimon Peres). The wicked states, Iran, Syria and Libya, have forsakentheir bad old ways and are basking in the Pax Americana. All the Weapons of Mass Destruction inthe region have been abolished, except for Israel’s.
No wonder the Sharon government is in a dilemma. They are doing what they can to foil this plot.They publish Qaddafi’s overtures, so as to embarrass him into denying them. They rejectAssad’s peace stratagem. “Don’t run and jump!” Sharon admonished his ministers this week,commanding them not to get excited about it. Assad is not serious. He only wants to suck up to theAmericans. He wants to use us in order to reach Bush. For him, Israel is only “a stair of the WhiteHouse”, as Sharon put it.
Defeatists might say: let’s seize the opportunity. Assad is weak? Assad is afraid? Assadwants to appease the Americans? All the better, that is the opportunity to make peace. Whathave we got to lose? If Assad is serious, we can put an end to our conflict with a dangerous enemy.And if he isn’t, we will unmask him.
(The same defeatists proposed in 1972, too, that we should accept the peace offers sent byAnwar Sadat via the UN emissary, Gunnar Jaring. But Israel had a tough leader, Golda Meir, whorejected them “out of hand”. True, this led to the Yom-Kippur war and the deaths of some 2000young Israelis, not to mention the tens of thousands of Egyptians and Syrians, but itcertainly screwed the defeatists.)
Sharon will not accept the Syrian proposal, because that might lead to peace. And peace withthe Syrians would mean the return of the Golan and the dismantling of all the settlementsthere. That would be awful. It would also be a dangerous precedent for the Palestinians.
Bashar Assad, the fox in lion’s clothing, wants to renew the negotiations at the point wherethey were broken off by Ehud Barak. At the time, Barak just managed to save himself from thethreat of peace in the nick of time. Assad Sr. would accept nothing less than regaining theshores of Lake Tiberias (the June 4, 1967 line) instead of staying ten meters short of it (the1949 line). Barak couldn’t stand the idea of Assad dipping his long feet in the waters of thislake. Now Assad Jr. is hinting that he is prepared to forgo the pleasure. He can dip his long feetsomewhere else. Perhaps in the waters of the Euphrates.
Sharon will not repeat the mistake of Barak, who barely extricated himself by the skin of histeeth. He will not start negotiations at all. And indeed, if Assad is weak, why negotiate withhim?
Catch 23: If the Arabs are strong, you can’t make peace with them. You have to defeat them. And ifthe Arabs are weak, there is no need to make peace with them. Why offer them anything?
Catch 24: If the Arabs say they want war, you have to believe them. But if the Arabs say they wantpeace, they are clearly lying. And how can you make peace with liars?