| To: FaultLine who started this subject | 1/6/2003 2:25:52 PM | | From: FaultLine | | | | American Primacy in Perspective - Part 2/2
Foreign Affairs, Jul-Aug 2002, v81n4.
Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth
UNIPOLAR POLITICS AS USUAL
The conclusion that balancing is not in the cards may strike many as questionable in light of the parade of ostensibly anti-U.S. diplomatic combinations in recent years: the "European troika" of France, Germany, and Russia; the "special relationship" between Germany and Russia; the "strategic triangle" of Russia, China, and India; the "strategic partnership" between China and Russia; and so on. Yet a close look at any of these arrangements reveals their rhetorical as opposed to substantive character. Real balancing involves real economic and political costs, which neither Russia, nor China, nor indeed any other major power has shown any willingness to bear.
The most reliable way to balance power is to increase defense outlays. Since l995, however, military spending by most major powers has been declining relative to GDP, and in the majority of cases in absolute terms as well. At most, these opposing coalitions can occasionally succeed in frustrating U.S. policy initiatives when the expected costs of doing so remain conveniently low. At the same time, Beijing, Moscow, and others have demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with the United States periodically on strategic matters and especially in the economic realm. This general tendency toward bandwagoning was the norm before September ll and has only become more pronounced since then.
Consider the Sino-Russian "strategic partnership," the most prominent instance of apparent balancing to date. The easy retort to overheated rhetoric about a Moscow-Beijing "axis" would involve pointing out how it failed to slow, much less stop, President Vladimir Putin's geopolitical sprint toward Washington in the aftermath of the September ll attacks. More telling, however, is just how tenuous the shift was even before it was thrown off track. At no point did the partnership entail any costly commitment or policy coordination against Washington that might have risked a genuine confrontation. The keystone of the partnership -- Russia's arms sales to China -- reflects a symmetry of weaknesses, rather than the potential of combined strengths. The sales partially offset China's backward military technology while helping to slow the decline of Russia's defense industries. Most of the arms in question are legacies of the R&D efforts of the Soviet military-industrial complex, and given Moscow's paltry R&D budget today, few of these systems will long remain competitive with their U.S. or NATO analogues.
Even as the two neighbors signed cooperative agreements, moreover, deep suspicions continued to plague their relationship, economic ties between them remained anemic and unlikely to grow dramatically, and both were highly dependent on inflows of capital and technology that could come only from the West. Russian and Chinese leaders highlighted their desire for a world of reduced U.S. influence not because this was a goal toward which they had actually started moving, but because it was one general principle on which they could agree.
Balancing rhetoric is obviously partly the reflection of genuine sentiment. The world finds it unfair, undemocratic, annoying, and sometimes downright frightening to have so much power concentrated in the hands of one state, especially when the United States aggressively goes its own way. But given the weight and prominence of U.S. power on the world stage, some unease among other countries is inevitable no matter what Washington does. Foreign governments frequently rail against what they regard as excessive U.S. involvement in their affairs. Yet inflated expectations about what the United States can do to solve global problems (such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) can lead to frustration with supposed U.S. underengagement as well. Nothing the United States could do short of abdicating its power would solve the problem completely.
Local and regional politics also contribute to balancing rhetoric, although not to its substance. Even nondemagogic leaders face incentives to play on anti-American resentment for domestic audiences. And simple math dictates the need for more regional cooperation today than previously, much of which can take on an anti-American coloring. The nineteenth-century international system featured six to eight poles among roughly 30 states. In the early Cold War, there were two poles, but the number of states had doubled to just over 70. Today there is one pole in a system in which the population has trebled to nearly 200. Inevitably, therefore, much activity will take place at a regional level, and it can often be in the interests of the parties involved to use balancing rhetoric as a rallying point for stimulating cooperation, even if that is not the chief driver of their actions.
Such maneuvering has the potential to backfire, however, by reinforcing the perception that the countries in question are too weak to act individually, something that can have harmful consequences at home and abroad. Thus, other powers have to find a way of reminding Washington that they have somewhere else to turn, but without talking down their own capabilities or foreclosing promising bilateral arrangements with the United States. The result -- balancing that is rhetorically grand but substantively weak -- is politics as usual in a unipolar world.
SO WHAT?
