| Topic: |
Science > Prophecies-Of-Nostradamus |
| User: |
"Arnold Holbrook" |
| Date: |
25 Apr 2004 08:46:09 AM |
| Object: |
The Day Bush Took Gaza: Israel's Exit Plan Mean U.S. Entrance (Towards a US led peacekeeping mission in Gaza) |
The Day That Bush Took Gaza
Israel's Exit Plan Will Mean a U.S. Entrance
By Martin Indyk
Sunday, April 25, 2004; Page B01
Call it an election-year device to please a domestic constituency, or
a change in rhetoric based on deep-seated conviction. But whatever its
origin, President Bush's embrace of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan
for unilateral Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip is going to
turn out to be more than a mere gesture.
Sharon's radical initiative would evacuate all Israeli settlements and
military positions, unilaterally, within the next 18 months. His
purpose is to end the Israeli occupation of Gaza and thereby absolve
Israel of responsibility for the Palestinians there. Indeed, one of
the articles of Sharon's disengagement plan declares that it will
"obviate the claims about Israel with regard to its responsibility for
the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."
But who's going to take over that responsibility? Not the tattered
Palestinian Authority. Not cautious Egypt, which once ruled Gaza.
Instead, de facto responsibility for what happens in Gaza once Israel
withdraws will fall to the United States. That's the hidden meaning in
the president's letter of assurance to Sharon saying that the United
States will lead an international effort to build the capacity and
will of Palestinian institutions to fight terrorism and prevent the
areas from which Israel withdraws from posing a threat.
One wonders whether Bush really appreciates what he is getting himself
and the United States into. Having trumpeted his support for an
independent Palestinian state, he is now taking on responsibility for
ensuring that the Gaza mini-state created by Israel's withdrawal does
not turn into a failed terrorist state. The Palestinian institutions
that Bush mentions in his letter of assurance do not now exist in
Gaza. What does exist there is a collapsing Palestinian Authority and
a mess of competing security organizations, warlords and terrorist
organizations. If hooded Hamas terrorists end up dancing on the
rooftops of Gaza settlements or indoctrinating Palestinian children in
the former classrooms of Israeli settlers, Bush will be fielding the
questions instead of Sharon. And if Israeli forces then reenter Gaza
to stop a terrorist threat emanating from there, Bush could be held
responsible for that, too. Indeed, in the eyes of the Arab world at
least, his embrace of Sharon's initiative has already implicated him
in Israel's subsequent killing of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the new Hamas
leader in Gaza.
The irony in all this is that it puts Bush right where he'd rather not
be. One of Bush's articles of faith since entering the White House has
been that no good purpose is served by engaging in a Clinton-style
effort to make peace in the Middle East. From time to time, however,
circumstances have forced the president to stray from that tenet.
It happened in October 2001, when a threat from Saudi Crown Prince
Abdullah to reevaluate his country's relationship with the United
States jarred loose a presidential commitment to an independent
Palestinian state. It happened in December 2002, when a desperate plea
from Britain's Tony Blair in the run-up to the war in Iraq produced a
presidential endorsement of the road map for resolving the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It happened in April 2003, when the
Palestinians unexpectedly responded to a Bush demand that they empower
a moderate Palestinian prime minister, prodding the president to
convene a June Israeli-Palestinian summit in Aqaba, Jordan, despite
his earlier declaration that he didn't do Middle East summitry.
On these previous occasions, flourishes of presidential rhetoric and
flurries of U.S. diplomatic activity led nowhere and were quickly
replaced by a return to Bush's default, do-little position. But this
time, Bush has hitched America's diplomatic wagon to Ariel Sharon's
bulldozer. Unlike other initiatives, Sharon's does not depend on a
feckless Palestinian leadership for negotiation or implementation. The
unilateral plan depends only on Sharon's ability to secure support
from his right-wing constituency for evacuating settlements. Bush's
willingness to reward Sharon with friendly adjustments in U.S.
positions on the shape of final borders and the ultimate destination
of Palestinian refugees has all but ensured that Sharon will secure a
majority of Likud Party votes for a move that would essentially negate
their ideology.
Like it or not, Bush's endorsement of the Sharon plan means that the
United States will end up inheriting the problems of Gaza. Recognizing
that Bush's new posture carries real consequences, the National
Security Council staff has plunged into the most intensive
negotiations with Israeli officials since the breakdown of Clinton-era
efforts. And in a sign of White House anxiety about those
consequences, Bush has asked Sharon to postpone the Gaza disengagement
until after the U.S. elections, according to Israeli news reports.
