Freeloaders

Sebastian Mallaby has it partly right in today's Washington Post. He correctly notices that China, Russia and Europe have been guilty of blocking peaceful solutions to terrorism. That's refreshing, since it's something this blog has been pointing out for some time now. His reasoning is a bit off, I think.

Before things can turn a corner in the Middle East, we need the diplomatic equivalent of electric-shock therapy. We may need $100 oil to jolt the Europeans and the Chinese. We may need the Russians to be told that they can forget joining the World Trade Organization. And we're going to need something dramatic to reward India, whose response to terrorism last week was exemplary.

The India-Israel comparison is startling. Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorists shower rockets on Northern Israel and carry out a raid that inflicts eight deaths and two abductions. Israel justifiably responds by bombing the headquarters of the Hezbollah leader, but it also rains fire on Beirut's airport, roads and apartment towers, destroying the props of a new and hopeful Lebanon.

First, the situation in India is not at all settled yet, so it's a bit early to declare victory even though up until now they have not gone to a military option. Second, blaming Israel for hitting civilian targets when Hezbollah has been hiding rockets in civilian dwellings is disingenuous at best. I do not know how the Israeli targets are being selected, but I'm willing to guess they are choosing based on intelligence, not flailing wildly.

Almost everybody understands that failed states are good for terrorists. With their bitter experience of the Palestinian territories and the Lebanon of old, Israelis ought to grasp that better than anyone. But their leaders seem determined to re-create a failed state to their north. They complain that the Lebanese government has failed to rein in Hezbollah terrorists, then destroy the infrastructure that provides that same Lebanese government with its only chance of functioning.

This may be a fair criticism, I would prefer Israel not target Lebanon other than where Hezbollah is operating. The attacks may well be based on good intelligence, but maybe the better way to handle it would be to broadcast that information and demand the Lebanese government take action in those cases.

So the challenge in the Middle East and beyond is to show that diplomacy can function. In the wake of the Bombay attacks, Pakistan is a good place to start: China, a traditional Pakistani ally, should join with the United States in telling Pakistan to close down its jihad network. Until now, of course, China has regarded India-Pakistan tensions as a strategic plus. But it needs to update its worldview. Trade and investment between China and India are growing, and China depends on imported oil. War in India, or the emboldening of Pakistani jihadists with links to the Middle East, is not in its interest.

But Pakistan is only a beginning. On every major security challenge, from North Korea's missiles to Iran's uranium enrichment, diplomacy is undermined by Chinese, Russian and sometimes Western European foot-dragging. These powers are happy to criticize unilateralism and belligerence at every turn. But when there's a chance to make diplomacy work, they call for U.S. leadership and hide behind the curtains.

There's a direct causal link between this freeloading irresponsibility and Israel's bombardment of Lebanon. The Chinese and Russians ensure every day that diplomacy is limp, and then they sound surprised when Israel chooses the military option.

Western Europeans lament the fact that the Bush administration, its energies sapped by the Iraq war, has not shown much appetite for the shuttle diplomacy that brokered the last Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire in 1996. But if France and others had not undermined sanctions on Iraq in the late 1990s, the case for the military alternative would have been weaker — and the war might not have happened.

This is where Mallaby has it right, I think. The left blames the entire situation in Iraq on Bush and his advisers. They fail to take into account that the sanctions were being actively subverted by corrupt Europeans and a utterly corrupt UN. The freeloading countries point fingers at America and do nothing to try to help control the problem spots. When all hell breaks loose, the expectation that America will step in shields the freeloading countries from blame.

I've been saying for a long time that the world had better get it's collective act together and face up to the problem situations in Iran and North Korea. We had better start facing the terrorists and dismantling their ability to kill civilians. We had better do so very soon, too. The more we delay the confrontation, the more likely war becomes.