18
“How’s the first Jewish president doing?” Barbara Bush acidly greeted her son on a telephone call after he gave a 2002 speech demanding that the Palestinians break with Yasser Arafat’s leadership.[1] George W. Bush interpreted that comment as an expression of both parents’ disapproval at his rupture with the conventional approach to the peace process.
Israel policy would create discomfort in both the Bush family and the Republican Party during the George W. Bush presidency. As the heir to the most successful American political dynasty since the heyday of the Adams family, the younger Bush was rooted in the history and networks of the old establishment. The Bush dynasty like much of that establishment had deep ties with the oil industry and, consequentially, with countries in the Middle East that went back in some cases for generations. But in the party over which the younger Bush presided the remnants of the establishment were fighting a long rearguard action against Ronald Reagan’s Sun Belt coalition, and strong support for Israel was, as we’ve seen, one of the bonds holding the rising coalition together.
Texas, the most important state in the Sun Belt as California shifted to blue, presented a particularly complicated picture. As a leading player in the global hydrocarbon industry, Texas was a major focus of Gulf Arab investment, and links between Texas businesses and universities and the Arab world were strong. Yet pro-Israel sentiment was deeply embedded in Texas’s religious and political culture. After 9/11, the administration scrambled, not always successfully, to respond to the challenge of Middle East–based religious terrorism in ways that at times disappointed and baffled both wings of the Republican Party.
Grounded in the older Republican tradition, the George H. W. Bush administration sought to avoid the costs in the Arab and Islamic world of any perceived excessive American support of Israel. That traditional caution was reinforced by the international politics of the 1991 Gulf War. To hold the international coalition against Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait together, the first Bush administration made large promises to Gorbachev and took pains to demonstrate its sympathy for the Arab and Palestinian viewpoints.[2] When the Bush 41 administration tried to pressure Israel to halt West Bank and Gaza settlement construction by suspending loan guarantees for relocating Soviet Jews in 1991, the move was bitterly criticized by pro-Israel groups in the United States[3] and assisted Bill Clinton’s successful attempt to oust the elder Bush.
Yet while the old GOP establishment—which included many of George H. W. Bush’s associates—was still influential and represented by Colin Powell and, as was assumed at the time, by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Shultz protegée Condoleezza Rice in W’s administration, the younger Bush was personally and politically much more attuned to Israel and its American supporters. The center of gravity in Republican politics had continued to move south and west since the elder Bush’s term in office, and the next generation of the Bush family, despite its continuing habit of returning to the Northeast for prep school and summer vacations, was more closely connected to Sun Belt conservatism than the elder Bush had ever been. George W. had risen to national prominence as governor of Texas; his brother Jeb was elected governor of Florida. Immersed in a milieu where Christian Zionism and a symbolic identification of the Israeli and American causes were powerful cultural influences, W came to the White House with a much stronger emotional connection to Israel than any Republican president except Ronald Reagan—and unlike Reagan, who had a visceral dislike of Ariel Sharon, Bush admired the man who would dominate the Israeli political scene in the years following 9/11.[4] Trying to balance his pro-Israel instincts with his deeply felt sense of the country’s energy interests in the treacherous circumstances following the 9/11 attacks would test his political skills—and not just with his mother.
To this day, George W. Bush is one of the most misunderstood of modern American presidents. The Bush administration came at a time when the inadequacies of America’s post–Cold War vision of the world were leading the country’s leadership into an intellectual and strategic quagmire, but many of the country’s opinion leaders and policymakers were still committed to a naive reading of the prospects for liberal order. It was easier and more soothing to blame the shortcomings of Bush policies (and there were many shortcomings to blame) for the growing disarray than to take stock of the challenges that were disrupting the hoped-for transition to a peaceful, democratic, and post-historical world.
Beyond this, the Bush presidency both helped to cause, and suffered from, a dramatic intensification of the political polarization that marked the Clinton years leading both supporters and opponents to interpret events in hyper-partisan ways. For some, George W. Bush was courageously defending the United States against the gravest of dangers; for others, he was a crazed, incompetent warmonger and a danger to American democracy. That polarization would continue to deepen and intensify during the Obama and Trump administrations, making a clear-sighted and dispassionate view of the Bush years difficult to achieve.
Add to these factors the rapid dramatic shifts in both strategy and tone that marked the Bush administration’s response to changing conditions, the centrality of the poorly understood Middle East to American policy following the attacks of 9/11, and the simplistic and polarizing nature of the American debate over Israel policy and it is, perhaps, not hard to see why Americans have struggled to come to terms with both the achievements and the shortcomings of this momentous presidency.
Bush’s reputation as a strongly pro-Israel president was already well established before the 9/11 terror attacks. His problems with the foreign policy establishment began when he turned a deaf ear to pleas from European allies and the old Republican establishment to launch a major diplomatic effort to calm Israeli-Palestinian relations early in his term.[5] The Second Intifada was believed in much of the Arab world and beyond to have been triggered by Ariel Sharon’s controversial decision in 2000 to take a walk through the Haram al-Sharif, the area containing the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem.[6] The violence in the Holy Land, with daily reports of clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinian demonstrators, inflamed public opinion against both Israel and the United States across the Arab world and in much of Europe.
This was precisely the kind of situation that the foreign policy establishment believed it was Washington’s job to manage—and Sharon’s apparent role in creating it demonstrated why, in their view, Israel was a strategic liability for the United States and needed to be held at arm’s length. Experienced Washington hands wise in the complications of the Middle East might not believe that a peace process begun under such unpromising conditions might actually create peace, but they appreciated the international benefits Washington reaped by at least appearing to engage. Secretary of State Colin Powell was ready and eager to set forth on a new round of diplomacy. In the opening months of the new administration, Powell and many senior figures in both Democratic and Republican wings of the Washington foreign policy establishment were baffled by 43’s reluctance to take what they saw as a natural, necessary, and virtually risk-free step.
Bush’s decision to remain aloof from peace talks was hailed by some and deplored by others as reflecting a robust pro-Israel stance. Bush’s strong and heartfelt condemnations of terrorism as well as his emerging personal rapport with Prime Minister Sharon—widely seen as a hardliner’s hardliner—further cemented the impression that the new American president was either from conviction or opportunism determined to drive American foreign policy toward a relentlessly pro-Israel posture. Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks would further entrench this view.
The Shock of 9/11
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon dramatically if temporarily increased the importance of the Middle East in American policy and politics. For roughly a dozen years following those attacks, the Middle East would be the central focus of American foreign policy, and both President Bush and President Obama would feel that their presidencies could not succeed unless voters were confident that they were reducing the threat to Americans of fanatical religious terrorism.
Overall, America’s Middle East policy between 9/11 and the end of the Trump presidency can be divided into two eras. Between 2001 and the collapse of the Arab Spring movements for democracy in many Middle Eastern countries, the United States would pursue a transformational strategy in the Middle East. While the Bush and Obama administrations differed sharply over tactics, they agreed that the best, and in the long run the only, way to address the specter of religious violence was to eliminate the “root causes” of the radical ideology that inspired it. The lack of political freedom in much of the Middle East combined with the failure of most countries in the region to provide rising living standards and good jobs for young people made radical ideology attractive, and as long as those conditions persisted, terror groups would find support. To stop the terror, we needed to address the social conditions that caused it.