Sooner or later, though, the president will have to figure out how to
handle Gaza. He can, of course, turn to others to help ease the burden
of this newly acquired responsibility. Egypt, for example has declared
that its own national security interests require that order be
maintained in Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal. The Egyptian security
services are already preparing to move into Gaza to help reorganize
and retrain the Palestinian security forces there. However, the
Egyptians will not put themselves in the awkward political position of
policing the Palestinians.
The World Bank is discussing with the Israelis the idea that it would
assume responsibility for developing the abandoned settlements, which
occupy lands the size of Gaza City, including prime beach front real
estate. But in one key respect, the World Bank is like the pope -- it
lacks military divisions. It will be unable to prevent Hamas militants
and other armed gangs from marching on the settlements.
Heightening the president's new Gaza security dilemma is the fact that
Israel is planning to retain control of the "Philadelphi" corridor
that separates Gaza from Egypt, as well as the sea and air space
around Gaza, in order to prevent the smuggling of terrorists and
weapons into and out of the Strip. But this will enable the terrorist
groups within Gaza to claim justification for continuing their attacks
on Israel and refusing to disarm on the grounds that Israel has not
really ended its occupation.
Ideally, a responsible Palestinian government would emerge in Gaza
with an effective security force that would take control of the
settlements, disarm the terrorist organizations and armed gangs, and
police the borders and entry points. But the moon is closer to the
earth than the Palestinians in Gaza are to achieving that state.
There is one answer to all of these challenges that Bush will have to
contemplate -- an American-led international force that could take
over the settlements, police the corridor and control the sea and
airspace around Gaza. This is not a large-scale endeavor and, unlike
in Iraq, there would be plenty of countries ready to share the burden
of helping to promote order in the first installment of a Palestinian
state. But is George Bush ready to take on this responsibility as
well? Given his feelings about multilateralism, it won't come
naturally.
If things aren't going to be complicated enough on the security level,
there are also a series of political dilemmas for Bush.
The president rightly brands Hamas a terrorist organization and
therefore will have nothing to do with it. But because the more
moderate nationalist forces in Gaza lack the capacity and will to
confront Hamas, which enjoys considerable popular support, they have
begun negotiations with Hamas leaders about power-sharing
arrangements. And the Israelis and Egyptians are encouraging this
discussion because they understand that it's the only way to prevent
chaos in the wake of Israel's withdrawal.
In other words, in the worst case, the president will be responsible
for Hamas taking over in Gaza, and in the best case he'll oversee a
process in which Hamas will join in the governing of Gaza. This is a
nuance which the president will have difficulty fitting into his
ideological, anti-terror straitjacket. And the dilemmas certainly
don't end there. In order to avoid the collapse of the Gaza economy,
the president will need to turn to the European Union and the United
Nations to repeat the efforts they undertook during the Oslo
negotiations to rebuild the Gaza economic infrastructure and supervise
quick-start employment projects that could begin to put Gazans back to
work.
This comes at a time when Bush is already depending on U.N. Secretary
General Kofi Annan to oversee the establishment of a credible interim
government in Iraq by the June 30 handover date. Moreover, he needs
the EU to overcome its resistance to putting troops on the ground in
Iraq if he is to lower the profile of U.S. forces there. In short, the
president's need to spread the burden of responsibility in Gaza and
Iraq at the same time renders him vulnerable to the demands of his
putative partners in Palestinian state-building.
These chickens will come home to roost in early May, when the
president convenes a meeting of "the Quartet" (the United States, the
EU, the United Nations and Russia) to seek their tangible support for
the Gaza initiative. What he is likely to discover then is that his
partners will demand their own letter of U.S. assurance as recompense
for their involvement. King Abdullah of Jordan, who will be meeting
with the president in early May, has already opened the bidding in
this regard. And Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak can be counted on to
add to these demands.
Since Bush has already opened the final status issues by assuring the
Israelis about borders and refugees, backers of the Palestinians can
now demand elaboration of the U.S. positions on other final status
issues. They will ask questions such as: If the United States is ready
to recognize border adjustments for Israeli "population centers" in
the West Bank, will it also endorse "territorial compensation" for the
Palestinians?
Then Bush will confront his ultimate political dilemma: In an election
year, can he afford to water down his support for Israel for the sake
of ensuring the international involvement that he needs in order to
prevent a failed terrorist state from emerging?
Welcome to Gaza, Mr. President.
Martin Indyk is director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at
the Brookings Institution. Under President Bill Clinton, he served as
assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, senior director
at the National Security Council and twice as U.S. ambassador to
Israel.
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