You broker it, you buy it - US policy on the Middle East

The problem with common sense is not only, as Voltaire said, that it is not so common, but that it is often wrong. Much analysis of the recent shift in U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict is a case in point. While some of its errors reflect recent misjudgments by U.S. policymakers, others are wholly original - and the combination has begun to elicit some of the most seductive, but worst policy advice on the Middle East that any administration has received in years. As a result, it is not obvious whether it is the peace process that stands closer to the well worn "edge of the abyss", or U.S. policy toward it.

The usual cast of policy experts on this topic overwhelmingly agrees that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's August 6 speech presages a far more active and substantive U.S. role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations than has been the case since the August 1993 signing of the Oslo accords. That role, it is said, has come none too soon, for it is understood as an act of contrition for excessive U.S. diplomatic passivity since the brokering of the Hebron accord of January 15, an achievement widely hailed as having saved the peace process largely because it presaged greater U.S. involvement.

The current common sense also builds prediction onto interpretation. The United States has now taken up two of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's peace process demands: that the by-now counterproductive incremental logic of the Oslo process give way to immediate negotiation over final status issues such as borders, refugees, and Jerusalem; and that the Palestinian fulfillment of its security-related obligations precede such a negotiation. But Washington has done so, it is believed, only to "get at" the rectification of Israel's own sins, which the administration is said privately to view as equal to if not greater than those of the Palestinian Authority (PA). So if the PA does take its security commitments more seriously, it will mark the opening act of a drama scripted to pass quickly into a withering, though of course well intentioned, barrage of U.S. pressure on Israel. As an old friend puts it: Before you knife someone in the back, you first have to get behind him.(1)

Opinions divide over whether the coming U.S.-Israeli ordeal, like many before it, will be on balance a good thing for Israelis, Palestinians, and the United States; or, more pointedly, over whether it will be good for only some of the above. Many influential observers - from a coterie of former high officials to the editors of the Washington Post - believe that all will benefit, the more so and the more quickly if the United States endorses Palestinian statehood as a lever with which to bend a final status negotiation into a permanently successful diplomatic structure.

This, then, is the latest dose of common sense: that the United States is prepared to push hard; that it is Israel that will mainly get pushed, and rightly so; and that if certain American words about Palestinian statehood are intoned in the process, everyone will be the better off for it. But, as Ira Gershwin once put it, "It ain't necessarily so."

As to the first proposition, the current common sense expects too much; Arafat may flunk the security test, and the administration's immediate goal may be not to make a quick peace, but to make Labor Party leader Ehud Barak prime minister of Israel. Either eventuality will diminish the anticipated American diplomatic profile.

As to the second, that Israel will not only be pushed hard but deserve its pushing, this is an error inherited from officialdom. The Netanyahu government has hardly been blameless for peace process woes, but much less so since the Hebron accord than before it. It is Chairman Arafat who has been stiffarming the peace process lately, yet many U.S. officials, seemingly caught in a diplomatic version of the Stockholm Syndrome, keep finding ways to "understand" the Palestinians and blame the Israelis.

As to the emerging third element of the current common sense, the advice that Washington should endorse Palestinian statehood as a means to a final Arab-Israeli peace, it is very bad. Since we may hear it in future, both in coming weeks and beyond, and since it stands to do much damage if adopted, it is a point that deserves special attention.

If the common sense is right about the expansive swath of current U.S. policy ambitions, that would be most unfortunate. There are several reasons why the United States should keep a safe distance from the key substantive details of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but the most important is that if Washington were to succeed in brokering a final status accord with itself enthroned as guarantor, it would inherit responsibility for the inevitably fragile outcome. That great powers are obligated to what their power brings into being is as close to a law as anything international politics has to offer. So, too, if the United States were to endorse Palestinian statehood, it would become responsible, literally, for a semi-sovereign Palestinian state no less than, through Dayton, it has become responsible for a vulnerable rump-Bosnia.

This does not mean that the United States should oppose Palestinian statehood if the local protagonists agree to it. But there is a world of difference between accepting a result that emerges from the regional principals themselves and pressing for such a result in order to shoehorn a recalcitrant party into acceding to it. An American endorsement of Palestinian statehood, were it of this latter variety, would be calamitous for at least three reasons.