That this vast transformation seemed possible reflected the post–Cold War optimism of the American establishment. If history was over, and the tide of western-style modernization was rolling across the world, it could as easily roll across the Middle East as anywhere else. In 2001 leading Americans for the most part still believed that China was moving toward liberal democracy, that democracy was becoming stronger in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, and that Russian backsliding was a temporary phenomenon with no lessons and few consequences for the rest of the world. The Middle East was an anomalous region, the only place on earth where economic and political liberalism were failing to advance. After 9/11, that needed to change.
As President Bush wrote in his memoirs, “For most of the Cold War, America’s priority in the Middle East was stability….After 9/11, I decided that the stability we had been promoting was a mirage. The focus of the freedom agenda would be the Middle East.”[7] This implied a major change in American objectives and in the resources needed to achieve them. After 9/11, practically unlimited resources were available to the Bush administration for the purpose of preventing new attacks, and the Bush administration began to take stock of the policy changes that needed to happen.
The old stability agenda presumed close and enduring cooperation with conservative Arab allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states. This had been the mainstay of Republican thinking about the Middle East since World War II. The younger Bush, however, was prepared to break away. A freedom agenda would inevitably be interpreted as a threat by those regimes, as none of them saw democratic transitions as either possible or desirable. Indeed, it appeared that the conservative regimes deliberately suppressed liberal political movements while allowing more space to Islamist parties, then fended off American calls for reform by pointing to the “Islamist radicals” who were likely to benefit from any changes in power.
The other dimension of the transformation agenda involved reducing the sense among many Muslims that the United States specifically, and the Christian and post-Christian West more generally, was their enemy. This was a daunting task, and both George W. Bush and Barack Obama believed that the unresolved Palestinian issue needed to be addressed if the United States and the Middle East were to build a better relationship.
The transformation agenda was not a success. By the end of Obama’s first term, Americans were no longer confident that we knew how to eliminate poverty and dictatorship in the Middle East, and the mood of the country shifted. As year followed year with no successful repetition of the 9/11 attacks, and as the importance of Middle East oil to the American economy gradually declined, American priorities began to shift away from the Middle East toward the Indo-Pacific theater in world politics, where China appeared to be emerging as the new great power rival to the United States. In Obama’s second term and under President Trump, policymakers sought to extricate the U.S. from the Middle East as much as possible. The Obama team thought that this could best be accomplished by reaching out to Iran. The Trump team thought that building on existing alliances with Israel and the Gulf Arab states offered a faster and safer way to reduce commitments—but both administrations were looking to scale back American involvement.
The move to reduce America’s Middle East commitments intersected with an increasing sense among many Americans that the entire post-1945 framework of American foreign policy needed a rethink. Here again, despite their enormous differences in ideology, character, and political style, Obama and Trump seemed to converge. Both displayed impatience with traditional allies who were playing Uncle Sam as a sucker. Both believed that the United States could no longer afford the kind of global leadership that had characterized the last seventy years. Both believed that American foreign policy could and should change fundamentally in the twenty-first century; both were willing to ignore established conventions and consider approaches that “The Blob,” as Obama aide Ben Rhodes characterized the Washington foreign policy establishment, had firmly rejected since the time of President Truman.[8] That two such radically different leaders supported by such radically different constituencies were both willing to challenge long-standing foreign policy orthodoxy is a sign of just how weak the post-historical consensus had become.
That era of disillusionment and disengagement lay in the future as the George W. Bush administration grappled with the consequences of the 9/11 terror attacks. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the vast majority of Americans experienced a wave of unity and solidarity, but such moments rarely last. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq saw hundreds of thousands of American troops engaged in bloody combat across the region while Americans nervously awaited new terror attacks, debates over the wars and over Middle East strategy more broadly inevitably brought Israel policy under the spotlight.
As the Iraq War turned into a quagmire and the weapons of mass destruction the administration had used to make the case for war failed to appear, the American Middle East debate became more bitter still. That Bush was a minority president, whose disputed election involved a controversial Supreme Court decision over votes in Florida, a state governed by Jeb Bush, was momentarily forgotten in the emotional outpouring that followed 9/11. But as more Americans questioned the decision to invade Iraq, and the vicious guerrilla struggle led to an indefinite prolongation of an American combat role, resentment over the contested election fused with anger over the war to further inflame a national political climate already stressed by the partisan warfare of the Clinton years. With an assist from the developing power of social media, Americans got their first taste of the ugly polarization that would mark their politics in the early decades of the new century, and the question of Israel policy was inevitably drawn into the melee.
While Israel policy itself was never at the center of American debates over how to respond to the threat of terror after 9/11, those debates had large implications for America’s Israel policy—and the importance of Israel in American culture, among both supporters and opponents, helped to make those debates more bitter. In the end, polarization over Middle East policy would continue from the Bush and Obama administrations into the Trump years, drawing from and feeding the growing rancor and divisions in American society as a whole. With the wisdom of hindsight one can say that at least some of this rancor was due to the sad truth that neither of the principal strategic camps into which American society and the American foreign policy machine divided after 9/11 offered a genuinely workable approach to a new and quite difficult problem in foreign affairs.
The 9/11 attacks confronted the country with new and urgent but also deeply perplexing foreign policy problems. That an attack on this scale could be mounted by, essentially, a private organization forced Americans to reevaluate the nature of strategic threats and of such concepts as deterrence. If transnational terrorists secured a nuclear bomb, deterrence might well not work with them. If a nuclear attack comes from a state, you at least know where to retaliate. But what if it comes from an elusive organization whose agents are everywhere but has no homeland or capital city? And the United States had invested hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars in building up its capabilities to defeat state-led forces in conventional warfare. Did these attacks mean that much of that investment was now obsolete?
Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, as toxic smoke still poured from the rubble of the World Trade Center and Manhattan struggled to restore transit services, packages with weapons-grade anthrax began to appear at news organizations and political offices.[9] Were the anthrax attacks related to the hijackings? In any case, they heightened the American sense of new risks and dangers and raised the specter of chemical and biological attacks with, potentially, even greater consequences than anything seen on 9/11.
Questions proliferated. Was radical Islamism an emerging new ideological challenge to liberal capitalist democracy? Just how far into the world of Islam did this theology of hate extend? Was it a fringe movement like the radical and sometimes violent sectarian movements that emerge in Christianity from time to time or was it closer to the Islamic mainstream? Was it the inevitable result of the intersection of the poverty and corrupt dictatorships found through so much of the Islamic world with a civilizational and religious rage at centuries of humiliation at the hands of the at least nominally Christian West? Or were the violent radicals, as they claimed, the “true face” of Islam, the most authentic form of a religion that counted more than one billion adherents around the world? Was the Saudi Wahabi state to blame for this fanatical band providing vast sums of money in the form of both public and private funding for radical preachers around the world?
There were other questions as well. The attacks of 9/11 came at a time of rapid population growth in the Islamic world, and at a time of growing migration by Muslims to the advanced industrial democracies.[10] Did these migrants and their children pose a security threat to western countries? Were Muslims assimilable? Should Americans and Europeans worry about a “fifth column” of terror sympathizers at home? Were the prisons producing new terrorists?
