| October 2006 Call it Mission Impossible. European diplomats now pin their hopes of averting a general conflagration in the Mideast on two women - German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "Rice and Merkel could talk with each other and come up with solutions" if "no one else prevented them," asserted one retired but very active European diplomat.
He was simplifying, of course. But his shorthand personification summed up a gathering European consensus that the danger of explosion in the region is now so great that Western policy there can no longer be left to the United States alone. Washington must lead, but Europeans must work hard, Talleyrand-like, to help turn the West's multiple weaknesses there into composite strength in some comprehensive Mideast bargain, the thinking runs. That would require modulating the enthusiasm of President George W. Bush for an Israeli iron fist against Hamas and Hizbullah into a more neutral stance of honest broker, on the pattern of his father after the first Gulf war in 1991. It would also entail drawing moderate Arab governments into the process and (probably) opening direct U.S.-Iranian talks for the first time in 25 years.
Gareth Evans, one of the few conceptualizers of a Mideast démarche who is willing to go public at this early stage, elaborated last week what would be needed to revive an Israeli-Palestinian peace process after its six-year coma. In a column in the Financial Times, the former Australian foreign minister and current President of the International Crisis Group argued that Hamas has accepted or is about to accept the "Quartet's" three criteria for treating the Palestinian unity government as a negotiating partner: renunciation of violence, recognition of Israel, and observance of past Israeli-Palestinian agreements. The Quartet of the U.S., the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations must now show its own seriousness by "enforcing a real ceasefire on all Palestinian factions," he continued, and by holding Israel to its Quartet "roadmap" obligations of giving the Palestinians the tax revenues due them, ending "assassinations, incursions and bombardment," and resuming "bilateral negotiations in good faith." The aim would be to woo Hamas away from violence by carrots as well as sticks. In a follow-up editorial, the Financial Times added the hope that the demonstration of "the limits of military power" in Iraq - and in the month-long fighting between Israeli and Hizbullah forces in Lebanon in August - might now pave the way for a resumption of Mideast diplomacy.
In all the buzz in European capitals about lobbying Washington to this end, it is assumed that Britain, Germany, and France would have to be the coordinators of European diplomacy, as they have been since late 2003 in negotiating with Iran about keeping Tehran's nuclear program peaceful. It is in this context that Merkel features as the point woman for Europe, Rice as the point woman for America.
Not surprisingly, German diplomats shrink from the burden this scenario bestows on their chancellor and are doing their best to minimize expectations for Berlin's joint presidency of the European Union and the G8 next year. Merkel is weak, they protest, plagued by domestic squabbling within her left-right "grand coalition" and within her own conservative party. She is in no position to assume leadership of a wider Europe. And Germany, with 10,000 armed forces already deployed abroad, has just recently gone the extra mile in breaking a fifty-year taboo on sending military forces to the Israeli theatre, in order to block weapons-smuggling to Hizbullah. With this move, Berlin has exhausted both its military and its political potential, they contend.
Corollary skepticism about Rice's ability to work wonders in the U.S. is also rife, as the European diplomat cited earlier implied in his barbed warning about the risk that someone else might "prevent" a Merkel-Rice solution. He and others regard the American president himself as something of a barrier to Middle East reconciliation in his total identification with Israeli hardliners.
Despite the daunting hurdles, European advocates of a Merkel-Rice solution (including diplomats from America's closest ally, Britain) do not easily take no for an answer. On this side of the Atlantic they see no alternative to European leadership by the German chancellor. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who in March 2003 vainly tried his hand at pressing Bush to act on Washington's declared policy of establishing a Palestinian state, will in any case be gone in less than a year, they point out. So will French President Jacques Chirac. And Merkel, unlike her own predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, has developed the kind of rapport with President George W. Bush that would allow her to tell him frankly that Europeans want to see American diplomatic as well as military muscle applied to the vexed Middle East.
As for Rice, European diplomats praise her as an undogmatic pragmatist who is willing to discuss policy with allies in an open way. There is no indication that she buys into what is by now the consensus European view - and the view of America's own 16 intelligence agencies, as was revealed over the weekend - that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a disaster that fueled worse Islamist fanaticism, terrorism, and anti-Americanism around the globe rather than curbing them. ("Well done, Osama!" exclaimed one British diplomat sarcastically.) But as America's essentially unilateral military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have deteriorated into today's stalemate and overstretch, it has been Rice who has softened Washington's solo positions and invited European allies into at least the outer periphery of Washington's inner circles. This month she helped resuscitate the moribund Quartet. Currently she is postponing controversial decisions on sanctions over Iran's nuclear program while "talks about talks" continue that might still lead to direct U.S.-Iran negotiations.
