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« Back to America, Quo Vadis? Part 2 main page    Transcript for: America, Quo Vadis? Part 2Mr. Wattenberg: Hello I’m Ben Wattenberg. Arguments about military strategies for the conflict in Iraq fill the news but do they squeeze out a discussion about America’s broader foreign policy challenges in the region. Do all roads lead to the Middle East? What are the limits of diplomacy? Today’s central question is “America Quo Vadis” the latin for “wither goest thou?” To find out Think Tank is joined by ambassador Dennis Ross, a central figure in the Middle East peace process under both President George H. W. Bush and President Clinton councilor and distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of The Fight for Middle East Peace and by Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former editorial editor of the Wall Street Journal and author of most recently War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History 1500 to Today. The topic before the house; America, Quo Vadis? Part 2. This Week on Think Tank.Mr. Wattenberg: We are here to talk about some specifics, but specifically about the generalities of American Foreign Policy, you know, qou vadis, where are we? What did Lincoln say? “Where are we and wither are we tending”? And I think you sort of come from -- swing from different sides of the plate, Max, you’re –- while there’s a blend, you’re interested in the use of military power, and Dennis, you’re interested in the uses of diplomacy. Dennis, you have specialized in the Middle East and for all the diplomacy and all the military might, it never seems to get off the dime. I mean, they still hate it each other, they still want to kill each other. Is there –- what do you do about something like that? Mr. Ross: Well first you’ve got to look at the basis of the conflict that you’re dealing with. There are some conflicts that I call existential. In the case of the Israelis and the Palestinians you have two national movements competing for the same space. That’s an existential conflict. It doesn’t mean... Mr. Wattenberg: Existential meaning the right to existence. Mr. Ross: Yes. It doesn’t mean between Israelis and Palestinians that you can’t find a solution. In fact I make the case in a book I wrote and having been a negotiator, that the negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians actually was one that came very close to an agreement. The problem was in the case of Yasser Arafat, he couldn’t give up who he was. He couldn’t redefine himself. He was a revolutionary who couldn’t make the transition from being a revolutionary to a statesman. But that’s an existential conflict. A conflict Israel and Syria might be portrayed as a state-to-state conflict where it’s not about the existence of the other; it’s about where do you draw a border? That said, you know, most conflicts, there’s a root to the conflict, there’s a reason for the conflict and the question is can you find a way to overcome it? I remain one of those who think it’s possible to overcome it, but we also have to be quite realistic. I look at where we are today, for example, between Israelis and Palestinians and when I hear people suggesting well, gee; now’s the time to go settle it, I say at a time when you have weak leaders on each side, meaning they lack very much public support...the Prime Minister of Israel has a 13% approval rating. Mr. Wattenberg: And that’s Ehud Olmert. Mr. Ross: Yes. And on the Palestinian side you’re basically characterized by a stalemate in paralysis... Mr. Wattenberg: And his name is? Mr. Ross: President Mahmoud Abbas. So what you have is two leaders; one facing a stalemate internally with Hamas, even if there’s an agreement that’s been negotiated -- we’ll have to see how it’s actually implemented -– the other is a leader who doesn’t have a strong political base. When you have leaders who don’t have a strong political base, that’s hardly the time where they’re going to take on what I call the questions that go to the heart of self-definition and identity. Mr. Wattenberg: There’s also a powerful, if somewhat silent majority for peace in both sides. Mr. Ross: I agree with that. Mr. Wattenberg: And, you know, the best politics can be sometimes what appears to be the worst politics. In other words, if you do, I mean, I guess President Johnson used to say you do what’s right for the people and the people will do what’s right for you. I mean, there’s some pretty high-minded people in that racket. Mr. Ross: It does describe leadership, but if you look at the Middle East, strong leaders take risks for peace; weak leaders tend not to. Mr. Boot: To be successful you have to have leverage, and I’m not sure we ever really had enough leverage against either the Israelis or Palestinians to force a deal on the terms that Dennis was negotiating on. And even in the case of the Israelis, who I think genuinely do want a deal and do want that peaceful settlement, they have not been able to force the Palestinians into going along, because even though, as you say, perhaps most ordinary Palestinians would like peace, there’s the issue of the armed extremists who are actually in control of the streets and the issue always comes down to who is going to coerce the most extreme elements of society? Now, in a democracy like Israel, you have a political process that can take care of the extremists as we’ve