Israel's Next War

by Martin Archer

Then there was a long conversation in which Anil pointed to me and Harry several times and then to Si and Solly. After a while the apparent leader of the roadblock and the man in the back of the truck yelled something back and forth to each other. Whatever was said caused the guy in the truck to put down our weapons and jump out of the back of the pickup without them. Hot damn. They’re friendlies.

  Five minutes, a lot of handshakes, and one relieved piss later, we were sipping at the bottles of orange soda which have been pressed into our hands as we gathered around one of the tables with a big civilian style road map spread out on it. According to Anil, the PUK Kurds, like Hozan and his men, knew from both the Kurdish language radio in Turkey and the Kirkuk radio that Iraq and its coalition partners have been defeated. They’d also heard rumors of an Israeli advance. Our presence confirmed it in their minds and they became increasingly enthusiastic by the minute.

  “We’re here and the Iraqi border police have a roadblock about ten kilometers down the road,” Anil translated as he pointed to a couple of dots a tall and emaciated looking guy with a stubby white beard had just penciled on to a grubby map. He’s apparently the leader of this roadblock’s Peshmerga.

  Then the leader of the roadblock said something and he and Anil smiled at each other.

  “They are afraid to come any closer,” Anil translated.

  ******

  We spent the rest of the day with the roadblock Peshmerga lounging about on camp stools under the big canvas tent. The tent’s rolled up sides let fresh air in and it was actually quite pleasant. Tonight we’ll walk around the border police checkpoint and meet Goran and his empty truck on the other side about twenty kilometers down the road. Hozan will go with us and so will another of the PUK men.

  Every so often a new Kurd came to the tent as they took turns getting out of the sun. They all seem quite willing to talk so we took advantage of the opportunity and asked a lot of questions. They had a lot of questions for us too.

  What we learned as we waited for the sun to go down was simple—they all hate Majid and the Sunni government in Baghdad; the Shiites are even worse and will undoubtedly try to get back in power; and there is bad blood between some of the Kurdish factions. Apparently there have even been mini-civil wars between them. Can their differences be reconciled? To a man they say yes—if the leaders of the various factions order it.

  Are these guys representative of all the Kurds? Damned if I know. And where is the latrine?

  “Anil, would you please ask him if there is there a latrine around here? … No?” Oh well. It won’t be the first time; but I sure wish to hell I’d brought some toilet paper.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  ****** General Christopher Roberts

  Tel Aviv is hot and dusty this morning and I’m in the embassy’s guest suite. At the moment, I’m eating breakfast alone and reading the English-language Jerusalem Post while I wait for the initial draft of the Morning Book. Breakfast is a basket of croissants with strawberry jam and a pot of tea. Perfect. One of my favorite breakfasts.

  According to the Post, the fighting has completely stopped and almost all the Israeli reservists are in the process of being released from active duty except for those in the occupation forces outside the country and certain “other key personnel.” Already the opposition political parties are complaining about the reservists being brought home too slowly.

  Hmm. I wonder if the opposition parties know about the plan to dismember the Coalition countries by setting up buffer states and arming the minorities in them to the teeth? It might be worth knowing; I think I’ll ask Peter to check.

  The Jerusalem Post’s headline and lead story was about the Israeli casualties—more than twenty-six thousand dead and almost one hundred and fifty thousand wounded. That’s huge for a country with such a small population. Virtually every family has been touched except the Haredi and the Palestinian Arabs.

  The Post is strongly secular and there is a front page story about how the ten percent or so of Israelis who are Haredi ultra-orthodox “draft dodgers” spent the war. It scathingly compared them to Europe’s gypsy welfare cheats and included an editorial demanding that they be stripped of their welfare checks and right to vote until they registered for the draft.

  “It is outrageous and unjust,” the editorial proclaimed, “for the monthly pay of a man who fights for Israel to be less than the monthly welfare payment received by a Haredi man who does nothing.”

  Good grief; that is outrageous and unjust.

  What really made the point were side by side pictures on the Post’s front page—four distraught Israeli soldiers grieving over the body of a dead comrade and four Haredi men smiling at each other over a luxurious restaurant meal. It was a striking presentation of a highly conflicted society.

  I read the Post to kill time while I waited to go to the Prime Minister’s office with Tommy Talbot to meet with a Turkish military delegation led by General Demir. The Turks will be arriving at the military airport east of Tel Aviv in an hour or so for secret talks with the Israelis. They’ll meet in a couple of hours and Tommy and I have been invited to attend the initial meeting. Tommy and I are probably really here because everyone, including me, thinks the United States will end up paying a good part of the bill for whatever they work out.

  Normally Jack Billaud, our Secretary of State and a gaggle of his press aides and hair stylists would be here instead of me. But for some reason both the Turks and the Israelis contacted the White House and requested Tommy and I head up the US delegation because the initial discussions will be focused on “military and national security issues.” Works for me and Tommy but it sure pissed off Jack Billaud when he found out he wasn’t invited.