The first and most important practical consequence of unipolarity for the United States is notable for its absence: the lack of hegemonic rivalry. During the Cold War the United States confronted a military superpower with the potential to conquer all the industrial power centers of Europe and Asia. To forestall that catastrophic outcome, for decades the United States committed between 5 and 14 percent of its GDP to defense spending and maintained an extended nuclear deterrent that put a premium on the credibility of its commitments. Largely to maintain a reputation for resolve, 80,000 Americans lost their lives in two Asian wars while U.S. presidents repeatedly engaged in brinkmanship that ran the risk of escalation to global thermo-nuclear destruction.
Today the costs and dangers ofthe Cold War have faded into history, but they need to be kept in mind in order to assess unipolarity accurately. For decades to come, no state is likely to combine the resources, geography, and growth rates necessary to mount a hegemonic challenge on such a scale -- an astonishing development. Crowns may generally lie uneasy, but America's does not.
Some might question the worth of being at the top of a unipolar system if that means serving as a lightning rod for the world's malcontents. When there was a Soviet Union, after all, it bore the brunt of Osama bin Laden's anger, and only after its collapse did he shift his focus to the United States (an indicator of the demise of bipolarity that was ignored at the time but looms larger in retrospect). But terrorism has been a perennial problem in history, and multipolarity did not save the leaders of several great powers from assassination by anarchists around the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, a slide back toward multipolarity would actuaUy be the worst of all worlds for the United States. In such a scenario it would continue to lead the pack and serve as a focal point for resentment and hatred by both state and nonstate actors, but it would have fewer carrots and sticks to use in dealing with the situation. The threats would remain, but the possibility of effective and coordinated action against them would be reduced.
The second major practical consequence of unipolarity is the unique freedom it offers American policymakers. Many decision makers labor under feelings of constraint, and all participants in policy debates defend their preferred courses of action by pointing to the dire consequences that will follow if their advice is not accepted. But the sources of American strength are so varied and so durable that U.S. foreign policy today operates in the realm of choice rather than necessity to a greater degree than any other power in modern history. Whether the participants realize it or not, this new freedom to choose has transformed the debate over what the U.S. role in the world should be.
Historically, the major forces pushing powerful states toward restraint and magnanimity have been the limits of their strength and the fear of overextension and balancing. Great powers typically checked their ambitions and deferred to others not because they wanted to but because they had to in order to win the cooperation they needed to survive and prosper. It is thus no surprise that today's champions of American moderation and international benevolence stress the constraints on American power rather than the lack of them. Political scientist Joseph Nye, for example, insists that "[the term] unipolarity is misleading because it exaggerates the degree to which the United States is able to get the results it wants in some dimensions of world politics.... American power is less effective than it might first appear." And he cautions that if the United States "handles its hard power in an overbearing, unilateral manner," then others might be provoked into forming a balancing coalition.
Such arguments are unpersuasive, however, because they fail to acknowledge the true nature of the current international system. The United States cannot be scared into meekness by warnings of inefficacy or potential balancing. Isolationists and aggressive unilateralists see this situation clearly, and their domestic opponents need to as well. Now and for the foreseeable future, the United States will have immense power resources it can bring to bear to force or entice others to do its bidding on a case-by-case basis.
But just because the United States is strong enough to act heedlessly does not mean that it should do so. Why not? Because it can afford to reap the greater gains that will eventually come from magnanimity. Aside from a few cases in a few issue areas, ignoring others' concerns avoids hassles today at the cost of more serious trouble tomorrow. Unilateralism may produce results in the short term, but it is apt to reduce the pool of voluntary help from other countries that the United States can draw on down the road, and thus in the end to make life more difficult rather than less. Unipolarity makes it possible to be the global bully -- but it also offers the United States the luxury of being able to look beyond its immediate needs to its own, and the world's, long-term interests.
RESISTING TEMPTATION
Consider the question that preoccupied many observers before September ll: whether to engage or contain potential great-power challengers such as China. Supporters of engagement argued that the best way to moderate Chinese behavior (both internal and external) was to tie the country into the international political and economic system as thoroughly as possible. Supporters of containment, meanwhile, argued that this course was far too risky, because it might hasten the emergence of a strong but still tyrannical power. To the extent that the above analysis of unipolarity is correct, however, the risks that accompany engagement are minor, because the margin of U.S. superiority is so great that China is unlikely to pose a significant challenge to U.S. dominance for decades, no matter what policy is followed. Although engagement may not succeed, therefore, the chance that it might makes it worth a try, and there will be plenty of time to reverse course if it fails.
