The Middle East now and tomorrow

Steve Clemons provides a short summary of how bad the situation in the Middle East currently is, and where it might go.

What I see evolving in the Middle East today is a regional Cold War manifested through regional contests between Iranian and Saudi proxies with hot moments.

Even though Israel is a regional nuclear and conventional superpower, it has little long term viability unless it either comes to terms with its moderate Sunni Arab neighbors or convinces the US or Europe or other major security patrons to fully and politically acquire Israel as one of their own domestic states.

I spent Monday in Los Angeles and met an insightful next generation Arab-American thinker, Sama Adnan, who told me he believed that there was something like a mathematical equation in the Middle East that few Americans -- Democrat or Republican -- understand. He said that democracies or more self-determining populations in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East were impossible as long as the Palestinian-Israeli standoff over Palestine's state status remained unresolved.

He said that if true democracies governed in any of these states, then those democratic movements would focus on their outrage that Israel was continuing to illegally occupy Palestinian territory. The more totalitarian governments in the region are bulwarks against a popular will that is focused on grievances involving Israel. The only way to create a more liberal and stable order in the Middle East, according to this young observer, is to deliver on Palestine -- develop an effort towards regional confidence building between Israel and other states -- and then try to encourage incremental change in the region.
[Emphasis mine - Editor WTF-o]

The right-wing Israeli Likud demands the kinds of military right-wing control to prevent the predations of Palestinian terrorists. That demand for control was what instigated last year's (failed) attack on Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon more than any specific incident just as the demand for military control is behind the constant attacks on terrorist leaders (with the attendant and politically counterproductive collateral damage.) The Wall between Israel and the West Bank is another such soon-to-be-proven-a-failure right wing effort to control their enemies instead of talk to them ans work with them. If those efforts at control were going to work, Israel would still have troops in Gaza and still be in control there.

Not that the Palestinians would be easy to work with. They also have a lot of grievances to work out, and no reason to trust Israelis. Without mutual trust, there will be no solution. Military attacks and walls do not build mutual trust.

If the problems were only located in those sad lands of Palestine and Israel the rest of us might just wash our hands of the idiocies those people are perpetuating on each other. But it isn't so limited. The problems in Israel/Palestine are either the source of the problems festering out into the rest of the Middle East or they prevent the resolution of major international problems in the Middle East. If the Middle East were not siting on top of large pools of oil that the short-term thinkers running our government thinks we need, we could still ignore the problem. In the long term, however, the problems in the Middle East have to be solved.

Clinton came very close to resolving the worst of the Israeli-Palestinian problems, so naturally the Bush people refused to go near those issues,probably for fear of being seen to be less competent that Clinton. Now that we know for a fact that the Bush administration is not only less competent than Clinton (and every other Presidential administration the U.S. has ever had,) what's the bushies remaining excuse for not attempting to do something about the problem?

Even incompetents can try.