These last five years have been fun, haven't they?
September 11th, 2001, Islamic Suicide bombings in Madrid, Bali, New Delhi and London, to name a few cities, Israel at war against a Shia Proxy of Iran and Iranian threats to wipe Israel off the map, as Tehran works full speed to acquire nuclear weapons. It's not surprising that we hear people voicing the notion that World War III has arrived.
Not surprising,maybe, but we haven't got there...At least, not yet. Last week, Martin Ivens discussed this question at length in an excellent article in the Sunday Times. Mr. Ivens compares the West's confrontation with militant Islam to the East-West conflict of the Cold War. He warns against the danger that many made in the cold war when they were "seduced by the notion of a monolithic satanic enemy". This was the mistake that the US Government made during the Vietnam War, when all Communists were placed in the same boat. It is forty years since the Vietnam War, and it seems so absurd now that the Johnson Administration saw Communists of all stripes as a monolithic threat - this is what struck me while reading Henry Kissinger's seminal work, Diplomacy. By the early 1970s, Nixon took the opportunity to exploit Sino-Soviet divisions, through his visit to China. Nixon's realpolitik prevailed over Johnson's righteous anti-communist crusade.
The domino theory which was in full sway during the Cold War seems to be back. We are back to spheres of influence, once again, as Iran attempts to build an arc of Shia influence in the Middle East. Still, I feel that we would all benefit if we rejected knee-jerk hysteria, and looked at the world in a more level-headed manner. Yes-fundamentalist Islam is a huge threat to the west. Yes - Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a very dangerous man who must be contained at all costs. Having said that, we need to adopt a subtle approach in analyzing this problem - something which the Bush Administration has neglected, up until now. Just to quote Mr. Ivens:
Bashar al-Assad of Ba’athist Syria is allied to theocratic Iran by opposition to Israel and America, not ideology. Israel does face real Islamist enemies who would like to see it “wiped off the face of the earth”, but the Palestinian issue has its own dynamics, its own rights and wrongs. Nor is a Sunni Muslim the same as a Shi’ite.
To fight a new cold war against militant Islam at home and abroad takes skill and cunning; it means striking a balance between restraint and the use of force, between security at home and the protection of ancient liberties from the security state. This is the warning from history about the cold war. Some highly principled people then, as now, were seduced by the notion of a monolithic satanic enemy. Some cold warriors saw a single enemy made in Moscow, not realising that Mao’s China and even Tito’s Yugoslavia had their own ambitions. Third World dictators allied to the Soviet Union had their own agendas, too.
Disagreements about how to fight such an enemy are inevitable. Without the benefit of hindsight, if you supported the successful Korean war should you have automatically advocated fighting the communists in Vietnam? If you did should you have tried to play on Sino-Soviet divisions? ....Apply the analogy to the Middle East, Al-Qaeda, the Iraq war, the Iranian nuclear programme and the Ba’athists. When to fight and when to contain? Are we uniting our enemies instead of dividing them? We urgently require a synthesis of idealism and realism.
The urgent task is to deal with Blair’s “arc of crisis” in the Middle East. Perhaps we should first find out if we can separate the Palestinians from some of their “friends”. Is Hamas’s leadership in Gaza and the West Bank irrevocably opposed to the existence of Israel or could it be detached from its military leadership in trouble making Syria? We should find out fast.
We need to exploit the divisions in the Arab World. We know, for instance, that Jordan and Saudi Arabia were very critical of Hezbollah's provocations, and weren't afraid to say so. Syria's Bashar Assad is a nasty piece of work who sponsors and shelters terrorists. Still, for all that, I don't think it would be a bad thing if the US opened a dialogue with Assad - at the very least, this could be an opportunity to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran. Syria is a major problem for Israel and for the west, in general, but Iran is a far greater danger. In order to deal with Iran, we might have to "sup with the devil" (Assad) as the saying goes, and "use a long spoon". I suspect that the White House is unearthing some long spoons, as we speak.
