Winston Churchill, reminding us history is written by the victors, determined he would be sure it was recorded “properly” by writing it himself. But the corollary of his axiom is to remember amidst cascading events what is most important may be lost in the daily shuffle.
Talking heads – especially those schooled in Arabism – reduce the current melee to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Especially Israel’s critics – many tracing their ideological ancestry to Harry Truman’s endorsement of a Jewish state in the old caretaker British League of Nations Mandate of Palestine against the better judgment of many if not most of his military and diplomatic advisers.
It’s still fashionable in those circles that draw their inspiration there to talk about Jewish-Arab relations as “the root issue” in the region. They conveniently forget of 40-odd regional wars since World War II, under a half dozen involved Israel, most not even indirectly. The eight-year bloodbath between Iran’s mullahs and Sadam Hussein‘s Iraq, for example, had nothing to do with Israel. Nor did the 1991 Sadam attack on Kuwait. Fogotten among the historical debris, there was the Soviet attempt to use Aden to overthrow Oman. Or there was the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict over the spoils of the imploding Soviet trans-Caucuses. Or there was the bitter Lebanese civil war, itself, a struggle for dominance by the Christian Arabs for whom France created it in the 1920s and growing numbers of Moslem Arabs, the ultimate origin of the present Hizbullah.
President Bush has turned this old canard on its ear, reminding his critics what is “root” is international Islamic terrorism. Whether they are Sunni fundamentalists who attacked the U.S. in 9/11 with such ferocious success, or Shi’a psychotics who first used suicide bombing against American Marines in 1982 in Beirut or the American embassies in East Africa, or assassinations of CIA station chiefs and diplomats, it is this threat which is “root”.
Economic development – so long denied to Arab masses despite enormous oil revenues either through greed or incompetence – is not root. Poverty, per se, has never been the source of terrorism, not in our times or earlier bouts of fanaticism. [Note: terrorists’ leaders largely come from wealthy and middleclass Moslem families.]
In practical terms, then, what are we to make of events now happening with such speed in the Mideast?
One of history’s lessons – if, indeed, different times, issues and conditions in different societies have real analogous significance – are strands of events unnoticed, or virtually so, at the time may be paramount. There is a good deal of talk of ‘Munich” just now – as there should be: when to negotiate with an enemy and when to deny him advantage by appeasing him on fundamental issues is critical and often unknowable. But what happened at Munch was not just a shameful selling out of an ally by the British and French but the incredible advantage it gave Hitler for his next move.
While the world was wringing its hands over injustice done the Sudeten Germans, a minority among many minorities incorporated in the Czehoslovak Republic by the Treaty of Versailles, the prize was two Czechoslovak divisions’ first class armaments and the giant Skoda munitions works in the Czech lands. Without these, the German general staff could not have gone along, however reluctantly, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland only a few months later.
What is at issue in Lebanon may not be the suffering and bloodletting of Lebanese and Israelis, as heartrending as it may be, nor even the preservation of a Hizbullah militia publicly dedicated to wiping out Israel.
More important, probably, is the likelihood Hizbullah in its political as well as military roles would come to dominate the Lebanese state. As an ally, nay even an instrument of Iranian power projection, it would not only offer a new sanctuary for state-sponsored terrorists, but mark a critical geopolitical shift. Iran would have established itself not only inside the Arab world – so often denied its imperial ambition in the past because of ethnic and religious conflict – but on the Mediterranean.
Hizbullah now presents itself as the only Arab force which has brought the Israelis to a standstill since the infant Jewish state won its independence against Arab arms in 1948. It presents itself as the Arab world’s hero and savior to the larger Moslem umah, largely a collection of failed regimes and poverty-stricken populations.
Furthermore, if through Hizblullah’s installation in Lebanon, Tehran’s mullahs win a propaganda victory endorsed by a UN-sponsored farcical “peace”, it will have propped up its own fragile structure. [Just imagine what would happen if the half of its refined fuel Tehran has to import – despite being the world’s No. four exporter of crude – were cut off by effective sanctions!]
Just as Munich rewards were crucial to Hitler’s program – if not survival despite his general popularity with the German hoipoloi – a stalemate in Lebanon would be the kind of historical footnote, probably, dictating even greater future conflicts. That is what is now at stake.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
