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Now deal, or no-deal, with enemies?

Thursday, September 2, 2010

"MAJOR COMBAT OPERATIONS in Iraq have ended”, said the President.

No, not this President. Rather, that was the previous one, George W Bush, speaking ... his infamous proclamation from the deck of aircraft-carrier Abraham Lincoln back in May 2003. Few of our media outlets could resist pointing up the obvious, chiming and repetitive echo in presidential messages while reporting Barack Obama’s address to the nation this week (above left).

President Number 44 differed from Number 43 in semantics, adopting a formula saying it is now America’s “combat mission” (a less specific, more generalized notion than “operations”, perhaps?) that has ended.

The current president also tweaked the tone visually as well as verbally. Far from coincidentally, the Oval Office backdrop had been given a makeover during the First Family vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, with calmer, “no-drama Obama” shades of tan replacing the gaudy gold color-scheme of the Bush years.

But far more telling in the broader context of the week’s diplomatic developments, was another hark-back to Bush seven years ago – one that news archivists haven’t been at pains to retrieve.

I’m thinking of a jaw-dropping justification that Number 43 voiced then for going to war against Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t delivered to the nation from the Oval Office, but at the annual award-giving dinner of the conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute, just three weeks before hostilities were launched.

Bush said: “The passing of Saddam Hussein's regime will deprive terrorist networks of a wealthy patron” - which was, just about, an arguable contention. But he also went on to claim more broadly, and much less credibly, that his war would “begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress toward a truly democratic Palestinian state.”

And as it has turned out, within a day of Obama setting his own seal on the end of Bush’s military misadventure, he has been hosting Israeli and Palestinian leaders (above right). They've conferred separately before the face-to-face talks begin today under the Obama State Department’s nervous stewardship, focusing on those very issues Bush raised so optimistically -- Middle Eastern peace and Palestinian statehood. How much, we must ask, has Bush’s bellicose intervention in the region helped with those tough issues?

The clear answer is not a jot. But it would be wrong to blame his miscalculations, as stupidly off-mark as they were, for all the difficulties now confronting these talks.

 

It’s the Obama Administration’s own Bush-like myopia (which is, like his, triggered by the hot-button term “terrorism”) that has pre-installed an essential weakness at the heart of today’s renewed peace-making summit.

 

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GEORGE MITCHELL, THE SUMMIT’s prep-chef appointed by Obama last year, only one day after his White House term began, inadvertently but revealingly alluded to this very weakness himself. We can maybe call it The Irish Analogy.

With the indulgently amused diplomatic press corps in attendance (embarrassingly for other journalists following the story) the former Senator recalled his peacemaking efforts in Northern Ireland. He cited them, of course, as an encouraging precedent for the current Middle East initiative. And they did represent, after all, a signal achievement when he worked for President Bill Clinton - and interestingly had assistance from an often under-acknowledged participant in the Irish scenario, his current nominal boss at State, Secretary Hillary Clinton.

Mitchell joked to the press that both in his Irish endeavors, and in his already exhaustingly lengthy cajoling of Israelis and Palestinians toward today’s negotiating table, the slowness of the process was like a housepainter who assiduously prepares and primes his work-area before its final painting - which, in a bit of a stretch, he claimed could then (and presumably also now) get finished very rapidly.

Those of us who have closely observed and reported on both peace struggles must point out that there is one very big difference between the two cases - the glaring omission of a major player in the Middle East drama, Hamas – the Islamist faction which, like it or not, rules the Gaza subdivision of the Palestinian territories.

 

A VITAL ELEMENT TO THE SUCCESS scored in the Irish arena was the inclusion at an early stage of the previously shunned terrorists – the Irish Republican Army (or at least its thinly-separated political wing, Sinn Fein) which once ruled distinct stretches of Northern Ireland, then called “no-go areas” - in other words neighborhoods that were barred to the official security forces. Sinn Fein's negotiating delegation was led by Martin McGuinness, who later became a government minister, but whom I first knew when we both ran around such an IRA no-go area in the city of Derry, he wielding his ArmaLite rifle, I bearing my reporter's notebook.

 

By complete contrast, in today's Arab-Israeli maneuverings Hamas is resolutely being excluded from the process. Not unnaturally, the movement is for its part disdaining the idea of any talks.

On the eve of the Washington meeting, Hamas’ armed wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, reminded everyone of its unwelcome but undeniable role in the ongoing crisis by brutally killing four Israeli settlers in the West Bank - and the shared reaction of negotiators was, predictably, to simply insist that the murders would not affect the peace talks at all.

When Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American commentator who co-founded the website Electronic Intifada, wrote a New York Times OpEd article this week, making direct comparisons between the IRA and Hamas and arguing for the latter’s inclusion in negotiations, the age-old protests of politicians everywhere (in this case mainly Israeli and American) that “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” were angrily raised again.
 

 

THE TRUTH IS  (and our Irish experience bears this out once more) we do negotiate with terrorists – ideally from a position of counter-insurgency strength and with a cease-fire in place, but in all cases with a realistic sense of what their role actually is, and how much power - or how little - they actually wield.

I’m reminded that John Hume, whom I've known even longer than McGuinness, and who earned a Nobel Prize for his work bringing peace to Northern Ireland, provided some firm advice last year when writing a letter to The Times (of London) along with a group of fellow international peacemakers:

“We have learnt first-hand that there is no substitute for direct and sustained negotiations with all [my emphasis] parties to a conflict and rarely if ever a durable peace without them. Isolation only bolsters hardliners and their policies of intransigence.”

Hume and the others concluded: “Engaging Hamas does not amount to condoning terrorism or attacks on civilians. In fact, it is a precondition for security and for brokering a workable agreement.”

Hume’s co-laureate David Trimble (representing Northern Irish pro-British unionism, to Hume’s Irish nationalism) has been more circumspect about the broad argument, saying (rightly, I'd say) that the applicability of Irish lessons to the rest of the world must be seen as limited. Mitchell himself has said as much (since presenting his not fully convincing painter parallel) and has more carefully now emphasized that "there are analogous, not identical and not directly comparable conditions".

 

Even Trimble, however, has also acknowledged the importance of what he called the “pull factor”, the drawing of the enemy’s militants into the political process.

Those now closeted in Foggy Bottom are relying on a stance of bolting the shutters to keep Hamas out. A little “pull factor” is the last thing we can expect to see being reported.  But it will have to happen at some point.

 

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