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AMB. PHILIP KAPLAN
Former arms negotiator, U.S.A.

PLENARY SESSION II
“An Eye on Consequences: The Military and Security Threat”

Bob has made it clear that I cannot keep a job! And in the post–Cold War era all of us are constantly looking for ways to improve ourselves. Much of what will be said today will focus on military security type issues and intelligence, and we have been asked to talk about the consequences and the threat and what is next. I have elected to focus on the diplomatic side of this. I need to stress that there is an absolutely inseparable bond between these different dimensions, the military and the diplomatic, and an understanding of the political cultures of the regions and the groups that we are dealing with.

The consequences of the September 11 attacks were counted in some 3,000 innocent human casualties. The military/security threat is embodied in the risk that 9/11 could be repeated on an even greater scale, perhaps with the use of WMD. That is the context for the new focus on homeland security, counterterrorism, and Iraq.

But 9/11 also triggered a shock of recognition, for many Americans, that the Middle East political paradigm of the last half-century is dysfunctional. Screaming headlines and television images of suicide bombers, angry Palestinian youths and funerals in both Ramallah and Gaza, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, are daily fare, with no end in sight. The specter of rising oil prices, and war, has become all too familiar. The peace process initiated a decade ago in Oslo, following the Gulf War at a time of hope and handshakes—and well before that by Henry Kissinger at a forgotten desert kilometer marking, by Jimmy Carter at Camp David and by Bill Clinton at the Wye Plantation—now has given way to hatred and hostility. How to break the cycle? That’s the question!

Managing this exacerbated security threat now commands the attention of our government and people. Knowing how to deal with it requires us to understand its sources. It is important in this respect to distinguish between Islamist fundamentalists who elected terror as their weapon to force change, and the pious middle classes and governments who have worked with us in the past and wish, despite policy differences, to sustain their economic, political, and security relationships with the United States.

Problem

We have heard a lot since 9/11 about Osama bin Laden and the network of al-Qaeda terrorists. Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis identified the question on many minds in his new book Why Do they Hate Us? There also are broader groups of fundamentalists all over the Arab and Muslim world—from Algeria to Afghanistan, from Bosnia to Nigeria—who advocate and sometimes act with violence to overturn their governments. Why?

The answers lie in a combination of despair over the poverty, political disenfranchisement, and frustrated religious fervor that grip many in the Arab world. They attribute their current plight to the incompetence or cupidity of their political leaders. American support for Arab leaders, and for Israel, reinforces this frustration and anger. With little to lose, these people become obvious targets for proselytization and recruitment by the radicals.

Popular emotions are further strained by television images of Palestinians being bombed or abused by Israeli forces. In fact, for many Arab governments, the Palestinian issue holds little real priority. Despite pressing us for a more balanced approach toward the Palestinian-Israeli issue, in part to mitigate internal pressures, Arab leaders know that a solution to this chronic problem can come only through the good offices of the United States and that Yasser Arafat lacks control over Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Aqsa terrorists in the Palestinian Authority territory.

Here in America, the terrorists often are seen as out of control and outwitting our government and intelligence agencies. This perception is understandable in light of the series of attacks launched in recent years against our interests, our citizens, our armed forces, our journalists, and our embassies in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa and even here at home, indeed, just a few miles down the road at the Pentagon. Measured in physical destruction, killing and economic disruption, the terrorists achieved successes at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, our embassies in Africa and military facilities in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

But as French scholar Giles Keppel demonstrated in his book Jihad, Islamist fundamentalists and terrorists have been losing, in country after country, throughout the 1990s. Assessed in terms of their real political objective—securing fundamentalist influence and control in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Muslim world—they have failed.

That is why Osama bin Laden and the Islamists struck out on 9/11 against the United States as the bulwark of the global system and as the ally of the moderate Arab regimes. After driving out the Soviets from Afghanistan, with the help of U.S. Stinger missiles, bin Laden offered to assist the Saudis against the Iraqi challenge in 1990. The Saudis said no and bin Laden was further enraged when the Saudis allowed this task to be undertaken in the Gulf War by what he regarded as U.S.-led infidels “trampling” on Saudi holy sites. Bin Laden decided to build his own cadres, in Sudan, Afghanistan, and 60 other countries, including Germany and America. The rest is history.

But it is a sordid history filled with terrorism, deaths of innocent people on many continents and, from the al-Qaeda perspective, failure. It was that failure which led bin Laden and his allies to go for the big one in New York and Washington, the long end-zone pass, hoping that this would break American will and lead to a rupture of Arab-American relationships, perhaps even open the door to replacement of the hated moderate governments by fundamentalist regimes. They misjudged America and they failed again.

Policy Implications

Part of the answer to violence and the risk of renewed attacks lies in military response and enhanced defense. That is what the homeland security proposals, and department, and the new doctrine of preemption is about. The Bush administration has declared that the long-standing defense doctrines of deterrence and containment, applied for over three decades against Soviet military power, is not relevant against the very different terrorist threat. That is why the administration is focused on disarming Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein, given his programs of WMD and proven record of willingness to use them.