The same applies with even more force to Russia. The aftermath of the September ll attacks demonstrated the benefits of having a stable friend in Eurasia's heartland, and the preceding three centuries demonstrated the high costs that could come from an autocratic Russia that is extracting military capabilities from its vast territory. Integrating Russia fully into the reigning international order would represent a major step toward eliminating the perennial "Russia problem." Russia's political and economic institutions have a long road to travel before such integration becomes feasible, of course, but thanks to unipolarity there is plenty of time to wait, and there are plenty of resources to deploy in helping.
Washington also needs to be concerned about the level of resentment that an aggressive unilateral course would engender among its major allies. After all, it is influence, not power, that is ultimately most valuable. The further one looks beyond the immediate short term, the clearer become the many issues -- the environment, disease, migration, and the stability of the global economy, to name a few -- that the United States cannot solve on its own. Such issues entail repeated dealings with many partners over many years. Straining relationships now will lead only to a more challenging policy environment later on.
As for the developing world, if the United States could help improve political, social, and economic conditions there, practically everybody would benefit -- the locals directly, and the rest of the world indirectly. No magic wand can transform the situation overnight, but the United States can nevertheless take a variety of measures that would help on the margins. The most important would be to lower the high protectionist trade barriers Washington maintains for agricultural products, clothing, and textiles -- all crucial for the economic prospects of much of the developing world. Opening up U.S. markets to developing-country exports in these areas would not guarantee rapid economic development abroad, and even if it did, rapid development is not a panacea for all ills. But there is little doubt that it would help the exporting countries' economies and societies along with America's image.
President George W. Bush recently said, "To be serious about fighting poverty, we must be serious about expanding trade.... Greater access to the markets of wealthy countries has a direct and immediate impact on the economies of developing nations." But deeds are more important than words. Lowering domestic trade barriers would be precisely the kind of U.S. policy that could reduce the inevitable frictions and resentments unipolarity generates. It would mean going beyond reacting to security challenges once they became critical and trying to forestall their emergence in the first place. Implemented fully and expanded to other cases, this approach could serve as the velvet glove covering the iron fist of American power, demonstrating that the United States was interested in not just its own special interests but the interests of others as well.
Magnanimity and restraint in the face of temptation are tenets of successful statecraft that have proved their worth from classical Greece onward. Standing taller than leading states of the past, the United States has unprecedented freedom to do as it pleases. It can play the game for itself alone or for the system as a whole; it can focus on small returns today or larger ones tomorrow. If the administration truly wants to be loved as well as feared, the policy answers are not hard to find. |
| | Foreign Affairs Discussion Group | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: JohnM who wrote (64648) | 1/6/2003 2:26:37 PM | | From: Nadine Carroll | | | | Why am I not surprised there is another view!! Of course.
Of course indeed. Let me know if it shows up in the op-ed pages of the NY Times, will you? I'm not holding my breath. |
| | Foreign Affairs Discussion Group | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: FaultLine who started this subject | 1/6/2003 2:27:41 PM | | From: carranza2 | | | | Tarek Heggy is an Egyptian businessman and scholar who has written some interesting things. I found this bit of linguistic analysis fascinating. According to Heggy, no comparable word to the words "compromise" or "integrity" exist in Arabic. Very interesting read.