  ******

  The cars bringing the Turks and me and our little delegation of Americans drove into the building’s courtyard at virtually the same moment—and it was the same five generals I’d met in Ankara. We greeted each other with effusive handshakes and smiles and began walking together towards the entrance just as the Prime Minister and some of his government ministers came out to greet us.

  The Israelis all had big smiles on their faces as they greeted General Demir and he introduced the officers in his party. It was obvious that this was not the first time they’d met. That wasn’t particularly surprising,—according to my briefing papers Israel and Turkey have worked together in the recent past on everything from the purchase of military equipment to joint training exercises.

  As we walked in I asked General Demir if he had heard from any of the officers we’d sent into Iraq. His answer worried me; he said he was concerned because he had not.

  “Actually, General Roberts, I was about to ask you the same question. We must hope there is no problem. The Kurds can be dangerous, you know.”

  Damnation. After the meeting I’m going to ask Peter to inquire if the CIA and NSA have heard anything. They should have checked in by now.

  ******

  The Prime Minister’s conference room had a long table with fourteen chairs around it and a sideboard with coffee, tea and pastries. There were name cards in front of each chair so everyone would know where to sit. Circling all the way around the table were a couple of rows of folding chairs for staff members. The chairs were full of our translators and aides and there were more men and women standing behind them. Everyone in the room is fluent in English but, just in case, we are all here with translators.

  The Prime Minister sat at the head of the table with Ari sitting on his right side and the head of the opposition party on his left. A couple of Israeli army generals and Israel’s foreign minister were also at the Prime Minister’s end of the table. The five Turkish generals were at the other end of the table with General Demir sitting at the end facing the Prime Minister. We four Americans, me and Tommy Talbot and a couple of state department officials, were sitting across from each other in the middle of the table.

  Tommy and I sat side by side with two men Jack Billaud sent from the State Department sitt
ing across from us. They are here, it seems, to advise Tommy and me in the event we need advice on political and economic matters.

  Both of our “advisors” are typical State Department employees according to Tommy.

  Unlike me, Tommy has been in Washington for years and knew enough to have his staff check them out.

  Joseph “call me Joe” Haring, the one who is assigned to be our “economics expert,” is a portly lawyer who never studied economics; the other, Peter Gruenstein, is a 30ish “international relations expert” on the Secretary’s personal staff. According to Tommy, Gruenstein’s experience in politics and international relations involved spending two years working as an aide in the Secretary of State’s congressional office and a vacation in Europe.

  I should have checked them out myself and asked for replacements; that’s a mistake I won’t make again.

  ******

  The Prime Minister got straight to business by passing out a map and four or five stapled together typed pages from a stack of paper sitting next to his water glass. It was entitled A Summary of Israel’s Proposal.

  “Here are our basic thoughts,” The Prime Minister said to introduce them as he motioned for an aide to pass out the four page summary and a map.

  “And ours,” Demir replied as he did likewise with a somewhat similar set of pages and a map from a stack sitting in front of him.

  I began reading and it was all I could do to repress a smile when it quickly became apparent the Turks and Israelis had already seen one another’s initial thoughts. I knew that was the case when they each quickly scanned the other’s proposal and then waited for me and Tommy and the state department guys to catch up.

  Okay. It figures. The Turks and Israelis have already worked out the details between themselves; the meeting is being staged to present the United States with what the Turks and Israelis have already agreed to do.

  All in all, both proposals were similar and look very much like what I expected. On the face of it there is little of substance to be worked out before the Turks and Israelis talk to the leaders of each of the potential new mini-states to see if they want to participate.

  I assume they’ll want representatives from the US present when they talk but maybe not.

  In essence, both the Turks and the Israelis want buffer states established and they want them in a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Turkish Commonwealth.

  The Turkish suggestion for the new borders surprised me a little, although it probably shouldn’t have. The Turks want Turkey to annex a couple of small Turkish-speaking border districts in Syria along the Turkish border and they want the new buffer states to run contiguously all the way from Northern Iran to Southern Lebanon. And, no surprise, they want five Kurdish mini-states instead of one big Kurdistan. They are also adamant that the Kurds in Turkey not have a separate state. There is no mention of Turkey’s Kurds anywhere. That’s a mistake, a big one.

  What was a surprise is that both the Turkish and Israeli maps show a significantly larger Israel that extends beyond the Golan right up to the outskirts of Damascus. They also include most of the Israeli settlements on the West Bank and a large portion of the arid and relatively unpopulated Jordan Valley, almost all of it except for a narrow corridor running to Jordan.

  Both plans include a Palestinian state on the west bank centered on Ramallah with a narrow land corridor all the way to Jordan and a Gaza city state that is independent until it can become part of Egypt. Neither would be part of the Turkish commonwealth. Of course not; no one wants Arab extremists.

  Basically, as the Turks and Israelis see it, the new “Turkish Commonwealth” would be just that—a grouping of independent states, each of them with a relatively homogenous population and mutual defense treaties with both Turkey and Israel to discourage their larger neighbors from using force to reacquire them.

