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Holy Lands, Unholy Wars

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

As I write, the dust from the Qana massacre settles. Hezbollah, supposedly easily cleaned out, sends its rockets ever further into Israel. Israel, destroying Lebanese infrastructure, stops Iranian-Syrian armaments but also humanitarian aid.

Lebanon bleeds. Shiites bleed, the 40 percent Christian population bleeds. Stupidity is rife. My denomination’s presiding bishop and its social policy committees send out constant appeals to the U.S. to stop the killing of Christians in Lebanon. In reply, our ‘Christian’ president and his ‘Christian’ government daily send ‘Christian’ U.S. rockets from ‘Jewish’ Israel to kill Christian Lebanese. Lebanese ‘democracy,’ always in fragile form with its private militias and changing religious coalitions since 1944, now totters. A government of national defense, Hezbollah-dominated, will take over if Fouad Siniora’s elected government falls. As Condolezza Rice waits for the ‘right time’ for a cease-fire, America, which has made ‘democracy’ its slogan but not its practice, destroys what little there was of Middle Eastern democracy through delay.

After the Lebanon-Israel war broke out a few weeks ago, NFP issued the following public policy statement:

NFP calls on the United States to support to the maximum degree efforts to introduce international peacekeepers to prevent the escalation of the war on the border between Israel and Lebanon and, where possible, on the Palestinian-Israeli border. We call on the Nebraska congressional delegation to ask President Bush and Secretary of State Rice to support the findings of the United Nations task force that is presently in the Middle East, and to allow the European Union and Russia, if they are able, to send UN-supervised peacekeepers to the region. We call on the United States not to exercise the veto in the Security Council, but to allow the majority to rule in regard to United Nations Middle Eastern policy.

And we were right.

Despite repeated allegations that the UN would not be accepted, would be impotent, would not have the command structure to maintain peace, the UN can do the job. Polls have found that the United Nations is the only agency that carries wide regional credibility. The Arab League would not satisfy Israel. NATO and the European Union are largely tools of American and European interests. They scare the Arab world. France is too largely anti-Israeli. The UN must do the job.

Nebraska’s Senator Hagel, on July 31, called on the administration to seek an “immediate cease-fire in the Mideast” in the face of President Bush’s call for a ceasefire only when long-lasting peace is certain. Hagel asked how we believed our support for Israel’s destruction of our Arabic friend, Lebanon, would enhance our image or give us ‘trust’ and credibility in the Middle East: “Our relationship with Israel is special and historic… [I]t need not and cannot be at the expense of our Arab and Muslim relationships.”

Next day, newspapers were quick to attribute Bush’s push for United Nations action to Hagel’s rebellion. We ought to thank Hagel. The present resolution, however, has to be stronger. Israel has to get out of Lebanon. Hezbollah has to be moved out of South Lebanon. The arms trade has to stop. Rebuilding has to begin. Policing has to be thorough and objective. A job, clearly, for the UN.

And the reason why a supranational agency such as the UN must do the job is that there are few traditional nation-states (in the Euro-American sense) in the Middle East. Nations did not grow there; they were carved up. Rule of law exists in enclaves, but not in the nation-state units.

The modern Middle East was formed through the British-French 1918 overthrow of an Ottoman Turkish Empire that eschewed attention to the issue of ‘nationhood’ or group affiliation in arranging administrative units. The British and French did the same. The French, given a mandate over the Ottoman Syrian-Lebanese territory, separated Lebanon (a mixed religious area) from Islamic Syria along arbitrary lines. Outsiders, not locals, called the shots. The British similarly installed the Hashemite ‘kings’ in Iraq and Jordan because they had helped against the Turks in WWI. They installed the ‘helpful’ Al Sabah family in Kuwait, in what had once been a semi-independent part of the Turkish Caliphate of Baghdad, for the same reason. The locals counted for nothing. We (i.e., the victors in WWI) put in the tyrants and kept them there. Whatever law existed was clan law or some local version of Islamic law.

Then Standard Oil discovered Middle Eastern oil in Saudi Arabia in 1936, and our Middle Eastern Arab rulers became pawns of our corporations developing oil wealth. To remind them of their pawnhood and send them a message they wouldn’t forget, the CIA toppled the government of Mohammed Mossadegh (the democratically elected prime minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953) and installed the Shah as absolute ruler. Mossadegh’s crime? Resisting western oil companies — threatening to nationalize them when they would not give adequate oil royalties.

