The National Interest
Winter 2001/02

What Victory Means

by Conrad Black

 

. . . The fundamental problem with the Arab world is that many Arabs believe that their people have been in retreat since the battle of Tours in 732, which led to their expulsion from France. Some believe that success can only be recovered by reverting to the militancy of early Islam, minus early and contemporary moderate Islam’s respect for other "peoples of the book." What has now been unleashed is not a war against Islam; it is a war for Islam, for the salvation of a humane and tolerant civilization. Both the secular extremists such as Saddam Hussein, and the clerical militants who have usurped secular authority, as in Iran, must be humbled.

The comparatively brave moderate Muslims, especially in Arab countries, must be respectfully and generously helped. And the weak "allies", such as the Saudis, who will not have any offensive action launched by the Americans from their territory, and the Egyptians, who, despite receiving billions of American dollars in assistance every year, endlessly revile the United States in their state-controlled media, must be submitted to President Bush’s litmus test: they are "for us or against us."

Those regimes owe their survival to the United States. If they are unable to command the adherence of their own countrymen from the distractions of the extremists, they will fall eventually with or without American support. And fall they might. That is why the task of promoting progressive government, power-sharing, and responsible behavior in the Arab world will be easier the more crushing is the American victory over those extremists. At the same time, various forms of the American assistance to which these countries have become so accustomed that they imagine it to be unconditional will be indispensable as well.

The United States has need of local intelligence and proximate staging areas. Beyond that, it has in this conflict no military need of allies at all, and the unseemly and indiscriminate pursuit of coalition-building seemed at the beginning to become an end in itself. The administration wisely declined most offers of contributions of manpower, presumably to avoid a Kosovo fiasco, where in exchange for a few technicians or quartermasters or support troops a veto on the conduct of the war was extracted.

The United States, as its President made clear on October 7, is grateful for the support of its friends, but it asks no one to fight its battles for it. The Secretary of State should not have been proudly reporting to the press on September 12 that he had been speaking to "Chairman Arafat" and the rabidly anti-American Egyptian foreign minister. The British foreign secretary’s demeaning visit to Tehran was in the same category. With such a coalition of potential supporters, including some of the world’s most accomplished supporters of terrorism, declared enemies are almost superfluous.

Arafat could join a genuine coalition, even after the murder of the Israeli tourism minister, if he moved decisively toward a permanent resolution that deals with the fundamental problem in the Arab-Israeli dispute, which is how to share the land between two legitimate claimants to it. Britain, in the darkest moments of World War I, incited ambitions to the same territory at the same time in both the Jews and the Palestinians. Contrary to some Arab claims, it did not sell the same real estate simultaneously to two different buyers, but it did encourage competing bids. As President Bush has acknowledged, two states must exist in space where there is barely room for one.

But that cannot happen until the Palestinians stop pretending that the Jews are not an indigenous people, and that the Palestinians are the protagonists in an epic poem that will end with the departure of the Jews in the footsteps of the Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Turks and British before them, with a small number of Jews perhaps permitted to remain as a timorous minority. The Palestinians must accept the legitimacy of the concept of a Jewish state, as the majority of Israelis (conditional on it being reciprocal) have accepted the concept of a Palestinian state.

A line approximately twenty miles from the Mediterranean must be drawn as the boundary of the West Bank, as Israel cannot go back to being nine miles wide, as it was prior to the 1967 war—a war initiated by the Arabs and won by Israel. The Israeli settlements beyond that line and in Gaza should be surrendered in exchange for Palestinian renunciation of a practically unlimited right of return. The miserable wretches that the Arab powers have kept festering in refugee camps for over fifty years should then begin moving at once into what will be vacated former Israeli settlements. For more than half a century, the Arab leaders have distracted the Arab masses with the plight of these refugees, rejecting any effort to help them, in most cases in order to draw attention away from their own misgovernment. In a final resolution of the Arab-Israeli dispute, a generous aid package could be arranged to help the refugees, provided it was administered honestly and not simply trousered by Arafat and his cronies—as has been the case with hundreds of millions of dollars up to now.

But only a decisive American victory in the present conflict with terrorism will create the conditions in which such a resolution could become imminent. There are now too many Arabs who believe the West is in retreat and that the Americans are fundamentally weak, using their weaponry as a substitute for moral purpose and physical courage. Because they want to believe this, they also believe that with escalated terrorist attrition, the United States will abandon any support for Israel. They think the United States can be bullied into a craven plea for an end to terrorist harassment—to the opprobrium of the old international Left, the anti-Semites, the forces of envy, and all the ancient wellsprings of anti-Americanism. All those who believe this, or anything resembling it, must be convincingly disabused for a just peace to become possible. . . .