U.S. must rein in Sharon's chutzpah

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, March 25, 2004

With the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, no friendly foreign leader has complicated modern American diplomacy and strategy more consistently or gravely than Ariel Sharon. He pursues Israel's interests with a warrior's tenacity and directness that take away the breath, and the options, of everyone else.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Sharon and President Bush have followed the same elemental strategy: Terrorists who attack or plan attacks on their citizens will be made to pay a price for their actions and their intentions. The terrorists and their facilitators will be hunted, captured or killed, whatever the consequences.

But consequences are inevitably different for a small Middle Eastern democracy fighting an existential conflict than for a global power that manages the world's most important alliances and, through them, international stability.

That point would seem obvious. But it took Israel's assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin on Monday to drive it home, or perhaps out into the open. The fumbling official U.S. response -- which went from spontaneous nonchalance that almost said "no biggie" on morning television to studied "deeply troubled" platitudes at midday briefings -- captured the growing American dilemma of this moment more succinctly than any critic or artist could.

The morning-midday contrast was unconscious commentary on the vast challenges the United States faces in trying simultaneously to entrench democracy in Iraq, encourage the spread of freedom in the rest of the Arab world, keep the region's oil supplies safe and flowing, bolster an Israeli leader who confronts similar terrorist challenges -- while managing a dozen other vital and related global tasks.

The killing of the paraplegic Palestinian sheik by Israeli missiles outside a mosque early Monday hit all of those tasks amidships. The reactions throughout the region and in Europe will gravely complicate the Bush administration's efforts to sell its Greater Middle East Initiative of reform, implicate the United Nations in its Iraq exit strategy and get Muslim nations to cooperate openly in the fight against al Qaeda.

From his perspective, however, Sharon is probably wondering what's new -- or disastrous -- here.

For 30-plus years, Israel's targeted assassinations of Palestinian terrorists and their leaders have -- on balance -- bought for its citizens relief and time, if only to brace for new attacks. Pursuing killers and preempting them does bring to the attacked a sense of immediate frontier justice, emotional satisfaction and some greater operational security, be it after suicide bombings in Tel Aviv or airborne destruction of Manhattan skyscrapers.

But longer-term consequences are not so simple to foresee or celebrate. To say that killing Sheik Yassin or Osama bin Laden is a necessary and sure step to a final victory for justice is to make a guess. And predicting that each slaying of an important terror leader will produce 10 more fanatics and worsen the problem is also a way to ignore history and insult the future.

That second line of reasoning, which holds that eliminating terrorist chiefs as well as tacticians is inevitably counterproductive, is now conventional wisdom in the Arab world, Europe and many circles in the United States. The history of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, as long as I have observed it, does not bear that out.

A few days after I conducted my first interview about Middle Eastern terrorism with Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut in July 1972, the accomplished Palestinian author and political spokesman was assassinated by a car bomb planted by Israeli agents. Youssef Najjar, Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser were shot down in Beirut some months later by an Israeli commando squad that included Ehud Barak, who as prime minister was to unsuccessfully offer Yasser Arafat a sweeping peace agreement in 2000.

These targeted assassinations did not directly create greater strength for the Palestinian organizations. The Palestinians were, in fact, left reeling. But the Israeli raids also contributed to the tensions that led to the October 1973 attack by Syria and Egypt on Israel. The Palestinians then turned to terror or to negotiations as circumstances changed.

The point for Sharon is that he needs for once to look at the big picture, especially if he values not adding to Bush's woes in a difficult time. In ordering Sheik Yassin's killing, Sharon makes an implicit statement that he will, if necessary, turn Gaza to scorched earth and then leave it -- in ruins.

He believes he can live with that consequence. But it would handicap a reelected Bush or a president-elect John Kerry enormously with other strategic tasks in the region. Each needs to make clear to Sharon now that his presidency will not be capsized by Sharon's short-horizon chutzpah.

This article also appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Houston Chronicle on Friday, March 26, 2004.