http://www.zaman.com/?bl=commentary&alt=&trh=20060721&hn=3495107.21.2006 Friday - ISTANBUL 15:04
Lurching Toward Regional War in the Middle East
by Richard Falk
Israeli moves toward all out war in Gaza and Lebanon seem linked to wider dangers of a regional war with severe global consequences. By interpreting these wider dangers it is not meant to minimize the human suffering and regressive political effects of current carnage in these two long tormented war zones. Looking at this bigger picture is crucial for its own sake, but also helps us understand the immediate crises more fully than if as officially presented by Israel, and unfortunately echoed by many governments around the world.
Whatever else, this outbreak of major two-front violence is not about Israel’s right to defend itself against an enemy that is seriously threatening its territorial integrity or political independence, the only grounds for justifiable war. To treat border incidents, involving a few casualties from rockets and the abduction of a single Israeli soldier by a Gazan militia and two by Hezbollah in south Lebanon, as if it were an occasion of war is a gross distortion of well-accepted international law and state practice. To justify legally a claim of self-defense requires a full-scale armed attack across Israeli borders. If every violent border incident or terrorist provocation were to be so regarded as an act of war, the world would be aflame. If India had responded to the recent Mumbai train explosions that killed some 200 Indian civilians as a Pakistani act of war, the result would have been a devastating regional war, quite possibly fought with nuclear weapons. There are many other flashpoints around the world that might justify police methods in reaction to provocations, and in extreme instances, specific military responses across borders. If such occasions were viewed as acts of war, the consistent result would be catastrophe. Recent Hamas/Hezbollah provocations, even if interpreted through a self-serving Israeli lens, were not of a scale or threat that warranted large-scale military actions that are directed at a wide array of targets unrelated to the specific incidents and causing severe damage to civilians and the entire civilian infrastructure of society (water, electricity, roads, bridges).
The exaggerated Israeli response, together with circumstantial evidence, suggests that Israel used the Hamas/Hezbollah incidents as pretexts to pursue a much wider and long planned security agenda directed at Palestine and Lebanon, and beyond this, as an opportunity for a political restructuring of the entire region in partnership with the United States. In this regard, as George W. Bush’s comments at the St. Petersburg G-8 summit emphasized, the real responsibility for the anti-Israeli incidents should be associated with Syria and Iran given their support of Hamas and Hezbollah. It does require a deep reading of international relations to recall that both right wing Israeli opinion and the neoconservative worldview that has dominated American foreign policy during the Bush presidency advances a vision of world order based upon a comprehensive political restructuring of the Middle East, starting with ‘regime change’ in Iraq.
What Israel is undertaking is a change of tactics with respect to the pursuit of this regional vision. The initial plan seems to have been based on a decisive military and political victory in Iraq followed by an essentially diplomatic campaign to exert major pressure on other problematic governments in the region, relying on The Greater Middle East Project of ‘democratization’ to do the heavy lifting without further military action. Instead what has occurred has been failure and frustration in Iraq, which has turned into an American quagmire, but more seriously, a consistent set of electoral outcomes throughout the region that have discredited a political approach to the regional vision embraced by Washington and Tel Aviv with the goal of achieving compliant Arab governments that are passive with respect to Palestinian aspirations, and accepting of American hegemony. These geopolitical disappointments began to be revealed in the Iraqi sequence of elections, which even under conditions of the American occupation and a hostile resistance produced clear victories for Islamic political forces and stinging repudiations of the sort of compliant secularists that Washington backed. Similar outcomes, with less dramatic results, were evident in elections held in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which together with the election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as President of Iran, apparently sent a clear message that the more democratic the political process, the more likely it was to produce an anti-American, anti-Israeli leadership. The Hamas victory in the January elections in the Palestinian Territories culminated this disillusionment with the democratic path to security, as envisioned by Israel and the United States, for the region. <snip>
In concluding, it is obvious that there are wider implications for other countries in the region, especially those faced with ethnic conflict and transnational armed struggle. As tempting as it might be to follow Israel’s lead the prudent course, especially in light of these dangers of regional war, is to be extremely cautious about undertaking cross-border military operations. The Israeli policies have already backfired to a significant extent, strengthening the political stature of Hezbollah with Lebanon and causing Lebanese public opinion to unite around criticism of Israel’s behavior.
July 18, 2006
07.21.2006
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After I finished my PhD at Oxford, there were two countries I thought of moving to and teaching.
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Victory of Strategic Thinking
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One year ago, between 9am and 10am on 7 July 2005, four suicide bombers detonated their deadly bombs on a packed London transport system.
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I would like to begin by expressing heartfelt greetings to all of you from the great people of Turkey.
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