Democracy in the Middle East? – Israel’s War Goals

by Stephen J. Sniegoski, PhD, Washington D.C.

In President George W. Bush’s speech to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute on February 26, he spoke of a transformed Middle East that would result from the American guided democratization of Iraq. ‘A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions,’ he said. This message warmed the hearts of his neoconservative audience since they had advocated the war as an instrument to transform the entire Middle East for some time. And a regional transformation dovetails with views expressed by the Israeli government officials. ‘The shock waves emerging from post-Saddam Baghdad could have wide-ranging effects in Tehran, Damascus, and in Ramallah,’ Efraim Halevy, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s national security adviser, recently said in a speech in Munich. He continued: ‘We have hopes of greater stability, greater enhanced confidence from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic shores of Morocco.’ [1]

It is likely that President Bush actually believes the democracy fairy tale--a proposed ‘democratic’ Iraq at the same time the United States has been trying to bribe the Turkish government into supporting the war by offering it territorial concessions in the Kurdish-inhabited areas of northern Iraq. But would the Israeli government (and their American neoconservative supporters) really want stable, democratic governments in the Middle East, if that were feasible? Hardly! Middle Eastern governments that represented the popular will would be at least as hostile to Israel as the existing regimes, and probably more so. And stable democratic governments would be more effective opponents of the Jewish state both in military and diplomatic terms. Certainly, Israel would lose any moral luster it now has if the governments of other Middle Eastern states were more democratic than Israel itself, with its occupied territories. Diplomatic pressure from a democratic Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia would be harder to withstand than the ranting of their current non-representative authoritarian rulers. Certainly, effective pressure could be put on Israel to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction and abide by the numerous UN resolutions that it currently ignores. And model democracies throughout the Middle East could serve to force democracy on Israel itself, which would mean the end of the Jewish state.

But as Israeli government officials and American neoconservatives well know, all this blather about democracy in the Middle East is simply a vaporous pipe dream, or deceptive cover for the realities of power. Israeli leaders, however, certainly hope for a transformation of the entire region. As Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon put it, an attack on Iraq would set off a geopolitical ‘earthquake.’ [2]An American invasion and occupation of Iraq would bring about the destabilization of the entire Middle East as the masses become more inflamed by anti-Americanism. Pro-American regimes--such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Gulf emirates -- would face the likelihood of being overthrown. The United States could try to restore order by military means and establish puppet regimes. And the anti-American turmoil in the region would draw the United States closer to hard-line Israel, its only ally.

The idea of destabilizing the Middle East has actually been a long-time theme of Israeli strategic thinkers, most especially on the Right. One prominent article that outlined this thesis was put forth by Oded Yinon, entitled ‘A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s,’ which appeared in the World Zionist Organization’s periodical Kivunim in February 1982. In summarizing this strategy in his The Zionist Plan for the Middle East, the late Israel Shahak observed that Yinon’s essay ‘represents . . . the accurate and detailed plan of the present Zionist regime (of Sharon and Eitan) for the Middle East which is based on the division of the whole area into small states, and the dissolution of all the existing Arab states.’ Shahak continued: ‘To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.’ [3]

One cannot assume that Prime Minister Sharon has now become soft or senile, so that all this talk about Middle Eastern democracy must be to him just so much fluff to cover the harsh realities of war and power politics. Undoubtedly, Sharon sees the situation with the same cold realist eyes as he did in the early 1980s. Israel has become a military superpower, with nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. But in the eyes of rightwing Zionists, the danger to Israel is greater than ever before, with the burgeoning Palestinian population in Israel and the occupied territories threatening the Jewish nature of the state, Israel’s very raison raison d’être. With American neoconservative supporters of Israel holding influential foreign policy positions in the Bush administration, it is apparent that the United States can serve as Israel’s proxy in its military and diplomatic policy in the Middle East. And the likelihood that the war will set off a Middle East firestorm is right in line with Israel’s strategic goals as is the possibility that the United States would successfully militarily dominate the entire region. From the perspective of the Sharon government, either chaos or American control would be a satisfactory outcome that would give it the opportunity to solve the Palestinian demographic threat (by expulsion or other means) without outside interference. The war, in short, puts Israel in a win-win situation. Only President Bush’s dream of stable democratic states in the Middle East would run counter Israeli strategic plans, and Prime Minister Sharon and his followers undoubtedly view this utopian scenario as roughly nil.

[1] James Bennet, 'Israel Says War on Iraq Would Benefit the Region', New York Times, February 27, 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/international/middleeast/27ISRA.html

[2] Adam McConnel, 'Israeli sources say war imminent; Iran and Syria next', Malaysiakini, February 14, 2003, www.malaysiakini.com/foreignnews/200302140111046662808.php

[3] Israel Shahak, ed. and trans., The Zionist Plan for the Middle East (Belmont, Mass.: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc., 1982), www.geocities.com/roundtable_texts/zionistplan.html