More "ripped from the classroom" blogging. I'm going to make an analogy between the Bush doctrine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--and the U.S. gets compared to a side you will not like. So let me be clear : I am not making a moral or historical parallel between Bush and Arafat, let alone our military and suicide bombers. I would never do that, and if I did you'd be quite right to scream at me. I am only trying to point to a shared strategic problem.
Yesterday my terrorism class had, as a guest speaker, a prof at my law school from Egypt, who had done research for the Palestinian negotiating team during the Camp David and Taba negotiations. He was there to give the Palestinian side of story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he made a very good presentation, changing my mind about a few things though not my overall view of what's going on there. But my professor asked him a question at the end of the class that he could not respond to. To paraphrase:
"The main thing that makes me pessimistic, is: how can any Palestinian negotiator ever make a credible promise to Israel that the terror will stop, no matter how many concessions Israel makes?"
His point was not that the Palestinians all want to drive Israel into the sea, or that they are all untrustworthy. Nor was it that Arafat wants to drive Israel into the sea (which I don't believe, I think he's a horrible combination of self interested and inept and self pitying, but not especially fanatical) or that Arafat is much too untrustworthy for any Israeli government to believe. I do think Arafat has proven himself untrustworthy for any Israeli government to believe, but the problem goes deeper than that: I don't think any Palestinian leader, no matter how moral he was or how much he negotiated in good faith, could promise that the violence would stop. The polls of Palestinians make it hard to believe that they would accept a two state solution right now, and while I think a healthy majority could be convinced, there is a significant minority who probably never can be.
Palestinian violence, my prof said, was probably a strategically effective tactic in one way: it made Israelis willing to make concessions to the Palestinians to stop the violence, that they wouldn't have considered and did not consider when the violence wasn't as bad. But it also stops Israel from actually making those concessions, because Israelis now believe, with a lot of justification, that nothing they give to the Palestinians will ever stop the bombing.
This struck me, partly because it reminded me of something that Henry Farrell (now of Crooked Timber) wrote a while ago about the Bush war and the pre-emption doctrine:
You see, the thing about credible threats is that they have to be conditional if they’re going to be effective. In other words, you threaten to do something nasty to someone, unless that someone does whatever it is that you’re telling them to. Presumably, then, if your threatened punishment is severe enough, and is credible, the offending party does whatever it is that you wanted him to do....
But this isn’t what the US and its allies were up to at all. They weren’t using the threat of invasion in order to make Saddam cough up his WMD. Instead, they were making it quite clear that they were going to invade anyway, regardless or not of whether Saddam started to make nice. They didn’t go through the UN in order to enhance the UN’s credibility, but rather to daub a thin patina of legitimacy over the course of action that they had decided to take anyway. The threatened invasion of Iraq was not intended to deter Hussein, it was intended to depose him. Nor is US policy likely to deter other dictators from building up WMD; when they look at the lily-livered US attitude towards North Korea, they may reasonably draw the conclusion that going nuclear is the best way to stop Uncle Sam from sending in the troops.
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