But solving the problem also compels us to go beyond the military dimension and face up to the sources of the security threat. To that end, we Americans and our allies must decide how to deal with a volatile Middle East. Do we stick with the stymied but familiar processes and structures of the past—the peace process and the somewhat cynical arrangements just behind the curtain of Mideast diplomacy? Do we back the moderate Arab regimes all the way, even if we see the seeds of further trouble in their internal practices? Or do we try to help shape democratic societies in tune with the modern world. Is such a reformist option beyond our capability?

It is our Arab friends who face the hard choices. This includes whether and how to support our military responses to the war on terrorism. But their choices go much further. Fundamentally, the issue is whether Arab states are willing to open their political systems, to diversify their economic structures beyond energy supplies, and to resolve their historic dispute and normalize relations with Israel.

To simplify, even to caricature somewhat, some say that Arab economies have served until now as gas stations for the West, in return for which we have largely averted our gaze from a lack of democratic legitimacy and revisionist declaratory foreign policies toward Israel. Over the years, a so-called silent bargain developed whereby some Arab authorities avoided internal disturbances triggered from fundamentalist Islamists by financing their schools, military training, and certain other needs of the radicals. Externally, the West averted its gaze concerning the connections of these Arab states with fundamentalists in return for acceptable energy supply arrangements.

These silent bargains are receiving heightened attention in our government and are beginning to be called into question. State Department Policy Planning Director Richard Haass departs this weekend for the Persian Gulf region to reassess our relationship with the Arab world. He will focus on support by Arab allies for the war on terrorism and on internal political practices. Haass told the IISS that “it is no longer sustainable to have narrowly defined relationships that focus almost exclusively on access to energy resources or basing rights and that we need to forge new, broader relationships that encourage and enable Arab regimes gradually to address the freedom deficit that that has developed in their societies. Such a reorientation is not simply the right thing to do (but also) makes strategic sense. If we fail to reorient our policies to address the lack of opportunity in these states and their resulting brittleness, our allies in the Arab world will grow weaker—not stronger—and their interests will suffer.”

All this poses the choice between seeking to manage the present volatile status quo, for mutual advantage, and facing up to radical policy decisions to alter that framework. The issue arises first in Iraq (where the U.S. is determined to remove Saddam) and in Palestine (where President Bush has undertaken to support a solution involving two independent states of Israel and Palestine living side by side in democracy). There obviously is much to be done to get to either result. We all are aware of the debate over Iraq and the president's insistence on democratic reform, including a free election and Arafat's departure, in breaking through the violence and achieving a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But the challenge transcends the Palestinian question, and Iraq, and is even more dramatic.

The big question is whether Arab leaders will be ready to push for incremental but truly serious economic and political reform or will be content to ride the waves of the status quo while seeking to crush the radical Islamists. This is by no means a simple or certain choice. For some Arab governments, the instinct may be to prefer stability over reform. The question will be whether that approach, together with relative success against the radical Islamists, will suffice to ensure stability, or whether a more root and branch approach is required. The problem is that enforced stability may continue to undercut the Arab potential, ensure stagnation in a modernizing world and global economy, and affect adversely other international relationships (such as the trans-Atlantic relationship, which historically has been a casualty in Mideast crises).

From the American perspective, there are those who argue that not only modernization and privatization but a historic Arab “reformation” is required to join the world economy and benefit from globalization. These officials argue for a shift away from the Arab-Israeli duel, and Palestinian issue, to revival and integration of Arab states into the international system. They warn that the status quo will mean continued strife and violence and the persistence of the erosive Mideast crisis. It also could mean that the United States would be positioned on the side of those impeding economic progress and democratic legitimacy, a posture incompatible with American tradition and values.

A new U.S. foreign policy steadfastly pursuing economic and political openings, a kind of Arab perestroika and glasnost, would be designed to evoke change. Like President Reagan’s policy for radical reform of the Soviet empire and for an end to the Cold War, and the still ongoing effort initiated by President Nixon with China, it would require a patient and long-term strategy.

This course would be a bold wager and could fail. Political opponents of some allied Arab governments may try to exploit our advocacy of reform, just as they will seek to stir discontent over the upcoming war with Iraq and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. It is said that a time of reform is the most dangerous time, and some Arab nations may perceive nothing less than a new American crusade to upset their political systems. Mr. Gorbachev learned that maxim painfully. And it is hard to forget the ill-advised U.S. pressures that drove out the Shah of Iran and replaced him with Ayatollah Khomeini.

But the Russian experience has shown that change is possible, with results that are far from perfect but which do constitute major progress. And with all the persisting concerns about China’s future policies, that country is much freer since the economic changes ushered in by Deng Xiaoping.

In the Middle East, the United States is well placed to pursue a similar gradual process of reform due to its position as the sole superpower and to the alternative energy oil supplies that have emerged due to our more constructive relationship with Russia. Much depends on whether our Arab friends take the risk. In the end, the main threat is to them rather than to us. But if pursued with persistence and, importantly, with sensitivity to Arab political cultures, it could open the door to an Arab “renaissance.” It also could jar loose Iran from the medieval hold of the mullahs and contribute to a strategic global realignment involving India and China.

This is the hard strategic choice that lies beyond the necessary military/security strategy now developing. The president has said that inaction is not an option, and I believe he is right. Does this also apply to this political choice? If so, we should prepare for a long but highly important challenge for U.S. foreign policy that could lead over time to a freer, more prosperous, and more stable Middle East, with the promise of a more secure America and peaceful world. If not, the question will remain: how do we break the cycle of violence?