Blue Crab Boulevard

Changing The Model

It's always been the model up until now: Fighting breaks out involving Israel and (insert opponent here). The US jets in a few envoys. Shuttle diplomacy occurs for a while. US pressures some concessions from Israel. A shaky ceasefire is worked out. Israel obey the terms of the ceasefire, (insert opponent here) plays at meeting the terms while secretly readying for the next outbreak. The US envoys pat themselves on the back and fly home. And the clock starts ticking on the next round, which will produce the same results. In going on sixty years now, it hasn't really worked to bring a lasting peace.

So it turns out that the Bush administration, especially the President himself, does not want to just follow the same old model. Which brings criticism from those who have acted as envoys in the past, big surprise.

President Bush's unwillingness to pressure Israel to halt its military campaign in Lebanon is rooted in a view of the Middle East conflict that is sharply different from that of his predecessors.

When hostilities have broken out in the past, the usual U.S. response has been an immediate and public bout of diplomacy aimed at a cease-fire, in the hopes of ensuring that the crisis would not escalate. This week, however, even in the face of growing international demands, the White House has studiously avoided any hint of impatience with Israel. While making it plain it wants civilian casualties limited, the administration is also content to see the Israelis inflict the maximum damage possible on Hezbollah.

As the president's position is described by White House officials, Bush associates and outside Middle East experts, Bush believes that the status quo — the presence in a sovereign country of a militant group with missiles capable of hitting a U.S. ally — is unacceptable.

The U.S. position also reflects Bush's deepening belief that Israel is central to the broader campaign against terrorists and represents a shift away from a more traditional view that the United States plays an "honest broker's" role in the Middle East.

In the administration's view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq. Israel's crippling of Hezbollah, officials also hope, would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah.

"The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. "He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived."

The thing is, you can see hints that Bush is correct in his assessment. Bashar Assad said the other day that he was quite surprised a ceasefire hadn't already been imposed. The miscalculation on the part of the terror puppetmasters is revealed by statements like that. They wanted the old model to work again in their favor. Bush isn't playing, though. But critics of the President, of course, abound.

Many Mideast experts warn that there is a dangerous consequence to this worldview. They believe that Israel, and the United States by extension, is risking serious trouble if it continues with the punishing air strikes that are producing mounting casualties. The history of the Middle East is replete with examples of the limits of military power, they say, noting how the Israeli campaign in Lebanon in the early 1980s helped create the conditions for the rise of Hezbollah.

They warned that the military campaign is turning mainstream Lebanese public opinion against Israel rather than against Hezbollah, which instigated the violence. The attacks also make it more difficult for the Lebanese government to regain normalcy. And what seems now to be a political winner for the president — the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution yesterday backing Israel's position — could become a liability if the fighting expands to Syria or if the United States adds Lebanon to Iraq and Afghanistan as a country to which U.S. troops are deployed.

"There needs to be a signal that the Bush administration is prepared to do something," said Larry Garber, the executive director the New Israel Fund, which pushes for civil rights and justice in Israel. "Taking a complete hands-off, casual-observer position undermines our credibility. . . . There is a danger that we will be seen as simply doing Israel's bidding."

Robert Malley, who handled Middle East issues on the National Security Council staff for President Bill Clinton, voiced skepticism about whether the current course would pay off for either Israel or the United States. "It may not succeed with all the time in the world, and Hezbollah could emerge with its dignity intact and much of its political and military arsenal still available," said Malley, who monitors the region for the International Crisis Group. "What will you have gained?"

One could ask what was gained by following the old model? A few years of lower level violence at best? Was peace ever achieved? No, not really. The closest thing to any success has been the uneasy relations between Israel and Egypt. But that peace has not stopped the ability of Hamas to get arms and ammunition into Gaza, has it? The old model just does not work when one side is not serious about it.

It's about time we changed the model, don't you think?

War | Gaius July 21, 2006

By Donna, July 21, 2006 @ 7:18 am

All this talk of models is so soothing to our souls while we witness this scene of people dying and their livelihoods being destroyed. I forgot for a moment that most of the dying ones are unserious anyway, so they and any others we self-justifiably get to label with a collective identity are fair targets for destruction. Much more important than saving lives is to find the correct new-model level of punishment that will once and for all eradicate reactions to er, overwhelming disproportionate punitive force. Destroy infrastructure, destroy whole societal systems, and so forth. After all, this worked in Iraq, didn’t it?
By Gaius, July 21, 2006 @ 7:25 am

So just keep doing the same useless thing over and over instead?
By Juaquin Salgado, July 21, 2006 @ 7:29 am

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, this is about a concisely as this position has been stated. Thank you!
By Juaquin Salgado, July 21, 2006 @ 7:34 am

Donna, unfortunately pity, however warrantable, does not provide free people with protection.
By Alan, July 21, 2006 @ 8:12 am

Was the modern state of Israel ever a good idea? I think not.

