Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 2003, pages 6-7, 57

Special Report

 

U.S. Sinks Into a Quagmire as Israel Tries To Inch Out of One

 

By Rachelle Marshall

Dejectedly, a man sits on the ground.

The man has been detained. His hands are bound.

His crime is truly simple to explain:

Possessing pictures of Saddam Hussain.

Our soldiers snared him in a swift attack.

They're there to bring our freedoms to Iraq.

—Calvin Trillin, The Nation, July 14.

Everyone plays a game of let us pretend. We pretend that the occupied and dispossessed will stop their resistance before their freedom is attained. We pretend that refugees will forget their rights to their homes, lands, and businesses. We pretend that settlements do not exist on Palestinian land.

—Mazin B. Qumsiyeh,

Palestine Chronicle, June 10.

If the Bush administration strategists who set out to remake the Middle East were not so divorced from reality, one might be tempted to pity them. While Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was busy undermining George Bush's road map to peace, the lightning U.S. victory in Iraq was turning into a protracted nightmare. Instead of being welcomed as liberators, U.S. forces found themselves confronting a hostile population as an army of occupation, faced with all the costs in bloodshed and wasted resources that a foreign occupation entails.

The peace plan, or roadmap, endorsed by the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations, was supposed to get underway after Bush met with Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas at Aqaba, Jordan, on June 4. Even as those talks took place, however, Israeli troops were carrying out raids in Gaza and the West Bank that left 50 Palestinians wounded in two days. In the two weeks that followed, Israeli gunfire and helicopter attacks killed 40 Palestinians, almost all of them civilians, and a suicide bombing by Hamas killed 16 Israelis.

The reality that went unmentioned at the Aqaba meeting is that the road map is at best a flimsy basis for negotiating a peace agreement—and as interpreted by Sharon, with Bush's tacit approval, is a sham. The Bush administration has joined Sharon in making Israel's compliance conditional on whether the Palestinians first carry out political reforms and dismantle their resistance forces, an approach that assumes Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is legitimate. Israel is required to modify its occupation policies only as the Palestinians prove able to guarantee Israel's security. Even the road map's call for a provisional Palestinian state is vague, since borders are not defined and Sharon has vowed to give up only 42 percent of the West Bank. Meanwhile the Israelis continue to confiscate Palestinian territory, since the road map's call for a freeze on settlement activity has been reinterpreted by Israeli and U.S. officials to allow for the expansion of Jewish settlements.

Although Edward Said has pointed out that the road map is "not a plan for peace, but a plan for pacification," the Palestinians had little choice but to accept it. Abbas is relying on Washington to persuade Israel to loosen its chokehold on the occupied territories and help Palestinians to rebuild their economy and civic life. He can expect at least minimal concessions from Sharon, who is asking Washington for $10 billion in aid and loan guarantees this year and knows that as long as he pays lip service to the road map he will get it.

And lip service is obviously all that is required. Sharon assured Knesset members that Israel would continue to expand Jewish settlements—but quietly. "Israel should not celebrate the construction," he said, "just build." As a bow to the road map, what the Israelis did celebrate, with television cameras rolling, was the dismantling of a few trailers and a rusty tower near the West Bank settlement of Ofra on June 10. Nearby settlers who protested were carried away by the army, but it was only theater, since all the participants knew that as soon as one outpost is removed others spring up. No television cameras were present in the town of Beit Hanoun earlier that morning while the army was demolishing 13 Palestinian homes.

Sharon did his best to keep the road map from getting underway with a burst of attacks aimed at Palestinian militants—and any others who happened to be nearby. Less than a week after the Aqaba meeting, as Abbas and Egyptian negotiators were attempting to persuade resistance leaders to agree to a cease-fire, the Israelis launched a helicopter strike on Gaza that wounded Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Hamas's chief political spokesman, and killed five others. A few days later two more Israeli attacks aimed at militants killed 22 people, and by the end of two weeks 44 Palestinians were dead, most of them civilians and at least eight of them children. After the sixth Israeli helicopter strike in one week, Zehava Gal-On of the Meretz party said, "Every time there is some calm, or some hope, the prime minister approves the eliminations. Is this the way a peace-seeking prime minister should behave?"