seen not long ago when the Israeli government decided to pull settlers out of the Gaza Strip and this was obviously unpopular with the minority of Israelis, but nevertheless the political process prevailed; there was no serious disturbance, and in fact, the evacuation took place relatively peacefully, whereas it’s very hard to imagine the Palestinians being able to peacefully give up their claims on Jerusalem or so-called right of return to Israeli homes and all these other issues which they’ve been holding up for many years because in effect, the street has a veto over anything that the more modern elements might agree to. And so the issue becomes how do you coerce the extremists, and there certainly is not –- the Palestinian government, whatever the intentions of Mahmoud Abbas, does not have the power to coerce the extremists and the Israelis don’t really have the willingness to do so because this would involve a really long term pacification counterinsurgency campaign and they really want to wash their hands of the whole problem, and so this is the basic issue you come down to is there are some very fine negotiations, but at the end of the day the Israelis, the Americans, the moderate Palestinians don’t have the leverage to make an agreement stick. Mr. Wattenberg: Trying to be fair about it, the barrier to peace and to men and women of goodwill on both sides, are the Arab extremists. Mr. Boot: Right. And I mean, you can argue and you can certainly debate whether there is in fact a silent majority in Arab lands who want a more moderate course, and you can sort of debate that one way or the other. It’s hard to know because public opinion polling doesn’t tell you very much in such repressive societies, but the reality is that whatever the broad majority may think, they’re not the ones who are in control. It’s the extremists who are often in control or dictators who are very afraid of the extremists and therefore are not willing to challenge them. And so it almost doesn’t matter in the end what ordinary people may think; they don’t have the power that they have in a democracy like Israel or the United States. Mr. Wattenberg: Well, you know, we have seen over recent decades, the most profound moment (sic) movement in human history toward democracy. I mean, the Freedom House numbers are unbelievable. And the Arab lands are by far the least. But even there, Lebanon at one point was a functioning democracy, Tunisia has some democracy, Egypt has some democracy, Jordan has some real democracy. I’m mean I’m somewhat of a congenital optimist, but there is reason to think that the slow and halting process is toward democratic views and values, even in the Middle East. Would you buy that? Mr. Boot: Well, I certainly buy that because when, as you say, when you look at the long term trend in history, when you start off with say, the foundation of the United States, at that time there probably wasn’t a single democracy as we would define the term, not even the United States because the minority of the citizens had the vote and now today you can argue about the numbers but perhaps as many as 120 countries out of 190 are democracies of one form or another. So keep in mind that just while there aren’t many more democracies now, just because the country becomes a democracy doesn’t necessarily mean it remains a democracy, and we’ve seen a lot of backsliding in recent years in the case of Russia for example, which made major steps towards democracy in the 1990s but is now going in reverse. Mr. Wattenberg: Well, but Max, it’s going –- in other words, it is two steps forward and one step back, not the other way around. I mean, the United States used to be threatened by the Soviet Union’s nuclear force and we’re not anymore. I mean, there are a lot of things we want it to be that it’s not, but that process is still ascending...it’s jagged. Mr. Ross: There’s a distinction, though because the Russians may not be a threat to us the way they once were. The question is institutionalization. What’s happening to the development of democracy based on the institutions? Do we see a society with a rule of law today? I think the answer’s no. Do we see the emergence of a free media? I think we’ve seen a reverse there as well. Do we see, in fact, checks on the executive power? I think we’re seeing few signs of that. So there’s a liberalization in the financial area, although even there there’s enormous state power still, so what we’re seeing is a –- it’s not a -– I think the way to look at this is democratization is a process and it’s not a linear process. Mr. Wattenberg: Absolutely not. I agree with that. Mr. Ross: We have to be -– I mean, I couldn’t do what I did being a negotiator in the Middle East as long as I was -- if I also, like you, wasn’t a congenital optimist. I always think there’s a way to try to move ahead, but I think it’s very important to color your perceptions with an important awareness of reality. In the Middle East what we’re facing today are sectarian divides that have become much more pronounced. This is going to color what the region looks like for some time to come. When the Saudis broker a deal between Fatah and Hamas, they’re not doing it because they’ve now decided, gee, let’s go ahead and let’s see if we can create inter-Palestinian peace because it’s a good in and of itself. They’re focused on how do they wean Hamas away from Iran, because there’s a larger