“We see it as a full circle sort of thing,” says Wilson (and no, he is not the former U.S. congressman who made the Afghan mujahedin his pet project in the 1980s). “We recycle weapons of war, put the money into education, and hopefully help to avert future wars.” The public relations would be great for the United States, of course, and for Wilson and McClelland, too. “What we’d like,” says McClelland, only half joking, “is a [White House] Rose Garden ceremony were we hand President Bush the speedometer from a Russian-made T-72 tank mounted on a plaque…” Like so many other good ideas for what “could be,” or “should be” or “must be” done in Iraq and the Middle East, however, this one was ignored by Washington when it was still relatively easy to implement. Now, as the Mesopotamian battlegrounds erupt again with fighting, the work of retrieving dead tanks for salvage gets more dangerous by the day. And as casualties mount, charity is going by the boards. “It’s very difficult to get something like this on the radar screen,” says Wilson. By the time somebody in the United States government finally focuses on the necessary permissions, the answer may well be “sorry Charlie, too late.”
How many times have we seen good ideas-and good will–in the Middle East squandered by folks who were far too quick to make war, and far too slow figuring out how to make peace? I’ve lost count. But it keeps happening every day.
This week, for instance, President Bush had the good sense to appoint former Secretary of State James Baker as a special envoy to renegotiate Iraq’s international debt, which may be more than $100 billion. Then the Pentagon announced that three of the key creditors with whom Baker has to negotiate–Russia, France and Germany–are barred from participating in contracts to rebuild Iraq. The measure is more symbolic than substantive, since it doesn’t affect subcontractors. But the public slap has brought a furious response. Russia’s defense minister said flatly there’s now no intention to re-negotiate the $8 billion that’s owed to Moscow. Sorry, Jim.
There was a time, last summer, when a credible way for the United States to extricate itself from Iraq might have been to invite greater international participation, including the United Nations and NATO. But the administration moved only grudgingly on that front. The UN went in out of duty, but with next to no authority. Its headquarters in Baghdad got blown up. It pulled out. NATO never went in as such, remains badly divided, and the civilian geniuses at the Pentagon never miss a chance to dis what could be some of the best nation-building troops–the French, the Germans and even the Canadians. So that kind of multilateral solution is now a panacea whose sell-by date has expired, a hope of the past, even though many Democratic presidential candidates still talk about it in the present. Sorry, Howard, Wes, et al. The same pattern applies in Middle East peacemaking. As both the Israelis and the Palestinians know, an initiative that’s stalled is an initiative that’s died. That’s why the so-called “road map” included a calendar with set dates and a verification process that called on the United States, the European Union, the Russians and the United Nations to judge whether both sides were complying at each step along the way.
The document was finished a year ago, approved by the Palestinians in January, and published in April. The first phase was supposed to be completed by May, but Israel didn’t even accept it until then, and only with reservations. The second, transitional phase to statehood, was supposed to be completed by now. Forget that. The final phase, the establishment of a permanent status agreement and an end to the Palestinians-Israeli conflict, is due on the roadmap’s calendar by the end of 2005. In your dreams.
The verification process of this “performance-based and goal-driven roadmap,” which was supposed to be key to its success, isn’t even mentioned anymore by American officials. To the peace-loving majorities in Israel and Palestine, what can you say? Sorry.
The good news, bad as things may be, is that good ideas do keep coming. The Bush administration is right to be looking for ways to speed up the handover of titular sovereignty to an Iraqi government. It’s right to be re-enlisting, and vetting, the old Iraqi military. (Somebody’s got to help the United States restore order, and it’s the Iraqis’ country, after all.) It’s also right to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. But all these initiatives should be moving ahead much more quickly to close the gap between good ideas and effective implementation.
President Bush must know that it’s not only the obvious enemies–the “bitter-enders” mounting a guerrilla war in Iraq, or the suicidal fanatics of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Holy Land (or, for that matter, the French or the Germans) - who stand in the way of his good intentions. It’s bureaucracy and greed, corruption, ideology and hidden agendas on our own side that have to be watched. Are there some people we call friends and allies who don’t really want a peaceful, democratic, united Iraq? Are there some who don’t want an equitable peace between a viable Palestinian state and a secure Israel?
I don’t doubt President Bush’s good intentions, but the results he’s gotten have been so sorry, you’d think he’d be asking himself if all the members on his team really do share his goals. There’s no shortage of interests in the Middle East that see chaos as a cash cow for military industries; or who believe so strongly in their ideological missions that they work to undermine every effort at intelligent compromise and international cooperation. And then there’s the endemic problems of lame ignorance and plain bad judgment. Eventually, folks out here get pretty cynical about good intentions.
That’s why it’s so good to hear about an imaginative project like “Tanks for Schools.” It may never get off the drawing board. It may never overcome the bureaucratic, technical and security problems it is up against. (About half the estimated 8,000 destroyed tanks sitting around Iraq and Kuwait are so peppered with depleted uranium ammunition it’s hard to know what to do with them.) But at the very least this project reminds us that some people in this world still really are looking for ways to “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks-or turn T-72s into No. 2 pencils-so that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
