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Also in this section:
Shaking
Things Up - In Mideast, Who Needs 'Stability'?
By JONATHAN FOREMAN
August 19, 2002
You can hardly open a newspaper or turn on a news channel
without coming across some foreign policy notable who thinks we shouldn't
go to war with Iraq because, even if we can somehow win without triggering
Armageddon,fighting Saddam Hussein will "destabilize" the Middle
East.
It's taken for granted that that would be a bad thing - that "destabilizing"
the region will somehow make things worse either for us or for the people
who live there. But this is not necessarily true.
As Ralph Peters recently argued in a powerful essay for the U.S. Army journal Parameters, stability abroad - though a long-term obsession of the foreign-policy establishment - isn't always in America's interests. And it's certainly not in the interests of the hundreds of millions of people who live under the yoke of oppressive, undemocratic third world regimes. This is particularly the case in the Middle East, an area that arguably suffers from far too much stability.
Not that you would know this from listening to the unholy
alliance of stability worshipers that today comprises senior State Department
officials, the editors of The New York Times, a Colin Powellite
cadre of
isolationist/obsessively risk-averse generals at the Pentagon and now
a coterie of prominent Republicans notable for their cynicism and wrongheadedness
on the subject of foreign policy.
(It's worth pointing out that the latter include not just
paid flacks for the Saudi princes - and we know how much they benefit
from stability at least on their own doorstep - but also some of the men
who let the Syrians and Iranians get away with murdering Americans for
20 years and worked to keep Saddam Hussein in power.)
Look, for instance, at the most recent developments in the
Palestinian territories. There, Yasser Arafat is trying to get Hamas to
join a coalition government even while Hamas insists on its right to murder
civilians, and calls openly for the total destruction of Israel. The last
thing the Palestinians actually need is a coalition
government that includes psychotic fundamentalists. What they do need
is an outright civil war - like the one fought by Ireland's Michael Collins
against IRA extremists in the 1920s - that will destroy those very fundamentalists.
Because there is absolutely no chance of peace with Israel
so long as groups like Hamas - whose irredentist claims justify the deliberate
murder of children - are calling the shots in the Palestinian territories.
And for that matter, the defeat of Saddam would have deeply salutary effects on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By marking the destruction of the strongest and most strident Arab tyranny, it would discourage the sponsors of terror in Damascus and Riyadh, and almost certainly take the wind out of the hysterical blood-maddened maximalism that seems to have captured the Palestinian collective consciousness.
Indeed, a victory against Saddam by the democratic West (in the form of America) after a war opposed by all the other ghastly Arab regimes (plus Iran) might be just what is needed to shake the region's tyrants loose.
Such military defeats can have enormous moral effects:
Look at the collapse of the brutal Argentine military junta after its
defeat in the Falklands. The episode led to destabilatization - and then
to the
return of democracy.
And who would mourn the passing say of the Assad regime that has controlled Syria and much of Lebanon for so long? Surely only the Assad family and its cronies. The same goes for the House of Saud.
Of course, there's no guarantee that destabilizing the region by smashing Saddam would give birth to liberal democracies, or even that the advent of democracy would give rise to peaceable, prosperous states.
But it might at least give the unfortunate peoples of the Middle East a chance to control their own destinies that they presently lack. And given that so many of region's regimes are at least covertly hostile to America, it's hard to see what harm the loss of stability there would do to the United States.