struggle going on in the region. Now, how you look at that, you know, is going to form what you do. It might be good in some respects; it might not be so good in other respects. If you’re trying to negotiate an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, inter-Palestinian peace with Hamas being the arbiter of what may happen in the future is not exactly a prescription for producing peace given their rejection of Israel. The Saudis may well want to take the Palestinian issue off their back in this larger sectarian struggle. They may really like to see a solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but if they’re focused on weaning Hamas away from Iran, that’s actually an approach that focuses on inter-Palestinian peace, but not peace between Israelis and Palestinians. So we’re dealing with what is a complex reality I think in the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere also. Mr. Wattenberg: Well, let me ask you. You’re both so reasonable here, and yet I know… Mr. Ross: That’s because we’re both such reasonable guys. Mr. Wattenberg: …you don’t share the same... Mr. Boot: It can’t last forever (laughter). Mr. Wattenberg: Well, give me an example of something that you disagree about. Mr. Boot: Well, I disagree with Dennis on the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. I don’t think that there is a realistic chance of success and I think President Bush has been right not to try to breathe life into that corpse. I don’t think there is any life there and I think we ought to try a different direction, which is to pursue long term change in the Middle East that will one day make an end to the conflict possible. But I don’t think given where the Palestinians are right now and have been for the last several decades it’s possible to negotiate an agreement that they will stick to. And so I think that this is -– I mean I think Dennis did about as good a job as anybody could possible do of trying to bring the two sides together, but at the end of the day the agreement just was not there because the Palestinian side would not agree to it, and I don’t think that’s likely to change anytime in the near future, so you know, I think there are a lot of people now who are saying for practical reasons we ought to restart the Israeli/Palestinian peace process and I descend from that view. Mr. Ross: They made a mistake in my mind from walking away from the peace process. They made a mistake because in fact, things didn’t have to get as bad as they are now. I agree, when I say today, I agree with you that now is not the time to try to resolve the conflict, I am in favor of greater activity to try to contain it, to limit it. We had a moment, I’ll tell you, in 2005 that was lost. An act of statesmanship, an act of state... Mr. Wattenberg: What was the moment? Mr. Ross: The moment was Arafat does the end of 2004; Abu Mazen is elected on a platform of nonviolence. For the first time in the history of the Palestinian movement we have a Palestinian leader who is emphasizing nonviolence as the right course, and we have Ariel Sharon make the decision to withdraw from Gaza and pull out all settlers, taking on his own settler constituency. We parlayed those three developments by sitting on the sidelines. Mr. Wattenberg: We, being the United States. Mr. Ross: Being the United States, yeah. And we’re not solely responsible... Mr. Wattenberg: No, I understand. Mr. Ross: In effect, by sitting on the sideline, by doing –- by being much too inactive, being involved only episodically, we took those three developments and it got parlayed into Hamas winning an election. It didn’t have to be that way, so what you want to do is be active and recognize... this is what I mean by see things as they are, understand what you can effect, use the means at your disposal to effect it. We didn’t do that. Mr. Wattenberg: Could we have done something else? I mean... Mr. Ross: Absolutely. Mr. Wattenberg: What could we have done? Mr. Ross: I’ll give you two examples of what we could have done. I’ll give you more than two examples. In the case of Abu Mazen, having spent an enormous amount of time negotiating with him, I know that he’s not a ready decision-maker. When he won an election on the platform of nonviolence, the most important thing was to prove to Palestinians that his way worked as a way of shaping the future. That meant that he had to make decisions, we had to push him to make decisions, but we also had to deliver for him. We did neither. At a time when the per capita income on the Palestinian side had declined by one third over the preceding four years at a time when they had very high unemployment, at a time when Palestinians who used to work in Israel couldn’t. This was the point where we should have gone to the Arab states who had money, meaning the Gulf States. They did not have a cash flow problem given the increase in the price of oil. We should have focused with them and made it clear to them privately that if they didn’t help we’d get public about the fact that they weren’t helping. We should have worked to create a billion-dollar fund to provide a social safety net because Hamas was competing with its own; to build housing, because Palestinians were the backbone of the Israeli construction industry; to provide what would be pensions for a large part of the security organization that was largely corrupt among the Palestinians. Had we pushed in