From today's NY Times - Brooks and Segev
Two op-eds from today's NY Times, signed by David Brooks (A Million Little Pieces) and Tom Segev (What if Israel Had Turned Back?).
What will happen in Iraq? David Brooks thinks that some smaller US troops will hang around to deal with Al-Qaeda and to make sure the government remains in place. Meanwhile Iraq will actually have a partition, based on the militias' facts on the ground. Says Mr. Brooks, it(the partition) will be done de facto, through the back door, and in the bloodiest way possible....Instead of a sort of managed soft partition that at least has a shot of transferring power to the best local people, we’re now getting machine-gun partition that transfers power to the most violent people. For Iraqis, the thug who rules your local gas station rules your life.
As for Tom Segev (journalist at Haaretz and one of the Israel's controversial New Historians), he imagines kind of alternate history for the events that took place forty years ago: what if Israel hadn’t taken East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War?
Here are the two articles. Firstly the op-ed of David Brooks:
Over a year ago, Joe Biden, Les Gelb and others proposed a federal solution for Iraq. The basic argument was that Iraq is a ruptured society and there is no way to reconstitute it from the center.
There is no social trust between Sunnis and Shiites, the federalists observed. There is a winner-take-all mentality, which is not conducive to compromise. There is no tradition of impartial rule or impersonal justice, making it hard to establish big national institutions that won’t favor one tribe or sect.
Biden, Gelb and the federalists suggested a devolution of power to the regions, as envisioned by the Iraqi constitution.
Everybody out of power sympathized with their diagnosis, but everybody in power rejected it. Some of their objections were reasonable but not insurmountable. The Sunni and Shiite populations are too intermingled for a federal solution, senior administration officials would say when I would press them. There is no governing capacity in Iraq’s regions, so it’s crazy to talk about devolving power there, others pointed out.
Republicans, Democrats and others went ahead as if a solution could come from the center. The Republicans supported the surge, dependent on the performance of a nonsectarian national military. Democrats imagined that if they came up with the right array of benchmarks, timetables and incentives, they could induce Iraqi leaders to cut deals and make peace. A collection of smart, bipartisan people wrote the Baker-Hamilton report, based on the supposition that regional governments could work with the Iraqi center to create stability from the top down.
Now it’s a year later, and where are we? National reconciliation looks farther away than ever. There’s no petroleum law. There’s no de-Baathification law. There are no regional elections. There’s been no drop in violence.
Iraqi society has continued to fracture and is so incoherent that it can’t even have a proper civil war any more. As Gareth Stansfield wrote in a Chatham House report last month, what’s happening in Iraq is not one civil war or one insurgency. Instead, Iraq is home to many little civil wars and many little insurgencies that are fighting for local power. Even groups like the Mahdi Army are splitting.
After three and a half years of covering the conflict, Edward Wong, a Baghdad correspondent for The New York Times, wrote that the hunger for a final crushing victory overshadows any spirit of sectarian compromise. “Looking back on all I have seen of this war,” Wong wrote in last Sunday’s paper, “it now seems that the Iraqis have been driving all along for the decisive victory, the act of sahel, the day the bodies will be dragged through the streets.”
Meanwhile, American political capital has been exhausted. White House officials are looking for some modest, sustainable policy to implement after the surge. Gen. David Petraeus, on the other hand, is apparently looking to up the counterinsurgency. But Republican patience is gone. The Democrats are veering leftward and may not accept any residual U.S. force in Iraq.
The most likely outcome is that we’ll see a gradual withdrawal to the bases. Some smaller number of U.S. troops will hang around to fight Al Qaeda and to make sure nobody topples the figurehead national government. But the Iraqi people will increasingly be on their own, to find security where they can.
And the irony is that what they will get is partition. It’s just that it will be done de facto, through the back door, and in the bloodiest way possible.
