May 14, 2008

Exclusive: George Marshall in High Heels? With Iran on the March, Rice and Bush are Ready - to Deliver Israel

Joel Himelfarb

As the Bush presidency enters its final months, and the Middle East becomes a more violent, dangerous place, Washington's policies seem increasingly disconnected from reality. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei routinely call for Israel's destruction; Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps train militia members and smuggle weapons into neighboring Iraq in order to maim and kill American soldiers; Tehran and Damascus support the Hamas terror state in Gaza that fire rockets at Israel on a daily basis; and last week in Lebanon, Hezbollah staged a series of violent attacks in Beirut (while U.S.-armed and -trained Lebanese security forces stood by) that in all likelihood will topple the Lebanese government. For now, Hezbollah's lightning strike against its enemies in West Beirut has made Iran and Syria the dominant powers in Lebanon.

In the wake of last year's controversial National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran stopped part of its nuclear weapons program in 2003 (the product of a cabal within the intelligence community that has systematically worked to undermine the efforts of the president to hold Iran accountable), the international community believes that the Bush Administration has taken military action off the table with regard to Iran's nuclear program.

The administration gives no indication that it is prepared to launch military strikes against Iranian military bases and training camps involved in supplying Iraqi militias responsible for killing and maiming American soldiers, and the Democrat leadership in Congress is hostile to any kind of action against Iran. It's not hard to see why Ahmadinejad and Company perceive American political leaders of both parties as weak and vacillating - and will likely become even more brazen about throwing their weight around in the near future.

Given these unpleasant realities, the best thing Washington could do would be adopting a "do no harm" policy when it comes to Israel and the security challenges it faces - particularly in the West Bank, where the Israeli security forces retain substantial freedom to act against Palestinian terror cells and have been remarkably successful against proxies of Tehran and Damascus such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But that is not what's happening. Instead, Bush and Rice are determined to achieve something they can plausibly spin as a legacy to be proud of: a peace agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. And they want to do it by bludgeoning a weak Israeli government into taking down security roadblocks that have become an essential component of its defense against suicide attacks.

It would be hard to imagine two weaker leaders more ill-suited to reaching a viable peace agreement than these two. Olmert is hardly in a position to make far-reaching concessions to Abbas - concessions that many Israelis are justifiably skeptical of. Olmert is the subject of myriad corruption investigations, his approval ratings are abysmal, and the Israeli newspapers are filled with rumors of his impending political demise. Add to this the fact that the Israeli government's point man on West Bank security is Labor Party leader and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Barak, one of the greatest war heroes in Israel's history, was a disaster as prime minister of the country from 1999-2001 - a period in which he unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon, turning that area over to Hezbollah, and then unsuccessfully tried to give away the store to Yassir Arafat at Camp David (only to have Arafat reject an extremely generous offer and launch a war of terror against Israel.) Ariel Sharon ousted him in a 25-point landslide in February 2001.

While attempting a political comeback, Barak has sought to recast himself as a sort of "Mr. Security" figure. But in order to do this, he will have to fend off the Bush Administration's efforts to wring security concessions out of Israel. In short, neither Barak nor Olmert is in any political position to make such concessions to Abbas.

But the Bush Administration sees an opportunity to pocket some Israeli concessions, so the president and secretary of state are using the occasion of the Jewish State's 60th birthday (on May 14, 1948, the United Nations voted to approve a plan partitioning British-controlled Palestine into separate independent Arab and Jewish states) to pressure Israel into making life-and-death concessions to Abbas. This is a man who says nice things about making peace with Israel (even as newspapers and radio and television stations under the authority of his Fatah organization spew out the most incendiary anti-Semitic propaganda, a point amply documented by Palestinian Media Watch, at www.pmw.org.) But Abbas is a serially incompetent leader, a man who lost an election to Hamas two years ago and whose security forces in Gaza were routed by Hamas last year.

None of this appears to matter to Bush or Rice. The secretary of state and her diplomatic team have pronounced themselves dissatisfied over the pace at which Israel has been removing anti-terrorism security roadblocks in the West Bank, and last week the secretary dispatched observers to various West Bank locations in order to verify that Israel is taking down the barriers rapidly enough. It's ironic that 60 years ago at this time, Secretary of State George Marshall was lobbying furiously to prevent Israel from coming into existence. Today Secretary of State Rice professes solidarity with Israel while pressing it to play Russian roulette with its own security.

To be sure, reducing limits on Palestinian civilian freedom of movement is a commendable goal. But it has to be balanced against the real danger that less Israeli security checkpoints make it easier for terrorists to move about the West Bank, with an eye towards crossing the border into Israel. These checkpoints are part of a layered system of security defense that has enabled Israel to dramatically reduce the number of terrorists crossing the border to commit suicide attacks inside Israel during the past five years. In theory, removing some barriers might make sense if Abbas and the PA could demonstrate some ability to maintain security themselves. However, in recent months, U.S. officials have expressed concerns of their own about the ability of Palestinian security forces to fight terrorism in the West Bank. Now, they would have us believe, those problems may be about to be resolved.

But with all due respect, American generals and diplomats won't be the ones who suffer the consequences if Abbas fails once again. If terrorists are able to carry out more grisly attacks as they used to do with abandon in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Afula, Haifa and elsewhere, it will be civilians, Jewish and Arab, who will pay the ultimate price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time - not the State Department officials pocketing the concessions from one of the weakest governments in Israeli history.

Perhaps the most surreal aspect of all this is that Rice believes that she is fundamentally different from her predecessor of 60 years ago: George Marshall. En route to Israel on May 3rd, she noted with evident pride that President Truman resisted Marshall's efforts to prevent the existence of a Jewish State. But the unpleasant truth is that Secretary Rice is in a real sense the modern-day embodiment of Marshall when it comes to permitting Jews to defend themselves against murderous foes. The good news is that today, the State Department isn't opposing Israel's existence. The bad news is that it is hampering Israel's ability to make life and death decisions on protecting the safety of its people. But unlike 60 years ago, when Truman said no to Foggy Bottom, President Bush is fully behind the State Department's folly.

Joel Himelfarb is an editorial writer for The Washington Times. The views expressed here are his own.