A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  Of course, since the fall of the Communist system and the democratization of the European republics of the former Soviet bloc, the peace of deterrence between the eastern and western parts of Europe is rapidly being replaced with the peace of democracies. As soon as the Warsaw Pact was dismantled, NATO began to change its form accordingly. There is talk of orienting it toward a more political and a less military role, and to the extent that it retains its military functions its members do not rule out incorporating into it the countries of Eastern Europe, even the former Soviet Union itself. Furthermore, disarmament efforts, which previously had advanced at a snail’s pace under the totalitarian Soviet regime, are now hurtling along with such speed and scope that some arms experts even suggest slowing the pace a bit. For a democratizing Russia need not be coerced into making such concessions; it wants to make them and readily volunteers to accelerate the process.

  We can see the same principle at work in the former totalitarian regime of Germany, and in its relations with France, its principal antagonist since the 1800s. In the period between 1906 and 1945, France and Germany fought four of the bloodiest wars in history (the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II). Millions of French and Germans died. The border between Germany and France was fortified, with standing armies facing each other. Yet today it is an open border, shorn of any physical barrier. This development is often held as evidence that peace is possible between antagonists of long standing. Indeed it is. But the question we must ask is, when did such a peace become possible? It was realized only after the last despotism in Germany, the Nazi regime, was destroyed and replaced with a democratic government. Once this occurred, Germany and France reverted automatically to the first kind of peace, the peace of democracies. All the fortifications, troops, and weapons disappeared from the Franco-German border, and after half a century of solid German democratic institutions, they have not come back. I hazard to say that things will stay that way as long as German democracy displays firmness and vitality, unlike the weak and vacillating experiment of the Weimar Republic between the two world wars. But should there be a weakening of German democracy in the future and a concomitant rise of antidemocratic forces in an increasingly powerful Germany, the peace of Europe and of the entire world will surely be threatened. I do not use Germany as an exclusive example. The same can be said of Japan, of Korea, and of any other country with a despotic past and a powerful economic, and hence political and military, future. Similarly, whether the newly liberated peoples of the former Soviet Union will be able to avoid escalating their nationalist antipathies and territorial grievances against one another into overt wars—as has happened in Yugoslavia—will depend in no small measure on their abilities to genuinely democratize. If they produce authoritarian or dictatorial regimes instead, the chances of enduring armed conflict among them will grow accordingly.

  What we have learned in the twentieth century is that there are two radically different policies that will work to achieve peace and sustain it, depending on which kind of peace is at stake. In a society of democracies, such as Kant envisioned, it is possible to work to strengthen all states simultaneously, because the cooperation and goodwill of each state will in the long run work to the benefit of all. This is the situation that pertains in North America and Western Europe and that may now be spreading to parts of Eastern Europe as well. International relations in these areas consist almost entirely of devising cooperative schemes by which the peoples of the respective states will benefit. In such a context, concessions and appeasement toward friends are interpreted as signs of good faith, under the principle of “one good turn deserves another.”

  But since the policy of concessions does exactly the opposite when dealing with dictatorships, encouraging dictators to demand more, a different policy must be pursued toward such regimes. In these cases only the peace of deterrence is possible, and the only means of achieving it is to strengthen the democracies and weaken the dictatorships.

  Here, in a nutshell, is the main problem of achieving peace in the Middle East: Except for Israel, there are no democracies. None of the Arab regimes is based on free elections, a free press, civil rights, and the rule of law. Further, they show absolutely no sign of democratizing, thereby bucking the almost universal trend toward liberalization evident in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Central and South America, Asia, and parts of Africa (which many predicted could never democratize). In an era when even such hitherto cloistered despotisms as Mongolia and Albania are undergoing democratic revolutions, the stubborn refusal of the Arab world even to contemplate genuine democratization, let alone implement it, should send a warning signal to the champions of democracy in Western Europe and America that for now this region is capable only of the peace of deterrence.

  But alarmingly, no such signal is being received in the West. While the United States had a decisive role in pressuring the dictatorships of Latin America to democratize, as well as some of the African governments such as the Mobutu regime in Zaire; and while both America and Western Europe put enormous pressure (from trade sanctions to public protest) on the Soviet bloc and South Africa to observe human rights and allow pluralism, no such pressure, none whatsoever, has been placed on the Arab world. It seems that the crusading zeal of the democracies stops at the Sahara’s sandy edge.

  The first order of business for those in the West who are seeking a Western-style peace for the Middle East is to press the Arab regimes to move toward democracy. By this, I mean not only the tolerance of political parties or even of majority rule but the introduction of such novel concepts as individual rights, constitutional constraints on power, and freedom of the press. These run completely contrary to the bogus calls for “democratization” from the Islamic fundamentalists, whose first act upon coming to power would be to crush such freedoms, as was done in Iran.

  I, for one, summarily reject the view that Arabs are incapable of democracy. Israel’s Arab citizens (much like Arab-Americans in the United States) have adopted the country’s democratic norms, practicing democratic politics in the town councils and municipal and national elections with all the feistiness of Israeli politics and with none of the violence characteristic in the Arab world. Yet similar norms cannot and will not develop in the Arab countries without intense and systematic encouragement from the West.