mideastweb.org
Our need for "A Culture of Compromise"
by
Tarek Heggy
A few years ago, I discovered that there is no equivalent in the Arabic ýlanguage, classical or colloquial, for the English word "compromise", which ýis most commonly translated into Arabic in the form of two words, literally ýmeaning ‘halfway solution’. I went through all the old and new ýdictionaries and lexicons I could lay my hands on in a futile search for an ýArabic word corresponding to this common English word, which exists, ýwith minor variations in spelling, in all European languages, whether of the ýLatin, Germanic, Hellenic or Slavic families. The same is true of several ýother words, such as ‘integrity’, which has come to be widely used in the ýdiscourse of Europe and North America in the last few decades and for ýwhich no single word exists in the Arabic language. As language is not ýmerely a tool of communication but the depositary of a society’s cultural ýheritage, reflecting its way of thinking and the spirit in which it deals with ýthings and with others, as well as the cultural trends which have shaped it, I ýrealized that we were here before a phenomenon with cultural (and, ýconsequently, political, economic and social) implications. ý
For nearly twenty years, I had the opportunity to work closely with ýpeople drawn from over fifty different nationalities in a global economic ýestablishment which remains, after a long history stretching back to the ýnineteenth century, one of the five largest establishments in the world. What ýI noticed over the years is that people with a west European background use ýthe word ‘compromise’ more often than those coming from an eastern ýcultural tradition. As the study of cultures is one of my hobbies, particularly ýwhen it comes to comparing the Arab, Latin and Anglo-Saxon minds, I ýcould not help noticing that just as those with an Arab mind-set use the word ýcompromise less than those with a Latin mind-set, so too do the latter use it ýless than those with an Anglo-Saxon mind-set. There is a simple explanation ýfor this. If one’s way of thinking is based on a set of philosophical/religious ýprinciples, then it is normal that people raised in an Arab culture should be ýless inclined to use the word compromise than those whose minds were ýconditioned in a Latin context, where, although the philosophical ýdimension looms large, the religious dimension figures less prominently ýthan it does in the Arab mind-set. It is also normal that Latin societies use ýthe word less than societies with an Anglo-Saxon cultural formation. The ýAnglo-Saxon way of thinking, which has come to dominate the world in a ýmanner unprecedented in history, is based on an altogether different set of ýrules.ý
ý One of the principal influences on the reforming thought of the ýnineteenth century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), ýbelieved all systems, laws, institutions and ideas should be based on the ýprinciple of utility (utilitarianism). The United States, for its part, produced ýtwo renowned philosophers, William James (1842-1910) and John Dewey ýý(1859-1952), whose works reflected Bentham’s ideas but with modifications ýdictated by the passage of time and the unfolding of events and under the ýdifferent name of pragmatism. The notion of compromise spilled beyond the ýAnglo-Saxon world into societies belonging to different cultural traditions. ýIn Asia, for example, people of Chinese, Japanese and Indian stock ýmanaged, while jealously guarding their cultural specificity, to learn the ýmeaning of the English word compromise before they learned its linguistic ýform, tending in all their dealings to find solutions based on compromise. ýEven the Latin countries adopted the notion before the word became part of ýtheir political lexicon, as anyone following political discourse in the Latin ýcountries can see. Today it is not unusual to tune in to one of the French ýsatellite channels and find a prominent economist speaking in English, ýwhich would have been unheard of as recently as three decades ago, ýpresenting ideas based on the notion of compromise.ý
Moving to our region of the world, we find many people, even educated ýpeople, associating the word compromise with such negative terms as ýý‘submission’, ‘retreat’, ‘capitulation’, ‘weakness’ and ‘defeat’. These are ýterms that do not occur to a westerner when he uses the word compromise, ýbecause whatever his educational formation, whether it is in the field of ýscience, humanities or liberal arts, he knows that all ideas are in their ýessence nothing but compromises. Indeed, he is taught early on, during his ýschool years, that most natural phenomena are also compromises. Moreover, ýthe cultures of merchant nations (of which Britain is perhaps the most ýnotable example in human history) have instilled the idea of compromise in ýall spheres of life, intellectual, political, economic, cultural and social, even ýin human dealings. Thus while our popular sayings reflect a negative picture ýof the term compromise, hundreds of popular sayings in Britain do just the ýopposite.ý
Although Islamic scripture is totally compatible with a culture ýcharacterized by compromise, Muslim history (especially its Arab chapter) ýhas proceeded in a spirit that is antithetical to the notion of compromise. ýOur recent history is made up largely of losses which could have been ýavoided had we had not persistently rejected the notion of compromise as ýtantamount to submission, retreat, surrender, capitulation and even, as some ýof our more fiery orators put it, as a form of bondage to the will of others.ý