We also propped up Saddam Hussein through the Iraq-Iran War. He was our law. The Middle East guys are almost all our guys. Only now they fight.

You ask, “Why do they hate us?”

Because we have installed their tyrants, taken their oil, and deprived them of the opportunity to form nations.

The same goes for Palestine. When the British protectorate in Palestine and the Balfour Declaration made possible Jewish settlements in Palestine, we did not ask the locals already living whether they wanted them or not. The British departure in 1948-1949 made the Jewish declaration of the state of Israel possible, and since then, Israel has remained an American client state, armed by us, protected by us in the United Nations, and propped up by American private and public funds.

In no way is this to say that Israel has no right to exist. Having created the place and allowed — even encouraged — Jewish immigration to Israel, we have an ethical obligation to keep Israel’s borders secure.

In the Mideast, however, the western sense of nation-statehood hardly exists outside of Israel—and it exists in a fragile and complex form even there, because of the diverse national origins and religious backgrounds of its citizens, because of the deep divisions in that society when it is not at war, and because its very large Arab minority (about 20 percent or 1.2 million people) lacks many standard legal and market protections.

Now U.S. rockets fly from Israel to kill Lebanese civilians and Iranian rockets fly from Lebanon to kill Israelis. There is no governing law in the region. The world needs real nation-building.

To propose a UN force is not to propose something doomed to failure. The United Nations has run 60 peacekeeping operations in Israel, on the India/Pakistan border, the North Korea/South Korea border, the Suez border, and in El Salvador, Mozambique, Cambodia, many parts of Africa, the Balkans and so forth. Until we all convert to nonviolence, UN peacekeepers are the last best hope of material peace for humankind. Many of the 60 operations have fully succeeded or at least prevented the outbreak of major hostilities. That is no small feat. When the missions failed to prevent war or genocide — as they did, for instance, in Rwanda — it was largely because they were not armed or lightly so, had few personnel and were undercut by vetoes, by constraints from the international community, or in Rwanda’s case, by President Clinton’s irresolution. We never intended the UN force on the Lebanese border to stop a big war such as we have now.

But we could create a force that would stop it.

The Brahimi report, commissioned by the United Nations and made to the Secretary- General in 2001 by the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy, made recommendations to the Secretary General to improve peacekeeping efforts. It calls for UN forces to have clear mandates, be able to defend themselves, deploy rapidly and fulfill international human rights standards. They are to have a clear force structure so that troops from nations giving troops to the peacekeeping effort would be responsible to a unified command and enabled to take out violators that undermine the agreements. Brahimi also proposed that specially trained brigades from UN member nations be ready to move immediately under UN command. Though the U.S. has generally resisted UN strengthening, further efforts to streamline the UN and make it capable of robust operations have gone on since the report (H. P. Langille, Human Security Fellow, Global Studies, U. of Victoria, “Preparing the United Nations for Rapid Deployment to Protect Civilians," The UN is largely ready.

However, the U.S. has dangerously delayed the cease-fire to let Israel have its day in South Lebanon. Now that world opinion has turned against Israel and its war goes very uneasily, we turn to the UN with meaningless resolutions and threats of a veto for meaningful ones.

We could create an effective UN central command in a decent interval and draw on the peace-enforcing skills of troops from many willing nations. The UN could be empowered to begin community-building and peace-building operations in the Middle East through mediation, dialogue, the development throughout the area of the fundamental institutions of civil society, and the promotion of organizations like “Seeds of Peace.” It could act quickly to stop the flow of weapons to both sides and stop the international profiteering in armaments pursued by virtually all industrial nations.

And the United States, under the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney, could stop prostituting itself before apocalyptic Christian organizations like author Tim LaHaye’s that promote Armageddon and the “final conflict” and depict the United Nations as the Antichrist. It could stop having high-level officials curry favor with LaHaye’s and like groups. It could pay our bills at the UN and encourage gifts like Ted Turner’s to it.

And were these things to occur, perhaps above all of the blood, peace could emerge like the dove that stands for it.