Road to Mideast Solution Starts Elsewhere

On his march to power, Julius Caesar had the advantage of a mind that commanded sure and certain insights. One of them was this: The shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line. Take the road to Rome--Caesar understood that it ran not through Naples or Parma but through Paris.

To capture the seat of power in Italy, therefore, Caesar took an army to conquer Gaul. That was in 58 BC. Nine years later, Caesar crossed the Rubicon and swept through Italy, a conquering hero.

Caesar’s story offers lessons to American strategists today. Consider one of the most dangerous disputes in the contemporary world: the war between Palestinians and Israelis.

A just and secure settlement would infinitely strengthen the United States’ standing in the Muslim world, in turn a strategic battleground in the war on terror. But Washington will never resolve the conflict if it limits its horizons to the strip of territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The road to a solution does not run through Ramallah, where Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat sits under virtual house arrest. Nor does it run through Jerusalem and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government.

The road runs through Baghdad, Tehran and Damascus.

The reason, as Caesar might have put it, is that when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the local players are just centurions. The generals sit further east.

To understand why, consider the strategic realities.

First, public opinion. The Israeli public has hardened its heart of late against the Palestinians. The reason is that the Palestinian leadership rejected Ehud Barak’s generous peace offer in 2000 and then declared a second intifada. Currently it does little to stop a terror campaign against Israel’s civilians. And yet that same Israeli public, as poll after poll shows, yearns for peace with a Palestine that is willing to put down its guns.

The Palestinian public is probably no different. However much their leaders may talk of armed struggle, it is impossible to believe that the long-suffering Palestinian people want anything other than peace, security and independence.

So if it were up to the two peoples, this war would be over.

But it is not up to the two peoples. The main reason, and this is the second strategic reality, is the terrorists.

The fighters of Hamas and Hezbollah would rather kill Israeli civilians than negotiate with Israeli diplomats. They don’t want peace with Israel but merely a base from which to drive Israel into the sea. The terrorists take their orders from the same place that they get their arms, their funds and their sanctuary.

Which brings us to the third strategic reality, the enabling states of terror. Syria provides bases for Hamas and Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, which it occupies. Iraq offers schooling in terror techniques such as airplane hijacking. Iran offers weapons and funding. All three states mount media operations that drown out moderate Arab and Muslim voices.

Faced with such a sea of troubles, it doesn’t take a Caesar to see what should be done. If the United States wants peace in the Middle East, it should, first of all, make war on Saddam Hussein. U.S. power, helped by the Iraqi resistance movement, can bring his bloody regime finally to an end.

At the same time, the United States should take out the terrorists’ camps in the Bekaa Valley. With luck, this will in turn bring down Bashar Assad’s dictatorship in Damascus. Finally, there is Iran. Rather than engaging with the mullahs, as some advocate, Washington should support the coming democratic revolution aimed at the tyrants of Tehran.

To be sure, the use of force will raise a storm of public criticism. In private, however, the U.S. will find enormous support especially if, like Caesar, it takes speedy and decisive action. In the end, the world will hail the replacement of three tyrannies, each hated by its own people, with liberal, secular and friendly regimes. And the cheers will grow louder the clearer the U.S. makes it that one of the fruits of victory will be resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Barry S. Strauss is director of the peace studies program and a professor of history and the classics at Cornell University.