Time for Real Diplomacy: Brzezinski +

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1218021,00.html

Sunday, Jul. 23, 2006:
Viewpoint: Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argues that Secretary Rice must stay in the region as long as it takes - and talk to everyone
By ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

The following three propositions regarding the Middle East are axiomatic. One, for the U.S., the region poses the critical test of its capacity for global leadership. Two, the parties in the conflict cannot reach a constructive and durable resolution on their own. Three, the experience of the U.S. in Iraq, and the total experience of Israel in its several conflicts with its Arab neighbors, including its ongoing repression of the Palestinians, cumulatively demonstrates that even overwhelming military power cannot produce acceptable and lasting political outcomes. Theoretically, the U.S. could mobilize all of its might and treasure to impose its will on the Middle East, but the fact is, the American public would not support such an undertaking, and therefore it is only a theoretical possibility.

The Israelis can defeat every single one of their current or potential enemies, but in doing so, they simply enlarge the number of those increasingly determined to use force in resisting Israel. In the long run, Israel would then face the same dilemma that France faced in Algeria, be worn down and eventually expelled. That is the historical reality that can only be ignored at considerable strategic risk.

Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians can resolve the problem on their own because each suspects the other too much, with mistrust and antagonism by now deeply rooted. There have been times when the Israelis were prepared to consider serious negotiations but they had no viable partners on the other side; there were times when the Arab side seemed willing to consider a grand bargain (notably the peace effort early in 2002 initiated by Saudi Arabia and endorsed by the entire Arab League) but a terrorist outrage dynamited that effort as well.

The so-called Road Map to Peace proposed by the U.S. is a road map to an unknown destination, which intensifies the suspicion of those who are supposed to travel on it and makes each side reluctant to fulfill even its basic initial requirements: the Palestinians to dismantle the terrorist networks; the Israelis to stop construction of the settlements altogether. It follows from the foregoing that only an external intervention that is decisive and purposeful in its character can achieve a breakthrough to peace. That intervention can only come from the U.S. It has the power and some residual trust in the area, enabling it to undertake such a task. If the U.S. was prepared to commit itself to support peace along the lines outlined by the Geneva Accord, the joint Clinton-Barak proposals and the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Taba, a formula for peace likely to be endorsed by the majority of Israel and the Palestinian populations would make its impact felt. In fact, public opinion polls show that both the Palestinians and the Israelis are ahead of their governments in their readiness to consider a serious compromise.

The present crisis, however, clearly stands in the way and imposes a particularly important challenge for the U.S. If that crisis continues to percolate and take a higher toll in human life, and continues to demonstrate that terrorism on one side is matched by brutal repression by the other, then the chances for peace in the Middle East will be set back, the region will be progressively radicalized and increasingly dominated by extremist forces. America's position in the region will be placed in jeopardy, and if America's position in the Middle East are undermined, America's global leadership will ultimately be at stake. That's why it's so essential the President send his Secretary of State to the region with a mandate and a mission to tackle the problem head on: to achieve a cease fire between the parties, with sequential but not simultaneous exchange of prisoners, with an international undertaking to place troops from major powers in a security zone in southern Lebanon and perhaps even in Gaza and then to use that as the springboard for eventual negotiations. But to achieve the more immediate task, the Secretary of State has to be prepared to stay in the region as long as necessary, as was the case with Kissinger in the early '70s, and she also has to be prepared to talk to the parties concerned. The notion that the U.S. cannot talk to some of the Arab players is a self-imposed ostracism. The alternative to that is to sit in front of a mirror and to talk to oneself and that is hardly likely to be very productive.

In brief, America faces a challenge that offers it the opportunity to exercise the kind of leadership in the area that for a number of years it has failed to pursue.
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Profile: Zbigniew Brzezinski
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/kbank/profiles/brzezinski/

Born on March 28, 1928, in Warsaw, Poland, the future national security adviser to President Carter and son of a Polish diplomat spent part of his youth in France and Germany before moving to Canada. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from McGill University, in 1949 and 1950 respectively, and in 1953 earned his doctorate in political science from Harvard. He taught at Harvard before moving to Columbia University in 1961 to head the new Institute on Communist Affairs. In 1958 he became a U.S. citizen. During the 1960s Brzezinski acted as an adviser to Kennedy and Johnson administration officials. Generally taking a hard line on policy toward the Soviet Union, he was also an influential force behind the Johnson administration's "bridge-building" ideas regarding Eastern Europe. During the final years of the Johnson administration, he was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey and his presidential campaign.

In 1973, Brzezinski became the first director of the Trilateral Commission, a group of prominent political and business leaders and academics from the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Its purpose was to strengthen relations among the three regions. Future President Carter was a member, and when he declared his candidacy for the White House in 1974, Brzezinski, a critic of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy style, became his adviser on foreign affairs. After his victory in 1976, Carter made Brzezinski national security adviser.

