Professor Shibley Telhami Analyst Fears U.S. Will Win War In Iraq but Lose Peace in Middle East by John Shaw Shibley Telhami is a warm and cheerful man who has a dark and growing fear. A leading expert on the Middle East, he is concerned that the United States will soon wage a war with Iraq, secure a decisive military victory, but then lose the peace in the Middle East. Telhami believes an American-led invasion of Iraq could ultimately shatter that nation into pieces and intensify the anger, resentment and humiliation that much of the Arab and Islamic world feels toward the United States. In Telhamiís view, a war ostensibly launched to contain global terrorism could have precisely the opposite effect: It could spawn a new wave of terror and a fresh generation of terrorists who want to do great harm to the United States and the West. ìItís important to remember that defeating others is not the same as winning,î the professor said in an interview at The Brookings Institution. ìTher e is no question in my mind that the Bush administration has decided it will go to war. The only issue has been the extent to which it will build a coalition to do it.î Telhami said the timing of a war for the administration seems largely independent of the diplomatic maneuvering that is now unfolding around the world but added that the administration has been surprised and thrown off balance by the persistent opposition to a war with Iraq, especially in Western Europe. Telhami was born in an Arab town near Haifa and is now an American citizen. The Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, Telhami is also a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. In addition, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and sits on the board of directors at Human Rights Watch. Soft-spoken, measured and understated, Telhami has written extensively about the Middle East. His most recent book, ìThe Stakes: America and the Middle East,î has won wide praise for being empathetic to the perspectives of all parties in the region. ìI try to be fair and balanced, but that is very hard in this environment,î he said. ìFairness, unfortunately, is often seen as weakness.î Former President Jimmy Carter has called Telhami a ìvoice of reason on American policy toward the Middle East,î noting that ìfew command such balanced knowledge and understandingî of the region. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft has called Telhamiís work on the Middle East ìbalanced, informed, analytical and interpretative,î while Samuel Lewis, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, has described him as ìthe wisest commentator on Middle East affairs I know.î Telhami is concerned that the looming American-led war with Iraq is going to generate a host of unintended consequences. ìMy worry is not what happens in a war in the short term. The United States should win quickly. Most likely, Saddam Husseinís regime and the Iraq military will lose decisively. But then what?î he asked. ìFor the United States, the real job starts with the fall of the regime when the U.S. would inherit a broken country. The moment after the regime collapses, Iraq will be a larger priority for the United States than the day before,î he added. Telhami said the response to an American victory by the Iraqi people may be positive, but perhaps only briefly. ìThere will be people in Iraq who will welcome the United States. This, after all, is not a popular regime,î he said. ìBut once reality begins settling in, itís not clear the United States will be perceived as a friend.î He noted that any effort to hold Iraq together would be potentially expensive. ìIraq is going to need a lot more money from the outside than will be generated on the inside in the short term,î he said, disputing the assertion that Iraqís oil wealth will be sufficient to pay for the nationís reconstruction. Beyond the financial costs, Telhami fears an attack on Iraq could lead to enormous instability in that nation, which has a long history of animosity between its Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities. He is also worried that war will only fuel more anger and resentment in the Middle East toward the United States. ìThe most pervasive psychology in the Arab world today is collective rage and feelings of helplessness. Weíre seeing so much humiliation and hopelessness in the Middle East,î he said. ìAnd instability is ally No. 1 of terrorism. Unfortunately, I would expect in that environment of instability and humiliation there will be a lot more terrorism than before,î he added. Telhami believes that an American-led war with Iraq, coupled with other developments in the region, may exacerbate the already sharply critical view of the United States that prevails in the Middle East. ìThe United States is seen as the anchor of a system that is to the disadvantage of many in the region,î he said. Telhami argues that the Middle East has just passed through a decade in which many were willing to see if an American bid to broker a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to push broad political and economic reforms in the region would yield tangible results. But he said the failure of the so-called Camp David II peace talks hosted by President Bill Clinton in the summer of 2000 has depressed many in the region and convinced them that the 1990s was effectively a lost decade. Failure at Camp David, Telhami said, began the unraveling of the dominant paradigm of the í90s, which held that an American-brokered Arab-Israeli peace agreement would be the cornerstone of a new stable regional order. He added that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is the prism by which much of the Arab world looks at the United States. ìNo other issue resonates with the public in the Arab world and many other parts of the Muslim world more deeply than Palestine. No other issue shapes the regional perceptions of America more fundamentally than the issue of Palestine.î Telhami said many in the Middle East believe the United States adopts a double standard in which Islamic nations are rebuked and sanctioned for behaviors that other nations can engage in with impunity. Looking at the other side of the dispute, Telhami said Israelis expected they would live in a more secure world after the Oslo accord was reached in 1993, and they believe that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a generous peace offer in 2000. The people of Israel, he continued, suspect that Yasser Arafat refused Barakís proposal because he wanted to control not only the West Bank and Gaza, but all of Israel. With sharply differing views of the world and steadily rising tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, Telhami is concerned that the dispute is on the verge of becoming intractable. ìWhen you think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a national conflict, you can conceive of a territorial settlement with negotiated borders. But if things fall apart and it is seen as a fight between Jews and Arabs or Jews and Islam, it is hard to see how you end the conflict peacefully and live in peace,î he said. ìIf the conflict is ultimately defined in ethnic or religious terms, it is hard to imagine a solution at least in this generation,î Telhami continued. ìInstead a solution will only become more difficult as the cycle of violence and occupation continues.î Telhami doesnít believe the Middle East is yet at the point where the conflict has become irreversible, but he believes that time is not on the side of a settlement, adding that every day that goes by without an agreement is a day in which more innocent people are killed and a final accord becomes less likely. The professor is also troubled by the anti-American mood sweeping through the region and across the world. The negative attitude is not a criticism of American values but rather of Americaís foreign policy, he said, adding that much of this criticism is based on the view that the United States has become too unilateral, self-absorbed and arrogant. Telhami said the United States has lost much of the goodwill that was directed to it after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and that the U.S. approach to the war on terrorism has alienated many. He noted that the United States could have worked with the United Nations and other organizations to pass resolutions prohibiting the targeting of civilians and strengthening international norms that hold a state accountable for criminal acts commit ted by terrorists that operate from its territory. Additionally, Telhami said the United States could have fashioned an anti-terror coalition to create a comprehensive new treaty regime that goes beyond the existing patchwork of agreements, which require states to either prosecute or extradite terrorists by mandating a strong collective response to attacks on civilians. Telhami said that many people believe the United States has acted unilaterally to define its enemies as terrorists, failed to understand that terrorism is an anti-state rather than a rogue-state phenomenon, and has not tried hard enough to understand the root causes of terrorism. He added that U.S. officials need to consider the so-called demand side of terrorism, in which groups need to be able to recruit willing members, raise funds, and appeal to public opinion. Public despair and humiliation, he pointed out, are often fertile ground for terror organizers to exploit, and he reiterated that the United States should try to address the central issues that breed terrorism and are exploited by organizers who have their own ambitions. Whether it is confronting terrorism, addressing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or securing safe oil supplies in the Persian Gulf, Telhami said the United States needs to act firmly, but with greater compassion, humility and wisdom. ìThe United States has the power to reshuffle the deck in the Middle East and elsewhere but not to determine how the cards will fall,î Telhami said. ìWe may succeed tactically in the short term but only by losing ourselves and what we stand for. It is important to remember that, in the end, we become what we do.î John Shaw is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.