“What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
Secretary of State Condolezza Rice,
News Conference, July 21, 2006; 2:29 PM"There is something fundamentally wrong with a war where there are more dead children than armed men.... It has to stop."
Jan Egeland
United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator
July 28, 2006
How shall we understand the meaning of this new cycle of attacks and reprisals between Israel, Hezbollah, and Hamas?
Secretary of State Rice, speaking for the administration and reflecting the views of many in Congress, sees a painful but creative process of bringing a new Middle East into the world. Stopping the fighting with an immediate ceasefire would result in the stillbirth of democracy. The UN’s Jan Egeland sees something gone fundamentally wrong, resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe paid for in the death and suffering of innocent civilians. We do too.
What has gone wrong? Many views on what went wrong – U.S., Israeli, Turkish, Lebanese, Palestinian, Jordanian, Saudi, Russian, and others – could be described. I’ll focus here on two, the views from the administration and Congress and our FCNL perspective.
The administration and many in Congress argue that terrorists bent on Israel’s destruction who are determined to prevent the birthing of democracy in the Middle East started the war. Why now? Perhaps, they speculate, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon was following orders from Iran to make trouble for the U.S. and its ally Israel. Why would Iran want to make such trouble? Because of the tough pressure on Iran from the U.S. to stop its nuclear program; Iran wanted to change the game. Under such circumstances, the U.S. and Israel must, they say, defeat the terrorists and counter the Iranian threat. And, they assert, these kind of people only understand force – military muscle.
At FCNL, we see the meaning of this lethal outbreak of attacks and reprisals differently. We see a failure to prevent deadly conflict. Our question is: Who lost the peace in the Middle East? Our answer is that several parties share responsibility, including our own government and Israel. No one party – not Israel, the U.S., Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, or Iran – can be singled out as the guilty party. All must share responsibility. To return to peacebuilding in the Middle East – instead of bloodletting and destroying – our government needs to recognize its role in the making of this lethal mess.
We see in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan the outcomes of the Bush-Cheney doctrine, which holds that the United States can create a new world order through the force of military power. The U.S. would not have been given the historic role of “the world’s sole, remaining superpower” if it were not supposed to use that power for good, they argue. Regrettably, in the post September 11 shock, Congress and the public accepted this doctrine and its global war on terror. The administration promised to take the U.S. and the rest of the world safely through the valley of death by being the meanest, badest, toughest nation on the planet. Congress anted up with all the taxpayer money requested for the military and homeland security budget. Hard power was in the driver’s seat. War was the answer.
Five years later, the result of the war is the answer doctrine is a diplomacy gap, a huge deficit in the soft power capabilities of the U.S. Until now, no one much worried that the U.S. was ignoring its soft power diplomacy tools in international relations. Bashing the UN and sending a U.S. Ambassador to the UN who is openly contemptuous of the world body was seen as essential to the Bush-Cheney get tough approach. Weakening nonprolifteration and arms control treaties and agreements was seen as harmless when the U.S. and its allies held military superiority. Drawing lines in the sand to sort out the good guys from the bad guys wasn’t seen as juvenile conduct but as a moral statement that the U.S. will never compromise with evil.
Now the Bush-Cheney doctrine is unraveling. The people and movements it demonized have each grabbed a thread of the doctrine and pulled on it. No level of military superiority will put it back together again. Nevertheless, the situation is not hopeless. If we recognize that war is not the answer, then peace is possible through peaceful means.
The public should demand that Congress and the administration change course now. We have to de-militarize for democracy. Our government officials should recognize that what the people of the world respect about the United States is not its military superiority but its culture of freedom; its scientific and technological achievements; its tolerance for many points of view;; its academic excellence; its ability to engage with people of all religious, ethnic, and national origins; and its humanitarian and moral standing.. These attributes of soft power are national security assets that have been blithely discarded by this administration. In fact, U.S. security depends on the skillful application of just this kind of soft power to engage in peacebuilding.
The global war on terror – its decent into torture, its targeting of civilians, its hogging of the federal budget – has starved our government of the soft power it needs to succeed in the world of global politics. The U.S. will not win hearts and minds with weapons and threats. Until Congress, with demands and support from the public, closes the diplomacy gap, the Bush-Cheney doctrine of world security through military force will take the U.S. down into a new dark age of war. War has now been tried and proven not to be the answer. It’s time for the U.S. government officials to get out of their battle fatigues and into their civies. It’s time to de-militarize for democracy, both here and abroad.
PS: Watch your mailboxes for the next issue of the FCNL Washington Newsletter which is focused on practical ways we can take this issue to Washington.