Scowcroft and Brzezinski See Another Unique Opportunity For Peace In The Middle East

Shmuel Rosner writes about the column in today's Washington Post written by Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. There is not much new in their approach that settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to peace in the Middle East.

What Rosner points out in particular is their conclusion that:

in many ways the current situation is such that the opportunity for success has never been greater, or the costs of failure more severe.

Naturally, since we are talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Scowcroft and Brzezinski are short on facts to back up their claim.

Maybe their writing is simply a result of how they see the Middle East.

Last year Brzezinski spoke at the America in the World Conference, where he spoke about the need to address

the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it is poisoning the political atmosphere in the Middle East. It is generating more and more hostility towards the United States. And only people in a state of denial would disagree with that because the fact is anyone you talk to in the Middle East finds that to be one of the reasons for this more pervasive anti-Americanism which al Qaeda and groups like it can exploit. [emphasis added]

But in contrast, at February's 5th Annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum, Tamara Cofman Wittes noted:

The lack of a fire-breathing Amr Moussa or Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi on the program certainly made a difference. But changes in the region and in U.S. policy also help explain the slackening of the resentment that has accompanied our past years’ discussions on America’s role in the Muslim Middle East.

More bizarre is a discussion noted in The Washington Post in October 2005:

Scowcroft, in his interview, discussed an argument over Iraq he had two years ago with Condoleezza Rice, then-national security adviser and current secretary of state. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. The article stated that with a "barely perceptible note of satisfaction," Scowcroft added: "But we've had fifty years of peace." [emphasis added]

Fifty years of peace in the Middle East?

James Taranto wrote at the time:

Now let's see. Between 1953 and 2003, here are the Mideast wars we can think of off the top of our head: the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, the two Palestinian intifadas against Israel, the Algerian Civil War, the Yemen Civil War and two Sudanese civil wars. That doesn't even count acts of terror against non-Mideastern countries, from the Iranian invasion of the U.S. Embassy to the attacks of 9/11.

What do you call someone who describes this as "50 years of peace"? A "realist."

But let's go a step further and put aside wars involving Israel. Raphael Patai, in an updated chapter in his bookThe Arab Mind has his own list of Arab conflicts--not including Israel--taking into account just during the 13 years from 1970 to 1983:

1. Intermittent disputes involving border warfare and assassinations between South Yemen on the one hand, and North Yemen and Saudi Arabia, on the other since the early 1970's. A brief but fierce border war between the two Yemens took place as recently as March, 1979.

2. A major and bloody, albeit brief, conflict between Jordan and Palestinian guerrillas in 1970, complicated by Syrian intervention.

3. Fighting between the Kurds and the Iraqis, which lasted several years.

4. A bloody conflict between Northern and Southern Sudan, 1956-1972.

5. Clashes between South Yemen and Oman, linked to the Dhofar rebellion, 1972-1976.

6. A tripartite conflict between Algeria on the one hand and Morocco and Mauritania, on the other, over the control of the former Spanish Sahara, beginning in 1976 and subsequently transformed into guerrilla warfare against Morocco by the Polisario, the freedom fighters of the Western Sahara, supported by Algeria and Libya, which was still in progress in 1982.

7. Intermittent hostility, and actual border fighting, including air attacks, between Egypt and Libya in 1977.

8. The Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975, involving two outside parties, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization, still unresolved in early 1982.

9. The invasion of Chad by Libya in 1980.

10. The war between Iraq and Iran, which began in the fall of 1980, in which Iraq is supported by Jordan and Iran by Syria, making it in effect, an inter-Arab conflict. It was still in progress in early 1982.

11. In February, 1982, a conflict flared up between the Syrian government and Muslim fundamentalists in the Syrian city of Hama, in which several thousands were killed and major parts of Hama were destroyed. [p.357-358]

Scowcroft and Brzezinski share a worldview that appears to be based more on what they would like to see done in the Middle East than on the way things actually are. Or maybe their optimism for a unique opportunity for change in the Middle East is merely a case of Obama fever.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

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