  But if the West is unprepared to agitate for democracy in the Arab world, it should at least bolster the deterrent capacity of the Middle East’s democracies (there is only one) and work to weaken the power of the more radical tyrannies. This is in line with the basic principle of building the peace of deterrence: firmness toward tyrants, friendship toward democracy. Yet so often when it comes to this part of the world, the hard-learned distinction between the two kinds of peace evaporates, and the West instead does precisely the opposite: pressuring Israel for concessions, and feverishly appeasing the tyrants with every conceivable weapon and resource. The most obvious example is Saddam Hussein, to whom the American government insisted on supplying loan guarantees a few days before his invasion of Kuwait. 3 In the subsequent war, the Americans had to fight weapons systems that had been supplied by firms from France, Italy, Britain, Austria, and Greece and tried to bomb Saddam out of fortified bunkers that had been built by Belgians and to gird its troops against poison gas supplied by German and Swiss companies. 4 Now the United States is trying to ferret out of Iraq the multiple hidden nuclear weapons projects that Saddam has built and continues to build, using technologies sold to him by the West. His current ill repute, of course, seems to have induced some of his Western suppliers to switch to selling their products to Syria, which was rewarded for its passive support of the American war against Syria’s archenemy Saddam.

  Not only does the West build up Arab dictators, it refuses to link granting them favors to any sort of democratic reforms or to an end to human rights violations. When it does bother to think of criticizing oppression in the Middle East, the West focuses on Israel, the
solitary democracy in the region, whose record compares more than favorably with that of other democracies that have faced similar circumstances. Often enough, Western officials will even stoop to asserting that because of its behavior, Israel cannot be considered a democracy. But such condescension merely displays the speaker’s ignorance: of riot control in Los Angeles and Detroit, of antiterror tactics in Northern Ireland, of the postwar Allied military administration in Germany and Japan. Israel is a democracy at war, and its behavior compares favorably with that of any democracy under such circumstances.

  Even a cursory glance at events in the Middle East in recent years reveals that the Arab governments obey the rules of the peace of deterrence to the letter. In 1975, when the Shah of Iran was at the height of his power, Saddam Hussein signed a nonaggression pact with Iran because the Shah was so strong that there was nothing that Saddam could gain by aggression. But after the fall of the Shah and the collapse of his once-formidable army, Saddam tore up the agreement and invaded Iran, starting the nine-year Iran-Iraq War. It was only after the first years of fighting, when he realized that Iran would not be beaten, that Saddam sued for peace. But at this point the Iranians under Khomeini—no democrats either—thought that they could win and refused to call off the war. It was only after Saddam had managed to beat back the Iranian counterattack for several years that Iran too sued for an end to the fighting, and the peace of deterrence was restored along the original border.

  Kuwait, too, lacked the capacity to defend itself against Iraq’s aggressive designs and perished until an American-led invasion brought it back to life. Predatory Arab regimes are limited in their aggression either by deterrence (the two largest predators, Iraq and Syria, have never actually warred with each other because of mutual fear) or, when deterrence fails, by someone with superior force physically rolling back their conquests. This was the case with Libya’s invasion of Chad, which the French intervened to repel in 1985, much as the British had helped Yemen repel the Egyptian invasion in the early 1960s.

  In other words, peace in the Middle East means “peace through strength.” One way the West does acknowledge this fact is through its massive arms sales to the nonradical Arab regimes. But this policy is chimerical, as all the weapons in the world cannot transform flimsy Kuwait and Saudi Arabia into nations capable of fending off a military state like Iraq, which has an army twenty times the size of theirs. They can be armed to the teeth, but they have no teeth—as the need for direct American protection of these states in the Gulf War has proved.

  What the arms-sales policy does do, on the other hand, is build the arsenals for the future fanatics who may one day overthrow the existing rulers—as Qaddafi overthrew the pro-Western King Idris of Libya, and as Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran. Similarly, Arab tyrants may acquire weapons that their neighbors gained, through pillage (as Saddam did in Kuwait) or through pressure of other sorts to put the weapons at their disposal. In the Arab world, therefore, the destination of massive infusions of weapons today is not necessarily where they will end up tomorrow; nor is their purpose today necessarily the purpose for which they will eventually be used.

  The only certain effect of these huge arms transfers is to bolster the conviction of the Middle East’s radicals that the wherewithal to destroy Israel does exist in the Arab world. The more weapons the Arabs receive, the clearer it becomes to them that the only thing standing in the way of victory over the Jewish state is Arab disunity itself. Many people in the Arab world are well aware that Israel cannot possibly compete against the arms buildup currently under way. To them, the only thing lacking is the right strongman to concentrate all this power in his hands and bring it to bear. The policy of massive sales of advanced weapons to governments in the Arab world is thus an inducement for adventurers such as Saddam to make a bid for forcible unification. It is therefore a policy that works directly to undermine deterrence—and as such is diametrically opposed to peace.

