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Stronger Alliance, Limited Options
Joseph Alpher
Conquer rogue states like Iraq and North Korea one by one?And then what does the U.S. do with its conquests?
ALREADY IN THE FIRST DAYS AFTER THE AT-tacks in New York and Washington, it was clear that the perpetrators were Islamic extremists. We can also assume fairly reliably that those extremists relied in some way on a state infrastructure, probably in Afghanistan, Iran or Iraq. What are the likely ramifications for Israel and the Arab world?
First, relations between the Bush administration and Israel will now almost certainly become even closer. Despite the vast difference of scale, the similarity between the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and on Tel Aviv�s Dolphinarium or Jerusalem�s Sbarro restaurant will be self-evident to most Americans.
The administration, with Israel as an ally, will now push its anti-missile defense program with even greater energy, arguing � effectively � that enemies capable today of flying hijacked civilian aircraft into Manhattan skyscrapers and the Pentagon will not hesitate to fire missiles at the U.S. as soon as they acquire them.
Here and there circles in the West will argue that it is Israel and its behavior that brought all this upon America � as if Muslim extremists did not target U.S. interests over a year ago, when the peace process was alive and flourishing. But those anti-Israel voices will be drowned out by others who understand the real nature of this �civilizational� clash between militant Islam and the Western democracies.
The U.S. is almost certain to seek to retaliate with great force against its Islamist enemies � President Bush may well seek to act on a scale reminiscent of his father, 10 years ago, in the Gulf. But he will be hard put to recruit Arab and Muslim allies for any major military operation quite as easily. Anger at the U.S. � over the failed Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the intifada and America�s continued confrontation with Iraq � is as widespread on the secular Arab street as among Arab Islamists, and regimes in Cairo, Amman and Riyadh will plead domestic constraints. Hence, as an alternative, we could conceivably witness, for the first time since the 1956 Suez Campaign, overt Israeli military cooperation with the Western powers against a Muslim country.
Still, it is by no means self-evident that Washington could actually strike a meaningful retaliatory blow against the perpetrators and their supporters. Bomb Afghanistan back to the stone age? The Taliban regime is dragging Afghanistan in that direction of its own volition. Fire a volley of cruise missiles? That smacks of Israel�s knee-jerk, ineffective response of bombing empty Palestinian police stations after every suicide bombing. Destroy the Iranian or Iraqi infrastructure? How many thousands of collateral civilian casualties could Washington justify, and how much additional fuel for the extremism of these regimes would such an attack provide? Conquer rogue states like Iraq and North Korea one by one? This would require a gigantic investment in manpower and resources. And then what does the U.S. do with its conquests? As Israelis have learned, occupation creates as many problems as it solves. Galvanize a major international coalition to quarantine the guilty state? But this is what the United States has done with Saddam Hussein for the past 10 years, with limited results.
Ariel Sharon can undoubtedly now take more aggressive initiatives against the Palestinians, with the United States not even making pro forma objections to Israel�s problematic use of American aircraft or to the growing scope of Palestinian civilian suffering. Europe, too, may now avoid criticizing Jerusalem.
Suppose, then, that Israel now feels free to reoccupy Palestinian territory and kill or expel Arafat. It will still be no closer to solving its Palestinian problem demographically and politically, or to eliminating Palestinian terrorism, unless it also withdraws quickly from virtually all the territories and dismantles several score settlements � something Sharon is obviously even less likely to do today than he was before September 11.
Sadly, many Palestinians felt that the United States got what it deserved. This attitude reflects the incitement spewed out by the PLO for months, along with a persistent and alarming Arab refusal to distinguish between military objectives and deliberately targeted civilian victims. But some Palestinians have, on second thought, grasped that a bleak new reality is emerging from the smoke and dust of the World Trade Center. Unless they act quickly to persuade Arafat to take advantage of this moment of trauma and to declare � citing as his rationale the depth of this tragedy � an immediate ceasefire and an unconditional readiness to negotiate all his differences with Israel, their proto-state may be doomed.
But is Arafat capable of grasping this reality? He appears to be as incapable of understanding how a free society functions and reacts as are the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. If he remains in character, he�s more likely to simply blame the Mossad for destroying the Twin Towers.
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Joseph (Yossi) Alpher is a former Mossad official and former Director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies
Israel
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