This all-or-nothing mentality is self-defeating. Any dispute or conflict is, ýby definition, a struggle between people or nations with different views and ýat different levels of power. It follows that any resolution of their ýdifferences that is not based on a compromise is impossible, because it ýwould entail the total subjugation of the will, interests and power of one of ýthe parties to those of the other. Such a conflict-resolution approach is ýdoomed to fail because it runs counter to the laws of science, nature and life ýitself. Some prominent Egyptian intellectuals, like Dr. Milad Hanna, who ýhas tirelessly expounded his theory on the need to accept the Other, and Dr. ýMurad Wahba, who has written extensively on the theme that nobody can ýclaim to hold a monopoly on absolute truth, are making a valuable and ýnoble contribution to the process of instilling the rules and culture of ýcompromise in our society. ý
I do not claim to be the first Egyptian writer who has addressed this ýissue. In the mid-fifties, the late Tewfik el-Hakim touched on it in his book, ýAl-Ta’aduleya (Equivalence). But on the one hand he was living in a time ývery different from the one we are living in today, which was reflected in ýthe final product he presented, and, on the other -and I hate to say this ýbecause I have the highest esteem for el-Hakim’s genius- he did not ýaddress the issue in sufficient depth. Perhaps the culture prevailing in Egypt ýat the time was an objective constraint preventing him from delving as ýdeeply into the subject as he would otherwise have done, not to mention the ýfact that the word ‘equivalence’ is very different in meaning and ýconnotations from the word ‘compromise’.ý
I believe the spread of a religious culture based on strict orthodoxy, or ýthe textual reading of scripture, was one of the reasons for the failure of the ýconcept of compromise to catch on in our culture. If we were to talk to Ibn ýRushd or Al-Gaheth (a renowned Mu’tazalite literary figure), we would find ýit easy to explain to them and they would find it easy to grasp the notion that ýall thinking, all dealings, must be characterized by a spirit of compromise, ýwith all its implications. That would not be the case if we spoke with ýproponents of the orthodox school, strict textualists like Ahmed bin Hambal, ýIbn Taymeya, Ibn Qiyam al-Juzeya, Mohamed bin Abdel Wahab or with the ýdozens of their contemporary counterparts who preach a dogmatic ýadherence to the letter rather than the spirit of religion, slamming the doors ýshut in the face of rationality. Attempting to explain the notion of ýcompromise to members of this school would be as much of a lost cause as ýIbn Rushd’s vigorous defense of the primacy of reason eight centuries ago. ýActually, it would be even more of a lost cause because, although Ibn Rushd ýwas vanquished by the textualists in the Arab/Islamic civilization, his ideas ýtook root in the Christian culture. There is no doubt that the ideas of this ýgreat Islamic philosopher prevailed over those of Thomas Aquinas in the ýthirteenth century, thanks to his many disciples in the University of Paris at ýthe time and the so-called Latin Averroists. Perhaps history will one day ýadmit that an Arab Muslim was behind the victory of reason over dogma at ýa time the prevailing culture in Europe was inimical to intellectual initiative ýand freedom of thought. Had the outcome of the battle for the hearts and ýminds of the Europeans favoured the other camp, Europe today would have ýbeen at the same stage of development and enlightenment as Africa.ý
A similar battle is now underway in our country, a battle whose outcome ýis uncertain. If we want reason to prevail over obscurantist thinking, we ýmust take immediate action. For a start, a team of intellectuals with a ýcultural formation made up of a synthesis of Arab, Islamic and other ýhumanistic cultures should come together and lay down a charter to instill ýthe rationale of compromise in the minds of the young people of Egypt ýthrough educational curricula and by promoting the idea that compromise ýis the strongest product of nature, life and the march of civilizations and ýcultures, while a rigid refusal to consider the merits of anyone else’s opinion ýand to insist on obtaining all one’s demands runs counter to the logic of ýscience, nature, humanity, culture and civilization.ý
In view of the fact that I was unable to find one Arabic word that ýcorresponds to the English word compromise, I have been forced to do two ýthings in this article that I would have preferred to avoid. One was to write ýthe word compromise in Latin letters throughout the article, the other was to ýuse the common translation of the word, the unwieldy ‘halfway solution’, in ýthe title. But because I am a great believer in compromise, and because I ýalso believe in the popular saying that “who cannot obtain all does not give ýup all”, I decided to write the article anyway. ý
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Arabic version of this article was published at Al-Ahram on 29th September, 2002.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Tarek Heggy combines academic, cultural and economic dimensions. He is the author of 17 books, a visiting professor at Princeton, Columbia and the University of California Berkeley. One of the world's top petroleum strategists, he was the Chairman of a major international oil company for ten years until July, 1996. Tarek Heggy's books advocate the values of progress as a human product, modernity, acceptance of the other, cultural tolerance, universality of science/knowledge, democracy and civil society. Beside his major areas of interest: the intellectual domain and modern management, he is the member of the board of some 30 prominent organizations, faculties and universities.. Selected works are online at heggy.org. |
| | Foreign Affairs Discussion Group | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (64588) | 1/6/2003 2:33:24 PM | | From: david | | | | I rather not give my opinion on Europe's behavior. regarding the blame on USA I can not do that, but as much as like and respect Kennedy, he was a human being and he did some mistakes.
