the Iran one

I promise something lighter soon...

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I keep wanting to write a blog about immigration... I mean a thoughtful blog at least. That's the thing about the Middle East; it has a habit of not staying quiet when you want it to.

So this one's about Iran.

If you Google Iran, you'll probably see a lot of stories about their nuclear program. That's the wrong story. Now, I'm not exactly sure what the right story is, but I am willing to give it a try. Here goes.

First of all, I've never been to Iran. I don't know that much about it. Annette told me that young women in Iran go nightclubbing with Western men in full burkas. The women I mean. So this is just what I hear.

I hear Israel invaded Lebanon today. Well maybe yesterday. You may have heard that too. I also hear that Iraq is getting worse. I mean, like worse worse. Coincidence?

Well, no. Israel is pissed that three of its soldiers have been captured. Lots more were killed, but as we all have seen, captives make better television than dead bodies.

Let's review the Israeli geography. Israel is bordered by Jordan on the east, Egypt on the south, the Mediterranean Sea on the west, and Lebanon on the north. There are three areas of contested land, one bordering each of these countries. The border with Egypt has the Gaza Strip. If I recall correctly, Israel has pretty much gotten out of there (or at least gotten their troops out of there). The border to the east with Jordan is the West Bank. Much much bigger area. Very contentious. The border to the north with Lebanon has the Golan Heights.

OK. Israel took the West Bank (like the others) after a war back in, oh I don't know, the 50s or 60s. Israel is kind of overcrowded, so once they had the land it was like this big new subdivision. I assume that land had been Jordan's, at least looking at the map. It sure as heck wasn't Israel's though. Everybody has known all along that Israel has to give most if not all of that land back if it wants to live in peace with its neighbors. Not to mention the fact that most of the people living there are Palestinian, not Jewish, so there's this whole growing political bloc that the Israeli government realizes it needs to re-district out of Israel. Most Israelis seem willing to give most of the land back, but they'd like to get something for it. You might think that the promise of peace would be good enough, but given that Israel had been attacked by its Arab neighbors not long after its Jewish people had been attacked by their European governments, it is understandably paranoid. After all, once given up, land is harder to take back than a promise.

For the past few decades, Israel has alternated between a "let's hit back harder than them" and a "let's make a deal with them" strategy. Hitting back hard had the benefit of changing facts on the ground in Israel's favor, but resulted in international isolation, and ultimately did little to advance the cause of peace. Call it a tough negotiating stance for an eventual peace. On the other hand, making a deal was contingent upon a willingness of those fighting Israel to stop fighting. Let's divide those fighters into three groups. One group demands the total destruction of Israel (more on them later). Another group would be willing to stop fighting if Israel gives everything back --- lands, prisoners, etc.. The remaining group just wants peace. The problem with making a deal was that Israel didn't want to give everything back, so any deal would be contingent on the third group controlling the first two. Even if Israel were willing to give everything back, it's not clear whether that first group could be controlled... and this of course has been Israel's excuse. The failure of Yasser Arafat to sign off on the deal President Clinton negotiated with Yitzhak Rabin reinforced the view that the Palestinians (and their backers) were, as Israeli conservatives had been, more interested in changing facts on the ground through force than in making a deal.

Israelis, believing that the Palestinians could neither be reasoned with nor beaten into submission, supported a third approach championed by Ariel Sharon, who had to start a new political party to enact it. The new approach can be thought of as an unnegotiated settlement. Recognizing they would not get a promise of peace, and recognizing they had to give most of the land back, they decided to build a wall with most of the land on the other side of it. The wall thereby replaced a promise with something more tangible.