  The Arabs justify this policy by insisting on Israel’s “aggressive” nature, a claim that they attempt to support by pointing to the fact that Israel has gone to war several times since 1948. It is hard to believe that anyone in the West could swallow this line, especially after the Gulf War. Night after night, Iraq dropped missiles on the civilian populations of Israel’s largest cities, while Israelis huddled in rooms sealed against chemical attack, waking their children to place them in protective plastic tents and gas masks. The attacks were unprovoked, but at the request of the United States and in the hope of depriving Saddam of an excuse to deflect the Allied war effort, Israel did not retaliate—even when attacks on Tel Aviv caused the deaths of Israeli citizens. There can be no more graphic a demonstration of how serious the “Israeli threat” is and how “aggressive” Israel is.

  Notwithstanding the false Arab claims, the United States has provided Israel with generous military assistance ever since the Six Day War. This has helped the cause of Arab-Israeli peace a great deal by contributing to the gradual Arab recognition of the fact that Israel will not be so easily destroyed. Reinforcing this perception and transmitting it to Arab regimes and organizations that have not yet assimilated it are the keys to achieving a sustainable peace between Israel and the Arabs.

  We can see precisely this kind of process occurring slowly but surely in Israel’s relations with the Arab states. In 1948 the Arab states thought they would have no difficulty in wiping out six hundred thousand Jews on their thin sliver of land. In 1967 that sliver was still tempting, and Syria and Jordan joined Egypt in trying to strangle Israel. But this attempt, too, failed. The Six Day War immeasurably improved Israel’s strategic position. The addition of the mountainous buffer of Judea and Samaria for the first time removed Israel’s population centers and airfields from the possibility of direct ground attack. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur in October 1973, Jordan had to consider whether to join the fray. Faced with the prospect of fighting across the Jordan Valley and up the steep escarpment of the Israeli-held Samar-ian and Judean mountains, Jordan chose to sit out the war, sending only a token contingent to join the Syrian forces on the Golan.

  Hence, while in 1948 five Arab armies invaded Israel and in 1967 three Arab armies fought, in 1973 only two Arab states attacked. And in the 1982 campaign against the PLO in Lebanon only one, Syria, entered into a limited war with Israel. Further, in the Gulf War in 1991, it was only Iraq, having promised to “burn half of Israel,” that struck with missiles, but it did not attempt any ground engagements—promoting one observer to describe it as “the half-effort of a half-country.”

  This represents a promising trend, provided we understand what forces brought it about. (If we do not, we could easily bring about its reversal.) Why has this decline in the number of countries attacking Israel taken place? It certainly has not happened because the Arab world as a whole has changed its opinion of Israel. Yet King Hussein’s willingness to go to war in 1967 stands in sharp contrast to his unwillingness to do so just six years later. Whether or not he went to war was determined by which side of Israel’s protective wall (the West Bank) his army was on when the war broke out. Likewise, the results of the Yom Kippur War strongly influenced Anwar Sadat in his decision to make peace with Israel. He may have restored Arab “honor” (by not losing to Israel for a couple of weeks), and he may have even earned the opportunity to speak of the Egyptian “victory” in that war, but he knew full well that despite the surprise attack on Israel that was launched on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the Israeli army soon turned the tables and reached the outskirts of Cairo and Damascus within twenty-one days.

  The declining number of warring Arab states reflects the underlying reality: Peace between Israel and its neighbors is the second kind of peace, the peace of deterrence. The probability of achieving it is directly proportional to Israel’s ability to project a strong deterrent posture—the stronger Israel appears, the more likely the Arabs will be to agree to peace. There is nothing surprising about this. It is the
classic doctrine of deterrence. It was not lack of desire that prevented the Soviet Union from attacking the West but the Soviet fear of retaliation. Similarly, what has decreased the likelihood of a joint Arab assault on Israel is not the absence of hostility but the fear of failure.

  This deterrent effect not only prevents those Arabs who are in a state of war with Israel from actually going to war, it helps keep those Arabs who are in a state of peace from reneging on it. This is why the single peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country, the Camp David Accords, provides for a larger buffer space between Israel and Egypt. The demilitarized Sinai is sufficiently vast that if Egypt were to violate the peace with Israel, Israel would have time to mobilize its defenses and counterattack.

  In the Middle East, security is therefore indispensable to peace; a peace that cannot be defended is one that will not hold for very long. The relationship between security and peace is often presented in reverse—for Israel alone, of course. Nobody would dream of telling Kuwait that its security lies in having peace treaties with Iraq. It had such treaties, and they were totally useless when Iraq came to believe it could swallow Kuwait whole. But those who confuse the peace of democracies with the peace of deterrence nonetheless tell an Israel beleaguered by heavily armed dictatorships that it can take inordinate risks with its security for the sake of “peace” because “peace is the real security.” On this Henry Kissinger has remarked that all wars start from a state of peace. This is especially true of the Middle East, which is littered with inter-Arab peace treaties and friendship accords, not one of which ever prevented a war.