For while the center remains paralyzed, local armed bands are grasping for power and creating their own facts on the ground. Wong and Damien Cave described on May 22 in The Times how this is happening. In the Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya, Shiite militias are gradually consolidating control. They are expelling the Sunnis. They have created a system of street justice, complete with underground Islamic courts. They’ve battled rival militias. They fund their activities through extortion and bribery. But amid the mafia behavior and ethnic cleansing, they’ve created relative calm. Two thousand Shiite families have moved in.
This is now a success story: an ethnically cleansed safe place. Instead of a sort of managed soft partition that at least has a shot of transferring power to the best local people, we’re now getting machine-gun partition that transfers power to the most violent people. For Iraqis, the thug who rules your local gas station rules your life.
The continuing U.S. mistake is an unwillingness to see Iraqi reality sociologically, from the ground up.
There is no social trust between Sunnis and Shiites, the federalists observed. There is a winner-take-all mentality, which is not conducive to compromise. There is no tradition of impartial rule or impersonal justice, making it hard to establish big national institutions that won’t favor one tribe or sect.
Biden, Gelb and the federalists suggested a devolution of power to the regions, as envisioned by the Iraqi constitution.
Everybody out of power sympathized with their diagnosis, but everybody in power rejected it. Some of their objections were reasonable but not insurmountable. The Sunni and Shiite populations are too intermingled for a federal solution, senior administration officials would say when I would press them. There is no governing capacity in Iraq’s regions, so it’s crazy to talk about devolving power there, others pointed out.
Republicans, Democrats and others went ahead as if a solution could come from the center. The Republicans supported the surge, dependent on the performance of a nonsectarian national military. Democrats imagined that if they came up with the right array of benchmarks, timetables and incentives, they could induce Iraqi leaders to cut deals and make peace. A collection of smart, bipartisan people wrote the Baker-Hamilton report, based on the supposition that regional governments could work with the Iraqi center to create stability from the top down.
Now it’s a year later, and where are we? National reconciliation looks farther away than ever. There’s no petroleum law. There’s no de-Baathification law. There are no regional elections. There’s been no drop in violence.
Iraqi society has continued to fracture and is so incoherent that it can’t even have a proper civil war any more. As Gareth Stansfield wrote in a Chatham House report last month, what’s happening in Iraq is not one civil war or one insurgency. Instead, Iraq is home to many little civil wars and many little insurgencies that are fighting for local power. Even groups like the Mahdi Army are splitting.
After three and a half years of covering the conflict, Edward Wong, a Baghdad correspondent for The New York Times, wrote that the hunger for a final crushing victory overshadows any spirit of sectarian compromise. “Looking back on all I have seen of this war,” Wong wrote in last Sunday’s paper, “it now seems that the Iraqis have been driving all along for the decisive victory, the act of sahel, the day the bodies will be dragged through the streets.”
Meanwhile, American political capital has been exhausted. White House officials are looking for some modest, sustainable policy to implement after the surge. Gen. David Petraeus, on the other hand, is apparently looking to up the counterinsurgency. But Republican patience is gone. The Democrats are veering leftward and may not accept any residual U.S. force in Iraq.
The most likely outcome is that we’ll see a gradual withdrawal to the bases. Some smaller number of U.S. troops will hang around to fight Al Qaeda and to make sure nobody topples the figurehead national government. But the Iraqi people will increasingly be on their own, to find security where they can.
And the irony is that what they will get is partition. It’s just that it will be done de facto, through the back door, and in the bloodiest way possible.
For while the center remains paralyzed, local armed bands are grasping for power and creating their own facts on the ground. Wong and Damien Cave described on May 22 in The Times how this is happening. In the Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya, Shiite militias are gradually consolidating control. They are expelling the Sunnis. They have created a system of street justice, complete with underground Islamic courts. They’ve battled rival militias. They fund their activities through extortion and bribery. But amid the mafia behavior and ethnic cleansing, they’ve created relative calm. Two thousand Shiite families have moved in.
