Second Error in Middle East Policy

Alastair Crooke, in the London Review of Book talks about how dangerous the situation in Gaza is.  Repercussions are not just for Palestine but the rest of the world.

The Europeans embarked on the second of their greatest policy mistakes in the region -- after their support for the invasion of Iraq -- with their dogged determination to isolate Hamas and attempt to return Fatah to power.

Hamas had argued during the election campaign (and won) that Fatah's promise to Israel of an end to violence would bring Fatah only Israeli contempt, perceive as Palestinian 'weakness'. For Hamas, a just solution will emerge only when Israel comes to 'respect' its adversaries.

Hamas therefore argues for continued resistance, and for a reversal of the Arafat doctrine, which held that Palestinian institutions should not be established until a state had been achieved. It believes that good governance now, and the unity it will bring, is the path to a Palestinian state. With its record of effective and corruption-free local government, it has been keen to put this into practice at the national level: it may now have its chance in Gaza if the big powers allow it.

The problem for Hamas is that its constituency -- the rank and file -- and the wider Islamist movement have now embarked on a period of introspection. What is apparent -- and this can be ascertained on any number of Islamist websites -- is that the mainstream Islamist strategy of pursuing an electoral path to reform is now being questioned. 

This will have an impact well beyond Palestine – most obviously in Egypt and Jordan. Three events have triggered this reassessment: the sanctions imposed on the Hamas government; last summer's US-backed war to destroy Hizbullah in Lebanon; and the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which raises not a peep of protest from Europeans. Continued Western hostility towards all Islamists, however moderate their policies, has also frustrated the grass-roots.

Strategists wonder whether the Iraq war has damaged America so badly as to set it on a path to "imperial decline". Is the post-Soviet "unipolar" world, established after America's first war against Saddam Hussein in 1991, coming prematurely to an end as a result of the second war to topple him? For Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading think-tank, "the American era in the Middle East is over" -- and because of the importance of the Middle East, American global power has also been weakened, for years if not for decades.

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