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Jewish World Review August 22, 2008 / 21 Menachem-Av 5768 Dominos anyone? By Caroline B. Glick
Great powers are not the only ones that can cause dominos to fall. Small
states can as well. Israel's actions make this point clearly.
This week the Olmert-Livni-Barak government voted to release another two
hundred terrorists from prison. Israel's leaders claimed that after
releasing terrorist murderers to Hizbullah last month, we have has no excuse
for not releasing terrorist murderers to Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas now. If
Abbas cannot match Hizbullah's achievements, they argue that he will be
discredited.
But as the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh explained Monday, there is
virtually no one in the Palestinian Authority who believes that Israel will
be strengthening pro-peace forces in Palestinian society by releasing Fatah
terrorists from jail. Those terrorists will merely strengthen the more
radical elements in Palestinian society that are generally allied with Hamas
and Islamic Jihad.
Previous Israeli releases of terrorists have shown that untold numbers of
Israelis will pay with our lives for the government's idiocy. But it isn't
just Israel that is impacted by Israel's mistakes. Jordan too is harmed.
Just after the government announced its decision, Jordan announced that it
was releasing four jihadist murderers from its prisons. The four terrorists,
who killed two Israeli soldiers in 1990, had been sentenced to life in
prison in Israel. Last summer, in a "confidence-building-measure" towards
King Abdullah, Israel transferred them to Jordan to complete their prison
terms.
If Israel cannot deny to Fatah what it granted to Hizbullah, so Jordan
cannot deny to Hamas what Israel granted to Fatah and Hizbullah. Jordan
cannot be stricter with murderers of Israelis than Israel is.
Jordan's recent rapprochement with Hamas follows the same pattern. According
to the Saudi Al-Watan newspaper, Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled
Mashaal is scheduled to visit Jordan in the coming days as part of a general
Jordanian policy to rebuild its cooperative ties with the Iranian-controlled
jihadist group. Amman severed those ties in 2006.
There can be no doubt that Hamas and its sister Muslim Brotherhood
organization in Jordan constitute threats to the Hashemite regime. The
Jordanian government would no doubt prefer not to have anything to do with
Hamas. Indeed, it would doubtlessly be pleased if the terror group was
destroyed. But Jordan cannot act against Hamas on its own. Only Israel can
do that.
But Israel has refused to take any action against Hamas as it has solidified
its control over Gaza and has increased its influence over Judea and
Samaria. Israel's inaction has compelled Jordan to appease the
Iranian-controlled terror group.
Israel's refusal to acknowledge the interconnectedness of international
events impacts events throughout the region. The US's strategic myopia
affects events throughout the world. Recent occurrences in Pakistan bear
this out.
Since the September 11, 2001 attacks the US has ignored the domestic
situation in Pakistan. First it placed all its faith in Pakistani President
Pervez Musharraf to act as its ally. Washington ignored Musharraf's refusal
to purge the Pakistani military and powerful Inter Service Intelligence
agency of its strong jihadist elements that collaborated with al Qaida and
the Taliban and provided them safe haven and allowed them to take control
over the provinces bordering Afghanistan.
Then, in an about face, last year Washington attempted to advance its
program of democratization of the Islamic world by pressuring Musharraf to
allow open elections to Pakistan's parliament. Unfortunately, the US failed
to notice that the supposedly democratic contending parties all hate America
and oppose taking any action against the Taliban and al Qaida.
Now that the anti-Western, "democratic" forces that the US has unleashed
have forced Musharraf from power, the US has no allies at all in Pakistan's
political and military-intelligence power structures with whom to
collaborate in fighting the Taliban and al Qaida. Even more disturbingly,
the US has no one it can trust to ensure that jihadist forces do not gain
access to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
This latter point was made clear on Tuesday when the New York Times quoted
a senior Bush administration official who noted that jihadist agents have
made "steadfast efforts" to infiltrate Pakistan's nuclear laboratories.
Beyond that, even Musharraf never gave the US full assurance that he was
securing his country's nuclear arsenal. Musharraf steadfastly refused to
give an accounting of how he spent much of the $100 million the US
transferred to him for the purpose of securing his 50-100 nuclear warheads.
Although during his first term in office President George W. Bush often
warned of the danger of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass
destruction falling into the hands of terrorist groups or transferred to
them by state sponsors, this issue has been largely ignored in recent years.
Administration officials have downplayed the significance of overt
cooperation between the Taliban and al Qaida and the Pakistani military and
intelligence agencies. And today, Washington's refusal to contend with that
cooperation is coming back to haunt it. Now the US has no easy options for
preventing the rapidly collapsing nuclear-armed Pakistani governing
apparatuses from falling under the influence of the Taliban and al Qaida.
A similar situation is playing out in Lebanon. Just as the US ignored the
ties between the Pakistani regime and al Qaida/Taliban, so it has ignored
the significance of Iran's control of Hizbullah and Hizbullah's control of
the Lebanese government.
