The Arab-Israeli conflict has become increasingly a part of the much larger struggle between radical Islam and the West. Iran is more determined than ever to achieve regional hegemony.
Follow this link to Download Full Report (85pp. - 2M pdf file).
The following excerpt is from the Executive Summary by Dore Gold ...
The Middle East has undergone revolutionary changes in the last few years that require a serious reassessment of how the region's myriad problems should be addressed.
For most of the 1990s it was the conventional wisdom that the key to regional stability was to be found in the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict ....with a diplomatic investment of a few years, it was hoped, it would be possible to conclude a region-wide peace agreement that included Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab states.
However... it has become clear that radical Islamic militancy, which had been organizationally led by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, transferred many of its main centers of operation to the Middle East after the fall of the Taliban regime. This was especially noticeable in the area of western Iraq and in several neighboring countries. Thus, it was becoming increasingly difficult to argue that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the root cause of regional instability. Indeed, the immediate historical roots of radical Islam could be traced to two events that had nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict: the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the 1989 defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan that spawned al-Qaeda.
Now radical Islam is gaining strength among the Palestinians with the victory of Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary elections of the Palestinian Authority. This was the first time an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood has seized power in the core of the Middle East. The hostility of Hamas toward Israel cannot be ameliorated through diplomacy or by means of a fair territorial compromise. Hamas and its allies completely reject a negotiated solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and align themselves with jihadi organizations across the region. As a result, the Arab-Israeli conflict has become increasingly a part of the much larger struggle between radical Islam and the West.
With the emergence for the first time of a Shiite-dominated Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran sensed that it now has an historic opportunity to emerge as the dominant power in the entire Middle East, projecting its influence to neighboring Shiite communities and reaching out to the Sunni Arab street over the heads of current governments....
....The Iranian drive for new great power status has been driven by the ideological orientation of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has rejuvenated the energy behind the original 1979 Islamic Revolution. He has underscored that he firmly believes in an impending Shiite apocalyptic scenario and, as a result, he does not seem to be influenced by the same considerations of deterrence that affected the calculations of the superpowers during the Cold War. He has put in place an Iranian government manned by fellow former Revolutionary Guards, many of whom share his ideological outlook. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps - and its Quds Force in particular - has been a critical instrument for spreading Iranian political-military influence across the Middle East, from Lebanon to Sudan, and most recently in Iraq.
It would be a cardinal error to see the rise of Sunni and Shiite militancy as completely separate developments that cannot influence one another and do not cooperate. Iran sought to make inroads with the Islamist regime in Sudan in the 1990s. It has backed Sunni organizations like Palestinian Islamic Jihad for years and is now emerging as the most significant source of support for Hamas. The 9/11 Commission details Iranian cooperation with al-Qaeda. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the butcher of Iraqi Shiites during the insurgency, was provided refuge and support by the Iranian regime when he evacuated Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. In order for Iran to assume a leadership role in the Islamic world, it must reach out beyond the Shiite communities of the world, which account for only 15 percent of all Muslims, and ally itself with Sunni movements, as well.
Yet while Iran seeks greater influence in the Sunni-dominated states, the Iraq War has exacerbated Sunni-Shiite tensions across the Middle East, leading Sunni leaders like Jordan's King Abdullah to openly talk about the dangers of a Shiite crescent encircling the core of the Middle East. And in anticipation of a U.S. pullback from Iraq, the Saudi Arabian leadership has voiced its concern regarding the prospect that Iraqi Shiites intend to ethnically cleanse Iraq of its Sunni minority population with Iranian backing.
As a result, the Sunni-Shiite rivalry is likely to emerge as the central axis of conflict in the Middle East in the years to come. Given this new strategic context, the U.S. and its Western allies have enormous leverage with the threatened Sunni Arab states. As a consequence, the West does not have to pay for their cooperation in Israeli coin. Moreover, Saudi Arabia's continuing support for radical jihadi movements among Sunnis needs to be carefully monitored and addressed.
It is striking that while these revolutionary changes are transpiring, many Western policy-makers seem to be locked into ideas for stabilizing the Middle East that were conceived more than a decade ago under completely different regional circumstances. This problem was particularly glaring in the report of the Iraq Study Group Commission, chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, that sought to accommodate Iran (as well as its Syrian ally) and increase pressure on Israel to reach a settlement with its most radicalized neighbors.
From the analysis that follows, new principles of Western policy become necessary that reflect the new realities of the Middle East:
- Iran is more determined than ever to achieve regional hegemony in the Middle East and is fueling regional instability across the entire area. ....
- The primary threat to the Sunni Arab states now clearly comes from Iran....Indeed, Israel and the Sunni Arabs may have many common threat perceptions. The resulting coincidence of their security interests ....might warrant low level discussions between Israel and its neighbors about how to address the threats that they face.
- There is no short-term diplomatic option for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict....
- The stabilization of the Middle East requires the neutralization of any of the components of the current radical Islamic wave. In this sense, it doesn't matter if Sunni or Shiite organizations are defeated, for the failure of any one of the elements in the present wave will weaken the other elements as well. The defeat of Hamas among the Palestinians or Hizballah in Lebanon would constitute an enormous setback for Iran.
- Israel has a continuing need for defensible borders. ... were Israel pressured to concede the Jordan Valley, for example, it would likely expose itself to a steep increase in infiltration to the strategic West Bank...the vacuum such a move created would increasingly attract global jihadi groups to Jordan, thereby undermining the stability of the Hashemite kingdom, and ultimately the region as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment