hese are bad days for America in the Middle East.
Ali Khamenei, Iran’s clerical overlord, isn’t alone
in seeing the United States on the defensive
throughout the region. American policy toward the Israeli-
Arab confrontation—keep trading Israeli-held land for the
promise of Arab peace—is naive. Yet the the Israeli Left
adopted this policy and kicked it into overdrive, and now
the inevitable dénouement is at hand: a real war between
the Israelis and Palestinians. Seemingly endless Israeli
concessions, always applauded by the Clinton administra-
tion, have undermined America’s standing in the Middle
East.
The Bush administration, led by an obviously and
understandably exasperated Colin Powell, has compound-
ed the problem by endorsing the Mitchell Report, which
puts forth the odd, very secular notion that Israeli settle-
ments in the West Bank and Gaza, comprising less than
2 percent of the land, have provoked Palestinian young
men to blow themselves to bits. The White House and
Foggy Bottom are desperate to “stop the cycle of violence.”
But only violence—Israeli violence, if prime minister
Ariel Sharon still has the stamina and insight at last to
unleash it—may recoup the damage that the Labor party,
Bill Clinton, and the Near East Bureau of the State
Department have done to America’s standing in the
region.
Farther east, the situation is even worse. From the
spring of 1996, the Clinton administration’s Iraq policy
was in meltdown; under the Bush administration, it has
completely liquefied. The administration’s retargeted
“smart sanctions” are clearly a huge retreat, which the
Russians, we can only pray, have turned into a permanent
defeat with their threatened veto in the Security Council.
All we need is to have two of our principal allies in the
region, Turkey and Jordan, further enmeshed in an Ameri-
ca-ordained, U.N.-“enforced” sanctions regime that pivots,
when all the diplomatic varnish is off, on bribery. Face to
face in the Middle East, rishwa is often the only expedi-
tious route for virtue to triumph over villainy. But bribery
mediated by the United Nations would be a strategic
cross-cultural mess. With “smart sanctions” in place, not
only would Saddam continue his “illegal” cross-border
weapons-related commerce—the allure of Iraqi oil money
is just too great—but we would have Turkey and Jordan
adamantly seeking financial redress for their efforts to
staunch the unstoppable trade. We would again be asking
others—in the case of Jordan, a weak kingdom always
inclined to appease Saddam Hussein—to bear the burden
and responsibility for our failure to confront directly the
Iraqi dictator.
Does anyone in the Bush administration remember
Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, and their minions
spinning themselves dizzy trying to deny that Saddam
Hussein had outwaited and outplayed Washington? It
would be better to see the administration start explaining
how we will live with Saddam and his nuclear weapons
than to see senior Bush officials, in the manner of the Clin-
tonites, fib to themselves and the public. In any case, in
Middle Eastern eyes, the Butcher of Baghdad has checked,
if not checkmated, the United States.
Only against this backdrop can we properly assess the
threat bin Laden poses. The Saudi militant is unquestion-
ably going to come at us again. If he can find a weak spot,
which he probably can, he will target us most likely in the
Third World, where his men can maneuver. Then the
Bush administration will have to make a defining decision.
Will President Bush continue the Clinton administration’s
preference for putting terrorist strikes into the FBI’s
investigative hands and, forensic evidence willing, into the
courts, thereby avoiding the diplomatically messy ques-
tion of retaliation? Will the administration forcefully com-
plement the above with another barrage of cruise missiles
aimed at rock huts on the thin hope of catching bin Laden
and his lieutenants unawares?
Deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage recently
warned that the United States would hold the Taliban
responsible for future attacks by Al Qaeda. We can only
hope that this doesn’t mean filing some future court case
in New York City or bouncing the rubble in makeshift
camps in Afghanistan. The Taliban chieftain Mullah
Omar ought to discover that dead Americans mean cruise
missiles coming through his bedroom window and cluster
bombs all over his frontline troops.
The Pentagon’s alarms in the Middle East and the
fecklessness of the administration’s policy toward Saddam
Hussein and Yasser Arafat, however, suggest a different
chain of events. Odds are, America’s position in the Mid-
dle East is going to get much worse. In the not too distant
future, bin Laden may well rightfully proclaim that he, as
much as Saddam Hussein, exposed America’s writ and
most terrifying principles—liberal, secular democracy—as
finished in the Arab world. This would be an amazing
accomplishment for a Saudi holy warrior, considering the
forces arrayed against him. The Assassins achieved far less
and were immortalized by friend and foe alike.