Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist based in London. He has a Ph.D. in Military and Middle East history, has served in the navy, and held academic appointments in Oxford and Sandhurst.
His basic thesis is that the United States needs neither a military presence in the Middle East, nor friendly regimes there, in order to secure its essential interest, a free flow of oil. He says that, whatever the regime, the states there will need to sell their oil and will need willing purchasers. He claims that, even in the last month before the United States attacked it in 2003, Saddam’s Iraq sold half its oil to the United States.
He sets his own more relaxed view of US military requirements against those in the then Defence Secretary Dick Cheney’s Planning Guidance of February 1992, which said that the US needed to be the globally dominant power and that that meant preventing “any hostile power dominating a region (the Middle East) whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power”.
Gwynne Dyer interprets the underlying concern here as being about China obtaining privileged access to Middle East oil, and a need for a US military presence in the region to prevent that.
This book was finished before the “surge” and assumes that early US withdrawal is inevitable. That assumption has now changed, but the underlying political problems in Iraq are not resolved.
On the Iranian nuclear question, his thesis is that what Iran mainly wants to do is to join 40 other states that already have the technical capacity to develop nuclear weapons quickly, but have not yet done so. He argues, not very convincingly, that Pakistan’s bomb is threatening to Iran. He draws attention to the failure of the US, Russia, France, UK and China to fulfill their own obligations to reduce nuclear stockpiles, but fails to deal with the risk of an escalating regional nuclear arms race, that might follow Iran getting a nuclear capability.
On the Israeli/Palestinian issue, he claims that by 2015 the number of Palestinian Arabs in the area of former Mandate Palestine will exceed the number of Israeli Jews there. Time is thus running out for an agreed two-state solution that would divide the territory on a basis acceptable to Israel. The 1967 borders already give it much more land per capita.
Israel worries that, if it makes a deal for a Palestinian state and goes to its bottom line to do so, the Arab side will not be able to deliver its side of the bargain – security for Israel. Unelected Arab leaders may lack sufficient popular mandate to stick by such a deal. And if elections do take place, they will produce majorities for parties like Hamas with which Israel refuses to do business. Gwynne Dyer produces no solution to this dilemma.
A solution may be found in the Arab Peace Initiative, launched by the Arab League in Beirut in 2002 and reiterated in 2007, which creates an umbrella under which all Arabs can negotiate with Israel and which explicitly recognizes Israel’s right to exist within its 1967 borders.
Just as the broader three-stranded approach and the involvement of the United States created space for the Northern Irish parties to negotiate successfully, a broader Middle Eastern context may give Israelis and Palestinians a space in which the “blame” for the inevitable compromises can be spread sufficiently widely to allow an agreement to be viable. The Annapolis process, initiated recently by the United States, could be merged into such a regional solution.
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