In the aftermath of the attacks, it was difficult to assess how much danger movements like Al-Qaeda posed to the United States and western democracies at home, and to vital American interests (especially to the security of the oil states) abroad. And how did one defend against an ideological movement that spread through propaganda and civil society? Was a defensive strategy even possible? How could one “harden” enough targets in the West to keep the public secure? Did this involve Israeli levels of domestic security, guarding against gunmen and suicide bombers in every mall, hijackers on every plane, dirty nuclear bombs on every container ship?
Assuming that while the contest was in part a military and security problem it was at its core an ideological one, how could the non-Muslim West address the challenge at its roots? How does western liberalism win the fight against Islamist fanaticism? Presumably this meant trying to find allies in the Muslim world, but who were they? Were they the military dictators and traditional monarchs who had long experience of maintaining public order in these turbulent countries, or were those repressive regimes part of the problem? Were we in trouble because for too long we had supported authoritarian regimes for the sake of stability, or were these regimes with all their faults our only bulwark against something much worse?
And if we were to turn away from the status quo regimes, to whom should we turn next? There were the pro-western, well-educated liberals who seemed entirely at home with western ideas and political forms, but were they too weak, too inexperienced, and too isolated from mass opinion to replace the old monarchs and dictators? Then there were the “democratic Islamists” like those associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and their ideological soulmate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. Were these true moderates who, if empowered, could marginalize the real radicals by offering a genuinely Islamic but also democratic and effective form of governance? Were they wolves in sheep’s clothing, who once in power would impose dictatorships of their own, and who would use their new power to promote an expansionist and narrow form of Islamist ideology?
Or what about Iran? While Iran billed itself as a revolutionary Islamist power, it was Shi’a, and the new extremists were Sunni. Could the enemy of my enemy be my friend? Could Iran be a partner in the struggle against Al-Qaeda and its associates, and if so, what kind of partner and on what terms?
Finally, there was the question of Israel. Was Israel an important asset, given its military and intelligence capabilities and its long experience with terrorists based in Arab Muslim societies, or would even the appearance of closer U.S.-Israel cooperation inflame public opinion in the Islamic world and simply make Al-Qaeda and other similar groups more attractive? Or, as the George H. W. Bush administration had done in the 1991 Gulf War, was there a way to offset the consequences of an Israeli alliance by adroit management and peace diplomacy? In American politics there was an additional question: Did the 9/11 attacks “prove” that Israeli hardliners were justified in their tough and distrustful stance and that one could not really make peace with Islamist fanatics, or did the attacks “prove” that hardline, uncompromising policies simply stoked the fires of hate, leading to more conflict and more danger down the road? Would the United States need to force Israel to change its ways or, failing that, to separate itself from the impenitent and provocative Jewish state?
Over time, some of these questions have found at least temporary and partial answers, but the problem of radical and violent groups emerging from the culture of Islamism remains a serious concern for American defense and foreign policy more than two decades after 9/11. While no single attack has killed as many people or inflicted a psychological shock as great as those attacks, the United States and many other countries have dedicated significant resources to a struggle that has by no means come to an end.
Given the stakes and the complexity of the problem, the debate over how to respond to 9/11 would have been intensely conducted under any circumstances. As it happened, the debate exposed many of the cultural and ideological rifts in American society that would do so much to shape the contentious politics of coming years.
If the West needed to wage an ideological war against this movement of fanatics, it needed at least a rough sketch of what the West stood for. During the Cold War it had been relatively easy for the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to develop a generic American ideology that could more or less mesh with European ideas about what the West was all about. But the West had become much more fragmented since the 1950s. Did the American consensus on human rights, for example, include or exclude the rights of sexual minorities?
In the United States, these questions exacerbated rising tensions between cultural liberals and conservatives at a time of rapid social change. Social conservatives tended to feel that Americans should respond to the new danger by returning to their cultural and religious roots to find the unity required to defeat the new enemy. Social liberals read the situation quite differently. It was time for America to reach out, to demonstrate its openness to individual Muslims and to Islam as a faith. At the same time, the attacks were an urgent warning that Americans needed to purge themselves from the elements of racism and western imperialism so sadly prevalent in traditional American culture and so firmly rooted in the biases derived from the nation’s Christian and European roots.
Those debates played into and exacerbated a growing polarization around the question of world order that had been almost invisible to the establishment. Many American salvationist Christians reject the idea that human effort can build a stable and peaceful world order. More than this, they believe that the final catastrophe will be triggered by precisely what the cosmopolitan technocrats and world order engineers are trying to accomplish: the establishment of a peaceful world order through human means with neither reference nor deference to the God of the Bible in whose hands lies the true fate of the human race.
“Millennial polarization,” as one can call political divisions that reflect the impact of conflicting “end of history” scenarios, had begun well before 9/11. While the post–Cold War American establishment considered its commitment to a liberal, secular world-order-building project benign and noncontroversial, many Americans saw these activities in more sinister terms.
In the evangelical world, the 1990s saw the publication of the first volumes of the sixteen-volume series of Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a series whose sales around the world have reached approximately 80 million copies.[11] These novels, grounded in a version of the premillennialist theology that has been one of the sources of Christian Zionism since the mid-nineteenth century, tell of a “global community” under the leadership of the secretary-general of the United Nations who is ultimately revealed as the Antichrist. In short order, the forces of globalism overthrow the American government, ban any form of Christianity that doesn’t hew to progressive orthodoxies, destroy the free market economy, and institute a global dictatorship that quickly degenerates into satanic totalitarianism.
The success of these novels—and many similar works by other authors—should not be taken as evidence that their readers fully or even partially accepted their specific outline of Christian theology. But it was or should have been clear to the national political establishment that a substantial portion of the American people were deeply suspicious of what looked superficially like a consensus American policy.
Believers, secular and religious, in a cool and peaceful end of history are fundamentally optimistic about the direction of the world. Humanity is on the road to solving its deepest problems, or at least under the right management, it can be. Globalization in particular is part of the benign revolution that is making humanity less tribal and less backward. New ideas about morality and about gender are part of a kind of ongoing, progressive revelation about how people ought to live together. The spirit of the age can be trusted, human reason is creating a better future, our institutions—while needing reform and improvement—are taking us in a good direction, and the state itself is a positive force for change.
The hot millennialist position was historically more prevalent among those who felt marginalized by the dominant culture and ethos of the country. Those who did not trust or accept the conventional wisdom of the American establishment saw a hot apocalypse coming, one in which the righteousness of God would strip away the vanities and burn off the corruption of the smug and the powerful. Hot millennialism was popular in both the Black and the white South, among poor farmers, immigrants, and the urban dispossessed. It was not always religious; belief that a socialist revolution must destroy the bourgeoisie is the secular equivalent of a hot biblical apocalypse. Redemption comes only after the cleansing and purifying fire.
One characteristic of apocalyptic eras like ours is that ideas about the final destiny of the human race become politically relevant. If the apocalypse seems very far away, differences of opinion about how the apocalypse will unfold when and if it arrives have little political salience. In eras like ours of intruding apocalypse, when the culmination of history seems near at hand, the difference between hot and cool millennial viewpoints can become a determining factor in the way many people understand current events and serves increasingly to shape political affiliations. After the 9/11 attacks the importance of this division to the course of American politics and foreign policy in the twenty-first century is difficult to overstate.
