Why Everyone is Negotiating in the Middle East

WASHINGTON, DC -- When Washington decided that the third-ranking US State Department official would join the international talks with Iran in Geneva last Saturday, it was a smart move -- not, as some might claim, a humiliating defeat for the United States. Israel for its part swallowed its pride -- and its words -- last Wednesday when it exchanged Lebanese prisoners for the bodies of its two soldiers whom Hizbullah had kidnapped in 2006 -- sparking that summer's war.

Both the United States and Israel are doing things they had said they would never do -- the US sits and talks with Iran before Tehran has suspended uranium enrichment, and Israel does a diplomatic deal to retrieve its soldiers' bodies after it had failed to achieve that goal by vicious and prolonged warfare. The fact that the US and Israel were both politically humbled during the same week has been widely interpreted as a double defeat, and victories for Iran and Hizbullah. That is too simplistic a reading of the dynamics in the region.

Hizbullah and Iran generate widespread support among Arab public opinion, because they defy and resist the United States and its allies. Iran and Hizbullah have emerged as the vanguards and bookends of a broad, loose coalition of forces -- parties, militias, governments, grassroots movements and several hundred million ordinary men and women -- who have stood up to US-Israeli military might and diplomatic swagger, and in places successfully faced them down. They have fought the American-Israeli-Arab conservative alliance to a draw, but they have not defeated their ideological foes.

What we have in the Middle East today is a stalemate, not surrender or defeat by either side. All of the main parties that drive politics around the region -- the United States, Israel, Syria, Iran, Hizbullah, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, along with supporting actors Hamas and the European Union -- have used their military, economic and political power in one way or another, and all of them have learned the same lesson: When your foes stand up and resist, your overwhelming power becomes less frightening, and your deterrence force withers.

Iran, the EU and the United States sat and talked in Geneva this past weekend because their willingness to fight has been matched by their realization that they cannot win. Israel and Hizbullah have experienced the same thing. They are both powerful, but their power is deeply curtailed by two decisive factors: They cannot defeat the other side militarily, and they cannot intimidate the other side politically because the other side does not fear them any more.

This is a classic stalemate, when military advantage is neutralized and power is immobilized. The American decision to join the talks with Iran and the Israeli-Hizbullah decision to exchange prisoners instead of missiles are positive signs that smart people do not want to keep doing foolish things, like fighting and wasting lives and national resources -- when such waste serves no purpose other than to reflect macho stubbornness.

The real question we should be asking is not who has won and who has lost, because neither side has won or lost completely. The important issue now is whether the key players can achieve their core goals through diplomacy and politics rather than through confrontation and war. This strikes me as the main reason why so many diplomatic initiatives have sprouted in the past few months, including Israel's exchanges with Hizbullah, Hamas and Syria, and the upgraded US-Iranian contacts.

Hizbullah, Iran, Syria and Hamas may like to be defiant and may have done well to date in forcing their foes to meet them halfway or even more; but they also understand that there is a limit to their people's willingness to perpetually fight, suffer, and die. Death cults are not an attractive vocation or a political growth industry in the Middle East or anywhere else. Arabs, Israelis, Iranians and Americans would rather make money than make war. They all understand the meaning of the evolving strategic balance in the region, and they are scrambling to position themselves to take advantage of the changes.

Hizbullah, for example, is more powerful militarily and politically now than it was two years ago, but it is suffering three new major vulnerabilities: It does not have room to maneuver in south Lebanon due to the expanded presence of the Lebanese army and Unifil forces; it is directly and vigorously challenged by fellow Lebanese in an unprecedented manner; and, Syrian-Israeli and Iranian-American diplomatic rapprochements will force it to drastically review its regional strategic positioning and its domestic tactical politics.

The stalemate between the Middle East's two major coalitions of power comes at a time when energy-fuelled regional economic prospects are high -- if political tensions can be curtailed. Intelligent people understand that perpetual warfare is about as stupid a strategy as human beings can devise, and perpetual warfare was the arena the Middle East was on the verge of entering in the past year. If the major protagonists can work out their differences and resolve their disputes peacefully, all the people of the Middle East would be winners for a change, instead of victims of chronic political deficiencies among their leaders.