Real Clear Truth

Jeff Jacoby’s latest column in the Boston Globe talks about the Death of the Bush Doctrine. What is the Bush Doctrine you ask? Well it’s many things, but in the context of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jacoby has it correct, the “Bush Doctrine” means the U.S. expects the Palestinian leadership to decide whose side they’ll be on, our side or the terrorists’ side. If they are truly not with the terrorists, then they will demonstrate it and “act decisively against terror”.

Based on this doctrine, the Bush administration has long demanded that before any peace process could be restarted that the Palestinians needed to stop the terror first and acknowledge Israel’s right to exist (meaning they would need to give up their demand for a “right of return” which would demographically destroy Israel).

Well, if you haven’t notice, the Palestinians haven’t changed any of their positions and yet Bush has restarted the “peace process”. So what gives? Is the Bush Doctrine dead?

Well, actually the Bush Doctrine died when Rumsfeld left the Pentagon and General Petraeus began his surge. The surge is far more than simply saying we lacked the number of troops needed to secure Iraq. The surge is an entirely new strategy that involves a much more nuanced and complex way of dealing with the situation on the ground. We no longer simply tell the Iraqi’s you are either with us or against us. Rather we look to see how we can win them over to our side. We work with them. We recognize that they are the only ones who can give us the intelligence we need to root out the terrorists, and that forces us to recognize that we won’t get their support unless we are willing to get down to their day-to-day level and talk with them — not with the point of telling them what to do, but with the point of understanding them and appreciating their concerns.

This has changed everything. It has enabled us to finally turn Iraq around. And this has in turn changed how the Whitehouse looks at everything.

In a very real sense, the Bush/Rumsfeld doctrine died because it simply didn’t work. It would have been great if it did, but some things really do take more nuance than just demanding that others do what we want.

Likewise with the Palestinians. Sure, the easy thing is to say let them rot until they decide to clean up their house, but that causes serious on-going problems for us. We DO need Arab support in a number of areas (like Iran & Iraq). We DO need to drain the “fever-swamps” that breed the terrorists. It is against our national interests to let this problem go on unresolved forever.

Jacoby suggests that perhaps Bush changed his policy because he is now interested “in a quest for a historic ‘legacy’”.

But the Bush administration has had plenty of time to get up to speed and understand the players involved, so if anything can be done, it would naturally be at the end of his administration. Maybe “legacy” is more driven by that fact that lots of time has been invested and presidents really do want to solve problems, not just leave them to the next president who would take years to come up to speed. Maybe “legacy” can be more than seeking a Nobel prize or looking for something impressive to write about in one’s memoirs.

Anyway, it’s easy to point out the reasons why the “peace process” will never succeed, but consider that Bush isn’t simply talking to Israel and the Palestinians. He’s also bringing in many of the Arab governments. While this may still not work, it does have a better chance at forcing the Palestinians into real compromises than ever before. Arab governments have never been fond of Israel or making things easy for them, but they also see the very real danger of the radical Islamists destabilizing the region. Thus, they now have a real interest to drain the fever-swamps too.

And so a new doctrine has been born.

Does this mean Bush never really believed in the original “Bush Doctrine”? Hardly. It simply means that the harsh realities of the region and new opportunities presented there have changed what is in our best interests and how best to approach those problems.

One of Bush’s core beliefs has been that all people yearn for freedom, and therefore we need to push for democracy in the region. However, reality shows us that democracy takes a lot more investment to realize than we ever bargained for, and many people yearn more to war for their own ideologies than to work at compromise in order to bring about freedom and peace. Throw off the tyranny of a dictator and people don’t necessarily vote for freedom, they may vote instead for leaders who vow to eliminate the putative sources of their “problems”.

So has Bush abandoned his core belief that people yearn for freedom. No. But it has been tempered by the brutal reality of the real world.

You may ask how can Bush be deluded into thinking the Palestinians will ever really want peace? Well, maybe he has always been deluded by his belief that people deeply yearn for freedom — and peace. And maybe he has long been deluded that he can work with people — like Yeltsin, Musharraf — and now Mahmoud Abbas.

But maybe now he also understands the situation better and can leverage the different players into at least a mediocre solution that brings a measure of stability and can begin a process of draining those fever-swamps. So, let’s at least see where this “process” leads us before we dismiss this as simply political expediency or legacy building.

Some say why should we even start a peace process as long as the Palestinians refuse to even acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

But apparently Abbas is ready to do this (otherwise this whole exercise is pointless). The problem is that he can’t say so publicly. He’s already lost Gaza to Hamas, and he could lose the West Bank if he talks freely about such things.

So he doesn’t and instead we work on the “peace process” with the idea that Abbas needs our help to strengthen his position until the momentum allows him to change his public statements. Yes, history gives us real reason to be concerned here, but time does change things and Abbas is NOT Arafat.

Anyway, here’s an analysis that shows how complicated all this is and why there’s much more to it than simply waiting for the Palestinians to first do something on their side — see here.

Given the many complications and the weakness of both Olmert and Abbas, I’m not exactly expecting much to come of this latest peace process, but neither am I worried that Bush is making matters any worse — and in the mean time he is able to leverage his work on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to get support he needs from Arab governments in other areas. To me then, it’s worth it to try.

Jacoby claims something worse than the second intifada could result, but if something does happen, it was going to happen regardless of any “peace process” happening or not — radicals will use any excuse they can find to launch their wars.

From my point of view, the original Bush Doctrine made this whole complicated mess of a region easier to understand and deal with. We simply told people to get on our side or else. Unfortunately, that didn’t work. The mess in Iraq forced us to change our policy there, and the mess in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has made us change our policy there as well.

If we ever want to win, we just have to learn to adapt to the complications of war, life, or… peace. If the neocons haven’t figured this out yet, then I’m afraid their time is over.