During the Cold War, cool and hot millennialism were both well integrated into the political consensus. Cool millennialists saw the American-led free world as a step toward the creation of a peaceful and progressive world order; hot millennialists saw the Soviet Union as an atheistic power attempting to impose an anti-Christian order on the world. That such a power existed focused the fears and apocalyptic forebodings of many Graham-era evangelicals; that it was America’s opponent legitimated American foreign policy, including its world-order-building aspects, in their eyes. The end of the Cold War meant the end of that consensus, and the consequences of its gradual unraveling continue to be felt.
Hot and cool millennialists responded to the shock of 9/11 in very different ways. Those looking to a cool millennium of orderly progress and developing world order interpreted the attack as a call both to intensify and reconfigure America’s order-building efforts. The existence of the pathology that led to such hatred needed to be dealt with, and the United States would have to double down on efforts to create a democratic and liberal order in the Middle East in order to get the process of benign historical transformation back on track. That the attacks were on the United States, that the attackers expressed hatred for western values and policies, and that the attackers came from undemocratic, religiously repressive societies where poverty and inequality were rife, confirmed the confidence that what the world needed was more America, and what America needed to do to meet the challenge was to become…more American: to live up to its values more consistently and to press its transformation agenda with more energy and force—while becoming more culturally sensitive to the specific challenges of building liberal order in the Middle East.
Hot millennium evangelicals also interpreted the attacks as bolstering their worldview. The attacks on the United States by Israel-hating, Christianity-hating, America-hating religious fanatics confirmed their view of history as following the trajectory of biblical prophecy. The vaunted peace process of the secular globalists had collapsed into chaos and war; instead of a liberal world order we were moving into an era of religious conflict of unpredictable dimensions. That Al-Qaeda hated the United States both because it rejected Islam and because it supported Israel made the conflict look like a religious conflict to many Americans—and simultaneously reinforced their belief that in this apocalyptic age, Israel stands at the center of world history and that those who hate Israel are at war with God.
The events of 2001 reinforced this identification of the Israeli, American, and divine causes. The summer of 2001 saw a wave of suicide bomb attacks across Israel as the violence of the Second Intifada surged. Twenty-one people were killed at the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv in June. As attacks, mostly from Hamas with some from a group calling itself Islamic Jihad, swept across Israel and the Palestinian Territories, many Palestinians celebrated the suicide bomb as a Palestinian tactic that could force the Israelis to come to terms. Two attacks on September 9 had left seventeen dead and three wounded; further attacks would continue through the fall. Israel and the United States were, it felt to many Americans, under attack from the same forces.[12] We needed to stand together.
From the Bush administration’s point of view, Israel was a policy asset as well as a political one. As the U.S. rushed frantically to upgrade security, Israel was the country that had the most experience. Israel had the know-how and in many cases the contacts and sources that could accelerate the buildup of American intelligence capabilities and the integration of overseas and domestic intelligence that was Washington’s most urgent priority in the aftermath of the attacks.
For many Americans, the attacks seemed to demonstrate that the process of the intrusion of the apocalypse into daily life had taken another lurch forward, and that the hot apocalypse toward which we were headed had a distinctively biblical shape to it. Russia might not be targeting the United States with nuclear missiles, but radical terrorists were actively looking to wreak as much havoc in America as possible. Would the next wave of attackers detonate a dirty bomb (an explosive device intended to scatter radioactive material) in an American city? Would they unleash bioweapons to bring on a plague? The existential fears of the Cold War era returned as Americans from President Bush on down worried about the potentially devastating consequences of anti-Christian, anti-Israel, and anti-American terror groups gaining access to weapons of mass destruction.
The New Prudence and the Iraq War
Contrary to some media speculation at the time, neither President Bush nor the circle of senior officials around him saw 9/11 as the opening scene of a Tim LaHaye apocalyptic novel. Bush was not expecting a Rapture, a Great Tribulation, or the arrival of the Antichrist at the podium of the U.N. Nor did Bush hand over control of American foreign policy to a cabal of pro-Israel neoconservatives who ordered the invasion of Iraq to satisfy the elders of Zion.
But the increasingly apocalyptic tenor of the times did play a role in the decision that would define the Bush presidency more than any other. Bush believed, as did Vice President Cheney and other key policymakers, that the potential that terror groups like Al-Qaeda could obtain chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons of mass destruction had changed the rules of world politics.[13] Rational state actors, we had learned during the Cold War and our long coexistence with the Soviet Union and its nuclear arsenal, could be deterred from the use of such weapons by the sure and certain threat of an annihilating response. The “balance of terror,” as Canadian statesman Lester Pearson called the resulting standoff, had kept the peace; no American or Soviet leader would order a nuclear strike that would provoke an equally devastating riposte. The balance of terror might have been a permanent Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the human race, but it was a terror one could live with.[14]
The events of 9/11 changed those rules. If a nonstate actor like Al-Qaeda, neither attached to nor responsible for any particular nation or place, could paralyze America’s biggest city, disrupt air travel worldwide, and send the American economy into a sharp but brief recession, what was the meaning of deterrence? And while nonstate actors were unlikely to develop nuclear weapons programs of their own, the existence of an undeterrable third party offered nuclear-armed states a way to attack the United States without necessarily facing retaliation. What would prevent a country like Iran, Iraq (assuming that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons), or Pakistan from surreptitiously passing nuclear weapons to a terror group for use against the United States? Clearly, nonproliferation had moved to the front burner and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by “rogue states” was so dangerous that the United States might need to go to war to prevent this from happening.
In a less challenging time, as during the Gulf War, the United States aimed to guard a status quo that was both favorable and complex. Although strong action and leadership were sometimes necessary, the best course for the United States was to exercise international leadership more like the board chair of a successful corporation than like an entrepreneur launching a start-up. Faced with an international crisis, an American president should assemble a consensus, work carefully with allies, weigh options carefully, and pursue limited rather than revolutionary objectives. A reputation for sound judgment was an important asset for U.S. power and should not lightly be hazarded.
That strategy, Bush and his closest advisors believed, had to change in the wake of 9/11. Facing the literally apocalyptic threat of a new age of terrorists armed with the deadliest chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons that the human mind has created to date, they believed the danger of inaction was greater than the danger of moving too fast. The United States would not only have to step up its monitoring of terror groups around the world. It would have to focus on hostile states developing or possibly developing weapons of mass destruction, and when a state appeared to be engaged in WMD production even as it developed relationships with terror groups, the United States might need to move quickly.
That decision would almost certainly have to be taken in the absence of incontrovertible proof that such activities were taking place. In the past, American intelligence had been blindsided by the Indian nuclear program. It was only after the fact that Americans discovered the full scope of the proliferation activities carried out by Pakistan. The Bush administration would be surprised in 2003 to discover the full extent of Libyan nuclear activity, and in 2007 the Israelis would destroy a Syrian reactor built with North Korean assistance as part of a nuclear weapons program.[15]
Further, the threshold was lower for a dirty bomb. The nightmare that Al-Qaeda or a similar group could put a dirty bomb on a container ship that destroyed the downtown of a major city haunted officials.
True prudence, Bush officials reasoned, might under these circumstances require launching a war against a country whose nuclear program was in the gray zone—where we did not know exactly how far the program had progressed or indeed whether the program was real or merely nominal. And if such a war were to be launched, the half measures of the Gulf War could no longer be tolerated: the war would need to be fought to its end, the offending regime overturned, and a new government established under conditions that ensured against a repetition of the danger.
