The problem with appeasement is that it does not work. If it did, it might be tolerable. Sure, you give up your self-respect: You are the secretary of state of the world’s greatest power and you are summoned by the Russian foreign minister from India to Geneva for a 2 a.m. meeting because he’s got a date, you see, in Brazil(!) the next day. But you can swallow all that. Because you get peace.
The problem is, you don’t get peace. The administration thought it had solved the Iraq crisis by offering Saddam Hussein “carrots” and letting the Russians reclaim a place at the Middle East table. Wrong. The crisis will not go away.
Why? Because Hussein wants his weapons of mass destruction and will keep thwarting inspectors. And he wants to start shipping oil.
The Russians, French and Chinese are on his side. And now, under the Russia-Iraq deal that we legitimized by relying upon it to avert a showdown last week, Russia has used its newfound status to campaign openly for subverting the inspections and overthrowing the sanctions.
The campaign is bolder than ever. For years we have quietly acquiesced to Russian obstructionism on Iraq. Now Russia has seized the initiative and we are the obstructionists, trying desperately to fend off Russian proposals that will make inspections even more farcical than they already are.
The crisis is ongoing because Hussein knows he is dealing with a weak president who answered previous provocations, such as Hussein’s wiping out the CIA-backed Iraqi opposition in northern Iraq, with absurd pinpricks–e.g., bombing an empty building at night–and a declaration of American victory.
Hussein also knows that he’s dealing with a weak secretary of state who in March says that any misstep by Hussein will lead to a cutoff of the oil (200 million barrels a year) he is allowed to export under the “humanitarian” loophole. But in November, as soon as Hussein serves up a real provocation–expelling American arms inspectors–she offers to increase Iraq’s oil exports by 50 percent if he will just be nice.
The most disgraceful part of this exercise, however, is the turning of a friend and ally into a sacrificial lamb. In the appeasement script you don’t just sacrifice a lamb to the enemy. You blame the lamb for not going more willingly. At Munich, the allies were very cross with the Czechs for trying to stay out of Germany’s death grip and thus jeopardizing “peace in our time.”
Now, the Clinton administration has shamefully turned on Israel for exacerbating the Iraq crisis.
This is patent nonsense. This crisis, which began with the invasion of Kuwait and continues because Hussein wants weapons of mass destruction, has as little to do with Benjamin Netanyahu as it does with Mobutu Sese Seko, and he’s dead. The administration, bereft both of policy and nerve in dealing with Hussein, is nonetheless trying to distract attention onto Israel.
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Thus Tom Friedman of The New York Times, parroting the state department yet again, writes that the problem in the Middle East is too much “Saddamism” and too little (Yitzhak) “Rabinism,” i.e., the problem in the Middle East is a twin problem: Saddam Hussein and Bibi Netanyahu.
This is a faithful, uncoded elaboration of the administration line. On Friday, President Clinton delivered the coded version: Beginning with “In recent weeks, as Iraq has challenged the United Nations,” just so you know he’s talking about the crisis with Hussein, he goes on to declare that “the absence of peace between Israel and her neighbors”–read: Netanyahu’s obstructionism–“compounds” and “makes more troubling” the “other difficulties, tensions and frustrations” in the region (i.e., the Iraq crisis: see above).
Anyone who follows the Middle East understands the message here: Iraq problem compounded by Israel problem. And we all know who’s responsible for the Israel problem. American presidents are constrained from indicting Israeli prime ministers by name. That’s where Times columnists come in handy.
This is truly disgraceful. It is one thing for the administration to argue–incorrectly in my view–that Netanyahu has not lived up to Oslo. (In fact, he simply said that so long as the other side refuses to keep its non-violence commitments, Israel is under no obligation to carry out more of its commitments.) It is quite another to imply that somehow if only Israel would immolate itself in accord with Arab demands, we’d be able to make Hussein lose his taste for botulism and anthrax.
This is conduct unbecoming a great nation. In the middle of a self-compounded crisis with Iraq, to scapegoat Israel is not just morally obtuse and factually wrong. It is an admission of bankruptcy.