Moreover, Rice is the one person who is close enough to President Bush to persuade him (perhaps) that if he wants to leave a positive historical legacy despite the Iraqi slide toward civil war, he now has a golden opportunity to do so. Europeans will soon be whispering in her ear that her boss could well use his last two years in the White House - when he will be freed from the constraints of electoral politics - to do what only the world's sole superpower can d convince the Israelis that their own security would be better served by adding positive Palestinian incentives to their repertoire of military punishment.
Here Europeans tend to agree with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that the most poisonous issue throughout the Islamic world is indeed the festering Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. They blame the final failure of the 1990s Madrid peace process launched by George H. W. Bush and the outbreak of the second intifada not only on Palestinian obduracy, but also on the mushrooming of Israeli settlements as faits accomplis on Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory in that decade. And they contend that however much the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein was intended to enhance Israel's security, it has done just the opposite by intensifying hatred of Israel and of the US and motivating new suicide bombers throughout the Islamic world. This deterioration, they believe, must be rectified by resumption of a serious search for a comprehensive peace.
More broadly, Europeans maintain that the U.S. experiment in deliberately destabilizing Iraq in order to plant democracy in the Arab world has backfired, setting off further, uncontrolled destabilization in the region. For a year or so the U.S. could herald proto-democratic gains in the interim Iraqi government, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and Muammar Gaddafi's ending of Libya's pursuit of nuclear weapons. But with the exception of the Libyan shift (which actually began with American diplomatic probes that predated the Bush administration), the other gains have proved ephemeral. Daily deaths by torture in the grisly communal Sunni-Shia warfare in Iraq have now risen to 40 or 50 a night. Embattled centrist democrats in a fragile Lebanon now face a militant Hizbullah that boasts of "divine victory" over the Israeli army that was unable to defeat it in a month of heavy bombing that devastated much of south Lebanon's infrastructure. The gulf has widened between moderate Arab governments and their peoples. And even Egypt, long a stabilizer rather than an unpredictable joker in the region, is now sparking Western concern by reopening its own nuclear - and potentially nuclear weapons - program. "The West has peaked. The control we have had [in the Middle East] in the past forty years of the twentieth century will not come back," declared one strong friend of the U.S. bleakly.
In the Levant Europeans therefore now want to restabilize politics, strengthen the authority of Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora as much as possible, coopt Hamas and Hizbullah as these movements participate in elections and governments, and offer Syria enough cooperation in a quid pro quo to help President Assad and the Alawi religious minority he represents evade being swamped by the Shia Hizbullah or Iran.
As Europeans conceive it, such a reaching out to Syria should be supplemented by drawing moderate Arabs into the peace process, in part by inviting them to join the Quartet steering group and enlarging the Quartet's writ to cover peacekeeping issues in Lebanon as well as in Israel and Palestine.
It should be further supplemented, European diplomats urge, by renewed efforts to engage pragmatists and isolate hardliners in Iran. These efforts entail stressing to Tehran the value of the package of positive incentives in economic integration on offer in onging contacts between European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani. They entail as well dissuading the U.S. from making things worse by mounting a preventive strike on Iran's hundred-plus underground nuclear facilities. Europeans are uncertain whether or not Washington is seriously considering such an airstrike, but they wish to make their judgment clear that such a rash move would only delay the Iranian nuclear program temporarily, at the cost of entrenching Iranian extremists for a generation to come.
Ideally, the Europeans would like to mediate a deal in which more pragmatic Iranian factions would sideline their country's presumptive drive for nuclear weapons in return for Western respect for Iran's role as a regional power. They recognize that such a deal will be much harder to pull off than it would have been when Iranian leaders, alarmed by America's swift regime change in Baghdad, proposed bilateral talks with the U.S., Washington refused, and the Europeans started negotiations with Tehran as a kind of surrogate. In the meantime, the radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has become president and substantially weakened less extreme politicians. And on second thought, all Iranian factions now see themselves as holding the whip hand after the U.S. destroyed their two worst enemies of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban - and after the Israeli army for the first time in half a century looks weak after its failure in intelligence and coercion in Lebanon last August. The Iranians have a national interest that parallels Western interests in preventing next-door Iraq from becoming a failed state next door, but they will be very tough hagglers on their own nuclear program.
Nonetheless, European diplomats assert that a bargain must be attempted, in the hope, however desperate, that with the time gained, Iran's vibrant pluralist society might yet begin to tame the autocratic theocracy. Nothing less than the magnitude of effort of such historic turning points as Richard Nixon's rapprochement with China or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's curbing of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union is required in both Iran and Israel/Palestine, they plead.
And when will the Europeans launch their Mission Impossible? No date has been announced. A shrewd bet, however, might be the day after the November elections in the U.S. - or just about when the bipartisan U.S. "Iran Study Group" will unveil its own recommendations for what is being previewed as a "course correction."
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