A Seriously Bad Idea: U.S. Monitors’ and Military Forces Have No Place in Palestine’

New York Times’ Tom Friedman Comes Unglued

(Washington, D.C.): George Santayana once described a zealot as someone who redoubles his effort upon losing sight of his objective. That certainly describes the current condition of the Middle East “peace processors.” They have watched with horror in recent months the predictable — and predicted — melt-down of their ambitions for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians, a phenomenon precipitated and fed by Yasser Arafat’s manifest bad faith and his continuing collusion with Islamist terrorists bent on destroying the Jewish State.

Rather than accept responsibility for their past errors — notably the vastly worse situation Israel finds itself facing thanks to the Oslo process in Intifada II (now being waged with automatic weapons, deadly CIA-trained snipers and daily suicide bombings) versus Intifada I (which was fought mostly with stones and the occasion suicide attack) — the peace processors propose infinitely to compound the earlier mistakes. That would be the result of the deployment of U.S. “monitors” and/or military personnel in the name of securing a cease-fire or imposing a settlement on the parties.

The dangers for the personnel involved, for U.S. interests and especially for Israel are addressed in brief in an essay published by Center for Security Policy President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. last week in National Review Online. They are dealt with in far greater length (albeit in a different, but related, context) in a study sponsored by the Center in [1994]. This study, entitled [U.S. Troops on the Golan Heights], was authored by eleven eminent military and civilian security policy practitioners:

General John Foss, Commanding General, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (who had responsibility for U.S. forces in the Sinai). General Al Gray, Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps. Lieutenant General John Pustay (USAF, Ret.) Assistant to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; President, National Defense University. General Bernard Schriever, Commander, U.S. Air Force Systems Command. Admiral Carl Trost, Chief of Naval Operations. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., Chief of Naval Operations. Douglas J. Feith, the current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Middle East specialist on the National Security Council staff; Frank Gaffney, Jr. , Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Policy); Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Policy). Eugene Rostow, Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; Under Secretary of State (Political Affairs). Henry S. Rowen, former Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs); Chairman, National Intelligence Council, Central Intelligence Agency.

This distinguished group’s conclusion was that neither unarmed U.S. monitors nor American military forces should be placed on the Golan Heights in order to lubricate Israel’s surrender of that strategic high ground to Syria. This conclusion, informed by the following findings, would appear to apply at least as well to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, areas that may be, if anything, even more explosive than the Golan would become once the Syrians are allowed to reoccupy it. Accordingly, where “Golan Heights” and “Syria” appear in the excerpts from the 1994 study, substitute “Palestinian-controlled areas” and the “Palestinian Authority,” respectively:

• Danger to U.S. Troops: U.S. troops on the Golan would face threats of terrorism and also the possible outbreak of war. They would be operating close to a substantial and potentially hostile population and within range of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations based in south Lebanon. Even if Syria chose not to stimulate terrorist attacks against the U.S. troops, Iraq or other states could find it convenient to do so, because the logistics of targeting U.S. forces on the Golan, would be far easier than those required to hit U.S. forces elsewhere.
• Drawing on U.S. Defense Resources: A small force of around 800 U.S. troops would be more vulnerable than an armored brigade. The United States may not be able, however, to sustain the commitment of a larger force to a long-term Golan deployment. To employ a brigade would require commitment of three times as many troops (i.e., a division). The [Clinton] Administration’s “Bottom-Up Review” plan contemplates only 10 active-duty divisions in the entire U.S. Army force structure. It is difficult to imagine that such a substantial part of the Nation’s total combat capability would be allocated to this purpose.
• Unreliable Commitments: Peacekeeping operations, including a deployment on the Golan, would have to be judged expendable if international crises arose and required reallocation of units and resources. The United States has an interest in ensuring that its Israeli allies realize that U.S. peacekeepers on the Golan might not be present in a future crisis if required to fill a gap elsewhere.
• Strained Relations: The potential for the U.S. Golan force to strain relations between the United States and Israel would create an incentive for Syria to manufacture situations of tension. With U.S. troops on the Golan, the United States would be reluctant to respond to Israeli intelligence collection requests if doing so increased the possibility of Israeli preemption against Syria. And in any event the United States would be inclined to withhold information from Israel if providing it would lead Syria to accuse the United States of favoring Israel or of functioning on the Golan effectively as an arm of the IDF.
• Damage to U.S. Public Support of Israel: Insistence on a dangerous deployment of U.S. forces on the Golan can be expected to damage Israel’s standing with the U.S. public. If those forces suffer casualties — from terrorism, for example — there will be U.S. public pressure to end the Golan mission and Israel’s image as a self-reliant ally would be tarnished. Israeli anxieties about the reliability of the United States as a “peacekeeper” on the Golan would intensify, and with good reason. U.S. credibility would be at stake.

