Unspeakable brutality in the Middle East is not a repugnant yet acceptable occupational hazard of diplomacy.
I. Barbarity
ISIS beheads people.
Saudi Arabia beheads people.
Iran calls out Saudi Arabia for beheading people — a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Iran kills people by the thousands via terrorist attacks and executions.
Ditto, Bashar Assad. His favored brutality is barrel bombs.
Ditto, Hezbollah and its favorite brutality: rockets aimed at civilians.
Ditto, Hamas. It favors rockets and terror tunnels.
From all this unspeakable brutality, you are left with three things:
• Iran and Saudi Arabia: willing to kill as many people as it takes to secure hegemony in the Middle East.
• The US: failing to understand that a sanction here, an air strike there, a speech pleading for cooperation, will not make a dent in the Middle East “neighborhood.”
• Israel: needing to be inflexible on national security —retaining the Golan; retaining checkpoints; hanging tough on Hamas, on Jewish Jerusalem’s perimeter and other territory — even if they complicate unrealistic diplomatic initiatives of the EU, UN or US.
Step back.
Realize what the US and Israel are dealing with here: barbarians (mostly confined to the leadership). People and countries who simply do not share our values.
Beheadings as public policy cannot simply be overlooked as “excesses of the natives,” as repugnant yet acceptable occupational hazards in Middle East diplomacy. There is a tendency and a history for Western countries to see things this way. When the “Mohammedans” in the 1890s were slaughtering Armenians by the hundreds of thousands; when the Turks in WW I were starving the Palestinians (i.e., the Jews in the territory that became Israel); when Sadaam Hussein in 1988 was gassing the Kurds; the rationalization of and indifference to such brutalities were commonplace. There is a certain compartmentalization in Western diplomacy that has the effect of tolerating double standards, of letting Middle East murderers alone, as if they were from another planet, with different DNA, incapable of humaneness.
True enough, the Western world has its own history of barbarity, the worst and most notable example being the Holocaust. But today the dubious distinction belongs in the Middle East. It doesn’t matter which groups in the Middle East indulge in beheadings, suicide bombings, indiscriminate rocket fire, stabbings and car rammings. It is impossible to regard any one of these terrorists as true “allies,” whatever strategic considerations may come into play.
We must never let a history of cooperation with the US by any of these brutal regimes lull us into thinking that such people are our “friends.”
Beheaders are not our “friends,” however much oil they now sell, or once sold; however much diplomatic cover they provide; however many air bases they allow us to station on their soil; however chummy the meetings between their leaders and ours.
The West never confused the debased moral and ideological status of Stalin with the need to fight alongside him during WW II. Stalin was a despicable mass murderer.
Ditto, Bashar Assad.
Ditto, ayatollahs in Iran.
Ditto, sheiks in Saudi Arabia.
Ditto, the leaders of Hezbollah and Boko Haram.
Ditto, the leaders of Hamas, Fatah and the various other terrorist factions of the Palestinians.
Ditto, ISIS.
Beheaders and practitioners of other brutalities need to be kept in perspective. It’s an elemental perspective: us vs. them. Civilization vs. barbarity.
II. Policy
What does all this mean for American foreign policy? Try this: Every time you read or hear “Saudi Arabia” in the context of the American response to the Saudi-Iranian hostility, replace “Saudi” with “Israel.” See how often it works, how it all sounds the same.
As in, the US had counseled Saudi Arabia for months not to execute the Iranian Shi’ite imam whose death led Iran to torch the Saudi embassy. The US had counseled Saudi Arabia, feeling abandoned by the US, not to act violently to try to stop Iran from fomenting anti-Sunni unrest in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the UAE and elsewhere.
As in, this parallel: The US had counseled Israel to lighten up on checkpoints designed to stop the flow of Palestinian terrorists. The US had counseled Israel to give up the Golan Heights to Syria. The US had ignored the security considerations in building West Bank settlements on the hills overlooking the invasion routes from Jordan, or in encircling the vulnerable city of Jerusalem with new Jewish neighborhoods.
American foreign policy? It’s one big tilt.
A tilt away from one inhumane regime to another, from Saudi Arabia to Iran; and a tilt away from one humane regime, Israel, to the inhumane Iran regime.
No matter that Iran violates UN resolutions by launching ballistic missiles. The US threatens weak sanctions against Iran, then backs away even from these.
Saudi Arabia knows that the first target of a bomb (nuclear or otherwise) at the end of an Iranian missile would be Saudi Arabia, not the US. Israel knows that the second target of an Iranian missile would be Israel, not the US.
Bottom line: What’s the big surprise at the State Department over Saudi Arabia’s execrable beheading of the Iranian cleric to stand up to Iran?
What’s the big surprise that Netanyahu is skeptical of its best ally, the US?
The US has too long made light of the true nature of Saudi Arabia out of concern for oil. The US now pretends that it can soften Iran’s bellicosity, state-sponsored terrorism and hatred of Israel by making a nuclear deal with it. But beheaders and executions don’t think that way.
Israel is taking note, seeing our government’s naivete in the Middle East, particularly the great American fallacy of recent years: withdrawal from the conflicts of the Middle East increases peace there and makes the US safer here. Facts contradict both.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