This is now a success story: an ethnically cleansed safe place. Instead of a sort of managed soft partition that at least has a shot of transferring power to the best local people, we’re now getting machine-gun partition that transfers power to the most violent people. For Iraqis, the thug who rules your local gas station rules your life.
The continuing U.S. mistake is an unwillingness to see Iraqi reality sociologically, from the ground up.
And the column of Tom Segev:
Forty years ago today, on the morning of June 5, 1967, Jordan launched an artillery attack on the Israeli part of Jerusalem. In reaction Israel conquered the Arab sections of the city as well as the West Bank.
History is full of “what ifs,” and responsible historians should not indulge in such speculation. But journalists may. What if Israel hadn’t taken East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War? Would the Palestinian situation have found some solution and Israel be living at least in relative peace with its neighbors? Would Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism have been avoided?
Perhaps. But the alternate history is not as outrageous or inconceivable as one might think. Leading Israeli policy planners had determined six months before the Six-Day War that capturing the West Bank would be bad for the country. Recently declassified Israeli government documents show that according to these policy planners, taking over the West Bank would weaken the relative strength of Israel’s Jewish majority, encourage Palestinian nationalism and ultimately lead to violent resistance.
These comprehensive political and strategic discussions began in November 1966 and concluded in January 1967. The participants were representatives of the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence branch and the Foreign Ministry. The documents they prepared were approved by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and the army’s chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, and therefore reflect Israel’s strategic thinking six months before the war.
There was general agreement that it would be to Israel’s advantage for King Hussein of Jordan, whose country controlled the West Bank, to remain in power: he had, in effect, accepted Israel’s existence, so Israel naturally had an interest in strengthening his regime.
Hussein was also endeavoring to unify the West Bank with the East Bank and was encouraging West Bank Palestinians to migrate to the east. Over the preceding 15 years, the number of Palestinians who had left the West Bank for the east had reached 200,000. Moreover, approximately 100,000 Palestinians had left Jordan altogether. Hussein’s effort to integrate Palestinians was “a positive phenomenon from Israel’s point of view,” concluded the final position paper that emerged from that winter’s discussions. Hussein was acting to eradicate the Palestinian question, and this was an excellent reason not to take the West Bank away from him.
But when Jordan attacked the Israeli part of Jerusalem on the first day of the conflict, all reason was forgotten. Jordan’s attack obviously called for some kind of retaliation — but striking back at the Jordanian Army did not require the conquest of the West Bank or East Jerusalem.
Records of the Israeli cabinet meeting where the scope of the retaliation was determined are now available. Amazingly they show that not one of the cabinet ministers ever asked why it was in the interest of Israel to control the Arab parts of Jerusalem. Israel was about to take over some of the holiest places in the Christian and the Muslim world, but no analysts were called in to offer the cabinet alternative ideas. No experts on international law were asked to brief the ministers on the legal implications of their pending decision.
The ministers obviously felt there was no need to raise these questions: the answer was as clear as only fantasy can be. Acting under the influence of the age-old dream of return to Zion as well as Israel’s spectacular victory over Egypt’s forces a few hours previously, the ministers decided with their hearts, not their heads, to take East Jerusalem.
Their emotions propelled the Israelis to act against their national interest. It may have been a series of threatening moves taken by Egypt, or it may have been the intoxication of victory, but in view of the results of the war there was indeed no justification for the panic that had preceded it, nor for the euphoria that took hold after it, which is what makes the story of Israel in 1967 so difficult to comprehend.
And of course once taken, East Jerusalem could not be given back. To the present day it remains the major obstacle for a settlement.
I belong to a generation of Israelis who slowly but surely came to believe in peace. We needed to believe in it. The years since the 1967 conflict led us from war to war, and from one mistake to another. When new hopes emerged, they were overcome by disappointments, and then forgotten. Still, we regarded the conquests of 1967 as temporary and were encouraged by the 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, under which Israel withdrew from Egyptian territory captured in 1967. We believed that peace with the Palestinians would follow.