In short, the Bush Administration should bear these harsh realities in mind as the likes of Tom Friedman encourage it to chase after visions of sugar-plums urged on it by so-called potential Arab allies in a war with Iraq, putative friends elsewhere or zealous domestic peace processors — without regard for these sorts of costs and risks. Like the insertion of American monitors and/or military troops into the Israeli-Syrian dispute, their deployment into the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a seriously bad idea whose time still has not, and should never, come.

If everything goes according to plan, retired general-turned-special emissary Anthony Zinni will arrive in Israel on Thursday with a dozen or so CIA agents in tow. The latter will have an assignment unprecedented in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: They will be charged with monitoring that conflict and whatever brief hiatus in or tempering of its violence that General Zinni is able to call a “ceasefire.”

The reason such U.S. monitors (not to be confused with American peacekeeping forces that have been whiling away the past few decades far from any battle lines in the deserts of the Sinai, or the limited role previously played by CIA officials discussing joint Israeli-Palestinian security arrangements) have been spared heretofore insertion into the middle of the uprising (or Intifada) is simple: It is a seriously bad idea. Bad for the monitors themselves; bad for the United States’s most important regional ally, Israel; and bad for American interests in the region.

Let’s start with the monitors. The small number are too few to do much of anything but get the United States committed to putting in more. They are defenseless and likely to be high-value targets for those who wish to kill Americans out of blood lust (as with Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl) or to inflame U.S. public opinion against Israel (who some will then blame for causing the monitors to be in harm’s way in the first place).

Inevitably, there will be pressure to provide protection for the U.S. monitors. As their numbers increase when, not if, the violence escalates further around the West Bank, sizeable contingents of American military personnel will likely be assigned to assure the CIA folks’ security.

Such a scenario would result in the realization of one of the Palestinians’ longest-held goals the “internationalization”of the conflict via the installation of foreign troops to run interference for them. If the experience in Lebanon where multilateral forces were supposed to separate the Hezbollah guerrillas from the Israeli security zone and forces there is any guide, the insertion of American troops will not prevent terrorist attacks from being launched against Israel. It will, however, create real impediments to Israel’s ability to preempt and retaliate against the attackers, lest U.S. personnel get hurt in the crossfire.

In this fashion, Israel will be rendered less able to provide for her own security. As a de facto Palestinian state is carved out of areas behind American positions, the capacity for terror and even paramilitary operations against the Jews will grow. Lest there be any doubt about this trend, compare the levels of violence associated with the pre-Oslo “peace process” Intifada I (i.e., stones and the occasional suicide bomber) and that now being inflicted on Israel from territories under Palestinian Authority (PA) control in Intifada II (i.e., automatic weapons, deadly snipers, rockets, and virtually daily suicide bombings).

It is not in America’s interests, either, to inflict such a fate on Israel. In 1934, Winston Churchill said “I cannot imagine a more dangerous policy” than one that deliberately weakens an ally to whom one’s own security is tied. The United States’ war on terrorism will suffer a serious reverse if, by our actions, we embolden or abet Palestinian ambitions to liberate not only the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but the rest of the territory Yasser Arafat (to say nothing of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah) considers “occupied”: namely, all of pre-1967 Israel.

Arafat’s intentions in this regards are in evidence wherever his official map of “Palestine” appears (e.g., in PA offices, on their “police” uniforms, at PA-sponsored cultural and social events and in the textbooks used to inculcate hatred for Israel in the next generation). On this map, there is no Israel. Should this ambition be realized or even the conditions created which encourage the Arabs once again to believe they can wage war to achieve it the United States would find its defense posture in the Middle East weakened and the security value of its alliances dangerously diminished.

It is not too late to pull back from the brink of this slippery slope. It is bad enough that the Bush administration has resumed its earlier effort briefly suspended after the covert shipment to the PA of Iranian arms aboard the Karine A was discovered to euchre Israel into making further political and, in due course, territorial concessions to Yasser Arafat. That mistake need not be further compounded by putting American monitors and, in due course, others into the line of fire, with all that portends. For the sake of the monitors themselves, Israel and the long-term U.S. interests in the region, the right answer should be “Hell no, they won’t go.”