Initially popular in a country still reeling from the shock of 9/11, the 2003 invasion of Iraq would dominate the rest of Bush’s presidency.[16] In its initial stages, the war unified the Sun Belt coalition behind the president, but over time the war in Iraq became a millstone around the neck of both the president and his party. The occupation of Iraq transformed into a guerrilla war that, for most of the remaining years of the president’s time in office, the United States seemed unable to win. Investigations on the ground did not bear out the sensational charges about Iraq’s WMD program that Secretary of State Powell presented to the United Nations in order to make the case for the war.[17] That critical and deeply embarrassing failure undermined faith in the competence or, among many, in the good faith of an administration that appeared to have gotten the country into a major war by mistake. Increasingly in Bush’s second term, the administration adopted a strategy of democracy promotion in the Middle East that ran counter to the Jacksonian and Jeffersonian approaches to foreign affairs that were gaining traction among the Republican base—as well as confounded many in the traditional GOP establishment.[18]
The war in Iraq would have many consequences in American politics. In the long run, it would accelerate the breakup of the Sun Belt Republican coalition and open the door to Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. In the short term, the war would reshape both the Israel policy of the Bush presidency and the national debate over the relationship with Israel.
Israel Policy and the Iraq War
It was not immediately obvious that the Iraq War was a strategic and political disaster for Israel. Saddam had been a principal funder of Palestinian terrorism, and his fall was a serious blow to Yasser Arafat. His overthrow, moreover, dealt a final blow to the pan-Arab nationalism that once, under the leadership of men like Egypt’s Nasser, had been Israel’s deadliest foe. However, by 2003 pan-Arabism was yesterday’s worry, and there were others waiting in the wings ready to take over his role as a terrorism funder.
Strategically, while Saddam was a committed enemy of the Jewish state, the collapse of his regime (as many critics of the invasion had pointed out in advance) shattered the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and elevated Iran. With more than double Iraq’s population (66 million to 23 million in 2000), four times its territory, more than twice its GDP, a more advanced technological base, and a more capable state structure, Iran was a much more formidable opponent to Israel than Saddam could ever be. Iran and Iraq were bitter foes; the 1980–88 war between them devastated both economies and led to approximately half a million deaths. The destruction of Saddam, and the resulting removal of a much weakened Iraq from the regional power balance, was a disaster not only for Israel but even for the conservative Gulf monarchies that cordially hated the man who invaded Kuwait.
It was worse. Saddam’s regime was more than a personal dictatorship. It represented the power of Iraq’s Sunni minority over a large and restive Shi’a majority. While Arab nationalism, and an age-old antipathy against Persians, were obstacles to the extension of Iranian influence in Iraq, the deep religious and cultural ties between Iraqi and Iranian Shi’a offered Iran many channels into the power structures of the emerging post-Saddam Iraq. In the wake of the invasion, Iran would create what opponents called a “Shi’a Crescent” stretching from Baghdad to Beirut, confronting Israel with one of the most dangerous challenges in its short but eventful history.
If the war empowered Israel’s most dangerous opponent, it also weakened Jerusalem’s closest friend. As the Iraq War dragged on and lost popularity in the United States, the American appetite for Middle East engagement contracted. American alliances in both Europe and the Arab world were affected by the war’s widening unpopularity abroad, and, until the Surge of 2007–08 improved American military fortunes on the ground, the perception that the United States was unable to deal effectively with the Iraqi insurgency dented American credibility. As Iran grew more powerful, America’s willingness to confront it militarily declined.
Politically, the Iraq War also damaged Israel’s position inside the United States. The war stimulated the rise of isolationist sentiment on both the left and the right and gave prominence to the views of intellectuals and activists who opposed the U.S.-Israel alliance as part of a larger program of wanting to reduce American commitments overseas. These “realist restrainers,” representing a resurgence of the Jeffersonian school in American foreign policy, would breathe new life into anti-Israel politics in the United States even as the deepening polarization of American political life that followed the devolution of the Iraq War into an unpopular quagmire created a new audience for anti-Israel policy arguments. Because a number of the neoconservative supporters of the Iraq War were American Jews, the idea that the unpopular war had been foisted on the United States by Israel and a Jewish-led, all-powerful “Israel lobby” whose loyalty was at best doubtful and dual began to spread in the United States and abroad. Not all of the realist restrainers by any means were Vulcanists, and the ideas themselves were neither antisemitic nor even anti-Zionist, but the fallout from the Iraq War would offer Vulcanism around the world a favorable medium for growth.
The new anti-Israel sentiment repeated some of the same arguments that State Department Arabists had been making continuously since the Truman administration, but there was an important difference. Arabists historically supported a far-reaching American foreign policy. They wanted a strong American presence in the Middle East. They opposed a close relationship with Israel because in their view this relationship complicated the essential task of building the strong relations with Arab states that could secure America’s Middle East position for the long run.
The realist restrainers of the post-9/11 era opposed both Israeli and Arab alliances. They saw the American presence in the Middle East as a whole as a liability and believed that reducing the American exposure to its conflicts and rivalries was essential to American security. This point of view found support mostly outside the foreign policy establishment and remained deeply unpopular within it. Among politicians and the wider public, however, the idea of realist restraint would only gain credibility as the shortcomings of the post–Cold War globalist consensus became more visible.
By the time a political term has become commonplace among academics, policymakers, and journalists, it has almost invariably lost any definite meaning. In the field of foreign affairs, the term “realist” is such a term; nobody hearing the term can be confident of understanding exactly what meaning its user intends to convey.
Long before the Iraq War, the term “realist” became a catch-all label for different people with quite different perspectives on foreign policy in the United States, but the term “realist restrainer” describes a growing group who opposed what they saw as excessive interventionism in American foreign policy after the Cold War and objected to the underlying premise that the establishment of a liberal world order was the proper or even a possible goal for American national strategy.
The essence of the realist restrainer position was to oppose the global ambitions of post–Cold War American foreign policy and to promote a less ambitious American agenda in keeping with a less expansive and ideological vision of the national interest. The adherents were a mixed group. They included paleo-conservative isolationists like Pat Buchanan, who also believed that U.S. intervention in World War II had been a mistake. They included left-wing critics of American society who believed that the American commitment to a global capitalist system was both a moral disaster and a political obscenity. They included distinguished political scientists and foreign policy commentators who saw globalist foreign policy leading into one absurdity and misadventure after another. And they included a growing chorus of those who objected both to the conceptualization of the “global war on terror” the Bush administration had proclaimed, and to the strategy, especially the war in Iraq, that had been chosen to fight it.
The 9/11 attacks first further marginalized restrainers as a wave of Jacksonian-tinctured patriotism surged across the country, but when the problems of the Iraq War multiplied, the realist restrainer position became much more influential. The core critiques that the restrainers were making about post–Cold War foreign policy began to resonate. American overreach, hubris, overreliance on military measures: to many Americans this looked like an accurate description of the Bush foreign policy. One of the consequences of the Iraq War was the revival of a mass base for opposition to military interventions overseas. In the Bush years, given the Republican tendency to support a Republican president, the antiwar movement seemed, like the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era, to be an expression of the left. But the disillusionment not just with the war in Iraq but with the intense global engagement that post-1990 American grand strategy entailed was if anything more pronounced in the Republican base than among Democrats.