But peace with the Palestinians has not come one inch closer. As a result more and more Israelis realize today that Israel gained absolutely nothing from the conquest of the Palestinian territories. Speculating again in hindsight — Israel may have been better off giving up the West Bank and East Jerusalem without peace than signing the 1994 peace agreement with Jordan while keeping these territories. Forty years of oppression and Palestinian terrorism, both extremely cruel, have undermined Israel’s Jewish and democratic foundations. With about 400,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and with extreme Islamism as a driving force among the Palestinians, the conflict has become infinitely more difficult to solve.
Hence young Israelis have good reason to look at my generation and say, “You blew it.” I suppose we did. In contrast to my generation, these young people no longer presume to know what should be done to solve the conflict; indeed they often no longer believe in peace. Many resort to cynical skepticism and fatalistic pessimism.
And yet — less idealistic and more pragmatic than people of my generation — young Israelis may also be more realistic than us. Their immediate challenge is conflict management, rather than futile efforts to formulate grand schemes of ultimate solutions to the conflict. With fewer hopes and lower expectations they just may be able to make life at least somewhat more livable for both Israelis and Palestinians. Given the present circumstances, that would be no small accomplishment.
History is full of “what ifs,” and responsible historians should not indulge in such speculation. But journalists may. What if Israel hadn’t taken East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War? Would the Palestinian situation have found some solution and Israel be living at least in relative peace with its neighbors? Would Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism have been avoided?
Perhaps. But the alternate history is not as outrageous or inconceivable as one might think. Leading Israeli policy planners had determined six months before the Six-Day War that capturing the West Bank would be bad for the country. Recently declassified Israeli government documents show that according to these policy planners, taking over the West Bank would weaken the relative strength of Israel’s Jewish majority, encourage Palestinian nationalism and ultimately lead to violent resistance.
These comprehensive political and strategic discussions began in November 1966 and concluded in January 1967. The participants were representatives of the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence branch and the Foreign Ministry. The documents they prepared were approved by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and the army’s chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, and therefore reflect Israel’s strategic thinking six months before the war.
There was general agreement that it would be to Israel’s advantage for King Hussein of Jordan, whose country controlled the West Bank, to remain in power: he had, in effect, accepted Israel’s existence, so Israel naturally had an interest in strengthening his regime.
Hussein was also endeavoring to unify the West Bank with the East Bank and was encouraging West Bank Palestinians to migrate to the east. Over the preceding 15 years, the number of Palestinians who had left the West Bank for the east had reached 200,000. Moreover, approximately 100,000 Palestinians had left Jordan altogether. Hussein’s effort to integrate Palestinians was “a positive phenomenon from Israel’s point of view,” concluded the final position paper that emerged from that winter’s discussions. Hussein was acting to eradicate the Palestinian question, and this was an excellent reason not to take the West Bank away from him.
But when Jordan attacked the Israeli part of Jerusalem on the first day of the conflict, all reason was forgotten. Jordan’s attack obviously called for some kind of retaliation — but striking back at the Jordanian Army did not require the conquest of the West Bank or East Jerusalem.
Records of the Israeli cabinet meeting where the scope of the retaliation was determined are now available. Amazingly they show that not one of the cabinet ministers ever asked why it was in the interest of Israel to control the Arab parts of Jerusalem. Israel was about to take over some of the holiest places in the Christian and the Muslim world, but no analysts were called in to offer the cabinet alternative ideas. No experts on international law were asked to brief the ministers on the legal implications of their pending decision.
The ministers obviously felt there was no need to raise these questions: the answer was as clear as only fantasy can be. Acting under the influence of the age-old dream of return to Zion as well as Israel’s spectacular victory over Egypt’s forces a few hours previously, the ministers decided with their hearts, not their heads, to take East Jerusalem.
