A West Asian tragedy in several acts S. Nihal Singh | The Asian Age | May 31, 2007
http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/opinion/op-ed/a-west-asian-tragedy-in-several-acts.aspx America and the world are finding out the hard way what happens when the central conflict in West Asia is obfuscated for strategic and ideological goals. Lebanon is only the latest in the chain as the embers of the revived Israeli-Palestinian conflict glow (crude rockets against deadly modern missiles) and the Palestinians become consumed in their own misery and internecine warfare. As in Vietnam, so in what President George W. Bush describes as the Greater Middle East, the future contours of the tragedies unfolding in the region will be decided by American domestic compulsions and politics. US presidential elections are casting their long shadow, and it is an immutable law of American political life as elections approach that Israel is above criticism, whatever it chooses to do to subjugate and kill occupied Palestinians. The Democrats might have lost their battle to impose a deadline for American troop withdrawals from Iraq in sanctioning more money for the war, but the duration of their stay and timetable are very much the stuff of American political debate. If the Vietnam War was lost in the sitting rooms of America, even the doctored versions of the Iraq War Americans are permitted to see on their main television channels have decisively turned the majority against the war. Undoubtedly, President Bush's successor will have the task of cleaning up his mess, but a significant leak is the harbinger of the shape of things to come. The US administration is apparently mulling over halving the number of troops in Iraq by next year. Further, the US is planning to dump the Iraq problem more and more on the luckless shoulders of the United Nations. And in Israel as the weak Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pretends to be strong, there is renewed interest in opening up the Syria front: Israel's traditional ploy to return the occupied Golan Heights to separate President Bashar from his Iranian friends and persuade Damascus to opt out of assisting the Palestinians and Hezbollah. There are many tragedies in West Asia, but the greatest of them is how the US' umbilical cord to Israel is tormenting the Palestinians and attempting to negate the greatest achievement of Yasser Arafat in giving them a sense of nationhood by converting them into the new Kurds, a people without a country. Thereby, the Israeli elite, in conjunction with the American establishment, has decided to live forever as a garrison state occupying the choicest Palestinian land and imprisoning Palestinians in Bantustans. Iran, to this way of thinking, becomes an interesting diversion to frighten the so-called moderate Sunni states into supporting US objectives as much as to balance Iran's greater salience President Bush created by invading Iraq. For all the fire and brimstone over Iran's nuclear activities, the US and Iran meet in Baghdad on Iraq in a half-hearted Washington attempt to bring a measure of stability to that ravaged country on the basis of mutual interests. Lebanon is a modern tragedy. It is always fighting someone else's war. In the present instance, an extremist Palestinian faction has embedded itself in a Palestinian refugee camp near the Syrian border as the Lebanese army seeks to ferret it out. Most of those killed are Palestinian refugees, now fleeing the camp. Yet the progeny of luckless Palestinians who became refugees on the creation of the Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world have remained refugees, tolerated by the host governments but living in limbo even as Israel has prospered while fighting wars and occupying more and more of Palestinian land. Despite the murmurs of faint praise from Tel Aviv for the renewed Saudi-initiated Arab plan for making a landmark peace compact between Arabs and the state of Israel, there is no real interest among the Israeli establishment to accept the hand of friendship. Thanks to the end of the Cold War and total American support, Israel no longer wants a just settlement of its conflict with occupied Palestinians. It wants a new version of Greater Israel and is in the process of reducing the occupied people to wandering Palestinians in a macabre reversal of the concept of the wandering Jews. In the new American scheme of things, Lebanon is now a western spearhead with the Siniora government, subjected to Israeli bashing last year with American complicity. America has sent Lebanon arms to help the Lebanese Army fight the extreme Palestinian faction in a political climate clouded over by the murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the widespread protests leading to formation of an anti-Syrian government, the withdrawal of Syrian troops and the appointment of a UN commission. Everyone knows how fragile the Lebanese political structure is, built as it is on apportioning power by an intricate religious formula. It is already under strain by the Shias, represented by Hezbollah, demanding a larger share of the cake after their stellar performance against the Israeli war machine. Given American domestic predilections guided by the philosophy of the religious right, the clout of American Jewry and strategic needs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue to eat into the West Asian body politic like a cancer. It might be convenient to wrap Palestinian agony in the colours of the "war on terror," but such an approach will do little to bring peace to President Bush's Greater Middle East. The US administration has tried to bring peace on its own and Israeli terms by going to Jerusalem via Baghdad. Israelis are now toying with the idea of imposing their version of peace via Damascus. There is nothing to indicate that Tel Aviv will succeed where Washington has failed. The tragedy of West Asia will continue to be played out as little wars take place interspersed with futile attempts at a faux peace. Nothing will change in real terms until there is a dramatic change in Israel the realisation that there are better ways of living as a nation state than being a garrison state in the midst of hostile neighbours. It will need a miracle, but miracles do happen.