I am against any authoritarian regime, Castro will burn in hell just like Pinochet, but there is a subtle difference between a Military Dictatorship and a Communist one.
The military one will go down in less than a generation without destroying the Economy , The communist one usually goes down after a few generations and leaves behind economic and standard of living devastation... BUT BOTH ARE EVIL |
| | Foreign Affairs Discussion Group | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: paul_philp who wrote (64649) | 1/6/2003 2:34:35 PM | | From: JohnM | | | | We've about run this topic out, Paul. We are down to typing the same things at one another and, evidently, still managing to misunderstand one another. I'm not typing that it's only about oil. Rather I'm typing that it's fundamentally about oil. Very, very important distinction.
I gather the distinction you wish to make is that, while oil is an ingredient, it's no longer the most important. If so, you can see I disagree. But we've now said that pretty clearly.
It is all about oil is too simplistic to be useful. Saying the US is aiming at Iraq with the intent to manage oil prices is equally simplistic. It may well have been the foreign policy calculus a few decades back but it sure is not the case today. They are attacking American's at home now. If you cannot see how that changes the calculation, then there is no point continuing the conversation.
I suspect that the "they" in those sentences is the other place we have serious disagreements. I understand the "they" to be Al Qaeda and its affilitates. I don't understand it to be the world of Islam, the Arabs, nor even Iraq. By generalizing the attack out of Al Qaeda, the Bush folk run the very real risk of permitting Al Qaeda to define the conflict as a civilizational one rather than one against a group of terrorists. |
| | Foreign Affairs Discussion Group | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last ReadRead Replies (2) |
|
| To: LindyBill who wrote (64654) | 1/6/2003 2:40:06 PM | | From: Nadine Carroll | | | | Good article by Max Boot. Has anyone seen anything about the Ginossar scandal in the US or European press?
Exploiting the Palestinians
Everyone's doing it.
by Max Boot
01/13/2003, Volume 008, Issue 17
IN AN INTERVIEW LAST MONTH with Britain's Sunday Times, Yasser Arafat rebuked Osama bin Laden for seeking to exploit the Palestinians' cause for his own ends. "Why is bin Laden talking about Palestine now? . . . He never helped us. He was working in another, completely different area and against our interests," Arafat was quoted as saying. "I'm telling him directly not to hide behind the Palestinian cause."
Good advice, but it's doubtful bin Laden will take it. Just about everyone else exploits the Palestinian cause--Arafat first and foremost, but also, according to the latest reports, some of his Israeli "peace partners"--so why shouldn't old fur face?
Whenever the serious issues of the Middle East are raised, from oppression in Saudi Arabia to nuclear weapons development in Iran, the answer one hears from Europeans, Arabs, United Nations functionaries, all sorts of supposedly serious people, is invariably the same: The real issue is the Palestinians. Until we resolve their horrible plight, peace will never come to the Middle East. This is an absurd argument since even if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, this would not affect in the slightest the tensions between Islamic fundamentalists and secularists, between rich Gulf kingdoms and their poor cousins, between Shiites and Sunnis, between democrats and dictators, or the countless other San Andreas-sized fault lines that run through the Dar al-Islam (House of Islam). It is helpful to remember that all of the dead in the Arab-Israeli wars of the past half century amount to only a tiny fraction of the million killed during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the 100,000 killed in Algeria's civil war since 1992, or the 100,000 killed in Lebanon's civil war from 1975 to 1990.
Surely anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the Middle East knows that the plight of the Palestinians isn't "the" issue. So why do so many people insist that it is? Let us count the reasons.