Since the Western-allied March 14 movement forced Syria to remove its forces
from Lebanon in 2005, the US has treated its leaders as reliable strategic
allies. As a consequence the US refused to understand that when Lebanese
Prime Minister Fuad Siniora allowed Hizbullah to join his government in
2005, he effectively placed his government at Hizbullah's mercy and so
became a proxy of Iran.
The US continued to ignore Siniora's subservience to Hizbullah during the
Israel-Hizbullah war in 2006. Hoping to strengthen Siniora, the US barred
Israel from attacking Lebanese infrastructures serving Hizbullah's war
machine. That US decision made it much more difficult for Israel to prevail
in the conflict. And Israel's failure to defeat Hizbullah/Iran in 2006 paved
the way for Hizbullah's seizure of power in May.
Just as the Taliban and al Qaida have taken advantage of the US's refusal
to acknowledge the significance of their ties to Pakistan's military and
intelligence services, so Hizbullah, Iran and Syria have exploited the US's
refusal to acknowledge their control over Lebanon.
One of the ways Iran, Syria and Hizbullah exploit the US's refusal to come
to terms with their control over Lebanon is by making that control
uncontestable. To this end, Hizbullah has forged alliances with disparate
groups in Lebanon and so further isolated the remaining pro-Western voices
in the country.
This week Hizbullah signed a cooperation agreement with Syrian-backed al
Qaida-linked Salafists in Tripoli. This move has shocked many Western
observers who have insistently argued that an alliance between Shiite and
Sunni jihadists is unthinkable. These observers have ignored the fact that
Shiites and Sunnis have strategic alliances throughout the region. Iran has
a strategic alliance with Sunni-majority Syria. It controls Hamas. It has
hosted al Qaida commanders on its soil since at least late 2001.
To a degree, these blind observers' fiction of Sunni-Shiite antipathy has
been abetted by the Sunnis and Shiites themselves. Understanding the West's
interest in ignoring the threat they pose both separately and together,
until this week they never made their alliances explicit. What Hizbullah's
accord with the al-Qaida-linked Salafists in Tripoli shows is that both
forces are now so convinced of the West's weakness, that they believe they
have nothing to fear from openly collaborating.
Unlike events in Pakistan, which are the consequence of the nature of
Pakistani society and the US's failure to acknowledge the nature of that
society, the latest events in Lebanon are at least in part the consequence
of Washington's impotent response to their ally Russia's invasion of the
US's ally Georgia.
It is often argued that Russia fears Islamic domination no less than the
West. And while Russia certainly has good reason for to be concerned about
jihadist, its concern has not led it to act as an ally to the West in its
fight against the jihadists. To the contrary, like Iran and Syria and their
affiliated terror groups, Russia views the US as its true enemy. Like them
it seeks to exploit US weaknesses to advance its own position.
Russia understands that Iran's ideological foundations make it impossible
for Teheran to ever reach an accord with the US. And it exploits the
situation to its benefit.
Moscow built Iran a nuclear reactor. It supplies Iran and Syria with
advanced weapons systems. Russia's alliance with Iran and Syria advances its
interests in two ways. It weakens the US and it ensures that Russia will not
be the target of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Just as the US's failure to back Israel's bid to destroy Hizbullah in
Lebanon two years ago paved the way for this week's Hizbullah-al Qaida pact,
so the US's weak response to Russia's rape of Georgia has emboldened the
Russians, Iranians and Syrians to expose their long-standing strategic
alliance. Wednesday Iran condemned Georgia as a "Zionist" state due to its
close ties with Israel. Russia returned the favor by defending Iran's
satellite launch, and backing Iran's announced intention to build another
six nuclear reactors.
Syrian President Bashar Assad capitalized on Russia's anti-US posture by
visiting Moscow on Wednesday. Russia set the tone of his visit by condemning
Israel for supplying Georgia with military assistance. It then allowed Assad
to announce Moscow's intention to supply Syria with the sophisticated
Iskander theater defense missile system which Syria has long sought.
Russia's exploitation of points of US weakness to advance its own position
leaves the US with two options. Washington can try to give Russia a better
offer than its enemies can. Or the US can work to weaken its enemies by
confronting them while strengthening its allies and so force Russia into a
cooperative posture. Today there is no deal that the US can offer Russia
which can compete with what Russia receives from its alliances with
America's enemies. So the first option is moot.
This brings us to option two which is simply the Cold War model of
containment, based upon the domino theory of world affairs. Seeing as it
already worked once, there is little reason not to return to it now. The
US's decision to sign a strategic alliance with Poland was s first small
step in the right direction. Diplomatic moves against Russia, like ending
Moscow's membership in the G-7 and its association agreement with NATO
should already have been carried out.
But most importantly, looking ahead, both the US and Israel should take a
lesson from their enemies. They must acknowledge that when they are strong
and victorious, their allies are strengthened throughout the world. And when
they are weak and dissolute, their allies also pay the price of their
irresponsibility.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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