The Guns of July

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By Harold Meyerson

Washington Post
Wednesday, July 19, 2006

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The world's sole remaining superpower has been super-absent from any role in mediating and mitigating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- partly because until recently the president didn't believe in diplomacy, partly because he believed that the key to regional stability was deposing Saddam Hussein. Plenty of people disagreed with him on that one. Indeed, one reason his father didn't send U.S. troops to Baghdad in the Persian Gulf War of 1991 was that he feared the opposite might be true, that Iraq might collapse inward on itself and that theocratic Iran, allied with the Iraqi Shiites, might emerge as the real regional menace. The old man, it turns out, was dead right.

With each passing day, the chief effect of our invasion and occupation of Iraq seems increasingly to be the destabilization of the already unstable Middle East. Within Iraq, the Shiite-Sunni conflict that many scholars, diplomats and intelligence experts warned of before our invasion is depopulating Baghdad. And though Republicans will argue this fall that we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here, there seem to be plenty of Islamist zealots left over to fight a two-front war against Israel and threaten the moderate Arab autocracies as well.

Their zeal to attain unattainable and nightmarish fantasies -- the elimination of Israel or, in al-Qaeda's case, the restoration of the caliphate -- through the deadliest of means makes the militant Islamists (particularly the rulers of Iran) the most terrifying force in the region. But they hold no monopoly on illusion, any more than our own president holds the copyright on Middle Eastern miscalculation.

Israel's retaliation against Hezbollah, for instance, may be both understandable and justifiable, but that's not to say it's effective. The aerial pulverization of Lebanon can destroy many things, including, possibly, Lebanon's democratic government (the least anti-Western within the Arab world), but it cannot destroy Hezbollah's thousands of concealed mini-missiles or the support for Hezbollah among the Shiites who live near the Lebanese-Israeli border. Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog may have boasted, "We've decided to put an end to this saga" -- that is, the Hezbollah presence in southern Lebanon -- but as Ariel Sharon could have told him, that's not so easily done. The remarks of Sharon's successor, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on Monday -- scaling back Israel's goals from Hezbollah's destruction to the return of prisoners, the end of rocket attacks and the placement of Lebanese troops on the border -- may signal a welcome descent from fantasy to reality in Israeli policy.

full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/18/AR2006071801377.html