For the realist restrainers, the U.S.-Israel alliance was a problem disguised as a solution. There were no significant foreign policy problems that the alliance helped solve, while there were some significant problems that it either caused or made worse. Most restrainers rejected the extreme, isolationist idea that the United States had no interests in the Middle East but saw those interests in limited and realist terms: maintaining access to Middle Eastern oil, preventing hostile powers from controlling the oil flow. These interests, restrainers like Andrew Bacevich argued, could be safeguarded without an extensive American presence in the region. America’s true role was to be an offshore balancer in the Middle East, assembling coalitions if needed to prevent a single power from inside or outside the region seizing control. To this end, a long-term alliance with any country, and especially one as widely disliked as Israel, was a mistake, and simply drew the United States further into quarrels that were not its own.
The 9/11 attacks struck these analysts as the tragic result of excessive American involvement in the region. The long alliance with the Saudis (an alliance that, unlike classic Arabists, realist restrainers deplored) had made the United States a target for those whose principal quarrels were with Middle Eastern governments. The long alliance with Israel made the United States a natural target for the enemies of the Jewish state. For the United States to respond to 9/11 by deepening its entanglements in the region was exactly the wrong step.
Worse, the excessive U.S. focus on the Middle East was distracting the country from more serious problems around the world. Some might point to Latin America, some to China, others still to problems like global public health and climate change, but for the United States to devote immense resources to a conflict that our own poor policy choices had done so much to ignite was to heap folly on folly.
The alliance with Israel looks particularly costly from this perspective. Israel has no oil, and as the experience of the 1991 Gulf War shows, when the United States went to great lengths to keep Israel out of the war, it contributed less than nothing to America’s ability to defend Arab allies. Worse, since the alliance is such an affront to Arab opinion, the United States finds itself having to offset the negative impact of the Israeli alliance in the Arab world by making a host of concessions to Arab states, as well as involving ourselves in such time-consuming and (from the standpoint of true American interests) irrelevant sideshows as the endless and fruitless Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
This list of the real-world costs of a useless alliance only scratches the surface of the realist restrainer objections to the U.S.-Israel relationship. In the politics of American foreign policy, realists of all stripes oppose distortions that, in their view, “idealism” imposes on American policymaking. This takes two forms. One is the more familiar set of realist objections to the perceived illusions of “liberal internationalism,” progressive pacifism, and the whole catalog of what realists think of as the magical thinking endemic to American culture. Woodrow Wilson bleating about the League of Nations, Henry Wallace mooning sentimentally about winning over Stalin by earning his trust, Jimmy Carter moralizing on the subject of human rights, but also George W. Bush preaching democracy promotion: realists want to cleanse the American foreign policy system of such foolish illusions.
But conventional liberal idealism is just a symptom of the real problem that worries realists and, in their view, creates so many disasters in American policy. The belief that America is a providential nation with a set of duties and obligations in the world that transcend the limited objectives of realist foreign policymaking is, realists believe, dead wrong. For America to succeed in the world, Americans must abandon the idea that America has to promote democracy, human rights, stop war, and promote any number of other good causes through alliances and interventions abroad. If we wish to inspire the world, we should improve our society at home.
Trying to reform the world or to build a “liberal world order” for that matter will be counterproductive, the argument runs. These ideals, however inspiring they may be on their own, leave the United States and the world less well off than they would otherwise be by creating unnecessary enemies, avoidable crises, and an endless series of unwinnable wars for the United States. You try to make the world safe for liberal democracy and human rights—and you end up operating the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq while spending your blood and your treasure in an unwinnable war.
From this perspective, the U.S.-Israel alliance is just the outward manifestation of a dangerous cultural construct that empowers the worst kind of idealistic foreign policy in American life. The national fascination with Israel is a shackle that doesn’t just chain the United States to a set of bad policies in the Middle East. It is a shackle that chains America to the whole dangerous set of illusions about the nature of history and our place in the world that led the U.S. into one disastrous overreach after another.
Liberal internationalists for the most part hated Bush and hated his approach to the war on terror. But realists could see a connection that escaped both liberal internationalists and Bush-supporting neoconservatives. America’s foreign policy for both groups was and had to be about more than just ensuring American security and promoting conventional economic interests. America was a transformational power and it could only be true to itself by embracing a revolutionary global agenda.
The realist restrainers believed that America needed to be disenchanted to flourish, and that the idea that there was or should be a special relationship between the United States and Israel was high on the list of fantasies that needed to go.
This position does not necessarily lead to Vulcanism, and there are many realist restrainers who avoid the pitfall of blaming American Jews for foreign policy choices of which they disapprove. Yet for some realist restrainers there were compelling reasons to look into the question of the “Israel lobby.” The alliance was, they believed, so obviously and radically against the American national interest that some explanation was required to show why American policymakers kept returning to it. The Iraq War of 2003 crystallized these concerns for many observers, some of whom would argue that Israel, acting with the support of American neoconservatives, inveigled the United States into the war.
This charge was widespread among foreign and, to a lesser extent, American opponents of the Iraq War, but over time it has lost credibility outside the most fervent centers of anti-Zionist sentiment. The surge in support for this idea was partly due to the prominence of neoconservative thinkers both in the Bush administration and among the supporters of the 2003 invasion. Neoconservatism embraces a highly ideologized vision of America in the world that is toxic for realists. Neoconservatism combines Wilsonian universalism with muscular unilateralism in ways that maximize the use of American power in the service of goals that realists consider unachievable, irrelevant, or both. It is liberal internationalism without the brake pedal that reliance on multilateral institutions provides. That so many prominent neoconservatives were both Jewish and ardently pro-Israel, and that neoconservative ideology struck so many realists as obviously absurd, could engender a suspicion in some minds that neoconservative ideology was constructed more to justify support for Israel (“the only democracy in the Middle East”) than as a sincere worldview.
Vulcanism appealed to some realist restrainers for another reason. Realism in foreign policy comes in many varieties. In some of its forms, realist doctrine maintains that domestic politics are largely irrelevant to the foreign policy choices that states make. The international system, with its ruthlessly competitive nature and the constant jockeying of states for advantage, dictates the kinds of choices governments can embrace. While liberal theories of international relations emphasize the role of domestic politics in foreign policy, realist theories are more likely to compare states to billiard balls on a pool table. Nobody cares what the billiard ball thinks or feels; it is knocked into motion by external forces and goes where it is pushed.
Yet if that picture is true—and it is easy to make strong arguments in its favor—what do we make of the American tendencies that realists so strongly deplore? The United States, it appears, is less predictable and well behaved than your average respectable billiard ball. Instead of waiting patiently until it is knocked into motion and then moving swiftly in a direct line toward some economic or geopolitical goal, it spontaneously leaps into erratic motion, now pursuing democracy promotion in Belarus, now supporting women’s empowerment in Ghana.
One way to address the problem is to make the point that great powers have more flexibility than small ones. Belgium and Sri Lanka must follow the iron laws of the pool table, but a superpower like the United States can afford to indulge its emotions and expend its energy on relatively minor issues.
But after 9/11, that approach came under pressure. For realist restrainers, the Bush administration’s response to those attacks was a series of dangerously misguided blunders. Spending more money than realists think useful on women’s empowerment programs in Ghana may be easy to explain; but what happens when the American reaction to the central issue of the day—terrorism after 9/11—is fundamentally distorted by weird ideological ideas so that the U.S. simultaneously embraces what realists would consider a crazy-pants doctrine of Middle East democratization and launches a foolishly conceived invasion and poorly executed occupation of Iraq? What happens when the billiard ball leaps five feet from the surface of the pool table, rotates in the air, and starts singing “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home”? How, exactly, was this response dictated by the structural realities of the international system?