Their emotions propelled the Israelis to act against their national interest. It may have been a series of threatening moves taken by Egypt, or it may have been the intoxication of victory, but in view of the results of the war there was indeed no justification for the panic that had preceded it, nor for the euphoria that took hold after it, which is what makes the story of Israel in 1967 so difficult to comprehend.
And of course once taken, East Jerusalem could not be given back. To the present day it remains the major obstacle for a settlement.
I belong to a generation of Israelis who slowly but surely came to believe in peace. We needed to believe in it. The years since the 1967 conflict led us from war to war, and from one mistake to another. When new hopes emerged, they were overcome by disappointments, and then forgotten. Still, we regarded the conquests of 1967 as temporary and were encouraged by the 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, under which Israel withdrew from Egyptian territory captured in 1967. We believed that peace with the Palestinians would follow.
But peace with the Palestinians has not come one inch closer. As a result more and more Israelis realize today that Israel gained absolutely nothing from the conquest of the Palestinian territories. Speculating again in hindsight — Israel may have been better off giving up the West Bank and East Jerusalem without peace than signing the 1994 peace agreement with Jordan while keeping these territories. Forty years of oppression and Palestinian terrorism, both extremely cruel, have undermined Israel’s Jewish and democratic foundations. With about 400,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and with extreme Islamism as a driving force among the Palestinians, the conflict has become infinitely more difficult to solve.
Hence young Israelis have good reason to look at my generation and say, “You blew it.” I suppose we did. In contrast to my generation, these young people no longer presume to know what should be done to solve the conflict; indeed they often no longer believe in peace. Many resort to cynical skepticism and fatalistic pessimism.
And yet — less idealistic and more pragmatic than people of my generation — young Israelis may also be more realistic than us. Their immediate challenge is conflict management, rather than futile efforts to formulate grand schemes of ultimate solutions to the conflict. With fewer hopes and lower expectations they just may be able to make life at least somewhat more livable for both Israelis and Palestinians. Given the present circumstances, that would be no small accomplishment.
Labels: David Brooks
posted by Pierre Radulescu at
6:00 PM
1 Comments:
Ultimul paragraf al articolului lui Regev este cred foarte la obiect in doua aspecte:
"And yet — less idealistic and more pragmatic than people of my generation — young Israelis may also be more realistic than us. Their immediate challenge is conflict management, rather than futile efforts to formulate grand schemes of ultimate solutions to the conflict. With fewer hopes and lower expectations they just may be able to make life at least somewhat more livable for both Israelis and Palestinians. Given the present circumstances, that would be no small accomplishment."
Corecta este in primul rand observatia foarte de bun simt pe care o face Regev - principala preocupare a israelienilor de astazi este de a rezolva probleem de zi cu zi, ceea ce inseamna un nesfarsit sir de "crisis management". Israelul pune prioritate in asigurarea securitatii imediate a cetatenilor sai impotriva atacurilor teroriste si a continuitatii vietii sociale si dezvoltarii economice in pofida amenintarii permanente de razboi si a izbucnirilor periodice de violenta. In pofida dusmaniei din jur si a indiferentei in cel mai bun caz a comunitatii internationale Israelul continua sa existe si sa se dezvolte ca stat independent si ca singurul centru real si viabil al vietii evreiesti in lumea moderna. A doua observatie a lui Regev tine mai mult de psihologie poate, dar s-a adeverit exacta in multe cazuri in istorie - poate in conditiile in care nivelul de expectatii este mai redus si o rezolvare a conflictului acum sau intr-o singura generatie nu este vazuta ca iminenta sa se creeze conditiile normalitatii, a redobandirii increderii de sine si a increderii minime in dusmanul care a fost si va fi partener, care pot face o reincepere a tratativelor pentru reconciliere si pace posibila in viitor.
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Dan Romascanu, at 5:04 AM
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