The New Middle East: An Elusive Bargain

In Jibaa village, southern Lebanon

Despite Israel's systematic destruction of Lebanon going unabated, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has rejected an immediate cease-fire and the return to the former status quo. Instead, Rice reiterated that the cessation of hostilities in the Middle East must come with conditions that allow for what she described as "an enduring peace." More importantly, she declared that "it is time for a new Middle East. It is time to say to those who don't want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail. They will not."

The US plan initially would involve putting an international force of up to 10,000 Turkish and Egyptian troops under a NATO or UN commander into southern Lebanon following a cease-fire. That force ultimately would be replaced by another international force of up to 30,000 troops that would help the Lebanese government regain control over the southern part of the country, where Hizbullah dominate. In order for this to take place, the US has given Israel a green light to drive 32 km inside southern Lebanon to end the threat of Hizbullah's missile attacks and create a situation where the Lebanese resistance movement should either accept this plan or be defeated.

The intensity of the Israeli military campaign and visionary US rhetoric about a "new Middle East" implies that wider, more encompassing goals are being contemplated by the US and Israel – goals that far surpass the return of Israeli captives or the limitation of Hizbullah's military capabilities. Despite the fact that Rice was not clear about what was meant by the "New Middle East," an awareness of the broad contours of US-Israeli policy in the region and the context in which this "New Middle East" was declared could allow for a somewhat nuanced understanding of America's grandiose vision for the region.

Visionary Rhetoric & Imperial Ambitions

With every major change in the strategic landscape of the region, the Arabs are usually presented with a new "initiative," "plan" or "project" – each promising freedom, prosperity, and regional advancement. When the Arab regional order was disfigured in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, Shimon Perez declared his own vision of a "New Middle East" where he promised the Arabs prosperity if they chose to fully normalize relations with Israel and include his country in all regional arrangements. Back then, an international coalition had been forged to force Saddam to leave Kuwait, while Israel was allowed to maintain occupied territories in Lebanon and Syria.

Eventually, Israel only agreed to engage the Palestinians in fitful long-term negotiations, which gradually became known as the Oslo process. The result was catastrophic: Israel gave the Palestinian Authority all the symbols of sovereignty, but maintained actual political, economic, and military control over the Palestinians during the ill-fated "decade of negotiations" in the 1990s.

After the US occupation of Iraq and the devastation that it wrought, the US announced a "forward strategy for freedom" which was followed months later by the so-called "Greater Middle East Initiative," promising economic prosperity, emancipation, and democracy to mainstream Arabs and Muslims. It proved to be nothing short of another Western attempt to maintain US-Israeli hegemony and dominance as the Arab and Islamic world continued to lie in ruins.

In 2006, a casual observation of the Middle East shows a region in utter despair: an Iraq that has become a cauldron of ethnic and sectarian warfare under the tutelage of a heavy-handed occupation and a Palestine with a democratically-elected government – shunned by the so-called "democratic" West – whose citizens are systematically slaughtered by Israel's Western-sponsored state-of-the-art military machine. The region has also witnessed relentless US saber-rattling against Syria and Iran, a Sudan on the verge of dismemberment, and millions of Arabs who continue to languish under the rule of Western-sponsored dictatorships.

History… The Key Player

In the ruins of the Ein El Helweh refugee camp, near Sidon, after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon

In this sense, the current conflict is a situation where history seems to be repeating itself. In fact, Israel's current invasion of Lebanon is reminiscent of the 1978 Operation Litani in which Israeli forces moved into Lebanon to push Palestinian militant groups away from the border with Israel and to bolster Israel's ally at the time, the South Lebanon Army. The subsequent 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon provided the United States with a golden opportunity to promote its grand designs in the region outlined in the Reagan Plan which sought to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict by weakening Syria, the eradication of the PLO's military presence, bringing Lebanon into direct negotiations with Israel, and the establishment of Lebanon under American tutelage.

The current crisis in Lebanon does not have its roots in Hizbullah's seizure of two Israeli soldiers as Western and unfortunately some official Arab circles wish to portray. It is in the "internationalization" of Rafiq al-Hariri's assassination where the US, France, and Israel exerted pressure aimed at humiliating and containing Syria and disarming Hizbullah under the pretext of UN Resolution 1559.

In fact, one can safely suggest that in the months following al-Hariri's assassination, both the US and Israel have sought to – once again – manipulate sectarian and confessional differences within Lebanon and to create a pro-Western coalition inside the country, one that would disarm Hizbullah, discredit the movement as a stooge of Iran and Syria, and contain the large Shiite impoverished underclass who form the base of movement's support.

Washington's Lebanese clients are the so-called "March 14th forces" – an assortment of confessional groups ranging from al-Hariri's Sunni Future Movement, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, the liberal Christian Qurnat Shahwan Gathering, and the Lebanese Forces of the Maronite Christian right. Despite frequent verbal exchanges between the March 14th Forces and Hizbullah in the aftermath of al-Hariri's assassination, both sides seemed aware of the need for national reconciliation as the memory of the Lebanese civil war loomed in the horizon.