First of all, Washington would bind itself to a very costly and frustrating exercise in "nation-building." If a Palestinian state were to harbor too many ambitions and bad habits, or simply display too much general incompetence, the United States would be pressed to do for Palestinians what it tried (unsuccessfully) to do for Haitians and Nicaraguans in the 1920s and 1930s - only this time under circumstances in which major interests are at stake and in which every false step would be diplomatically parboiled in the Middle Eastern sun. These are hardly fanciful anticipations; as serious a danger to the peace process as the collapse of Israeli-Palestinian trust is the possible collapse of the Palestinian Authority itself. Arafat and his "Tunisian" outsiders are trying to impose a standard Arab strongman regime on a population that is not reconciled to it. It is a population mobilized by the intifada, hardened through years of military occupation, and wide-eyed from gazing at close range for thirty years on the institutions of Israeli democracy. Moreover, only Arafat can run the crazy-quilt system of authority he has built, and when he passes from the scene - if not before - the prospect for a Hobbeseanesque internal collapse is all too real.

Becoming primarily responsible for dealing with such a collapse is something the U.S. government should avoid. Whatever we may call what we do to commute the obligations of great power guarantor, we will have taken sides in intra-Palestinian and inter-Arab conflicts whose minimal range will encompass Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as the West Bank and Gaza. Angry people may be counted upon to shoot and bomb us, compromising sharply the American ability to palliate the array of Arab-Israeli troubles that are bound to endure into the future. Nor will the specter of Americans policing Arabs in Palestine have a positive impact on U.S. relations with the Arab Gulf states, a strategically vital region in which we already have a full quota of challenges.

Becoming principally or substantially responsible for a Palestinian state's internal order and external relations would also endlessly complicate U.S. relations with Israel and with Jordan, the latter being a more important ally than is often recognized and a country whose long-term stability is more vulnerable to Palestinian irredentism than is Israel's. Just imagine the political fallout of a terror bombing in Jerusalem after a U.S.brokered and guaranteed final status accord. Israel demands answers and justice according to the new peace treaty; the new Filastin Arab Republic discounts responsibility or foreknowledge and blames Hamas operatives in Amman; Jordan cracks down on its Palestinian refugee camps only to find them seething with pro-Filastin rebellion, complete with provoking agents and smuggled literature; and all turn to the United States for judgment and diplomatic recompense. Having become responsible for peace, even when the local partners may occasionally doubt its benefits and sideswipe its rules, Washington would soon learn that the only thing worse than trying to mitigate such horrors from afar is having to manage them up close.

Finally, America-as-guarantor of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement would raise expectations for a final, stable peace beyond those that even the wisest ensemble of diplomats could satisfy. Thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict often suffers from a kind of "endism", to employ the useful phrase coined by Samuel Huntington in these pages, according to which it is imagined that if Israel signs formal peace agreements with all its Arab neighbors, the sinews of geopolitics will suddenly go limp. But many countries enjoying formal arrangements of peace have nevertheless gone to war, and the Arab-Israeli domain is hardly the place to look for immunity from this particular historical truth. All that will be achieved by formal peace agreements, if they are ever signed, is the fulfillment of the Zionist founders' dream to renormalize Jewish history after 1,600 years of exile - except that "normal", by Middle Eastern standards, is hardly synonymous with serene. Not even the U.S. State Department can change this.

The point here is that an American diplomacy that promises more than reality can bear is bound to fail, no matter what incidental good it does along the way. American statesmen can push Israel's difficulties with the Palestinians to a more enlightened level of belligerence, but, because the United States will not countenance heavy costs to solve someone else's problems, they cannot push them to a stable, final peace. Only the vitally interested parties can do that, and both sides are still hesitating over the many political and psychological obstacles blocking the way. That being so, America's measured distance from the conflict is a truly precious asset, one to be guarded closely; it makes a more delicate type of American mediation, which will be needed for years to come, immune to terminally disabling error. As American officials slowly come to terms with the impossibilities of implementing Dayton, it is clear - or it ought to be - that one lunge at a futile diplomatic endism is already one too many.

1 That being Harvey Sicherman, former aide to three secretaries of state, and hence an expert observer of the stilletoist's art.

Adam Garfinkle is executive editor of The National Interest.

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