What about the Palestinians? International efforts to broker a peace had resulted in significant inflows of money to the Palestinian Authority. With guaranteed money, a righteous political/military banner to wrap around themselves, and little actual dependence on the people they represented, the Palestinian Authority was increasingly corrupt. Hamas, a military/social/religious Palestinian organization, was by contrast effective at delivering services to the people. The Israeli "go it alone" approach to peace further diminished the stature of the existing government. Under Western pressure to democratize, elections for leadership of the Palestinian Authority resulted in Hamas rising to power. The problem of course is that Hamas, when they're not feeding the poor, likes to blow things up in Israel.

Iran? I'm getting to that, hold your horses.

Now, the previous Palestinian leadership (Fatah) had been funded by all those countries around the world that wanted peace in the Middle East. Where does Hamas get its money? Syria. Funding Hamas allows Syria to both burnish its image in the Muslim world by helping take care of the poor in Palestine, while exerting military pressure on Israel without having to actually go to war. In fact, it seems that the kidnapping by Hamas of an Israeli soldier a week or two ago was not carried out by the "local" Hamas militants (who after all are part of the government now), but rather by a Syrian-sponsored Hamas faction.

You see, peace between Israel and the Palestinians isn't necessarily in Syria's interest. Remember that one.

Iran? Yeah yeah I'm getting there.

So Hamas in Israel comes into power and starts getting all moderate, talking about peace. So Syrian Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier, and asks for Palestinian prisoners to be released in exchange. Israel will do the exchange, they have in the past, but in order to discourage future kidnappings and make the exchange palatable with the Israeli public, they have to blow a hell of a lot of stuff up first. The net effect? A deterioration of the peace process.

Meanwhile to the north of Israel, Hezbollah (oh thank God that's in the voice-recognition dictionary) sits in the south of Lebanon and shoots rockets over the border. Fortunately for all involved, the rockets don't go very farand there's not much worth hitting in northern Israel. Like Hamas, Hezbollah is a religious/military/social organization that is part of the Lebanese government. Like Fatah, the Lebanese government is generally pro-Western (as these things go). Also like Fatah, they are quite corrupt. I get the sense that the previous Syrian puppet government was also a corrupt, but when Syria assassinated the anti-Syrian opposition leader, they got kicked out. Anyway, again you have a relatively pro-Western corrupt government talking peace and a hard-working externally-funded militant Islamic group vying for power.

Where Hamas is an increasingly but by no means completely detached arm of Syria, Hezbollah is a highly integrated arm of the Iran (see, I told you we get here!). Iran sees Syria use Hamas to kidnap an Israeli soldier and upset the peace process (or to be fair, upset the status quo). So what do they do? Hezbollah kidnaps 2 Israeli soldiers!

When Hamas did its kidnapping, Israel buzzed jets over the home of Syrian President Bashir Asad, and blew up bridges at the southern end of the Gaza Strip effectively sealing off the border with the Egypt (to trap the kidnappers and the soldier in the Israeli controlled territory).

Unlike Syria, Iran has a proper army. Israel isn't going to buzz the palace of the Iranian President (whose name almost certainly is not in the voice-recognition dictionary, but sounds a lot like "Mach mood I. Modena shot"). And unlike Hamas, the Hezbollah party in power in Lebanon really is of the "wipe Israel off the face of the map" persuasion. So when Hezbollah kidnaps an Israeli soldier, Israel goes after Hezbollah. Which is to say, Israel goes after Lebanon.

Today this took the form of Israel blockading Lebanon in the Mediterranean Sea, bombing all the runways at the Beirut airport, and blowing up the highway to Damascus, Syria. Oh I left something out: amidst all this, Hezbollah found some bigger rockets and landed one in the Israeli city of Haifa. Now, the Lebanese government (including the Hezbollah politicians) say they aren't responsible for the kidnappings or the rockets, but lacking better targets Israel isn't splitting hairs.

This overreaction by Israel is calculated. Israel is already despised by most of the world (outside the United States), while Lebanon is kind of popular. Furthermore, they are very dependent on tourism and sure as heck can't afford a war. So Israel's calculation is that the political classes in Lebanon, while always happy to see Israel punished, will form a backlash against Hezbollah for going off on their own and trying to start a war with Israel.

