July 20, 2006
“If you say ‘war’ just once more, I’ll go in the house and shut the door. I’ve never gotten so tired of any one word in my life as ‘war’.”
Scarlett O’Hara in the novel Gone With The Wind
People around the world and especially in the Middle East can relate to the words of the character in the novel Gone With The Wind discussing her feelings about war just before the Civil War began.
A year ago TransAtlantic Magazine published a special issue on the Middle East. Our cover said “The Middle East, Playing a New Tune - Freedom, Peace, Democracy - or Singing The Same Old Song - War, Violence and Terror.”
A year later the Middle East, unfortunately, has chosen the latter course, once again, of playing the same old song of war, violence and terror. As the sage Yogi Berra would say, “It is déjà vu all over again.”
The terrorist group Hezbollah, acting in southern Lebanon with no interference from the Lebanese government, continued to shoot rockets into towns in northern Israel and recently kidnapped two Israelis soldiers. The cause of the current war is the kidnapping and the shelling by Hezbollah into Israel. But the larger causes of war in the East are the hatreds of the past continuing into the present. They are only getting worse with a terrorist government, Hamas, now running the Palestinian National Authority and a terrorist group running freely in Lebanon with the support and financing of Iran and Syria.
A year ago events looked more positive. John Andrews, a longtime Economist reporter who started his journalism career in Lebanon, wrote an article for our special Middle East issue of TransAtlantic entitled: Beirut: Optimism Is A Better Bet Than Pessimism.” He spoke positively of the Cedar Revolution (the word cedar refers to a national emblem which is the Lebanon cedar, a tree that is featured on the flag of Lebanon) and the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon and of the rebuilding of Beirut and the return of its fabled nightlife.
But he added a word of caution to his article when he wrote, “What will happen if Hezbollah, the Shi’ite Muslim militia that brought half-a-million supporters onto the streets in support of Syria, demands some kind of revenge for the humiliation of its Syrian sponsor?”
Andrews ended his prescient article saying, “Where does that leave the Lebanese? As usual, at the mercy of events beyond their control. Their tiny country is a collection of religious sects (18 are officially recognized) where a citizen’s loyalty is first and foremost to his family, clan and religion.
Add to that the disaffection of some 400, 000 Palestinian refugees, the intellectual ferment of half a dozen universities and a free and liberal press: the result is a nation which will never be fundamentally stable - and will never be boring. But, with a cosmopolitan culture and with a commercial instinct embedded in the national genes, it can certainly be prosperous. All it needs is peace between its neighbors: Syrians, Israelis and Palestinians. As decades of abortive diplomatic effort from America, the UN and the EU can testify, that remains a lot to ask. On the other hand, as the Arabs like to say, ‘Patience is the key to happiness’.”
Andrews’ article is a wonderful background for attempting to understand the always-shifting sands of the troubled Middle East. It is sad, indeed, that the optimism of only a year ago has been so soundly shattered.
Today, we see that U.S. Marines - a very small force of less than 50 soldiers - have landed in Lebanon for the first time in more than 22 years to begin evacuating American citizens from the country undergoing bombings by the Israeli Air Force.
However, the landing of the U.S. Marines conjures up images of what happened the last time they were sent to Lebanon under President Reagan in the 1980s.
In our special issue of TransAltantic magazine on the Middle East, I wrote an article entitled “The Middle East: From Harry Truman to George W. Bush.” Writing about the Marines I stated, “Reagan sent U.S. troops to Lebanon as peacekeepers after Israel’s 1982 invasion. U.S. troops fared poorly. Two hundred and forty-one Marines were killed when their barracks in Lebanon were hit by a suicide truck bomb in October, 1983, prompting a U.S. withdrawal from Beirut to offshore warships.”
That was not the only time U.S. Marines had been sent to Lebanon. I also wrote that “In 1958 Eisenhower sent 14, 000 American troops to Lebanon ‘unleashing the American military for the only time in his presidency. A quarter of a century later, his motives still remain unclear. Lebanon was under no real threat, records Stephen Ambrose in his biography Eisenhower. According to Ambrose, Eisenhower sent U.S. marines to Lebanon ‘to impress Nasser, and to show him that he could not count on the Soviets. Eisenhower was also anxious to demonstrate to King Saud that the United States could be counted on to support its friends.’”
And, I concluded my piece with the sentence saying, “American foreign policy has its hands full in the Middle East.” That was true a year ago but certainly more true today as Secretary of State Condi Rice meets today with the head of the UN Kofi Annan before preparing for her upcoming trip to the Middle East to, hopefully negotiate an end to this latest sad tale of war in the troubled region.
However, one has to ask the question, Who will the Secretary of State negotiate with to end the current war? Hezbollah, who began the war, is a terrorist group and the Bush Administration does not negotiate with or talk with terrorist groups. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton restated those feelings last night at a press conference at the UN.
France and the U.S. were successful in having Syrian troops leave Lebanon last year so it would seem strange to negotiate with the Syrian leadership and bring them back into a position of power in the political affairs of Lebanon.
The other major backer of Hezbollah is Iran and the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with that country and it would seem the Secretary of State would not be speaking to their leaders.
She will be welcome in Israel but one cannot end a war speaking to only one of the combatant sides. Will she speak to the more moderate leadership in Jordan or speak to the leaders of Egypt?
The leaders of the Palestinian National Authority are also terrorists. Hamas was elected but they are still terrorists and it seems very unlikely Secretary Rice will speak to this group.
Why is the Secretary of State going to the Middle East if she really has no one to talk to who can help negotiate the end of this tragic conflict?
The United Nations has again shown to be impotent in the face of a war in the Middle East. They can have as many meetings as they wish but it is not moving the war any closer to a negotiated end.
And, the G8 leaders meeting in St. Petersburg when the war first began seemed helpless to negotiate its end. They issued a series of meaningless communiqués and then went back to their respective countries. Why didn’t they stay longer and find a global answer to the war in the Middle East?
So, the question remains: “Who can actually bring the warring sides to a negotiated solution?” The Secretary of State better find out the answer before she flies over to the Middle East. She could consult with the new government in Iraq but they barely have control over their own nation.
If the war spreads beyond Lebanon what will be the role of the 130, 000 U.S. troops in Iraq? Would they be re-deployed to southern Lebanon to be part of yet another peacekeeping force in the Middle East? Does a roadmap to peace exist that will work to end the years of hatred in the Middle East? How do you defeat terrorist groups that have the support of their host countries? How do you end the financing of these groups by Iran and Syria?
As the bombings and killings continue in this latest Middle East War overshadowing the bombings and killings in neighboring Iraq one hopes someone in a position of power somewhere is working on an answer. If they are it is quite unclear at the moment what the answer is going to be to end this latest Middle East tragedy.
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