The
victory of John Kerry in the Democratic Party primaries following
Super Tuesday this week leads to an observation. To a remarkable
degree, the urgent desire to deny George W. Bush a second term
in the White House has papered over the schisms in the broad Democrat
church, even enticing many members of renegade sects back into
the fold.
A
lesser tenet in the "anybody but Bush" catechism is
that a Democrat, any Democrat, would perforce clean up the mess
that Bush has made in the Middle East. At first, those candidates
who are incumbent congressmen shied away from substantive criticism
of the Bush administration's Iraqi adventure or its imperial "forward
strategy of freedom" for the Arab-Islamic world. Then, to
blunt the appeal of Vermont Governor Howard Dean to party activists,
Washington Democratic insiders gradually adopted his rhetoric.
To
launch a war against Iraq without key European allies was to "blunder
down the false road of empire," intoned Kerry at the Council
on Foreign Relations in December 2003. Democratization of the
Middle East, Kerry continued, "must be rooted in the aspirations
of the people who live there, not in Republican political ideology."
The Kerry campaign's website echoes another standard Democratic
line by accusing Bush of "ignoring or downplaying" the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perhaps such statements are just
shots of vanilla syrup for the latte-sipping liberals who, in
the era of Bush, have licensed themselves to think more deeply
about America's role in the world. But in 2004, maybe even more
than in other recent presidential campaigns, that is not the point.
During
the 1996 and 2000 campaigns, a sizable number of progressives,
some under the banner of Ralph Nader and some not, preached that
there was not "a dime's worth of difference" between
Republicans and Democrats on most major issues of the day. On
Middle East policy, particularly as regards the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, the case is not much harder to make than in the past.
If many Americans believe that the Bush administration has drawn
the US perilously close to the strategic vision of Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon for Israel-Palestine, the fact is that few
in the Democratic establishment have objected.
As
if to underscore the point, Brown University's Students for Israel
recently published a brief article by Kerry under the title "The
Cause of Israel Is the Cause of America." Of his own trip
to Israel, the Massachusetts senator wrote: "I went as a
friend by conviction; I returned a friend at the deepest personal
level."
Last
week, Kerry defended Israel's right to build its West Bank separation
barrier after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed eight people
in Jerusalem. "Israel's security fence is a legitimate act
of self-defense," he said. This contrasted with an earlier
statement he made to an Arab-American audience last fall, where
he described it as a "barrier to peace." At a meeting
last Sunday with the leaders of 40 American Jewish organizations,
Kerry expanded on the policies he would pursue in the Middle East.
According to one participant, "he painted a picture that
a Kerry presidency would be more engaged" on Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations.
Expressions
of near filial attachment to Israel are common for big-league
presidential candidates. Arguably, Kerry never went as far as
Al Gore, who regaled the crowd at the annual American Israel Public
Affairs Committee policy dinner in May 2000 with the story of
a meeting between Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion,
and US Ambassador Ogden Reid. When Reid arrived to find Ben-Gurion
standing on his head practicing yoga, he quickly followed suit
so that the men could begin their discussion. Gore extracted the
following moral: "Even if the world is turned upside down,
the United States and Israel will see eye to eye."
By
themselves, pro-Israel electioneering and other generalities of
the campaign trail do not reveal a candidate's policy predilections.
Such glorified talking points as the "plan for winning the
peace in Iraq" on Kerry's website are intended more to immunize
the candidate from Republican criticism that he has no plan than
to assert what he would actually do as president. After all, if
Bush's handlers have their way, by the end of the summer voters
will believe that most of Kerry's plans -- "returning to
the international community," "transferring political
power" and "rebuilding Iraqi security forces" --
are missions accomplished.
It
is more instructive to look at the foreign policy advisers whom
the major candidates are consulting. Both Kerry and North Carolina
Senator John Edwards, who until Tuesday was Kerry's sole remaining
challenger, are allied with one-time policymakers from the two
Clinton administrations. The most prominent one, in Kerry's case,
is former Defense Secretary William Perry and was, for Edwards,
the former US ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke.
To
be sure, there are differences between the Middle East outlooks
of Clintonite neo-liberals and the neo-conservatives who infamously
came to dominate foreign policy decision-making in the Bush White
House. Distinctions are apparent in Kerry's suggestion that he
would dispatch Bill Clinton himself to broker a new accord between
Israel and the Palestinians. The Bush approach of alternately
sending low-level envoys or none at all has essentially allowed
Sharon to drive events. Kerry's Council on Foreign Relations speech
also contained a pledge to pursue "a realistic, non-confrontational
policy" toward Iran -- a slap at the neo-conservatives' belligerent
"axis of evil" coinage. But could Kerry really go back
to Clinton's policies if he takes office in January 2005?
On
the two central Middle East policy questions of the 1990s, both
the subject of perennial vacillation on the part of Clinton, as
Bush would say: "We acted." Partly because the US refused
to intervene positively, the Oslo "peace process" was
destroyed. Even though Bush committed the US more explicitly than
ever before to the creation of a Palestinian state, the two-state
solution envisioned at Oslo now appears to be the least likely
outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein
was overthrown and the US is the main occupying power.
Perhaps
most crucially, the September 11, 2001 attacks awakened Americans
to the possible consequences of 35 years of bipartisan winking
at both "moderate" authoritarian Arab regimes and the
Israeli occupation. The crisis management that characterized US
Middle East policy under both Democrats and Republicans is a harder
sell than it was before most Americans knew of the crisis. Meanwhile,
the neo-conservatives, in perhaps unconscious homage to their
Marxist intellectual roots, "sharpened the contradictions"
in the structural crisis inherent in the Middle East in order
to resolve it, but only succeeded in making things worse.
Should
Kerry prevail at the polls, Middle East policy will remain a major
political issue, but it will be difficult to spin him as an innocent
stuck with Bush's mess. Kerry (like Edwards) gave the White House
carte blanche for its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Iraq he
offers no convincing "exit strategy." Nor has he shown
any leadership in opposing the Bush administration's coddling
of Sharon. Recall that Kerry leapt eagerly at Dean's throat when
he prescribed an otherwise anodyne "evenhandedness"
for US diplomacy toward Israel and the Palestinians.
A
Democratic presidency would certainly clip the neo-conservatives'
wings, but it would hold no visible prospect for deep structural
change in US Middle East policy. Regarding the region, perhaps
the greatest hopes of a Democratic presidency are that the essential
continuities between the parties will be exposed, and that Americans
will finally demand politicians willing to address the multiple
hearts of the matter.
Chris
Toensing is editor of Middle East Report, published by
the Middle East Research and Information Project. He wrote this
commentary for the Daily Star.