For the Europeans, championing the Palestinian cause allows them to assuage lingering colonial guilt by championing the aspirations of a Third World people who claim to be oppressed by Western imperialists--in this case, Israelis. It also allows Europeans to trumpet their moral superiority over pro-Israel Americans. And, last but not least, it allows them to curry favor with both oil-rich Arab states and their own growing Muslim minorities. Europeans hope that Arabs will show their gratitude by doing business with them and not targeting them for terrorism. All of this comes at a price, though: The E.U. is one of the Palestinian Authority's main non-Arab bankrollers, to the tune of $10 million a month.
For Middle Eastern states, championing the Palestinian cause is even more vital because doing so provides an important pillar of legitimacy for their manifestly illegitimate governments. Naturally the Arab states' interest is in preserving "the struggle," not in succoring the Palestinian people who (along with the Israelis) are its chief victims. There are almost 4 million Palestinians and most live in conditions of unrelieved squalor; large swaths of the West Bank and Gaza Strip make the South Bronx look like Club Med by comparison. The only Arab state that has granted citizenship to Palestinians is Jordan; the others prefer to keep them as an unassimilated, militant minority.
More than 1.1 million Palestinians are jammed into 59 refugee camps whose support comes mainly from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and other international bodies. As former U.S. ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg points out, all the Arab states combined donate less than $7 million to UNRWA, just 2.4 percent of its $290 million budget. (Kuwait, Egypt, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates collectively contribute a grand total of zero.) By contrast, the Great Satan forks over $110 million, or 38 percent of UNRWA's budget. The Arabs prefer to spend their money to support Palestinian suicide bombers. Saddam Hussein alone has paid an estimated $20 million over the past two years to "martyrs'" families. The Saudis held a telethon to raise millions more. The Arab League as a whole contributes $55 million a month to Arafat's tyrannical Palestinian Authority, which keeps the suicide bombings coming.
Many Palestinians are privately appalled at these "martyrdom operations," which are killing their youth, destroying their economy, and empowering their religious fanatics. But Arab states are delighted. What are a few dead Palestinian teenagers in return for hurting Israel and its backers in America?
Much the same calculus seems to govern Yasser Arafat's thinking. He is, you might say, the chief exploiter of the Palestinians, followed closely by his senior goons. They reap the adulation of useful idiots abroad who celebrate them as "freedom fighters," but senior PA officials aren't the ones strapping dynamite to their chests and blowing up Israeli buses. Arafat's wife Suha has generously said that there would be "no greater honor" than to sacrifice her son as a martyr. But she doesn't have a son. She has a daughter and they live in Paris. Even though some suicide bombings have been conducted by teenage girls, it's doubtful that seven-year-old Zahawa Arafat will be blowing up an El Al office on the way to her école. Her life, and her mother's, are far removed, literally and figuratively, from those of ordinary Palestinians.
Anyone who visits the West Bank and Gaza Strip is struck by the contrast between the general conditions of abysmal poverty and a few glittering villas that wouldn't be out of place on the French Riviera. Who owns these palazzos? Arafat's men, of course. Since the Palestinian Authority keeps a ruthless grip not only on politics but also on the economy, anyone who gets rich within PA jurisdiction, by definition, must be one of Arafat's apparatchiks.
The pervasive corruption of the PA has long been known and resented by ordinary Palestinians, but it seldom comes out into the open, since Arafat doesn't allow freedom of the press. Revelations in the Israeli press during the past month have lifted the veil of secrecy a bit, revealing a circle of exploitation that includes not only Arafat but also some of his Israeli negotiating partners.
On December 2, the Tel Aviv daily newspaper Ma'ariv printed a fascinating interview with a businessman and former military intelligence officer named Ozrad Lev. He claimed that he and his former business partner, Yossi Ginossar, had undertaken extensive and lucrative dealings with Muhammad Rashid, Arafat's chief financial adviser. In return for fat management fees, they set up Swiss bank accounts into which Rashid transferred more than $300 million of PA money, with Arafat's apparent authorization. Lev said he decided to go public after $65 million mysteriously disappeared. "This money could have been used for personal needs, to form a shelter [to hide the money] for Arafat and senior Palestinian officials, to pay salaries, or even, and I really hope not, for illegal activities," said Lev.
