The Fall of the Fourth Pillar

At the dinner honoring Norman Podhoretz’s “World War IV” as the Power Line “Book of the Year,” Paul Mirengoff got into a discussion with Norman and John Podhoretz regarding whether the fourth pillar of the Bush Doctrine was still operative:

The fourth pillar (no Palestinian state until the Palestinians fight terrorism on a sustained basis and dismantle terrorist infrastructure) has, in my view, fallen. During an informal chat at the book award dinner on Monday, both Norman and John Podhoretz appeared to disagree with me on this point (we didn't discuss it in depth).

Yet to my knowledge, the PA is not engaged in a sustained fight against its terrorists, nor has the Palestinian terror infrastructure been dismantled. Nonetheless, the Bush administration is working to create a Palestinian state.

I presume the basis of Norman and John’s position is that because any agreement emerging from final status negotiations -- which the Bush Administration has spent the last year initiating and will spend its coming year trying to bring to a conclusion -- will be conditioned on dismantlement of terror infrastructure, the fourth pillar still stands.  Final status negotiations can occur, an agreement can be reached, but the agreement will not be “implemented” unless the condition is met.  So the pillar supposedly stands.

Norman once held a different view.  He was willing to bet his faith in Bush on his certainty that Bush would never allow the peace process to move to Phase III (final status negotiations) before Phase I (dismantlement of terror infrastructure) was completed.  Ariel Sharon certainly believed he had received that commitment from Bush -- in writing -- in the form of the famous April 14, 2004 letter that memorialized the Disengagement Deal.

In the April 2005 issue of Commentary, Norman wrote a spirited defense of the prospective Gaza disengagement.  That article produced a slew of letters arguing it was a dangerous policy for both the U.S. and Israel, that it would be followed by pressure by the Bush Administration on Israel rather than any demands that would “weaken” Abbas, and that Norman had unwisely put his faith in princes.  One letter writer, Israel Pickholtz from Elazar, Israel, asked what would convince Podhoretz that he was wrong, and “what, afterward, would he recommend to correct things?”

In the August 2005 issue, Norman responded to those letters by writing in part as follows:

Will Bush, as I believe, stick with the principles he enunciated on June 24, 2002? Will he, that is, continue insisting on an end to Palestinian terrorism as the necessary (but not sufficient) condition of American support for the establishment of a Palestinian state? Or will he . . . succumb to pressure from his own State Department and the “international community” and allow himself to be bamboozled by excuses and outright lies from Abbas the way his predecessors were by Arafat’s? . . .

Cutting to the chase, let me respond to Israel Pickholtz’s challenge. “What future developments,” he asks, would convince me that I was “wrong to support the current policies of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon”?

. . . [This] is my position: I will admit to having been wrong the moment Bush goes along with -- and Sharon acquiesces in -- Abbas’s wish to skip the first two phases of the “road map” and to jump immediately into the third and final phase.

In phase I, the Palestinians are required to “undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israel anywhere,” and also to mount “effective operations aimed at . . . dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.” Only when the Palestinian Authority does this are the parties to enter phase II, in which negotiations are supposed to culminate in “the creation of a Palestinian state with provisional borders.” At that point, phase III kicks in, and the process begins of forging a “permanent-status agreement [on] borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements.”

Abbas claims that he has already fulfilled his commitments under the first two phases, and that the time has therefore come to enter into phase III. If Bush and Sharon were to accept this claim while the facts on the ground continue exposing it as a fraud (or, at best, as a self-deception), I would admit to having been wrong about them. I would also admit to having been wrong if they were to endorse the characteristically cynical preference of the “international community” for a “fast-track” approach (i.e., jumping into the third phase even though the requirements of the first two admittedly remain unmet by the Palestinians).

I would like to hear more from Norman and John as to why they hold the view they apparently took in their conversation with Mirengoff.

I also hope Norman might respond to the second part of Israel Pickholtz’s question:  since the Gaza disengagement has now proved to have been a strategic disaster of the first order for both Israel and the United States, and has led not to U.S. observance of the commitment in the April 14, 2004 letter but to the Harriet Miers of peace plans, “what would he recommend to correct things?” 

Comments

[J. Lichty]

Brilliant. N. Pohoretz needs to be called on this, and I think a letter to commentary of this order would be welcome Rick.

In the most recent issue of commentary, NP does finally give moment to the possibility that Bush might not keep his word regarding permitting Iran to obtain the BOMB, so maybe he is finally willing to admit that he was wrong about Bush regarding the Arab Israeli conflict.

I am saddened to see that Norman Podhoretz is wrong, because I wanted him to be right, but these are dark times that even the heady cannot comprehend.