Bush added to Abbas' problems of winning over opposition groups by suddenly raising the goalposts and declaring that a cease-fire would not be enough. Echoing Sharon, he expressed doubts that a cease-fire would work and told leaders of the European Union on June 24 that "Hamas must be dismantled." The next day National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said she had urged Arab nations to cut off aid to Hamas charitable organizations as well as to their armed factions by reminding them that "money is fungible." Arab leaders could have reminded Rice that, by the same token, U.S. aid to Israel was funding everything from Israel's illegal settlements to the missiles used to kill Palestinian civilians.

Thanks to the help of imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti and President Yasser Arafat, Abbas was able to secure a cease-fire agreement with Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad in time for Rice's June 29 visit to Israel and Jericho. Barghouti reportedly argued that a truce would shift the focus away from Palestinian violence and increase pressure on Sharon to end the assassinations and withdraw from Palestinian cities.

The Israelis did make a few limited concessions in mid-June, but they were more than outweighed by new provocations. The army partially reopened Gaza's main north-south road and withdrew from the northern town of Beit Hanoun, leaving behind ruined buildings, smashed sewer lines, and uprooted orchards. Soldiers occupying the center of Bethlehem moved to the outskirts, but army checkpoints at every exit and 5-foot-deep ditches will still make it nearly impossible for Palestinians to enter or leave the city. After releasing a few hundred Palestinians from prison, the army arrested at least 200 more in raids on Hebron and Nablus. More than 7,000 remain in jail.

Immediately after their partial withdrawal from Bethlehem, and in flagrant violation of the road map, the Israelis confiscated Palestinian-owned land adjoining Beit Aksa and Beit Souriq, two villages just north of Jerusalem, for new settlement housing. Several Palestinian homes were marked for demolition. Sharon then announced that Israel would make no more concessions until Palestinian security forces disarmed and arrested militants. Israeli leaders are well aware that fulfilling this demand could doom Abbas, as well as the road map, since he already has come under fire from Fatah members for being too accepting of Israeli and American demands. Any concerted attempt to dismantleorganizations that many Palestinians regard as freedom fighters is likely to ensure his downfall and possibly lead to civil war.

Sharon also knows that neither a fragile one-sided truce nor the pursuit of militant Palestinians will achieve an end to the violence as long as Israel continues to occupy Palestinian land and keeps in place the restrictions that for nearly three years have made normal life impossible. But sporadic violence is a price he is willing to accept. In fact, in defiance of the road map's promise of a viable Palestinian state, Israel not only intends to retain and expand the Jewish settlements that now surround every Palestinian city, but is proceeding with construction of a fence that will eventually enclose 2 million Palestinians in a giant prison.

The project consists of a series of high cement walls, with broad ditches on either side, that will swallow up more than 10 percent of the West Bank as it zigzags several miles east of the border with Israel, separating Palestinian towns from Jewish settlements and from Jerusalem. Residents of 13 villages trapped between the barrier and the Israeli border will be totally isolated, and thousands of Palestinian farmers will lose their land and access to wells. During her visit to Israel Rice criticized the wall as a unilateral border, but did not say Washington would stop providing the funds Israel uses to pay for it.

 

Unbalanced and Misdirected

With Sharon allowed to set the pace and terms of the peace process, the road map does no more than paper over the fact that U.S. Middle East policy is both seriously unbalanced and headed in the wrong direction. Bush can hardly act as a credible mediator when his top officials are Likud supporters and U.S. forces are occupying an Arab country using tactics strikingly similar to those used by Israel against the Palestinians. A worldwide poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in late spring found that, just as experts had predicted, the war in Iraq had heightened international distrust of Bush's global policies, and greatly inflamed anger at the United States in the Muslim world.

Nor is the anger likely to subside. Months after Saddam Hussain was ousted, Iraqis were still without jobs, money, electricity, or even garbage collection. Child mortality was higher than in India because of contaminated drinking water and lack of medicines.

