More Defense of Neocons over at TPM Cafe (sigh)
Frank Gaffney wrote an excellent article in the National Review Online, noting that Israel’s planned withdrawal from Gaza, at least as currently envisioned, will be a boon to Islamofascit terrorists. Shockingly, Steve Clemons disagreed strongly, over on TPMCafe. I decided to tilt at some more windmills.
I could hardly disagree more strongly. How would--or should--the U.S. respond if Pervez Musharraf decides that policing Baluchistan is draining resources that he would prefer to allocate elsewhere, and that he is therefore withdrawing from the region? The outcome would be disastrous. It would give the Taliban and Al Qaeda a new safe haven and destabilize Afghanistan.
The Sharon plan marks a new maturity in Israel’s existence. Since Israel’s birth, it has stood as a bastion of of western liberalism, and a testimony to the strength of liberal ideas under even the most extreme stress. What Sharon is doing, for the first time in Israel’s history, iselevating bald national interest above the interests of the world at large.
There can be little doubt that Israel will be served well by declaring international borders that it can sustain and defend, and by then focusing on the rights, liberties, and welfare of all those who live within those borders. From Israel’s perspective, that situation would be preferable to the current one even if all of the territories that it evacuates become terrorist havens. It would help, of course, if the international community recognized those borders, but even without such recognition, withdrawal from Gaza serves Israel’s long-term interests.
Disengagement coupled with a completed security fence may also serve the short-term interest of the U.S. and the E.U. It gives them proof that they are exacting “payment” from non-Arab liberal democracies, as well as from Arab dictatorships of various stripes. From a long-term perspective, it promises to be a disaster. Setting aside actual motivations, there are more than enough facts available to lend credence to the claim that terrorism has put the West in retreat. Israel’swithdrawal next month will mark the second great victory of terrorism--the first was in Spain. There is no question that it will embolden the Islamofascist movement and motivate additional terror recruits. After all, why tamper with success?
So what should the West advocate? A three-part plan might work:
1. Israel’s withdrawal of its civilian presence from Gaza and from all areas of the West Bank that Israel cannot defend behind its security fence coupled with broad international recognition of the defensible area as Israel’s permanent borders.
2. The establishment of an international aid body, likely under the auspices of either the World Bank or the EU, to buy all evacuated villages from Israel at documented cost, and to administer them as new Arab communities with citizens vetted for a desire to build a new future for themselves. The aid body should focus on training for good government and the rapid development of self-governing village councils.
3. The maintenance of Israeli military control over terrorist hotbeds, akin to those that we push other countries to maintain over terror-laden regions within their control.
I have written about these issues before, though I can’t say that they’ve landed any place with much of a media profile.
Israel is doing its part. It is the U.S., and even more so the E.U., that is setting the stage for the disaster that Gaffney rightly foresees.
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