I hope the reason the Bush administration picked a retired military man as its special Middle East envoy was so he could scope out spots to deploy the peacekeepers when the United States, Russia and our European allies impose a peace settlement on the Israelis and the Palestinians.
I hope that Gen. Anthony Zinni and Secretary of State Colin Powell are spending a lot of time during their current “consultations” over one of those sand table relief maps, plotting out the particulars of the settlement and how to bring it off.
I hope President Bush is working the phones to his buddies Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair and all the rest, lining up commitments of troops, equipment and diplomatic support.
I hope Bush won’t wait too long after the first of the year to let Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat know what the deal is going to be and then to spring it to their peoples.
I hope, but I don’t believe.
I’d like to think that President Bush, who has risen to the occasion in marvelous fashion in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, could summon the same boldness in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which threatens to spiral out of control and ignite that entire region, and to burn the U.S. (again) in the process.
I’d like to think so, but I can’t. Dealing with Osama bin Laden is child’s play next to the domestic political pressures a president faces in dealing with this most intractable of foreign conflicts. As a result, I fear it will still be afflicting us all when my teenage sons reach my age (mid 50s).
The administration’s current policy, which is to excoriate Yasser Arafat and pressure him to crack down on terrorists and militants, has about it less the look of a strategic ploy than of an act of intellectual desperation.
Blasting Arafat is the default position of American Mideast policy. It’s what you do when you don’t know what else to do. And since Arafat has proven competent at nothing except surviving in the viper’s tangle of Palestinian politics, he will always be blastable.
But there are real issues at stake in this conflict, issues that the two warring parties have demonstrated they are unable to resolve. What they need is someone from the outside to resolve them for them, to cut the Gordian knot. That’s Uncle Sam.
Israel needs security; the Palestinians need a state of their own. A coalition led by the U.S. and including Russia and the various European countries that have panted for a role in the Mideast ought to be able to guarantee both.
Wiser minds than mine may come up with a better idea, but I don’t see why all the Jews now parked in settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip should not be told to find living space somewhere inside the Israeli borders laid out at the nation’s founding.
That’s the territory that America and the rest of the international community are morally bound to protect as the Jewish homeland. The settlements are illegal under international law and provocative, an incitement to Palestinian violence.
The Palestinians should be told to find living space in the West Bank and Gaza. They should be told bluntly that any so-called right of return to space inside Israel is a pipe dream, so forget about it and get on with living life.
With an international force of peacekeepers guaranteeing its security, Israel would have no excuse to retain any portion of the occupied territories. With the same force guaranteeing their security and territorial integrity (bulldozing the homes of recalcitrant settlers if necessary), the Palestinians would have no excuse to attack Israel. Jerusalem should simply be placed under the control of the commander of the international force, with instructions to guarantee everyone’s freedom to visit his or her own holy spaces.
Simple? Yes. Simplistic. Probably yes also.
But I don’t hear anything better coming from all the wizards who know every sub-clause of the Oslo accords and every other piece of paper signed in the name of peace.
Truth is, somebody is not going to like any plan that’s devised to settle this conflict. And since the one thing everybody seems to agree on is that the U.S. must be involved, we might as well dictate the terms.
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E-mail: dwycliff@tribune.com
