tarekk
03.11.03, 11:05
The Daily Star, Beirut, October 22nd, 2003
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/22_10_03_d.asp
Few disputed at the time that Israel was a factor that pushed Bush to go to
war on Iraq. Just how much weight it had among all the others was the only
controversial question. But what is clear is that Israel has become a very
important one indeed in the stumbling neo-imperial venture that is Iraq
today.
This “Israelization” of the US policy crossed a new threshold with the two
blows dealt Syria in recent days President Bush’s endorsement of Israel’s
air raid on its territory and the Syrian Accountability Act passed by the
House of Representatives on Wednesday. A community of US-Israeli purpose
pushed to unprecedented lengths is now operational as well as ideological.
For the US, the primary battlefield is Iraq, and any state which sponsors or
encourages resistance to its occupation; for Israel it is occupied
Palestine, its “terrorists” and their external backers. These common
objectives converge on Syria.
Of course, with his raid, Sharon had his own specifically Israel agenda,
growing out of frustration at his failure to crush the Uprising (Intifada).
Breaking the “rules” that have “contained” Israeli-Syrian armed conflict
these past 30 years, he signalled his readiness to visit on Israel’s Arab
neighbours the same punitive techniques he uses on the Palestinians. But
whereas such an escalation might have had some deterrent logic when these
neighbours truly did sponsor or harbour Palestinian resistance, it doesn’t
now. An essential feature of the Intifada is that, spontaneous and popular,
it derives almost all its impetus from within; nothing illustrated that like
Hanadi Jaradat, the young woman from Jenin whose very personal grief and
vengeance prompted the atrocious, self-sacrificial deed which prompted the
raid in its turn. So, other than brief emotional gratification to the
Israeli public, it achieved nothing. But that will not deter Sharon. Having
embarked on this course, he has little choice but to continue it; more
importantly, violence has always been the indispensable means by which, in
the guise of fighting terror, he pursues his real, long-term aims, the
building of “Greater Israel” and crushing any opposition, Arab as well as
Palestinian, to it.
But he is also, he believes, serving an American agenda. At least no one in
Washington says he is not. There was a time, even under this most pro-
Israeli administration ever, when the superpower would have strenuously
distanced itself from such an act by its protégé; a time when, mindful of
the intrinsic connection between the two great Middle East zones of crisis,
it would have recognized that too close an identification with the aims and
actions of Israel in Palestine and its environs would complicate its task in
Iraq. No more, apparently. Now these aims and actions either matter little
to America, or even, in Syria’s case, complement its own.
True, constraints persist even now. Bush still balks at Israel’s
projected “removal” of Yasser Arafat. On the other hand, he has
effectively “disengaged” once more from peacemaking, endorsed the Israeli
view that Arafat alone is responsible for its breakdown and left Sharon a
freer hand than ever to conduct the Israeli share of their common “war on
terror.”
It was partly because he couldn’t go after Arafat that Sharon turned on
Syria instead. Again, Bush urged caution - but then called it “legitimate
self-defence” of a kind America itself would have resorted to. It was
Palestinian “terrorists” Israel struck, but, in American eyes, these are of
a piece with those other “terrorists” - Arabs or Muslims whose passage into
Iraq Syria supposedly permits or does little to impede.
Bush’s endorsement of the raid together with his signalled readiness to sign
into law the Syrian Accountability Act against which he has long held out
means that, where Syria is concerned, he has now veered strongly in favour
of the neoconservative wing of his administration. Its members are so
closely linked, personally, ideologically and even institutionally, to the
Israeli right wing that it is impossible to disentangle what is American in
their thinking from what is Sharon and the Likud’s - and nowhere, Western
diplomats in Damascus say, is this more obvious than it is with regard to
Syria.
The Accountability Act - which calls for sanctions against Syria till it
stops supporting “terrorism”, withdraws its forces from Lebanon, ceases
development of weapons of mass destruction and enters “serious,
unconditional” peace negotiations with Israel - is something the neo-cons
have been working for since the mid-1990s. That was when they first proposed
their joint Israeli-American strategy for regime change in Syria as well as
Iraq, to be accomplished by such means as attacks on Syria by “Israeli proxy
forces” based in Lebanon, Israeli attacks on Syrian targets in Lebanon
and “select” targets in Syria itself.
The deepening US-Israeli alliance is all too liable to backfire. What the US
is permitting Israel to do in Palestine and Syria will further inflame Arab
and Muslim hostility to what it is doing in Iraq. The effects of that will
be felt at the popular level; as despised Arab regimes look ever more
incapable of fulfilling the fundamental duty of any government, defence
against foreign attack and domination, the militants among their people -
like Hanadi Jaradat in Palestine - assume that duty themselves; they
become “terrorists” and suicide bombers wherever motive and opportunity for
it most potently coincide. “Iraq and Palestine are one and the same.”
As for the regimes, Syria has so far opted for restraint. Aware that its
only hope of securing its future in a general Middle East settlement is via
the United States, it may become even more conciliatory than - by its own
lights - it already is. But if Sharon keeps up his attacks, there will
surely be a limit to such restraint, set by tactical necessity, domestic
public opinion, and its own perception of itself as a last bastion of Arab
steadfastness. It has intimated that, at some point, it will hit back
perhaps by really adopting the spoiler’s role in Iraq which the US
unconvincingly attributes to it already or, more likely, by activating
Hizbullah against Israel.
Of course that would be very risky, given Israel’s vast superiority over it
in conventional military terms. But - it will no doubt calculate - can the
US, floundering in Iraq, really afford another Middle East conflagration of
its ally’s making?
The Israelization of America, as a key ingredient in the ever more noxious
Middle East brew, is not an extravagant term for a relationship in which,
typically, Sharon leads and Bush lamely follows. The pattern constantly
repeats itself. Bush may have misgivings about what Sharon does - his
military excesses, his relentless settlement drive, his “wall,” and now his
attack on Syria - he may stammer out mild admonitions, but he always
accommodates him in the end. And with Iraq itself eating away at his
prospects of election for a second term, he will be more accommodating than
ever, more deferential to all the “friends of Israel” in America from whom
Sharon draws most of his power to lead - or mislead - him. With the
next “suicide” bomber will Sharon reply against the offices of “terrorist”
organizations in Damascus itself - as he has clearly intimated he might?
One thing is sure: if, somew