Aiming to replace Kissinger's "acrobatics" in foreign policy-making with a foreign policy "architecture," Brzezinski was as eager for power as his rival. However, his task was complicated by his focus on East-West relations, and in a hawkish way -- in an administration where many cared a great deal about North-South relations and human rights. On the whole, Brzezinski was a team player. He emphasized the further development of the U.S.-China relationship, favored a new arms control agreement with Moscow and shared the president and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's view that the United States should seek international cooperation in its diplomacy instead of going it alone. In the growing crisis atmosphere of 1979 and 1980 due to the Iranian hostage situation, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a deepening economic crisis, Brzezinski's anti-Soviet views gained influence but could not end the Carter administration's malaise. Since his time in government, Brzezinski has been active as a writer, teacher and consultant.
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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060723/31fouad.htm

The Heartbreak of History: Posted Sunday, July 23, 2006
By Fouad Ajami

A quarter century ago, there was another grim Lebanon summer--the war of 1982 between Israel and the Palestinians played out on Lebanese soil. The anarchy on the Israeli-Lebanon frontier had raged for well over a decade then. The Palestinians had built a state within a state: For the Palestinian chieftains, that was the best of all worlds. They held Lebanon captive, belittled its people, trampled over the Shiite country in the south, and hid behind the trappings of Lebanon's sovereignty. No one wept when the Palestinian gunmen and their leaders were cast out of Lebanon. They boarded ships firing into the air, freeing the Lebanese to embark on a new history of their own.

History has cunning: Israel had shattered the Palestinian sanctuary, and this led to the rise of the Shiites. Israel had done for the Shiites--Lebanon's largest and most disadvantaged community--what they had been unable to do for themselves. In a chapter now long forgotten, those villages in the southern hinterland had welcomed Israel's push into Lebanon. But Israel had stayed on, and what began in promise ended with two decades of bitter war between Israel and the Shiites. Iran soon found its way into the fray, and Hezbollah, a movement of the disinherited and the underclass, rode its legend of resistance to power in the world of Lebanon.

History does not repeat itself in all details. This time, there will be no ships to take the men with guns from Lebanon to distant shores. Iran had armed and financed them; Syria had sheltered them. The state in Lebanon was a virtual fiction, and Hezbollah gave the Shiites schools and clinics and rid them of the self-contempt that a snobbish land had bred in them. In return, Hezbollah had asked for their loyalty. Eventually, however, the line between Hezbollah's writ in Lebanon and Iran's would yield to the needs of the Iranians.

"Les guerres des autres," the wars of others, was the way the most venerable of Lebanon's thinkers, Ghassan Tueni, the publisher of the country's influential daily An-Nahar, has described the wars of Lebanon. (Some months ago he lost his son, Gebran, a passionate critic of Syria, to a massive car bomb.) Yesterday, it was the Arab-Israeli war that blew through that country. Today, it is an Iranian bid for regional primacy. The Syrian regime, a reign of plunder and autocracy, aids this sordid Iranian bid.

Chits. The Arab world had disenfranchised the Shiites of Lebanon; Iran had picked them up as its allies. Iran was far away, its language and culture alien to the Lebanese Shiites, but Hezbollah's clerics and lay leaders would ride Iran's coattails, for no other ride was offered them. One day or the other, Iran was bound to call in its chits--it had not come to Lebanon, after all, out of charity and benevolence.

Syria's motives, its stakes in this little war, are similarly easy to read. There have settled upon the Syrians second thoughts about the wisdom of their withdrawal from Lebanon just over a year ago. That decision had been made when the Syrians believed that the Pax Americana--or, more precisely, George W. Bush--was determined to topple the tyrannies of the region and to use Iraq as a springboard for a wider effort to change the ways of Araby. But in recent days, the Syrian autocracy has come to greater confidence that the storm has blown over. The Syrians aim to do all they can to subvert Lebanon's independence, to pull the smaller country back into the big Syrian prison.

The cruelty of history--and Lebanon displays that cruel juxtaposition of nature's beauty and history's heartbreak--is that men and nations are doomed to suffer great bloodshed before they settle down to outcomes inevitable all along. When the dust settles, the Lebanese government will have to take up its duty on its frontier with Israel. No one contests Hezbollah's role in Lebanon's politics; no one would deny its place in the country's sectarian landscape. But the guns and the missiles are another matter. Demography works to the advantage of the Shiites, and a great deal of the country's wealth has shifted their way in recent years. The Shiites do not need a holy war on their own soil. The reining in of Hezbollah is something they owe their kith and kin. They needn't be enamored of Israel, and they won't be. Those Persians bearing gifts, those Syrians who keep their own frontier with Israel as quiet as a tomb while setting ablaze Lebanon's lands, are no friends of the Lebanese.
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