Solving the Problems of the Middle East

Amir Taheri, formerly the executive editor of Kayhan (Iran’s largest daily newspaper), author of ten books, and columnist for the New York Post, has an important article in the February issue of COMMENTARY:  “Is Israel the Problem?” 

Taheri argues that in 1991, after liberating Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, Bush 41 and Secretary of State James Baker could have used the American victory and the increased military presence and prestige in the region to create a new balance of power to counter Iran, Iraq and Syria.  But instead:

Baker declared in September 1991 the administration would go for “the big thing”: that is, finding a solution to the century-old conflict between the Jews and the Arabs. The result was the Madrid conference, an impressive show of heads of state but, as the decade’s subsequent events would prove, a wholly counterproductive exercise in peacemaking.

The two key analytical assumptions that led to Madrid were, first, that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the issue, the Ur-issue, of Middle Eastern politics and, second, that all the other issues in the region were inextricably linked to it. Despite everything that has happened in the interim to disprove these two assumptions, they still underlie the thinking of diplomats today. Most recently, they were repeated almost word for word in the long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) headed by the very same James Baker. . . .

For a group of American “wise men” to embrace such retrograde and easily refuted notions bespeaks a truly dangerous ignorance of reality.

In fact, far from being the root cause of instability and war in the wider Middle East, one could argue that the Arab-Israeli conflict is rather peripheral, and that the region’s deeper and much more intractable problems lie elsewhere. And one would be right.

Taheri then describes a long series of regional conflicts – Sunni v. Shiite, Iraq v. Iran, Saudi v. Qatar, Syria v. Lebanon, etc. -- concluding that “in the past six decades, this region has witnessed no fewer than 22 full-scale wars over territory and resources, not one of them having anything to do with Israel and the Palestinians.”

The notion that all of these problems can be waved away by “solving” the Arab-Israeli conflict is thus at best a delusion, at worst a recipe for maintaining today’s wider political, diplomatic, and social paralysis.

For what is the reason behind the failure of the 1991 Madrid conference, the slow but steady death of the 1993 Oslo accords, the collapse of President Bill Clinton’s final effort to negotiate a peace deal at Camp David in 2000, and the faltering history of President George W. Bush’s “road map”? The reason is hardly the want of diplomatic efforts, especially on the part of the United States.  No, the reason lies elsewhere, and is plain to see in the sorry tale we have rehearsed.

Worth reading in its entirety, along with Bret Stephens’ equally important article in the same issue – “Realists to the Rescue?”

At least as bad [is] the [Baker Commission] report’s gingerly and at times beseeching attitude toward [Iran and Syria], especially when combined with its bizarre insistence that solving the Arab-Israeli conflict is the necessary prelude to peace in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. . . .

How serious can the ISG be in asking “Syria’s full cooperation with all investigations into political assassinations in Lebanon,” when it knows perfectly well that Syria itself is behind those assassinations? In what ways does it propose to enforce a “verifiable cessation of Syrian aid to Hizballah,” when Syria has been flouting that UN demand for six months? How exactly should the United States make a renewed commitment to Arab-Israeli peace when the Palestinian government is controlled by Hamas, which categorically rejects both peace and Israel?

This is not realism but fecklessness . . .