Iraqis sweltering in 115-degree heat were asking how the Americans could have the know-how to wage a high-tech war but be unable to bring in generators or repair broken sewage lines, and why U.S. Marines could guard the Oil Ministry and the palaces used by Iraq's American overseers but couldn't protect ordinary people from thieves and vandals. Even in the south, where the predominantly Shi'i population hated Saddam Hussain, people were angered at the continued presence of foreign troops, intrusive house-to-house searches, and time-consuming checkpoints where nervous soldiers sometimes kill innocent civilians.

Meanwhile, the freedom and democracy Iraqis were promised turned out to be a mirage. L. Paul Bremer III, the hard-nosed right-winger who is running the U.S. occupation, abruptly cancelled the election for mayor that was to be held in the city of Najaf in early June. He decreed that conditions were "not appropriate," even though a special army unit had conducted a successful voter registration drive and political parties had been vigorously campaigning for votes. Several days later U.S. Marines stormed the offices of a minor party in Najaf and jailed several of its members for allegedly inciting violence against the occupying forces. In late June Bremer decided to postpone nationwide elections indefinitely, and declared that instead he would appoint an interim governing council made up of Iraqis willing to accept the allies' "main goals" for Iraq.

These events exposed what a New York Times correspondent in Iraq called "an uncomfortable truth" about the occupation: "American officials are barring direct elections and limiting free speech, two of the very ideals the United States has promised to Iraqis," he reported. More than a thousand people demonstrated in Najaf against cancellation of the elections, and protests elsewhere in Iraq increased, as other grievances mounted. As sniper attacks on American and British soldiers became an almost daily occurrence, Bush taunted the attackers from the safety of the White House, saying "Bring 'em on," and boasting that "we've got plenty tough force" to deal with them. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld insisted these attacks were the work of Hussain die-hards and terrorists, ignoring the fact that resistance might be a normal response to an oppressive occupation even when people hated the former ruler.

If U.S. officials were surprised at the degree of popular opposition they encountered it may be because Rumsfeld and others in the Pentagon had been too willing to believe discredited Iraqi exiles and the Israeli government. According to an article by Robert Dreyfuss in the July 7 issue of The Nation, word that Iraqis would welcome American invaders with open arms came primarily from the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans headed by Abram Shulsky, an intensely pro-Israel neoconservative. Shulsky received his information from the discredited Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and from a rump intelligence unit in Ariel Sharon's office that regularly sends its reports to the Office of Special Plans. Sharon's secretive unit may also have been the source of the forged documents Bush used to claim Iraq was importing uranium from Niger. Mossad was not in the loop, Dreyfuss writes, because the Israeli spy agency prides itself on the accuracy of its information and its views were closer to the CIA's.

Bremer is clearly more concerned with crushing Iraqi resistance than with winning over hearts and minds, and consequently the U.S. army is following Israel's lead and responding to random violence with disproportionate force. An operation that began in late June involved sending thousands of troops, along with helicopters, guns and tanks, to carry out predawn raids in Baghdad and other towns in central Iraq. Soldiers searched homes and offices, and carried away computers and documents as well as guns. Amnesty International accused the military of subjecting the hundreds of men they had arrested to "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" conditions, a charge borne out by a photograph in the June 30 New York Times showing a group of heavily hooded Iraqis on their knees, with their hands tied behind their backs. They were hooded, soldiers said, in order "to disorient" them. The photo was almost identical to those of similarly hooded and handcuffed Palestinians arrested by Israelis.

It doesn't take a Middle East expert to know that such tactics have failed in the West Bank and Gaza and are not likely to work in Iraq. Like the Israelis, the Americans in Iraq have vastly superior firepower, but its use only breeds more popular resentment and more support for resistance. There is still time for Bush to call our soldiers back from Iraq and make way for a peacekeeping force under international command to help restore order. The United Nations should be allowed to oversee the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure rather than a free-market zealot such as Bremer and the shady Iraqi exiles the Pentagon favors. Above all, the Iraqi people must be free to establish their own government. If the administration instead chooses to remain in Iraq and impose its will at the point of a gun, America will end up in a quagmire when it should instead be prodding Israel out of one.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

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