For years I believed that when it came to Middle East peacemaking, America couldn't want peace more than the parties themselves. I no longer believe that. In fact, I now believe just the opposite. For there to be any progress, America must want peace more than the parties themselves in Israel and the West Bank, and in Iraq. And the question I have going forward is whether that will be the case with President Bush.
First a word about Mr. Bush. He deserves a tip of the hat for having his principles right. His conviction that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was necessary to build a different Iraq and a different Middle East which are both critical for drying up terrorism was right. And his convictions that the Palestinians had to move beyond Yasir Arafat to a responsible leadership and that the Israelis had to come to terms with the inevitability of a Palestinian state and an end to settlements, if there was to be any progress toward peace, are also right.
But you knew there was a "but" coming the question I always have about members of the Bush team is, How good are they at translating principles into practice? When it comes to breaking things they are very, very good whether it is the ABM treaty, the Kyoto accord, Afghanistan, Iraq or the old way of Arab-Israeli peacemaking. The Bush people believe in power and are not afraid to wield the wrecking ball. But how good are they with a hammer and a nail? How good are they at the detail work of building real alternatives to Kyoto, Saddam or the Arab-Israel peace process? This is still the most important unanswered question about this administration. Can it reap the harvest of the principles it has sown?
Don't get me wrong ultimately it is up to Israelis, Palestinians and Iraqis to liberate themselves. They have to want it. But at this stage, we have to use our power to help create the context for them to do it. And that is hard. It means taking hits politically and militarily, which is why if we are to do it right we really have to want it bad.
"In both Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict," says the Middle East expert Stephen Cohen, "there is such a struggle of wills within the competing parties, and between the competing parties, and the forces for and against change are so evenly balanced, that only a third party with a clear vision can swing things toward compromise. That is America's role. [Also] the parties themselves are always going to be focused on the immediate costs of doing something because the positive outcomes seem remote or even unlikely to them. Which is why they'll need our push."
In Iraq, it's still not clear to me how much the Bush team wants to do nation-building there. The Rumsfeld doctrine of small-force, high-tech armies may be great for winning wars, but you need the Powell doctrine for winning the peace: a massive, overwhelming investment of soldiers, police and aid. We should be flooding Iraq with people and money right now. Start big and then build down not the other way around. Ditto on the politics side. In destroying the Iraqi Army and Baath Party, we have destroyed the (warped) pillars of Iraqi secular nationalism. We need to start replacing them, quickly, with alternative, progressive pillars of Iraqi secular nationalism; otherwise, Shiite religious nationalism will fill the void.
We will have to do the same in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has said some remarkable and important things lately, most notably: "You may not like the word but what's happening is occupation. Holding 3.5 million Palestinians is a bad thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy." The newly elected Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, recently gave a talk detailing what a disaster the last two years of Palestinian uprising had been an uprising encouraged by Yasir Arafat.
But translating these changes in Israeli-Palestinian principles into real changes in quality of life, for both communities, will be a full-time job for the Bush team. Because for both Israelis and Palestinians, forging a two-state solution will require some level of civil war within each community between moderates and extremists.
And we should want that more than they do (or at least as much), because if we've learned anything since 9/11, it's that the spreading flames of Middle East conflicts have, in a world without walls, begun affecting our quality of life. Their madness has become our metal detectors and we've had enough of it.