Appeasing Arab Dictators

THE ARAB LEAGUE, like so much else in the Muslim Middle East, has an identity problem. Created in 1944 through British inspiration, the League was supposed to cement a hodgepodge of newly created Arab states into a postwar bulwark of British influence and power. That didn't happen. The organization quickly became a cacophonous expression of the anti-Western, anti-Zionist "Arab nation," its meetings and declarations rhetorical exercises in wishful, often disingenuous thinking. Even Egyptian diplomats, who have long dominated the machinery of the Arab League, and who give the institution an urbanity not present in many of its constituent states, can privately apologize for the juvenility of its proceedings and the enormous gap between the League's version of the Arab world and the way the Middle East really works.

Which of course provokes the question: Why did the Bush administration hitch its prestige to the deliberations of this body? There was no chance whatsoever that the League would produce, as the New York Times surreally put it, an "extraordinary appeal" for peace to the Israeli people. The most fundamental political and cultural mechanics of the Arab Middle East dictated that Saudi crown prince Abdullah's "peace initiative," warmly welcomed and frenetically advanced by the administration, would dead-end in a proposal more retrograde than the one Yasser Arafat demanded at Camp David in July 2000. A quick tour d'horizon of the region should have told the administration that any League declaration would, at best, be just a Saudi pronouncement, that Syria--the only other front-line Arab state besides Saudi Arabia and Iraq without a peace treaty with Israel--would never go along with anything remotely feasible.

Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak expended enormous capital and time in 1999 and 2000 trying to seduce Syria's dictator Hafez al-Assad into signing a peace treaty. (Please recall the optimistic Western reporting, newspaper editorials, op-eds, and State Department assessment of the Israeli approach and Syrian receptivity.) Deploying Israeli concessions as his epee--the same maneuver he tried later with Arafat at Camp David--Barak got nowhere. Indeed, Barak's precipitous unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon--Iran's clerical overlord, Ali Khamenei, more accurately described it as a "flight"--clearly signaled Damascus, and Arafat, that Israel no longer had the stomach for guerrilla fighting.

The Assad regime in Syria has one overriding concern--to maintain control of Lebanon, where perhaps as many as one million Syrians now live, sucking the life out of a country that many, maybe most, Syrians consider a runaway Syrian province. A Syrian peace treaty with Israel, which perforce would entail a Lebanese accord, would require the Assad regime to crack down on the Lebanese Shiite organization Hezbollah, whose members consider themselves on the cutting edge of the Muslim world's holy war against the Jewish state. They are spiritually, financially, and militarily the children of Iran's clerical regime, and Hezbollah has become an important arms entrepot for the Palestinian war against Israel. The recently seized Karine A, the Palestinian Authority's freighter carrying 50 tons of Iranian weaponry, rendezvoused with Tehran's men in the Persian Gulf via a Hezbollah middleman. A Syrian accord with Israel would fracture Damascus's critical economic and political ties to the clerical regime, which sees Hezbollah's war against Israel as its war, proof that Iran's Islamic revolution in foreign affairs is not dead. Most important, a Syrian treaty with Israel would inevitably set in motion greater Lebanese agitation for a Syrian withdrawal. The West, which has largely ignored Syria's occupation of Lebanon, might possibly start to focus on the Assad regime's depredations in the Levant. Hezbollah, which now lives to export its holy-warrior cause beyond Lebanon's borders, would definitely and violently focus on Syrian efforts betraying its anti-Zionist ideals. One suspects that the "Lebanese" decision to deny Arafat a satellite-delivered television presence at the Arab summit in Beirut was in part the Assad regime's way of reminding Yasser Arafat, and everybody else, who calls the shots. (The Lebanese no doubt also enjoyed insulting Arafat, who did so much in the 1970s to radicalize and destroy Lebanon's delicate society.)