CE Week #17: “The Bigger Middle East War”
BY BARRY RUBIN
Monday, January 5th 2009, 4:00 AM
The war in Gaza is the first chapter of a new era in the Middle East. The Arab-Israeli conflict is far from the region’s dominant dispute. The Arab-Islamist conflict now overwhelms it – by a large margin.
Increasingly, Arab regimes know Hamas isn’t their friend and, though they won’t say so publicly, don’t see Israel as an enemy. No wonder: Israel is politically stable and economically prosperous. It doesn’t threaten to take over their countries, overthrow their regimes and stand them in front of a firing squad.
Radical Islamism, Iran-style, does.
That’s right. Arab nations’ prime 21st century enemy is Iran and its allies: Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iraqi terrorists. After destroying their own countries, they want to do the same to everyone else.
Up on the Lebanese border, where I just visited, things are quiet. Hezbollah talks big about its 2006 “victory” but knows how hard Israel hit it then. It’s not looking for trouble with the Jewish state now.
At the same time, Egypt condemns Hamas and urges Israel to smash the radical Islamist group. Lebanese friends tell me they fear that unless Israel and the West stop the Islamists, their country will be taken over in this new year.
The editor of the important Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, himself a Saudi, warns that Iran and Hamas – effectively at war with Egypt and Saudi Arabia – are the real threat to Arab security.
And the meeting of Arab states last week, instead of producing a condemnation of Israel or America, did nothing.
What was the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war’s big lesson? That unless Israel wins a clear victory, Islamists will be more aggressive. It’s the same thing the U.S. surge in Iraq demonstrates: pulling punches on terrorists doesn’t make them love you or be peaceable.
Of course, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is far from over: It will probably continue for decades. But that’s precisely the point. It’s an Israel-Palestinian battle, smaller and less strategically significant than this other half-century-long conflict, which involves the whole region.
This is also a conflict among Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank, is still full of radicals but has worked recently to stop terrorist attacks against Israel and to create a stable society. The PA can’t and won’t make full peace with Israel, but the two sides do cooperate in reducing violence.
In contrast, Hamas wants permanent war on Israel, constant terrorism, and openly preaches genocide.
This is what the Obama administration must understand. The Arab-Israeli conflict is relatively unimportant today in regional terms. It is overwhelmed by a dangerous mix of other nations and issues: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon (on the verge of an Iran-Syria takeover), Islamism, terrorism and oil.
Barack Obama must understand that Iran and radical Islamists are out to destroy U.S. interests in the Middle East, expand their own influence and escalate anti-Americanism to murderous proportions around the globe.
Moderate Arabs – and the nations in which they have the most influence – live in constant fear of that happening. America can allay those fears – if it follows a policy mixing intelligence and toughness.
Rather than obsessing over the Arab-Israeli conflict, as many want Obama to do, job one for the new administration in the Mideast should be uniting America’s Arab friends alongside Israel against their common enemies: the fanatical Islamists.
A broad moderate Arab coalition, strengthened to resist the likes of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, will not only put the region on far more solid footing. It will help the Israeli-Palestinian mess take care of itself.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center (GLORIA) and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. He is author of “The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East.”
