The most striking thing about the current violence in the Middle East is the manic meddling by various elements of the "international community," that floating craps game of diplomats, bureaucrats and experts who consider themselves the avatars of good sense and acceptable international behavior. Whether it’s President Clinton frantically working the phones as if this were an election, Madeleine Albright summoning the principals to Paris and getting miffed that not everybody followed to Cairo, or UN Secretary General Kofi Annan sticking his two cents in and making appearances wherever a TV camera was in evidence, the fixers have been out in force.
Now I remember learning the theory of international relations in a nation-state system when I was in college. The theory is that each nation-state is sovereign in its own territory, with full authority to manage domestic affairs, while dealing with other sovereign states as at least theoretical equals. Obviously, some nations will be more powerful and influential than others, but to observe the forms properly even the powerful are supposed to pretend to respect the rights of smaller nations unless they’re actually in a war or other overt conflict. And theoretically there are supposed to be rules for conducting wars properly as well.
KING OF THE WORLD?
But Bill Clinton, for example, is acting as if he were not simply elected President of the United States, but King of the World. He has treated the Middle East as if it were Arkansas or South Dakota. He has let it be known that he really, really wants a summit meeting on the Middle East, that he’s terribly disappointed that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak doesn’t seem awfully eager to host such a meeting.
In essence, then the President of the United States handles other countries as if they were imperial satrapies, subdivisions of the world government he heads rather than independent, sovereign entities whose leaders have supposedly the same authority and legitimacy he has. Instead of any pretense of treating other national leaders as equals whose rights and prerogatives are to be respected, he treats the leaders of the Middle East as something analogous to provincial governors who owe allegiance, loyalty and obedience to the President of the United States, who is in essence the world’s emperor.
IS CLINTON RIGHT?
To be sure, whether he has thought the matter through completely or not, there are some possible reasons for Mr. Clinton to believe he should be able to snap his fingers and have other leaders fall into line. He intervened heavily in Israeli politics, even dispatching campaign consultants, to defeat former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and support current prime minister Ehud Barak. The U.S. has provided substantial funding for Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and has generally been solicitous of Palestinian demands.
So perhaps it is only natural for Mr. Clinton to figure that he who pays the piper calls the tune, and that the leaders of both sides owe him big-time and should pay respectful attention when he finds himself pondering deep Middle Eastern issues, as he does fitfully. Even so, the sheer arrogance with which Mr. Clinton and Ms. Albright even as they publicly acknowledge that these are difficult issues and the leaders must be attentive to their main constituencies and we’re just trying to help think they can swoop in and order people who have been struggling with deep-seated hostilities for centuries to straighten up and act like Americans or responsible World Citizens.
MAKING MATTERS WORSE
The appalling aspect is that in all likelihood all the well-meaning meddlers in the Middle East have made matters worse rather than better. It is becoming increasingly obvious, especially as larger-scale geopolitical considerations have receded, that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a local matter, perhaps even a classic tribal dispute. The likelihood that Bill Clinton, Maddie Albright, Kofi Annan, and all their horses and men can solve it through will and veiled threats is close to nil.
To many it was clear at the time that July’s Camp David meeting, where Mr. Clinton went through numerous gyrations (and came close to kidnapping the participants) to get any sort of paper agreement to burnish his legacy, was misconceived. It is becoming increasingly clear that by trying to force an agreement before its time, the process may well have exacerbated tensions and made the violence the world has deplored for the last two weeks more likely.
As Deborah Sontag of the New York Times wrote Monday, the violence of the past 10 days in Jerusalem and other disputed territories in the Middle East left many Israelis "staggered by this swift tumble from what seemed to be the brink of resolution back down into the depths of the elemental ethnic hatred at the root of their blood-soaked conflict." Many observers fear, as Ms. Sontag put it, that "from underneath, the longer the battle rages, a more primal conflict surfaces, too, tribe against tribe."
A TRIBAL DISPUTE
This notion of elemental tribalism coming to the fore after decades of what international leaders have chosen to call a "peace process" is certainly tragic and definitely unsettling. But as Leon Hadar, a scholar at the Cato Institute, teacher at American University, Washington correspondent, and author of "Quagmire: America in the Middle East," wrote here a few months ago, it might be most accurate to think of the current conflict as a tribal conflict and to recognize that outside observers and forces face extremely limited options until the two tribes get together and work out a practical means of living together.
The likelihood of a permanent, comprehensive peace characterized by mutual respect and amity might be low, but avoiding war is possible, especially if Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and European leaders back off and reduce their frantic machinations.
In other words, Mr. Hadar told me in a conversation Monday, it would be prudent to lower our expectations and hope for the best without illusions.
COLD WAR LENSES
For many decades most world leaders viewed the Middle East through Cold War lenses, with the area seen as a potential prize in the superpower struggle. The United States backed the Israelis (while lecturing and sometimes hectoring them) while the Soviet Union sought to curry favor with various Arab states. Every twist and turn in Middle Eastern politics seemed to carry life-and-death superpower implications.
"For many in the foreign policy and media establishments this new conflict seems almost like the old days coming back again, with familiar, almost comforting themes of great threats to world peace," Leon Hadar noted. "But how much can the United States and the United Nations really do, especially if they don’t understand that this isn’t like the old Cold War days but more like those much older, more deeply rooted conflicts that still have not been resolved."
It seems very much to be the case that the "international community," by raising expectations and by applying pressure at the recent Camp David meetings for an agreement the two parties weren’t ready to accomplish, has contributed to this most recent outburst of killing in and around Israel.