this direction and put Abu Mazen in a position where he was acting and got the Israelis as well in the circumstances where he was acting to be somewhat more flexible with regard to what they would allow with regard to movement, then you might have put the Palestinians in a position where suddenly a new leader who believed in nonviolence was showing that his way worked, which would have credited him, made him more confident and discredited Hamas in the process. We didn’t do any of that. Mr. Boot: Well, I think that’s a very optimistic scenario for what could have happened and I don’t mind supporting Mahmoud Abbas; I don’t mind supporting the more modern forces within the Palestinian authority, but we have to realize that although Abbas was elected he never had a strong base of support and never really controlled the street, which was controlled either by Fatah thugs or by Hamas thugs and there often is not that much difference between the two of them other than that they hate each other and are both competing for power. So I, you know, I think we may have been exaggerating the extent to which the forces of moderation were actually in the driver’s seat of Palestinian society, and there’s a real -– been a real danger in the past where in the 1990s, you know, we spent the whole time basically trying to follow the model that Dennis suggested, which was building up Yasser Arafat, whom at the time we were led to believe was like Abbas, somebody who was interested in peace and interested in giving up his bad old ways and the result of that was that we essentially empowered the Fatah security force which became the Al-Aksa Martyr Brigade and which undertook acts of terrorism against Israel and also terrorized their own society. That’s a very important part of it. I mean, all these groups claim their raison d’etre is fighting Israel, but in fact, much of their energy is spent fighting one another and extorting and terrorizing their own citizens. And these are essentially gangs of criminals who justify their conduct with this very extremist, nationalist and religious rhetoric. So, I mean, these are the real groups that you’re dealing with on the ground in the Palestinian authority, and I think that the essential point that we come back to is one I raised before which is who is going to coerce the extremist? And I’m not sure that Mahmoud Abbas ever had -- I know he didn’t have the power to coerce the extremist; I’m not sure he even had the willingness to do so because this would have required a decisive break with the very people who were supporting him within the Fatah movement of which he was the designated successor to Yasser Arafat. So I, you know, I’m somewhat less optimistic the Dennis here about the odds of success and I don’t think that -- it’s hard to say that the Bush policy has been any great shakes, but I don’t think the Clinton policy was any great shakes either because that led directly to the second intafada. Mr. Ross: Max is correct when he talks about the fact that they’re not the only ones who are responsible for carrying out violence, but my point was with regard to Abu Mazen, it’s possible if we’d done everything I suggested things wouldn’t have worked, but the one thing for sure, by doing nothing, you’re guaranteed failure. I think that there’s –- you certainly -– I think you have to understand one thing about Palestinian society today. Palestinian society is very much a reflection of the Arafat legacy. Arafat was an icon. He put the Palestinian movement on the map; he gained it a kind of international standing in recognition, and so he was seen as someone who embodied the movement and ruled it for forty years, but he created the following: one, he had a system governed by corruption. Why? Because corrupt officials would be completely dependent upon him. Two, he emphasized factionalization because he wanted nobody who could bring to be a competitor of his and he worked to have the factions competing with each other for his favor. So there’s corruption on the one hand; there’s factionalization on the other and he’s determined to prevent any institutionalization. Again, because that would have limited his power. So when he goes, there is a vacuum and it didn’t produce any kind of immediate internal struggle because everyone was afraid. Abu Mazen wins an election with 62% of the vote, running on a platform of nonviolence. Some people like to say that he’s against violence just because it’s counterproductive. The face is he gave a speech to the Palestinian legislative council back in 2003 where he said it’s unjust; it takes a just movement and makes it unjust. So he was campaigning against violence as something that wasn’t just tactfully wrong, but also strategically wrong. And what I’m saying is when he got elected, we had a stake in his success. We should have done much more than we did to try to make him successful, but we should have required something of him. Mr. Boot: Well, I think, you know, Ben, since you want some disagreement between Dennis and myself, I’ll deliver some disagreement because I think essentially the policy that we’ve been following, or we were following under the Clinton Administration is the policy –- and the Palestinian authority -– is the policy that we’ve been following throughout the Middle East for many decades, which is essentially to put our promotion of liberalism, democracy and human rights, put that on the back