Friday, January 02, 2009

More Peace Processing Won't Cut It

Claudia Rosett

Just over 70 years ago, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to declare that the settlement giving Germany its desired lebensraum in the Sudetenland was a "prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace"--or, in Chamberlain's most famous phrase of that day, "peace for our time." And so, as any schoolchild knows, Nazi Germany's voracious and depraved appetites were satisfied. Hitler stuck to his deal, kept his mitts off Britain and beefed up the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact into a free-trade agreement with Stalin's Soviet Union. With the help of multilateral aid workers, psycho-social counselors and a few additional rounds of peace talks, the Third Reich was peacefully integrated into what is today the European Community.

…Sorry, wrong universe. But it does seem to be the one that most of today's erstwhile leaders of the free world believe they inhabit--forgetting the courage and immense sacrifice it took in the 1940s to redeem the blindness and colossal mistakes that were supposed to produce "peace for our time."

Today, as Israel tries to defend itself by force of arms against enemies dedicated to its destruction, the ritual call is for peace processes for our time. Officials of the United Nations and the European Union want an immediate ceasefire.

President Bush, now whiling away his final days in office, has let it be known through his spokesman that he'd like Israel and Hamas to agree to "a sustainable and durable ceasefire"--which sounds like an approach that could lead right into the unconditional foreign-policy jaw-jaw promised by President-elect Barack Obama.

All that might be fine, were Israel's attackers in Gaza just a solo street gang of malcontents. Perhaps, given the endless media descriptions of Gaza as "isolated" and "impoverished" and "beleaguered," there are those who really believe all that's needed for peace is more humanitarian aid trucked into the enclave, open border crossings and another round of peace-processing.

But that requires ignoring history, the nature of tyranny and terror and the wider context of the modern world. The focus of the "international community" right now is on the number of aid trucks waved into Gaza and the parsing amid Israel's precision strikes of whether Israel, in trying to stop the firing of rockets and mortars at its population, has engaged in a "disproportionate" use of force.

Let us pull back for a look at the broader scene. Today, as in the 1930s, the entire free world faces a growing shadow of terror-based totalitarian movements, Hamas being just one of them.

In many aspects, the current scene may seem different from the gathering storm of the 1930s. The old axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan, militarily walloped in World War II, are now democracies all.

In these early years of the 21st century, the threat is a loose and shifting agglomeration of tyrannies and terrorist networks. But what bears noting is that they increasingly deal with each other, learn from each other and share a common interest in seeing western-style democracy--inimical to their various ideologies--consigned to the ash heap of history.

To list just a few of the better-known players, these include the likes of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela; Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. The weapons include everything from conventional arms to suicide belts, to airliners used as missiles, to nuclear bombs--which North Korea has already acquired and Iran appears to be pursuing at speed.

Their activities circle the globe and extend into cyberspace. And the ideologies driving these dangers have in their most lethal form been fused with the Islamic religion.

In that context, the terrorist group of Hamas, now ruling Gaza and firing rockets and mortars into Israel, is anything but isolated. On the most practical level, neither border constraints nor poverty has prevented Hamas from bringing into Gaza the wherewithal to bombard Israel.

On the broader level, since its founding in 1987 as an offshoot of the Palestinian branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas has drawn support from a global network. This has ranged from funds sent illegally from the U.S. to the official backing of a number of Arab states, including Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which paid out cash rewards to the families of suicide bombers who attacked Israel.

Most prominent and dangerous these days among Hamas supporters is Iran--an important source of funding, training and munitions. An illuminating article by Marie Colvin of London's Sunday Times, published this past March, recounts an interview in Gaza City with a Hamas commander.

He refused to give his name, but did provide details of the training received by Hamas fighters sent to study in Iran "under the command of the elite Revolutionary Guard force." At that stage, nine months ago, this Hamas source described a system in which hundreds of his terrorist colleagues were being milled through combat training in Iran, and hundreds more had received training in Syria from instructors schooled in Iran.

Start following the Iranian connections and it quickly becomes clear that Gaza is just one part of a larger web that we might once have called an axis--of evil, of tyranny, of totalitarian ideology.

In Lebanon, the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hezbollah--who run their own state-within-the-state--have been rearming and regrouping following the 34-day war they launched against Israel in July of 2006.

Syria has been serving as a totalitarian crossroads not only for Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, but also for nuclear-armed, missile vending North Korea--which, while peace-processing last year with the U.S., was secretly busy helping Syria build a clandestine nuclear reactor, with no apparent purpose but to make plutonium for nuclear bombs.

Israel took the risk of destroying that facility in an air strike in September 2007. But nothing to date has put a similar damper on Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The web goes on and on, and one can follow it, tracing the flow of arms, know-how, collaboration, tyrannical ambitions and terrorist attacks as they move from Mumbai to Istanbul to London, Madrid, New York and beyond.

In this context, Israel fits in not as a Jewish state, but because it is a democracy. Like Britain in the late 1930s, it sits on the frontline of a totalitarian advance. Among full-blown modern democracies, there is no country more battered, terrorist-targeted and directly threatened with annihilation than Israel--where the Foreign Ministry Web site reports that in a country of some 7 million people, the barrage of terrorist attacks from 2001-2007 killed more than 1,117 and wounded 8,341.

For anyone tempted to wonder if the extinction of Israel might mean an end to such violence, the answer is no. Totalitarian movements need enemies and feed on conquest. In Israel's present circumstances, the rest of the free world may read its own future--unless something more than "peace for our time" is brought to bear.

For Britain in World War II, and for the cause of freedoms that in America we still enjoy today, the beginning of real salvation came when America entered the war following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Later that same month, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited Washington and addressed a joint session of Congress, telling them, "Here we are together facing a group of mighty foes who seek our ruin; here we are together defending all that to free men is dear."

In that same 1941 speech, Churchill noted that the terrible war, by then unleashed upon them all, might have been averted had the great democracies taken firmer action some years earlier to stop the rising threats.

Here we are again. By some lights, America on Sept. 11, 2001 already suffered its Pearl Harbor and whatever one's view of the military invasions and regime-toppling in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration for more than seven years now has kept America safe.

Israel's predicament, in which the "peace process" is proving increasingly at odds with the need for self-defense, serves notice, from the front, of the still-gathering storm.

With luck, we may yet have some time. Whether America will fritter it away on false promises and hollow diplomacy, or act decisively to stop our enemies--by force of arms, if need be--is the question.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.com.

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