This is more than a test of American foreign policy. It is an intellectual test of realism’s ability to explain international events. If a great power like the U.S. is guided by illusions and ideology into hugely counterproductive policies at a moment of grave crisis, then the more structural forms of realist theory have some explaining to do.
The answer had to satisfy two criteria. In the first place, it had to explain why the United States was flouting all the “rules” of realist behavior. But the goal was to defend realist theory not to refute it, so the answer could not be to concede that liberal theorists are right and that domestic political struggles routinely drive foreign policy choices. The Iraq War needed to be the exception that proved the rule. Domestic politics might have been responsible for the Iraq War, but this had to be a very rare case.
The “Israel lobby” might be responsible for the Iraq War, but one had to be careful. To say that the “Israel lobby” was simply one of many lobbies all jostling in Washington to influence policy, all subject to more or less the same political dynamics, some more successful than others, is to destroy the intellectual position the theorists sought to defend. To make the theory work, the Israel lobby must be a uniquely powerful force with no real rivals or peers.
One could work oneself into this contorted position on purely theoretical grounds without any antisemitic or even anti-Zionist intent, but the idea that Jews and their allies exercise unique power over governments where Jewish interests are concerned has always been a cornerstone of antisemitism. The Israel lobby thesis electrified antisemites around the world as it appeared to place the authority of well-known academics behind one of the oldest, ugliest, and silliest conspiracy theories in the world.[19]
While those who believe “the Jews” are responsible for everything from the weather to speculative attacks on the currencies of Muslim-majority countries continue to uphold the view that “the Jews” also gave the Iraq War to the world, this view has, as noted earlier, gradually lost currency outside the fever swamps. The disastrous consequences of the Iraq War for Israeli interests and the evident Israeli skepticism for the idea that an American-led democratic transition in the Muslim Middle East would pave the way to Arab-Israeli peace agreements eroded the credibility of the core argument. It was not “the Jews” and their Benjamins-motivated hirelings who made the billiard ball jump; the ball has a mind of its own.
Bush, the Palestinians, and the Return of the Peace Process
The specific reason that Barbara Bush tartly addressed her son as the first Jewish president was her skepticism about George Bush’s 2002 decision to break off relations with Yasser Arafat and to make further U.S. participation in the peace process contingent on a change in Palestinian leadership.[20] Next to the invasion of Iraq, this decision was, from the point of view of both European and American foreign policy establishments, the most shocking act of the Bush presidency.
Arafat’s position as leader of the Palestinian national movement had long been the cornerstone of the Middle East peace process. The PLO chairman was directly or indirectly responsible for scores of hijackings and terror attacks around the world. Palestinian finances were murky in every way, but not so murky as to disguise the reality that for Arafat the distinction between the public purse of the Palestinian movement and the private purse of the Arafat family was shifting and vague. That he could speak of peace at an international conference in the morning and give the go-ahead for a suicide attack on a civilian target in the afternoon was a secret from no one.
Arafat was, in addition to everything else, a man of great charm and charisma. But it was ruthlessness and cleverness linked to an extraordinary political intuition that enabled him to build Fatah into the dominant organization in Palestinian politics, frustrate efforts from various Arab rulers to capture the Palestinian movement and turn it to their own ends, to survive one catastrophic defeat after another, fend off all rivals within the movement, and ultimately to create such an effective mix of terrorist army and political movement that he was able to impose himself on both Israel and the United States as the only possible interlocutor for peace.
For professional diplomats and policymakers, Arafat was one of many leaders of the emerging postcolonial world whose legitimacy came from the gun barrel rather than the ballot box. Such figures often had connections with terrorist movements in the past, and many continued to maintain power by arts darker than the mere mastery of Robert’s Rules of Order. They regularly made large if irregular deposits in shady banks, and more than a few corporate executives knew how to maintain their goodwill.
When, after the 2002 capture of the Karine A, a ship carrying weapons from Iran to Gaza (then under Arafat’s control), George Bush branded Arafat a terrorist and refused to have any further dealings with him, it was Bush’s behavior more than Arafat’s that shocked international opinion. For Bush, the incident demonstrated Arafat’s unsuitability as a peace partner. Bush could not negotiate with Osama bin Laden; he could not ask Sharon to negotiate with Arafat.
As Bush looked at the operations of the Palestinian Authority, the entity that many hoped would one day become the nucleus of the future Palestinian state, he saw an organization that was incapable of governing democratically or competently. At a time when disgust with bad Arab governments around the region was driving thousands of young people toward radical ideologies and terror movements, the Palestinian Authority looked to be as inept, corrupt, and unfree as any existing Arab government—and it was already promoting terrorism through the suicide bombings that were the principal element of Palestinian resistance in the Second Intifada.[21]
Everything that Bush believed told him that a government of this nature could never produce the kind of stability required for a successful peace with Israel; that Arafat either could not or would not change course; and that the Palestinian people therefore both needed and deserved new leadership democratically chosen.
At the time, the Israelis were building what they called a security barrier to block Palestinians from crossing into Israel proper, given that this was how suicide bombers were entering the country. The barrier—which Palestinians referred to as the Wall—snaked across the West Bank, sometimes separating Palestinian communities and cutting villagers off from the farmlands their families had cultivated for generations.
The barrier was the subject of widespread concern around the world, often portrayed as an illegal Israeli land grab, an infringement of Palestinian rights, and an instance of the inherent cruelty and inhumanity of the occupation. To these charges Israelis replied that the barrier was the only way to stop suicide bomb attacks, and that other countries faced with the same problem would take similar measures.[22]
The Bush administration, in a move that was popular with pro-Israel American Jacksonians and others, supported Sharon’s construction of the barrier even as it asked Israelis to show as much concern as possible for the Palestinians whose lives the barrier was disrupting. To break off relations with Arafat while endorsing Sharon’s wall seemed to be the very definition of one-sided pro-Israel policy. To those who sympathized with the Palestinian cause, it was a brutally unfair policy; to those who believed that only by building bridges to the Arab world could the United States blunt the appeal of terrorism and radical religious ideology, it seemed an act of suicidal self-harm.
That Bush was simultaneously endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state as the goal of U.S. policy (a position that went significantly further than anything his predecessors had said) did nothing to reduce the impression that his policies were blindly pro-Israel. His support for the goal of a Palestinian state was so conditional and so hedged about with demands for reform (reforms that, however noble considered abstractly, seasoned observers of national liberation movements considered arbitrary, unreasonable, and, in the real world, impossible to achieve) that it seemed a lot less impressive than the concrete steps the United States was taking that strengthened the Israeli position.
This is not an unreasonable summary of the consequences of Bush’s position in the 2003–05 period, but Bush and his associates saw themselves as rebuilding the peace process on a more stable foundation rather than demolishing it, and their ideas about Palestinian political reform reflected their wider optimism about the possibilities for democratic transitions across the Middle East. The shock of 9/11 had not extinguished the heady optimism of the 1990s; in the minds of many liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike, democracy was still on the march worldwide, and it was both racist and Islamophobic to believe that the democratic enlightenment would fail to illuminate the Middle East. Bush’s forays into Palestinian state building, such as supporting reformist prime minister Salam Fayyad late in his second term, were part of this effort.
