« home

MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS:
---------------------------------------------------------
Stop digging

The Oslo Accords put me in mind of what my good friend, Colin Gray, the British strategic theorist, has called "the dilemma of arms control": Arms control agreements are most likely to succeed when they are least necessary - when disagreements between the two parties have been minimized. Ronald Reagan stated the principle that underpins this fact when he observed that states do not disagree because they are armed, they arm because they disagree.

So it is with Oslo. On the one hand, the fundamental goal of Israel is to survive and prosper. On the other, no matter what some Palestinian Arabs, most notably Yasser Arafat, may say for consumption in the West, their goal is to extinguish the State of Israel. No mere scrap of paper can survive such a chasm.

Let's examine the record. When the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the Intifada was exhausted and Arafat's power and influence had reached its nadir. He was shunned by the Arab world because of his support for Saddam in 1991 and was on the verge of being kicked out of Tunis. The world had not yet heard of suicide bombers.

Oslo rehabilitated Arafat, thereby sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The failure of Oslo should have become apparent to all when Arafat first rejected the best deal the Palestinian Arabs are ever likely to get: the offer by former prime minister Ehud Barak of some 97 percent of the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza and control of East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, and then re-launched the Intifada, now built around the suicide attacks that have rocked Israel for several years now.

Oslo can be criticized on the basis of a saying made popular in the United States by a former US Army chief of staff, General Gordon Sullivan: "hope is not a strategy." Oslo indeed was based on hope - that the concessions granted by Israel pursuant to the "peace process" would lead to an increasingly liberalized outlook among Palestinian Arabs.

But among some Israelis, it also took on a life of its own. Just as the "ideology of arms control" among certain Americans during the Cold War led them to act as if arms control was not so much a means to the end of security as an end in itself, so these Israelis defended Oslo, despite its failures, as the ideal of peace itself.

How did the Palestinian Arabs view the Oslo Accords? Thanks to the indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which provides translations of the things Arabs say among themselves, we have some idea. For instance, a MEMRI special dispatch of July 2, 2001 provides a translation of an interview with Faisal Al-Husseini appearing in an Egyptian daily. Al-Husseini called the Oslo Accords a Trojan horse, designed to achieve an intermediate objective in pursuit of the strategic or long-term Palestinian Arab goal of creating an Arab state from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.

And Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, the outgoing PA prime minister, pointed out the role of Oslo and other elements of the peace process in bringing about the fragmentation of Israeli society.

Abu Mazen contended that Camp David and Oslo sharply exposed conflicts within Israel. In other words, the reason Abu Mazen was considered a "moderate" was not because he had renounced the goal of exterminating Israel, but because he believed that the peace process, in "bringing the Israelis down from their tanks and forts would strengthen the peace camp in Israel" thereby making a "just settlement" possible.

According to a MEMRI special report of April 29, 2003, Abu Mazen told Fatah commanders in Gaza (July 2002) that Oslo was "the biggest mistake Israel ever made" because Israel recognized what it considered to be a terror organization and the Palestinians gained much (West Bank land) and gave up nothing.

The flaw in the thinking that underpins Oslo was nicely captured by former prime minister Golda Meir who once said that there will be no peace in the Middle East until the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews. The fact that the Palestinians are now sending their children out to immolate themselves in order to kill Jews illustrates with profound clarity the degree to which Oslo has failed.

There is an old adage that goes, "if you're in a hole and you want to get out, stop digging." Israel and the United States need to stop digging - except to bury Oslo.

The writer is a professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. The views expressed in this piece are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, or any other agency of the US government.