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January 26, 2010Bin Laden & the Palestinians
Osama Bin Laden's recent invocation of the Palestinian's plight has led a number of people (Bruce Riedel, Marc Lynch, Daniel Larison, among others) to argue that this underscores the need to bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a conclusion and deny al Qaeda a potent propaganda tool. Here's Matt Duss:
Failure to move the parties toward a just resolution hurts U.S. credibility in the region, and constantly refills a propaganda well from which our enemies continue to draw.
And Andrew Sullivan:
It would not remove or emasculate the more irredentist factions, the Qaeda core, the Saudi nutjobs, and the Mumbai maniacs. But it would help shift the paradigm in which they can use the daily humiliations of Arabs in the West Bank or the horror of the Gaza attack as ways to move the Muslim middle.
There are numerous problems with this approach, starting with the pretty obvious point that none of the relevant parties are interested in making peace. The U.S. has demonstrated, for decades, that it is unable (or unwilling) to bring the two parties to a settlement and the Obama administration has just provided us with a case study in the futility of trying. No matter where you place blame for this state of affairs, the fact of the matter is that the U.S. has not been able to bridge the gap between the Israelis and Palestinians and nothing about the current peace process overseen by George Mitchell should give us any confidence that this is about to change.
But I think the focus on trying to end the conflict is looking at the problem the wrong way. For the United States, the basic issue is not the lack of peace - there are lots of places around the world that are not at peace but are nonetheless not a source of anti-American propaganda and jihadist recruitment. Rather, it is our involvement in the conflict that is ultimately the issue.
At the end of the day the U.S. has a limited ability to control what the Israelis and Palestinians do. But we can control what we do. If we are seriously concerned that sustained hostilities pose a direct threat to our security (and many people obviously don't believe this), then it seems to me the more sensible thing to do is to disentangle ourselves from the mess and not try in vain to clean it up.
(AP Photo)
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