  Each of the buffer states will control its own economy and politics and military. They will each use the Turkish lira as their currency, share a borderless common market for any products and services they produce, and be represented diplomatically by Turkey in countries where they have no embassies of their own.

  Israel is to be an “associate member” of the Turkish common market and continue using its own currency and retaining its seat at the United Nations. Conditional on making a permanent peace with Israel and Israel’s approval, Palestine and Gaza would be offered the opportunity to become associate members of the common market with their own separate currencies and United Nations memberships.

  That’s smart. They’re not likely to combine against Israel in the future because the leaders of one or the other would have to give up a role on the world stage.

  Importantly, very importantly I think, Israel and all the members of the commonwealth will be tied together by a major transportation corridor with a four lane interstate highway, power lines, oil, gas, and water pipelines, and a double tracked rail line. It would run from the new Kurdish state in northern Iran through Turkey and the new mini-states all the way to the Israeli ports of Haifa and Elat.

  The Turkish and Israeli militaries would be responsible for defending the new states with Turkey and Israel each having a one hundred and ninety-nine year first right of refusal to buy one third of each state’s production of gas and oil and other natural resources such as water. They would do so at market prices with international arbitration under the auspices of the UN if there is a price dispute.

  Of course. Israel is going to tap the Euphrates where it enters Syria. It could work. We brought water a lot further than that to green up Arizona and California.

  “It sounds like a good start, a very good start” I said, after the initial presentations are completed—and then I raised some questions.

  “What kind of buffer state, if any, will exist to link the isolated area of Kurds in northernmost Iran to the rest of the commonwealth states? And what kind of Arab state, if any, will exist in the coastal region of today’s Syria where Islamic Arabs are the majority population in the flatlands separating two Kurdish regions? Do you really need separate states in those two areas or will a right of way through Syria for the transportation corridor be sufficient?”

  The discussion which follows was very much what Tommy and I had expected. Both Turkey and Israel were adamant; they want contiguous mini-states and they want them in the commonwealth even if they don’t have predominantly Kurdish or Christian populations. They’ll be Druze and Alawite states.

  Okay—they want buffers all the way and the commonwealth to be as big as possible—so Iran, Iraq, and Syria are as small as possible. Works for me.

  Both General Polat and the Prime Minister were adamant about reducing Syria’s size and influence with both a Kurdish state separating Syria from Turkey and an Alawite state that cuts Syria off from the Mediterranean; and they similarly want to reduce Iran’s size and prevent it from bordering Turkey by establishing a new Azerbaijani speaking state between the two new Kurdish states to be established in what is now Iran.

  Okay. We know what our allies want and we can live with it. But will the Kurds and the other minorities accept their proposal? And how will Lebanon, which never officially joined the coalition even though Hezbollah effectively brought it in, react to losing the Bekka Valley to new Christian and Kurdish states and the non-Christian lands east of the Litani River to Israel?

  And most important, and not mentioned at all, is what will happen to the Sunni and Shiite Arabs who don’t want to live as minorities in the new mini-states? No one wants more Muslim refugees.

  “Gentlemen,” I observed as Tommy Talbot nodded his agreement, “from my personal perspective your basic plan makes good sense although, as the old saying goes, the devil is in the details. But what are you going to do if the leaders of one or more of your new mini-states decides they want to stay with their current country or want to be independent without being in a Turkish Commonwealth?”

  General Demir smiled, and then so did I and everyone else, when he said, “We’ll m
ake them an offer they can’t refuse.” Everyone’s smiling because we’ve all seen the movie. I don’t know about the others, but there is no doubt in my mind—he really means it.

  The kid from the State Department sitting across from Tommy opened his mouth and started to say something. I leaned towards him with my index finger up in the air and glared at him with a great deal of hostility. So did Tommy.

  Keep your goddamned mouth shut.

  ******

  Tommy and I flew home together to report to the President as soon as the meeting ended. Tommy nodded in agreement as I summed up the meeting for the President and the Secretary of State in the oval office.

  “Mr. President, what the Israelis and Turks intend to do is breathtaking. It’s brilliant. They’re redrawing the map of the Middle East to bring peace to the Middle East by dramatically weakening their enemies both militarily and financially.”

  “The Turkish-Israeli plan effectively cuts Iraq and Iran off from Turkey and Syria off from Lebanon and the coast. That alone will dramatically reduce the chance of future wars. And the Turkish Commonwealth and the transportation and communications corridor running through it will have a massive and totally positive impact on the prosperity of the entire region.”

  The Secretary of State, however, who apparently already knew about the details from his two “advisors,” was beside himself.

  “This is not right. It gives Israel conquered lands.”

  “Well Jack,” Tommy Talbot replied, “that’s not at all how they see it. What they are doing is returning conquered lands to the control of their rightful owners—the people who live there and want to be free from faraway despots telling them what to do.”

  Exactly so; I couldn’t have said it any better, except that after faraway despots I would have added "and meddling politicians like you who also live far away."

  Billaud was not convinced. He announced his intention to go to Istanbul and Tel Aviv to try to talk the Turks and Israelis out of it “because it sets such a bad example.”