Why is all this important? Well, just as Syria is motivated to undermine the peace process in Israel to maintain their influence in the Hamas organization and more generally in the region, Iran also has its reasons for wanting to see the conflict continue.

I always wondered why, if people want to live in peace (as I believe most people do), why it is that the conflict in the Middle East has continued decade after decade. I've also wondered why the conflict in Iraq has worsened year after year.

Today I listened to the best single discussion of the situation in the Middle East, especially in Iraq. What became clear, to me at least, is that the Middle East is a region with many countries vying for power. The removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq left a vacuum that each neighbor has sought to fill through financing and other support of allied factions on the ground. Just as in Israel, as long as Iraq's neighbors find it in their interest for the conflict to continue, there is little that we will be able to do to resolve it.

Look at this from the perspective of Iran. Iran hasn't historically gotten along with its neighbors. It spent 10 years at war with Iraq. Then the US waltzes in and destroys Iran's political rivals to the west and east (Iraq, the Taliban). Furthermore, the US announces that it intends to eliminate the existing power structure in Iraq (leaving a vacuum) and replace it with a political model that it expects to eventually lead to the overthrow of neighboring governments. And then the US stakes its credibility on the outcome.

So say you are Iran. You don't like the US. You don't like Israel. You'd like to have nuclear weapons (that would shut the Israelis up). All you have to do is funnel some weapons and money across the border into Iraq and wait. The US will have to stay to maintain order. That will make them unpopular, undermine the legitimacy of the government, not to mention giving you a rare opportunity to take a shot at them. If you get bored, you can start trouble in Israel, further isolating the US. Eventually the US will come to realize that their only way out is to either admit defeat or to ask you to stop making trouble. It's not like they can afford to start another war with you. They could try to bully you, but all that would do is make all those moderate reformists who have been criticizing you look unpatriotic. And when they come asking, you can tell them there will be a cost. That cost? Allowing them to have a nuclear program.

I mean, come on. In retrospect it's like we walked in, put a bull's-eye on our back, and asked nobody to take a shot. I suppose the logic was, complete collapse of Iraq is in nobody's interest, so everyone will work together to stabilize it. What that logic fails to recognize is that, by going it alone, the United States put itself in a position where it cannot really afford to call the region's bluff. Iran doesn't want Iraq to trigger a regional war. But it can afford to live with a civil war there, and United States cannot. So we need their help. And they know it.

So our options are:

1) Hope that the majority of Iraqis (especially Sunnis) can be persuaded that the government is legitimate, thereby channeling their dissent into the political process. This is our current approach.

2) Concede that the current government will not be viewed as legitimate, and thus treat the situation as a civil war. Abandon pretenses of pure democracy and pressure existing political factions to arrive at a compromise. This may or may not be consistent with the existing democratic institutions that have been put in place. To be blunt, this may mean turning our back on the government we set up.

3) Concede that the current government will not be viewed as legitimate so long as its neighbors consider its existence to be counter to their interests. Engage in diplomacy/bargaining with the very regimes that we once sought to undermine, seeking their support for the current government or an acceptable version thereof. This may mean sacrificing other interests in the region, such as allowing Iran's nuclear program, reducing our influence in Iraq, or in some way diminishing our support for Israel.

4) Concede that the situation in Iraq is effectively a civil war, and that the costs of buying off its neighbors outweigh the human costs and the costs to US prestige of allowing (as one caller compared to forest fires) "this thing to burn itself out." This would almost certainly further damage the United States' standing in the world (imagine "the US is willing to sacrifice the Iraqi people to defend Israeli policies"), and may lead to broader conflicts.

Sobering stuff. But I'm coming around to the view that while the chances for a peaceful, stable Iraq still exist, they may not be fully in our control. They may in fact be more in the control of countries we have labeled our enemies. How we square that circle, that's the kind of thing we need in our political debate.