Power

A colleague quoted in a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty segment succinctly describes the indirect hit the U.S. is taking as a result of the ongoing conflict in Gaza:

Just two years ago, experts such as Tufts University’s Vali Nasr speculated that the chaos in Iraq might lead to a Shi’ite-Sunni conflagration across the region. But history has taken a very different turn, says Mai Yamani, a London-based, Saudi-born anthropologist and analyst. “A very interesting change has taken place, especially after this Gaza conflict: that is, the alliance of all the Islamists, be they Shi’a or Sunni, against the so-called moderate Arab regimes, who are the allies of the U.S.,” Yamani says.

Yep. The past few years of U.S. policy have handed Iran one victory after another.

I’ve been scratching my head trying to figure out why the neocons can’t recognize this, and I’ve come to think it’s because they don’t understand what power is. Power is not the ability the blow people up, it’s the ability to change their behavior. The real key to our power is that when we’re doing our best, everyone trusts us more than they trust their regional adversaries, which means the paths to peace go through Washington, and we get to broker deals on our terms, which creates peace, stability, and prosperity. That’s where our values and our interests meet.

Things have gotten as bad as they’ve gotten in the Middle East in large part because George W. Bush has pursued a policy that puts us at odds with too many countries at once, and amounts to the opposite of divide and conquer. Aggregate and flounder. Turn every two small problems into one big one that’s twice as hard to solve. By refusing to work even with the less loathsome factions and political wings of difficult groups like Hamas, we’ve strengthened the hard-liners who say the only way to get the U.S. to pay attention is the sword.

And of course all of this plays right into Iran’s hands. Just ask yourself what you’d do right now if you were the Iranian leadership. You want the bomb, so you’d like to distract all the countries that don’t want you to get it (check), and make Israel look like a bigger warmonger than you could ever be (check). You want to weaken Egypt, Jordan and other moderate Arab governments that support the U.S. by accusing them of being complicit in continued Israeli attacks on the Palestinians — a charge that resonates in the Arab street (check). You want to bog Israel down in a messy and inconclusive war with Hamas, which becomes a bigger and bigger PR disaster for the Israelis each day the violence goes on (work in progress, but looking rosy).

If you’re especially lucky, you might even drag moderate Arab states and/or European states with spare military capacity into putting troops into Gaza (though there are few at this point, they don’t want to go in, and we’ve already got them looking for exits in Afghanistan), which would bring them into your crosshairs and give you even more leverage over them.

Either way, for the time being, you can count on Israeli action and American silence to help you by keeping Gaza in an economic stranglehold, which allows Hamas to ration goods and dole them out according to political loyalties — not unlike the Castro regime in Cuba — making it Hamas’ way or the highway for ordinary Palestinians.

The bottom line is that under the circumstances, it doesn’t matter who has better weapons, because we, the Israelis, and our Arab allies are all in reactive mode, while the Iranians, Syrians and Hamas leaders are actually setting the terms of the conflict. Iranian speaker of parliament Ali Larijani (whom Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei trusts more than Ahmadinejad to craft policy) is in Damascus for talks with the Syrian leadership and Hamas. Those talks are likely to do more to shape the eventual outcome of the war than the talks underway in the Knesset, Cairo, Ankara, European capitals, and Washington — which continues to sit idly by as its influence diminishes.

A good general rule in geopolitics is to tolerate as much adversity as you can, win over as many people as possible, and use your scarce political capital to crush the small minority who truly can’t be reasoned with.

All of which is not to say that Zbigniew Brzezinski is right that the entire Israeli/Palestinian conflict can be ended in Washington, or that high-level American officials should publicly commit themselves over and over again to a process that might result in humiliation. But as with most situations, if a solution can’t be found, we should make sure the world recognizes that it’s because of our enemies’ recalcitrance, not ours.