No Pain, No Gain in the Mideast

On Iraq, doves have looked pretty good the last few years as the rationales offered up by the hawks (myself included) have mostly fallen apart. But on Israel, which is now embarking on a promising peace initiative with the Palestinians, it's the other way around. In retrospect, the doves now look foolish and the hawks positively brilliant.

Three years ago, if you recall, Israel faced near-daily suicide bombings. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon responded by hastening construction of a security wall and launching a military crackdown in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Doves everywhere were horrified. "Mr. Sharon's policy so far has been worse than ineffective; it is aggravating the terrorism," wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

As it happens, Sharon's policy succeeded unequivocally. From September 2001 through July 2002, terrorists operating out of the West Bank killed 173 people. The following 12-month period, with the security wall under construction, that number fell to 68. The year after that, with the wall further completed, the number fell again to 28. Maybe Sharon aggravated the terrorists, but he did not aggravate terrorism.

Sharon also refused to negotiate with Yasser Arafat. This too was seen as reckless and irresponsible. Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska spoke for the traditional foreign policy establishment when he urged that "we cannot hold the Middle East peace process hostage by making Yasser Arafat the issue

Well, guess what? The Americans and Israelis demanded Arafat's removal. And credible Palestinian leadership did step forward. To be sure, luck -- in the form of Arafat's timely death -- intervened. Still, we now can see that negotiating with Arafat would have been folly. And President Bush, despite his many -- almost innumerable -- failings, deserves enormous credit for backing Sharon despite intense international pressure.

The doves got it so wrong because they fundamentally misread the situation. The idea that harsh Israeli counter-terrorist measures must inevitably backfire is rooted in the view that the Middle East conflict is a "cycle of violence." (No doubt you've heard this phrase countless times.) According to this theory, Palestinians attack Israelis because Israeli repression makes them desperate and angry. More repression creates more desperation and anger, which creates more terrorists. Yet the last Palestinian uprising began as a response not to excessive Israeli strength but to a perception of Israeli weakness.