Instead of enacting social policies of inclusion and accomodation, Europe has been exporting its adventurers, socio-economically deprived and dissidents to other global at the expense of indigenous populations for centuries. The genocidal holocausts resulting from this practice have produced suffering among innocents in number and degree that belies any claim that the suffering of European Jews might make as to historically unique victimization.

If the Euro-Jewish holocaust and the pogroms and discrimination that preceeded it provide the principal rationale for a separate Jewish state, then it is Europeans, not Palestinians, who owe the debt of land for the blood of slaughtered innocents.

I am a descendent of European social malcontents currently residing on land which for thousands of years was inhabited by Native American tribes that for the most part have been marginalized or driven to extinction. Furthermore, I am the descendent of Celts, Normans, Saxons and who knows what else: that is, groups that did their best at various points in history to enslave, oppress and wipe each other out.

As unfair as I believe it is that Israel was established where it has been, it has managed, with a great deal of U.S. assistance, to become to militarily too powerful to be dislodged, absent unthinkable acts of warfare.

We really need to recast our thinking about Israel and its geographical neighborhood.
By Juaquin Salgado, July 21, 2006 @ 8:40 am

Good thinking!! It would be so much easier to move an entire country that’s been there for sixty years than to MAKE TERRORISTS STOP KILLING…TO REMOVE FAKE ARMIES IN SKI MASKS FROM OTHERWISE PEACEABLE COUNTRIES…How tortured must your logic become in the hope for peace?
By Donna, July 21, 2006 @ 2:13 pm

Alan, first of all I have free will, given in God’s creation. What I do with my free will is exactly and all that shapes my own soul’s qualities. It is only my soul qualities that will go with me when I die, whether those qualities I have developed are aligned with God’s will or aligned against God’s will. I will not be passing on with any power and/or material accumulations of this life. And I especially will not get to take along some clever justifications for disobeying the Ten Commandments.

Though my heart goes out to those whose lives are being destroyed, I wrote my comment not out of pity, but rather out of a sense of responsibility to take a stand for God’s laws, the first of which is “Thou shalt not kill”. The question I always ask when I see what I consider over-reaching beyond-defense destruction is, “Where were the German people when Hitler began to ‘eradicate’ whole populations?’ Were the Germans watching Hitler’s destructive force and sitting on their hands diverting themselves with pondering about models for successful eradication of whomever the ‘enemy’ was at the time?

So, Alan, I am trying to say that there is something more important to me than ‘protection’. I cannot control what others do, including what terrorists do, or what Israel does to combat terrorism. But I do have control and responsibility over whether I compromise my own soul by sitting silent, or worse yet, scurrying about to ‘justify’ through a ‘new model’ the breaking of God’s laws. That ‘new model’ might bring a ‘peace’ solution for Israel in the same way the ‘eradicating the Jews’ was the ‘answer’ that was supposed to benefit Hitler’s Germany.
By Gaius, July 21, 2006 @ 2:18 pm

It’s more accurately translated as, “Thou shalt not murder”, Donna.
By Donna, July 21, 2006 @ 2:29 pm

Uh, Oh. I re-read the comments. Sorry, Alan, I was actually responding to the comment by Juaquin right above yours, not to yous
By Kathy, July 21, 2006 @ 6:16 pm

It would be so much easier to move an entire country thatâ€™s been there for sixty years than to MAKE TERRORISTS STOP KILLINGâ€¦TO REMOVE FAKE ARMIES IN SKI MASKS FROM OTHERWISE PEACEABLE COUNTRIESâ€¦

How do you make terrorists stop killing? And which countries are you referring to when you say “from otherwise peaceable countries”?
By jodetoad, July 22, 2006 @ 2:23 am

Our western model of honor we inherit from who knows how many centuries, accepted conventions of warfare, knighthood, all that stuff. Our almost innate understanding of conflict resolution is cultural.

As best I understand it, the middle east nomadic tribal tradition was to continue feuds for generations of low-level raiding, until one combatant finally was able to totally defeat the other, or some external event changed the situation. Their ideas of conflict resolution are cultural.

As human beings, east and west can understand each other well in some areas, yet in other areas we each are confounded by the thinking of the other.

To keep trying the same actions and expect different results is one definition of insanity. If the parties are using different rules, it’s time to change all the rules. We have tried the old way enough times to expect the results to be predictable.

And I don’t see that we have any obligation to pretend not to discriminate. Israel is an ally. If that word means anything, the US is on Israel’s side, and Israel is not at fault here. Why bend over backward to pretend otherwise? We want to act in reasonable and considered ways, but at this point, nothing we could do would change the feelings of those who detest us. Our image in the middle east is pretty much a lost cause, and should not be a serious consideration.