burner and make our policy be dependent upon these strongmen who we would think of as being moderates in the region and would keep the extremists at bay. So in the way that we’ve, for many decades supported Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or the Saudi royal family or various other friendly tyrants in the Middle East, so in the 1990s, we and the Israelis under Yitzhak Rabin decided to support Yasser Arafat in very much that same mode. And in fact, Rabin actually once said that, you know, that Arafat doesn’t have all these human rights groups that we have in Israel, so he could really deal in a strong way with the extremists. Now, of course, the problem with that is when you have a government whose basic legitimacy is only based on force, they’re not going to take on the extremists, or they may take on some extremists, but they’re going to support their own extremists. And when you think about all these leaders, whether it’s Mubarak or Arafat or so many others, the way they basically stay in power is by channeling the anger of their own population, which properly ought to be directed at them for not delivering jobs, for not delivering freedom, for not delivering opportunity. They take all that anger and challenge it (sic) and channel it towards outside objects of hatred -- Israel, the United States, the Zionist conspiracy, all this propaganda that they feed to their people and unfortunately that creates a very corrosive climate in which it’s impossible to make true long term peace. And that’s what we learned when the second intafada broke out when Arafat turned down the very good deal that he was offered by the Israeli government with American brokers. Mr. Ross: It wasn’t by the Israeli government; it was by us. Mr. Boot: Well, right; it was the one that you brokered in the Oslo process. He wasn’t interested in peace because his power ultimately depended on a state of war, or creating this perception that a state of war existed, and the same thing is true throughout the region. And I think one good -– I think I completely agree with President Bush’s policy which is we’re going to leave that old reale politick thinking behind; we’re going to try to promote liberalism, democracy and human rights in this region which has been so resistant to it for so many years. The problem... Mr. Ross: Is that what we’re doing now in Egypt? Mr. Boot: Well, of course the problem is we’re not doing it. The problem is we haven’t done it very successfully and now we’ve backed away from it and so I’m actually critical of President Bush for backing away from his original policy, and of course for being so ham-handed in his execution, which gets back to the point we were talking about before where you have to have not only the great ideals, but you have to have the wherewithal and the wisdom to execute the and that’s where President Bush has fallen short. Mr. Wattenberg: You are saying that the incumbent President Bush is too soft and you would probably say he’s too strong. Is that right? Mr. Ross: Well, no I think the last point that Max made I would agree with. I think in a sense one of the problems we see with this administration is that frequently it’s talking at the level of slogans, but it doesn’t have, it doesn’t act with the means to carry out the slogans. I’ll give you an example in Syria. I would say that the administration’s policy towards Syria right now is a policy that is tough rhetorically and soft practically. It turns Teddy Roosevelt on his head and that’s the mistake. I think where we agree... Mr. Boot: Absolutely. I agree with that. Mr. Ross: ...is basically you have to create a blend between objectives and means. The wherewithal you have to carry out your policies have to be connected. They have to be integrated. The administration I think has fallen off the tracks, not because its ideals were necessarily wrong, but because it really didn’t have any idea of how it was going to carry them out. Mr. Boot: Right and the administration is just driving me up the wall here because President Bush gives these very eloquent statements about how we will support democracy everywhere and democrats who are in jail know they have a friend in the United States, and meanwhile Ayman Nur who’s the great liberal opposition leader in Egypt is rotting in jail while we’re giving two billion dollars a year to the Egyptian government. We can’t square that circle. Mr. Wattenberg: Max, I mean, presidents and generals cannot be realistic. I mean, a general cannot say a charge –- we have a 64% chance of success; you have a 23% chance of being killed; the artillery (unintelligible) may come from the left or may come from the right; you weren’t properly trained; the missiles are going to...you gotta say “Go, follow me.” It may be a lie that we’re going to win, but you can’t engender passion by being realistic. I mean, that’s not the way the world works. Mr. Ross: But you got to have the means. You can’t –- if you’re going to engender the passion, what you’re going to end up doing is undermining the source of your passion by showing you can’t do what you say. Mr. Wattenberg: O.K. on that note we will have to end it for the moment. Dennis Ross, Max Boot Thank so much for joining us on Think Tank and Thank You. Please remember to send us your comments via email we think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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