July 15, Mid East Conflict

In the Times Select section of today's NY Times, Roger Cohen expresses his views about the events in the Middle East: the problem with disengagement is that the people and problems left behind do not go away. As a policy, it may offer a palliative, but never a resolution. The price of various forms of American and Israeli disengagement has become evident in recent days as the Middle East has stumbled toward regional conflict.
With Beirut airport burning from Israeli bombs and Israeli troops back in Gaza, President George W. Bush had this to say about the Middle East: "We have a good chance to get a two- state solution, two democracies living side-by-side in peace. It is a clear and achievable vision. There is a way forward called the road map to achieve that vision. What will prevent that vision from being achieved is - are terrorist activities, and that's what you've seen taking place."
That sounds like foreign policy by rote. Saying something often does not make it any truer. The fact is there has been no real vision for Middle East peace emanating from the Bush White House, and little suggestion peace is achievable. The very phrase "road map" has become a tired synonym for nebulous evasion.
"The Bush administration has never made a serious effort to be deeply engaged, and never embarked on intensive diplomacy," said Dennis Ross, who led American diplomatic efforts in the Middle East for a dozen years. "And when you do not have a process, events are harder to contain."
Just how hard is now clear. The "terrorist activities" referred to by Bush - the Shia militant group Hezbollah attacking Israel from southern Lebanon in a raid leading to the death of eight Israeli soldiers and the capture of two - have sparked a violent spiral.
Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, had a different view of the cross-border Hezbollah attack. He said it was "not a terrorist attack, but the action of a sovereign state that attacked Israel for no reason and without provocation."
That was interesting. Any daylight between American and Israeli positions has been rare since Sept. 11, 2001. And the little disagreement - terrorism or sovereign state aggression - said much about the inadequacy of the "war on terror" as a global American paradigm for achieving the world it wants.
The Middle East is a complex jig- saw puzzle unsolvable without coordinated American focus on the situations in Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Gaza and Ramallah. Labeling Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations and vowing to fight them in the name of the road map does not get you very far.
The Hezbollah raid coincided with the deadline for Iran to respond to Western proposals aimed at ending its nuclear program. Was that a coincidence? No.
Iran, with a flick of its muscles through its Hezbollah surrogate, showed it can provoke regional chaos, drive oil prices up, drive stock prices down, distract attention from the nuclear issue and smirk at an America whose options are curtailed by the war in Iraq.
"The lines are umbilical between Hezbollah operations and Iran," said Steve Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
They are not much less umbilical between Hezbollah and Syria, whose forces long provided the environment in which the group thrived. Syrian troops are gone from Lebanon now, but Damascus remains a critical address when it comes to applying pressure on Hezbollah to release the abducted Israeli soldiers and exercise restraint.
The problem is that American leverage over President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who has been strengthening his ties with the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is limited. One of the most astonishing aspects of the diplomacy of the current crisis has been Israel turning to Moscow for help in Damascus. That's one measure of the costs of American disengagement.
As for Israeli disengagement, it looks like a broken policy. Olmert came to power three months ago at the head of a new party, Kadima, and of a coalition dedicated to the proposition that unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians offered the best chance for peace.
Get Israel out much of the West Bank after the withdrawal from Gaza, "converge" behind the Israeli security barrier and get on with a decent life ignoring, as far as possible, the Palestinians over there: that, in essence, was the Olmert message.
And here Israel is bombing Beirut airport almost a quarter-century after it last did so, storming into Gaza a year after it withdrew, and coping as best it can with Hezbollah bombs on Haifa and other northern cities.
What happened? One significant thing that happened is the people being disengaged from plunged deeper into a morass that could not fail to have political consequences, in this case the rise to power of Hamas.
Its electoral victory earlier this year has left both the United States and Israel groping for an effective policy. The emergence of Hamas as a political force has also provoked virulent internal divisions that have contributed to the recent violence.
It is no coincidence that as Ismail Haniya, the moderate Hamas leader who is the Palestinian prime minister, inched toward some sort of implicit recognition of Israel, Khaled Mashal and other Damascus-based representatives of the extreme factions of Hamas acted to kill compromise. The abduction last month of an Israeli soldier amounted to a statement by Mashal that he's in control.
"When a resistance movement goes political, it's inevitable that the radical or militant wing will do something to establish control," Simon said.
It may have been inevitable, but there's little evidence it was foreseen or prepared for in Washington or Jerusalem. Disengagement can lead to forms of blindness that are dangerous. It may now only take a devastating Hezbollah bombing of Haifa to provoke an Israeli attack on Syria and a regional war.
There are ways to avert that, and there is leverage in the fact that most people - be they in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank or Israel - reject the extremist camps. But first Bush must drop tired formulas and engage, beginning at the G-8 summit meeting in St. Petersburg.

David Ignatius, in Washington Post considers that Iran and its radical allies are pushing toward war. We should not play their game. His conclusions:

• in countering aggression, international solidarity and legitimacy matter. In responding to the Lebanon crisis, the United States should work closely with its allies at the Group of Eight summit and the United Nations. Iran and its proxies would like nothing more than to isolate America and Israel.
• the power of non-state actors is magnified when there is no strong central government. The way to blunt Hamas is to build a strong Palestinian Authority that delivers benefits for the Palestinian people. The way to curb Hezbollah is to build up the Lebanese government and army.
• in an open, interconnected world, public opinion matters.

Israeli PM, Ehud Olmert considers (WaPo) that outcome will determine not only fate of captured soldiers, but also goal of defining Israel's borders.