The worldly, cynical, and pessimistic European diplomats who believed that the Middle East was doomed to remain indefinitely under a mix of demagogic dictators like Saddam and Qaddafi, bigoted mullahs in Iran, corrupt monarchies in other countries were on the wrong side of history. A new wind was blowing; the times they were a-changing.
In this ill-grounded optimism, President Bush and his advisors were tragically and destructively wrong, but they were not wrong about everything. The Obama administration in its turn would fall victim to the same ideologically driven American optimism when it embraced the Arab Spring. Obama appointee Samantha Power and Bush appointee Condoleezza Rice were not far apart in their thinking. The times had in fact changed since the 1970s. The old systems were failing and were seen to be failing by peoples all over the Middle East. From Algeria to Pakistan, public discontent was rising, governing structures were becoming less effective, and the status quo was becoming less sustainable.
Moreover, they were right to see that the question of Palestinian governance was of critical importance to the prospect of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Peace would not last unless the new state was willing and able to crack down on the minority of Palestinians who could not accept the compromises that a negotiated peace must inevitably bring. The Palestinians were not strong enough to impose the peace that Palestinian opinion truly wanted on Israel; the new state would have to be strong enough to enforce an unsatisfactory peace. There would be no right of return to Israeli-held territory. Jerusalem would at best be divided, with the Palestinians receiving the smaller portion. Inevitably, in a society where the idea of resistance to Zionism was the touchstone of legitimacy, a minority of Palestinians would reject the new state while others would see it as, at best, a first, halting step toward the Greater Palestine of their dreams.
None of this was unique to the Palestinians or represented some psychological disorder in the Palestinian political psyche. This is the absolutely normal and near-universal course of nationalist politics. German and Italian nationalism in the nineteenth century, French desire for revenge after the peace of 1871, Balkan feuds then and now, Irish rejection of the Partition, Russia’s dream today of restoring its former boundaries, mainland China’s hunger for Taiwan—these political passions are, however regrettable in their consequences, normal and natural in human politics.
But if peace between Israelis and Palestinians was to last, it would be the inevitable task of Palestine’s rulers to prevent hotheaded nationalists from carrying out acts of violence against either Israeli or Palestinian targets. The Palestinian government would unavoidably become the enforcer of a peace that favored Israeli over Palestinian interests.
Worse, outside actors would certainly be willing to fund rejectionist Palestinian splinter movements. The Soviet Union had supported Palestinian terrorism in its heyday; every major country in the region had a history of supporting rival Palestinian factions. The government of a Palestinian state would have to have the means and the will to crush nationalist Palestinians supported, armed, and trained by foreign states.
The rise of political Islamism added another complication. Many Islamists believed that it was immoral to cede Islamic land to non-Islamic states, and that this prohibition grew stronger in the case of sacred sites like those in Jerusalem. The rise of Hamas in Palestinian politics coincided with the perception that Fatah was becoming too “soft” with Israel; there are more radical parties competing with Hamas, should it falter in its rejectionism.
The Arafat-centered peace process, as we’ve seen, depended on the idea that Arafat was a competent enough thug that he could manage these problems once he made peace with Israel. He could develop a Palestinian secret police force as competent and as ruthless as the security forces of Egypt, Syria, or Saddam’s Iraq. In exchange for the wealth he could extract and the prestige he would incur from heading a Palestinian state, Arafat would impose an unpopular peace.
Bush’s decision to demand a change in Palestinian leadership reflected a moral discomfort with what he saw as a devil’s bargain with an aspiring autocrat, a conviction that Arafat was too wedded to terrorism to keep his word and play the part envisioned for him by the conventional peace process, and the realization that the durability of peace—in Palestine as well as in other countries in the region—could not be separated from the question of governance. A poorly governed Palestine would be a nursery for terror, just as poor governance across the region had contributed to the rise of Al-Qaeda.
The new Palestinian state could not base its legitimacy on the ideology of resistance to Zionism. More radical movements could always outflank a governing party committed to a peace deal that renounced key Palestinian objectives. Nor could the new state base itself on its adherence to Islam. It would have to find other sources of legitimacy, and these could only be “modern” sources like economic competence and participatory governance. For peace between Israel and Palestine to endure, Palestinians would have to prefer the prosperity and freedom that statehood brought to the emotional rewards of resistance or the siren song of fundamentalism.
Clearly, the Bush team reasoned, a democratic transition in Palestine—assisted and enabled by the United States and its allies—was the first step toward an enduring peace. Introduce democracy into Palestinian politics and allow civil society to flourish, and the dynamic would shift from resistance to achievement. Hamas could no longer compete for office by promises to drive the Jews into the sea; it would have to learn to fix potholes and manage the trash. Economic cooperation with Israel would bring greater prosperity; parties who embraced such policies—and who did a good job in administering government services—would defeat parties who stood in the way of the economic interests of the Palestinian people.
Bush and Rice did not see themselves as breaking the Middle East peace process by excluding Arafat. They saw themselves as reforming the peace process, outlining a “roadmap” (as their plan for Palestinian statehood was called) that, unlike President Clinton’s strategy, might actually work. They did not see themselves as choosing between Israel and Palestine, but as offering both sides a way out of their dilemma.
This grand design suffered from the same fatal flaw as their overall project for a “Greater Middle East” of democratic and modernizing states. It was beautiful in theory, unrealizable on the map. In language that became popular in the next administration, the “arc of history” might bend toward justice in the long run, but it did not run to a schedule on which American policymakers could prudently rely. It is one thing to hail the rainbow as a sign of God’s continuing care for humanity in a troubled world; it is another to expect to fund one’s retirement with the pot of gold at the end of it.
In the end, the Bush-era peace process had no better success than the Clintonian one. American aid to the Palestinian Authority did result in some improvements in the effectiveness of its security forces, but once Hamas stunned Washington by winning the 2006 Palestinian elections, the prospect of a democratic peace between Palestinians and Israelis faded away.[23] The Palestinians who wanted a peace agreement on the available terms were too weak to agree. The Palestinians who opposed the agreement were too strong to ignore. The Israelis, accurately reading the politics on the Palestinian side, were too skeptical about the value and longevity of any agreement to make the additional concessions that might have made a compromise peace easier for moderate Palestinians to sell. Neither American promises nor threats could move either side past its red lines.
Although Bush’s courageous and correct decision to launch the Surge in Iraq offered hope of a better future for Iraq by the end of his second term, and, as noted above, his success in preventing new major attacks on American soil was a significant achievement, it is hard to consider his overall record a success. An administration that began in a period of optimism and unchallenged American power left office with the Middle East inflamed, China ready to step up its campaign against the American-led world order, Russia hostile and resurgent, and the American economy mired in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
What nobody expected was that when his successor left office eight years later, the financial crisis would have been resolved, but the geopolitical situation would become more dangerous than ever. The foundations of the post–Cold War order were coming unglued and the problems of American foreign policy did not flow from the ways in which Bush’s vision of the world differed from those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. All three leaders had misread the nature of the post–Cold War world and the state of American society, and their failures in Middle East peacemaking reflected the widening gap between the world Americans wanted to live in and the planet they actually inhabited.