WorldView: 'It's really a proxy war between the United States and Iran," according to David Rothkopf of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and the author of a book on US foreign policy entitled Running the World. "When viewed in that context, it puts everything in a different light," he told the Washington Post.
Proxy means one who acts directly for another, as distinct from having overlapping, yet autonomous, networks of interest and policy. In this case Israel is assumed to act for the United States and Hizbullah for Iran (and Syria). This has a nice analytical symmetry, allowing linkages to be made between different elements of foreign policy. Presenting the issue this way, the US expects to stiffen the resolve of Europeans dealing with Iran on its nuclear enrichment and potential weapons programme at the UN Security Council. It now has a deadline to suspend them by August 31st.
Viewed in this light Israel's war against Hizbullah in Lebanon is seen by the Bush administration as part of a necessary warning to what its proxy Tony Blair calls a developing "arc of extremism" linking fundamentalist movements and states against the West. This will be the price of attacking Israel or other US allies. It must be made as expensive as possible. Hizbullah must be made "accountable" for its actions to the Lebanese population, which will then turn on the movement in disgust for the pain it has caused.
George Bush talks of the war opening up an opportunity to recast the region, by creating a new framework for democratisation, a "new Middle East" in Condoleezza Rice's words. This recalls the agenda of his first term, including the ripple effects from the invasion of Iraq and the need for regime change in Syria and Iran to install more compliant leaders. There is a deep homology between US and Israeli interests, policy and objectives on this account, bearing out the proxy case.
Asked by the Washington Post about the administration's optimism, Richard Haass, former Bush aide on national security and Northern Ireland, was scathing. "An opportunity? Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"
His comment typified a different stream of US Republican opinion, which has become increasingly vocal in response to the proxy assumption.
Richard Armitage, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Senator Chuck Hagel all warned this week that the US relationship with Israel, in Hagel's words, while "special and historic . . . need not and cannot be at the expense of our Arab and Muslim relationships. The United States and Israel must understand that it is not in their long-term interests to allow themselves to become isolated in the Middle East and the world. The core of all challenges in the Middle East remains the underlying Arab-Israeli conflict."
This group asserts the need for US autonomy from Israeli interests and policy, the better to mediate that conflict. They insist that the US should talk directly to Syria and Iran, not shun them diplomatically. As Kissinger put it: "Hard as it is to imagine that Iran, under its present president, will participate in an effort that would require it to abandon its terrorist activities or its support for such instruments as Hizbullah, the recognition of this fact should emerge from the process of negotiation rather than being the basis for a refusal to negotiate."
Haass says the Bush administration regards diplomacy as "an inducement to be held out only if countries meet a certain standard of behaviour. I simply disagree with that. We ought to approach diplomacy as simply a neutral tool that has the potential to promote or advance US interests." According to Armitage, "we get a little lazy, I think, when we spend all our time as diplomats talking to our friends and not our enemies."
Their realist criticisms of the Bush line are echoed in those made of the British prime minister by heavyweight diplomatic critics, such as Rodric Braithwaite writing in the Financial Times: "Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?" It is a telling critique of the proxy assumption.
Braithwaite says Blair has "reduced the Foreign Office to a demoralised cipher because it keeps reminding him of inconvenient facts". Among them this week was a pessimistic despatch from the departing British ambassador in Iraq, William Patey. "The prospect of a low-intensity civil war and a de-facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy." The danger is that Iraq could become like Lebanon.
Nor does the straight proxy argument hold for the relationship between Hizbullah, Syria and Iran. Certainly there is a spiritual and financial nexus between them, and a coincidence of objectives. Hizbullah's capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12th took attention away from Iran's nuclear negotiations and opened a second front for Israel along with Gaza; but that does not prove a case for Iranian agency. Experts on Hizbullah stress its political autonomy, its Lebanese specificity and its internal diversity. That makes diplomacy all the more necessary. At least the Europeans are pursuing it with Syria and Iran, although the results are pathetic as yet.
The same points are made about Shia movements. They too are diverse and particular, even though they have a common religious inspiration.
The proxy case is based on false unitary or essentialist assumptions about identities and ideologies, often imposed by Western interventions in the region. Hyping up sectarian difference for political purposes can, of course, have the self-fulfilling effect of making it a social reality, as in Iraq. But the emerging political solidarity between Sunnis and Shias in Lebanon and elsewhere in the region belies any such assumption - or a divide-and-rule policy based upon it.
According to Glen Rangwala, who analyses Iraq's descent into sectarian chaos in a new book, Iraq in Fragments (Cornell University Press, 2006), the Coalition Provisional Authority's decision to cede control of key ministries to sectarian parties reflected in part "a kind of low-level orientalism: the easy characterisation which sees tribe and sect as the steering forces of the Middle East".