Who is Yossi Ginossar? A former agent of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, who in the 1990s acted as an informal envoy to the Palestinians on behalf of prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak. Ginossar is a leading "dove" who sits on the executive board of the Peres Center for Peace, the think tank that is to the Israeli left approximately what the Heritage Foundation is to the American right. He also hobnobs with the American think tanker Stephen P. Cohen, another incorrigible peace advocate (the website of his employer, the Israel Policy Forum, recently featured a report claiming "Oslo didn't fail"), who, Ma'ariv reports, profited from the Ginossar-Rashid business deals. (Cohen told me he was involved in some deals with Ginossar, but doesn't know anything about Swiss bank accounts.)
Ginossar's position as envoy to the Palestinians allowed him privileged access to the highest councils of power. He participated in the 2000 Camp David talks, where he pushed Barak to make greater concessions. And, according to the Jerusalem Post, when the Gaza Strip was declared a military zone and closed to Israeli travelers, Ginossar was chauffeured to Arafat's office in Shin Bet armored cars.
Israel's attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, is now investigating this case, which has become a huge scandal in Israel, though it's gone largely unnoticed in the United States. Both Rashid and Ginossar deny any wrongdoing. Ginossar told Ma'ariv, "I was guided exclusively by boundless loyalty to the [Israeli] state," a claim that has been met with snorts of derision in Israel's rambunctious press. But there is perhaps an element of truth in what he says.
The Israeli governments of the 1990s wanted to encourage closer economic cooperation with the Palestinians in the hope that this would give their enemies a stake in peace. Unfortunately, instead of creating small businesses that could be the building blocks of Palestinian civil society, what developed was the kind of crony capitalism that is endemic to places like Russia. Arafat's confidants--not only Rashid but Muhammad Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and others--were the big beneficiaries. Along, it now seems, with some select Israeli friends.
The Palestinian people and the cause of long-term peace were of course not helped by any of it. Instead these "business" dealings helped foster a gangster state more interested in war-making than economic development. It is striking that at the same time that news of Rashid's $300 million slush fund leaked out, the PA claimed it had no money to pay 100,000 civil servants. But the PA's transgressions, no matter how glaring, have long been overlooked by professional doves like Ginossar. Indeed, Lev says that he and Ginossar continued managing the $300 million fund for the Palestinians until at least August 2001--almost a year after the Al Aksa Intifada had begun.
So to the list of those exploiting the Palestinian cause add leading "peace" advocates. The good news is that the people of the Middle East are increasingly hip to this tiresome con game.
The Iranian government has recently tried to deflect the student demonstrations over the death sentence handed down to a history professor who dared to suggest that Muslims not "blindly follow religious leaders." Instead of protesting Seyyed Hashem Aghajari's fate, President Mohammad Khatami urged students to demonstrate for International Qods Day, a holiday invented by the late Ayatollah Khomeini to protest Israel's supposedly unlawful occupation of Qods (Jerusalem). The Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran threw this demand back into Khatami's face. In a statement translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the students said, "Observing the 'Day of Qods' in support of violence is a lunacy that is neither advantageous to the Palestinian nation nor does it coincide with the national interests of the people of Iran."
Pretty smart, those Iranian students. They aren't fooled by pro-Palestinian rhetoric. But there is at least one group left that takes seriously the protestations that no progress can be made in the Middle East until the Palestinian issue is settled. You can find them in Foggy Bottom.
Max Boot is the Olin Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
weeklystandard.com |
| | Foreign Affairs Discussion Group | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last ReadRead Replies (2) |
|
| To: LindyBill who wrote (64654) | 1/6/2003 2:48:25 PM | | From: kumar | | | | | OT: watch it Bill, your 'grass shack' might get hit by one of those China Airlines jumbos pretty soon... :-) :-) |
| | Foreign Affairs Discussion Group | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (64658) | 1/6/2003 2:49:55 PM | | From: carranza2 | | | | The road to Jerusalem by way of Baghdad should require a brief stop at Geneva to allow some of those filched funds to get back to where they belong.
I had not heard of the Ginessar scandal. I admit I'm not surprised, however. Big sums, regardless of provenance, inevitably get the crooks's attention. |
| | Foreign Affairs Discussion Group | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last ReadRead Replies (1) |
|
| |
