As the good book says, God loves the sinner that repenteth even if he repenteth late — so George W Bush will probably win a smile from heaven for his belated call for a Middle East peace conference before the year is out. Sure, it’s a bit late now for the president to be scrabbling to make amends for six-and-a-half years of, at best, intermittent attention towards the Israel-Palestine conflict. But something is better than nothing.
What’s made Bush see the light? In a word: Iraq. With his administration losing allies by the day because of its failure in Baghdad, Bush is desperate for something that might resemble a foreign policy achievement. More interesting is why the other participants expected at Bush’s meeting will be there. Of course, Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas could hardly stay away: they both want to prove that, with Hamas shoved to one side, they can move forward. But Bush also plans for neighbouring states to come along — Egypt and Jordan and others, too. Their motive is more intriguing and comes down to a single word: Iran.
The so-called moderate Arab states, those that lean towards the West, are petrified by the rise of Tehran. Cairo, Amman and Riyadh fear both the Shia ascendancy and surging Islamism which Iran represents, the latter of which, were it not so thoroughly repressed in their own countries, would badly threaten their regimes. Egypt does not want to see Hamas, partner of Egypt’s dissident Muslim Brotherhood movement, take over the West Bank the way it’s taken over Gaza any more than Israel or Fatah does.
This emergence of a common enemy has sparked a flurry of activity in the long stagnant Israeli-Palestinian conflict, much of it positive. In a bid to boost Abbas, both Bush and Olmert have turned the money tap back on. Israel is also set to release 256 Palestinian prisoners. That’s in addition to the new Israeli amnesty extended to 178 fugitive militants from the Fatah-aligned Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Israel and Abbas will now cooperate on security too, all part of the strategy approved not only by Israel and the US, but also the European Union and several Arab states — of ensuring that West Bank Fatahland basks in the sunshine while Gaza’s Hamastan remains in shadow. As if to ram home the message, a deleÂÂgation from the Arab League will make history next week when it visits Israel for the first time.
There are other motives at work in all this, but Iran is a key factor. Reluctant to let Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pose as the Palestinians’ champion and anxious to prevent the Palestinian plight from further radicalising their own populations, these mainly Sunni, pro-Western states want to show they can deliver too. This is the window of opportunity through which Bush is pushing his conference.
These unexpected, happy bypro-ducts of the Iranian threat should not obscure our view of the threat itself. As was reported this week, the notion of military action to prevent a nuclear Iran is under serious consideration in the White House — with Bush apparently leaning towards Dick Cheney’s view that it may be necessary to use force before they leave office in January 2009. The flock of US presidential candidates are all at pains not to rule out military action and so was David Miliband in his first interview as British foreign secretary. When the Financial Times offered him the chance to repeat the view that the use of force would be ”inconceivable”, he declined.
Nowhere is the Iranian peril assessed more closely than in Israel, which would, after all, be target number one for any Iranian bomb. In conversations, Israeli policymakers all described Tehran as the biggest single threat to their national security, ranking ahead even of the Palestinian conflict. The way Israel sees it, the combination of a nuclear bomb and an ideology that yearns for a world without the Jewish state adds up to the threat of annihilation.
Even if Iran did not actually drop the bomb, it would still endanger Israel, argues Shmuel Bar of the country’s Institute for Policy and Strategy. He dismisses the theory that crossing the nuclear threshold has a taming effect, often turning states into more responsible actors. Pakistan behaved much more aggressively in Kashmir after it got nukes than it did before. Bar reckons that new nuclear states believe they can act with impunity; he imagines Iran bullying its neighbours in the Gulf, driving up the oil price, preventing any of them so much as talking peace with Israel. Besides even if there is only a 2% chance that the responsibility theory is wrong and that Iran will remain untamed, ”that is too big a chance for Israel”.
As a result, the country is not ruling anything out. The politicians will listen to the intelligence assessments and decide whether to strike. That decision will matter enormously, for then either Washington will block Israel or it will get out of the way — or it will act itself.
As it happens, presenting it like this suits the US quite nicely. It can go around pressing the Chinese or Russians to act diplomatically on Iran or else, if they do not, then those crazy Israelis will act instead: it is the classic good cop, bad cop.
And yet, I do not detect any gung-ho Israeli desire to pounce. Several voices in the military and political establishment speak instead of pursuing diplomacy and precisely targeted sanctionsÂÂ. They reckon that if the Iranian elite is denied international financial credit and the refined oil on which they rely, the regime could crack under the strain. ”Iran is not North Korea,” one Israeli insider argued — there is a civil society and an elite which might pressure the leadership to drop the nuclear dream if it proved too costly.
Israel has other reasons to be wary. An air assault on Iran’s nuclear sites would not be the clean, surgical hit on a single location that took out Iraq’s plutonium reactor at Osirak in 1981. Tehran’s uranium-enrichment centres are dispersed, hidden and protected. Above all, Iran has the power to retaliate — probably through terror cells that would hit Israeli and Jewish targets around the world.
So Israel feels a sense of urgency, one that may not be shared anywhere outside Washington. It need not end in war. If China and Russia are persuaded to tighten sanctions still further, force can probably be avoided. — Â