It seemed clear that the US and Israel were frustrated at the pace, scope, and inconclusive nature of the Lebanese National Dialogue, as neither Lebanese President Emil Lahoud's mandate nor Hizbullah's arms seemed to be resolved after nine consecutive sessions were held from March to June 2006. Therefore, it seemed rather imperative from the US-Israeli standpoint to end Hizbullah's stature within Lebanon and to pressure Syria and Iran by militarily defeating their Lebanese ally in the battlefield.

The New Middle East

In light of US and Israeli ambitions, the "New Middle East" implies ending every form of resistance to US hegemony and securing Israel as the undisputed regional hegemon, surrounded by feeble, impotent, and vulnerable neighbors whose only role would be to protect US and Israeli interests.

In recent years, both Israel and the US have buried diplomacy and negotiations as foreign policy tools and institutionalized the use of force as the only instrument of foreign policy. Despite frequent rhetoric concerning the "need for negotiations," Israel and the US have adopted unilateralism and military pre-emption with impunity and have avoided any negotiated settlement with their adversaries. Israel unilaterally built an apartheid wall in the West Bank and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza only to – also unilaterally – invade and bombard Gaza in subsequent months.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has to date refused to negotiate a prisoner swap with Hizbullah and the US has refused to have direct negotiations with Syria or Iran to solve their outstanding disputes. So while former US and Israeli governments at least showed some respect to diplomacy, the current Israeli and US administrations rely only on brute force to settle disputes. In fact, if one looks at the regional landscape, the only three remaining actors that have avoided joining the US bandwagon have been Hizbullah, Syria, and Iran. The main objective of the US supported Israeli military campaign against Lebanon is to strike at the weakest link of America's self-declared "axis of evil" starting from Beirut, passing through Damascus, and ending in Tehran.

Another important dimension to the current crisis, is the fact that both the US and Israel wish to establish a "new Middle East" in which pro-Western governments in the region adopt a burden-sharing role in favor of US and Israeli security objectives. Therefore, it is of no coincidence that representatives from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan were invited to the conference in Rome to discuss the future of Lebanon. The US and Israel recognize that their continuous military presence in many parts of the Islamic World irks the masses and therefore they wish to rubberstamp their dubious operations with an official Arab seal.

In turn, many Arab regimes have become fearful of Islamists in their midst and have implied on many occasions that they have common cause with the US-Israeli "war on terror" and have condemned Hizbullah for its so-called "adventurism that does not serve Arab interests."

US-Israeli Pipe Dreams

American plans for a "new Middle East" seem ambitious yet unlikely to materialize for a number of important reasons. First, it is based on the erroneous perception that Hizbullah is a feeble military movement that is simply a puppet in the hands of Syria and Iran and can therefore be crushed militarily with ease. On the contrary, Hizbullah is not simply a band of rag-tag militants operating on the fringes of Lebanese civil society, but is rather a mainstream movement that has an extensive social welfare program with multiple political and socio-economic linkages with important segments within the Lebanese society.

Despite Israel's aggregate military preponderance, Hizbullah has for the past 24 years demonstrated a remarkable ability to engage Israel in asymmetrical confrontations and to emerge victorious on a number of occasions. The movement gained widespread popular acclaim throughout the region since it is the only Arab party in history to force an Israeli withdrawal from any occupied territory without a negotiated settlement. Assuming that Hizbullah's military assets are diminished in any confrontation, its political, moral, and social assets will remain impregnable.

Second, the indiscriminant destruction wrought upon Lebanon by the Israeli war machine will make Lebanese factions too reluctant to stand up against Hizbullah or to explicitly seek its dismantling. It is also highly unlikely that the Lebanese Army will be willing to police Israel's northern border. The scope, constituency, and mandate of any intended foreign peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon will be highly contested between Israel and Lebanon.

More importantly, the apparent Israeli targeting of Shiite cultural centers and places of worship in Beirut's southern suburbs and in the south will only serve to fuel the Shiite community within Lebanon and bind them ever more strongly to Hizbullah.

The Israeli war on Lebanon could be a self-defeating endeavor in which Israel could lose more than it could gain. In fact, it might not be able to guarantee an end to Hizbullah's missile strikes into Israel, secure the unconditional release of its prisoners, or introduce a foreign force to police Israel's northern borders. By ostracizing Iran and Syria from any regional arrangements and seeking to undermine them by force, the US and Israel are putting their long-term interests at peril. One has only to note that US forces in Iraq are sandwiched between Iran and Syria and both countries have ample assets that they can use to influence the regional configuration.

It is in this light that Israel has shifted from becoming a proxy at the service of US interests to an outright determinant of US foreign policy in the region. By actively participating in the process of liquidating the democratically-elected Hamas government in Palestine and in the war against Hizbullah in Lebanon, the US has in fact become Israel's de facto proxy – a feature which not only precipitates popular Arab and Muslim outrage, but also systematically creates the conditions for the rise of militant Islamism and destroys any prospects for peaceful reform.

Kareem M. Kamel, PhD, is an Egyptian analyst based in Cairo, Egypt. He holds an MA in International Relations from the American University in Cairo and a PhD in Political Science from the American University of London. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the American University in Cairo and specializes in the politics of Islam and the Middle East, international relations, and foreign policy analysis.