Middle East: Marching Backward to the Future

HERZLIYA: After the war in Lebanon, the Middle East has entered a new era. It marks the end of hope for peace or democracy and one in which radical Islamism sets the ideological and political agenda.

The trend was clear with the Palestinian leadership and Syria rejecting peace with Israel in 2000; the post-Saddam violence in Iraq; the Arab regimes' defeat of reform movements; and electoral advances by Hamas, Hezbollah and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, among many other developments.

This version of the Middle East may persist for an entire generation. Most remarkable is the return to the thinking of the 1950s and 1960s, albeit with an Islamist rather than a pan-Arab nationalist framework. More remarkable is the fact that this earlier worldview and strategy failed so miserably, leading the Arab world into years of defeat, wasted resources, dictatorship and a steady decline in many socio-economic categories.

This new state of affairs serves two key groups: many of the existing regimes and the revolutionary groups who seek to displace them. The basic approach builds on the traditional notion that all problems of the Arab world and Iran are caused by Israel, America and the West, and extols a violent struggle in pursuit of total victory rather than pragmatism, compromise and economic construction.

Recalling positions taken a half century ago, Islamists argue that Israel, America and the West are weak. If Arabs and Muslims are willing to sacrifice themselves and their societies as martyrs, they can achieve victory. In this respect, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad eerily echo Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syria’s rulers and others during the 1960s. This kind of thinking led to the Arab defeat in the 1967 war.

Another repeated pattern is the belief that some political superhero will bring victory to Arabs and Muslims – Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s; Arafat and Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad, Bashar’s father, in the 1970s; Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and 1990s; and Osama bin Laden. All failed, all were defeated.

The new “resistance” axis promises to solve all problems quickly, albeit through large-scale bloodshed. Why compromise if you believe you can achieve total victory, revolution, wiping Israel off the map with armed struggle and intimidation of the West? Victory, said Bashar al-Assad in a recent speech, requires recklessness.

For now, the new alliance of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas rides high across the Arab world as heroes of resistance. For the first time, the Persian/Arab, Shia/Sunni wall has been breached. Within Syria, though not Iran, the adventure has increased domestic popularity.

Syrians and Iranians sponsored the conflict, yet avoided direct material damage to their countries, serious international criticism or calls for sanctions.

On the public-relations front in the West, Israel attracted far more condemnation than did Tehran and Damascus. This in itself is a victory for extremists. Imagine being able to arm, train and incite a terrorist group to violate an international border and deliberately target another country’s civilians, and make your victim come out looking worse! In the terrorism-sponsorship business, it doesn’t get any better than that.

But matters are not so simple. These events antagonized a number of Arab forces, including Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, countries threatened by radical Islamist forces; the Lebanese majority who do not want to be dragged into war by Hezbollah or ruled by Damascus and Tehran; Kuwaitis and Iraqis who have discovered personally the costs of extremism; and liberal Arab thinkers who are disgusted at being pulled back into an approach that has so damaged their societies and limited freedoms.

The conflict is most complicated within Lebanon. Many Christians, Druze and Sunni Muslims are on the verge of being readied to fight Hezbollah. Even within Hezbollah’s own Shia constituency, the rival Amal movement tries to make a comeback by providing Shia Muslims better services than Hezbollah.

If Hezbollah does not keep its promise to rebuild all the damage, will it lose followers?

The war has affected Israel on several levels. While there is no room here to present the evidence for saying so, a serious analysis shows that Israel won the war militarily. For example, about one fifth of Hezbollah’s best forces were killed, not counting wounded. Israel lost a tiny fraction of that. If Hezbollah resumes fighting, by refusing to disarm in southern Lebanon and sabotaging the ceasefire, Israel will achieve a far more undeniable success.

In direct terms, the conflict actually enhanced Israel’s deterrence power. Arab governments, in analyzing the crisis, tend to focus on the high cost to Lebanon. Clearly, war with Israel is disastrous for them. Their chance of attacking or fighting has declined, though it was low anyway, and they fear getting dragged into war by radical Islamists.

In indirect terms, Israel’s deterrence power has fallen, though perhaps by less than it seems, in two ways, both central to the fighting in Lebanon: covert sponsorship of terrorism and attacking Israel from someone else’s territory.

The idea of a regime assaulting Israel through another country is not new. Egypt and Syria used Jordan and Lebanon for this purpose from the late 1960s onward. The whole history of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and more than a dozen Palestinian terrorist groups depend on the principle of state sponsorship. Events in Lebanon took this concept to a new level – the sponsorship of a semi-army of suicide soldiers against Israel.

Yet one other factor should be kept in mind: Israel is quick to correct the mistakes it made in the war, including shifts in tactics. This has already started. Its opponents will be much slower to do so, if they try at all.

A third actor in the drama is the international community. The world managed to come up with a ceasefire plan. But implementation poses two sets of difficulties: dealing with Lebanon and handling the radical forces.

The first problem is that the international community, perhaps inevitably, works with the Lebanese government – weak, frightened, riddled with corruption – in which Hezbollah is a member of the ruling coalition. Equally, the military partner of the UN international force is the Lebanese armed forces – also weak, bribable, and riddled with Hezbollah sympathizers. The world can’t expect Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah or block arms shipments from Iran and Syria. Lebanon is most unlikely to stop Hezbollah from attacking Israel again.

The second problem is that many in the West want to appease the radical forces. If only Iran, Syria or Hezbollah are offered concessions, they argue, the threat will vanish. This view actually feeds the problem. The radicals have far-reaching goals, including genocide in Israel, and powerful ideologies that reject any deal.

Moreover, the extremists think they are winning. Any Western effort to achieve understanding is consistently viewed as weakness inviting escalation. Any reading of the radical leaders’ speeches makes this clear. Why should Arab governments, reformers or Lebanese factions oppose the extremists if they believe – correctly, in general – that the West will not help them?

It is both sad and shocking that few people outside the Middle East understand the devastating defeat for progress due to the international position of, at best, neutrality in the war, and the consequent failure to help Israel, moderate Arab states and freedom-loving Lebanese. As always, these mistakes in the Middle East will come back to haunt the globe for a long time to come.