ISRAEL IS NOT THE ISSUE: MILITANT ISLAM AND AMERICA
jackslucid | 14.07.2006 10:52 | Analysis | World
Did Support for Israel Trigger Islamic Fury? / Ideological Sources of Bin Laden's Anti-Americanism / The "Holy Land" is Arabia / Purifying Islam from Alien Innovations / The Organizational Priorities of the Bin Laden Network / The Supportive Media Environment in Arab States / Israel and the Quest for a Coalition / The Real Issue: Anti-American Incitement
Did Support for Israel Trigger Islamic Fury?
After the September 11 terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many American analysts have been seeking to understand the source of the intense hatred against the United States that could have motivated an act of violence on such an unprecedented scale. In that context, a new canard is beginning to run through repeated news reports and features: that somehow America's support for Israel is behind the fury of militant Islamic movements, like that of Osama bin Laden, towards the United States. Indeed, a Newsweek poll conducted on October 4-5, 2001, found that 58 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. relationship with Israel is "a big reason terrorists attacked the United States."1
These attitudes had to come from somewhere. For example, Caryl Murphy wrote in the Washington Post: "If we want to avoid creating more terrorists, we must end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict quickly."2 Similarly, Gary Kamiya, Salon magazine's executive editor, added: "A sword will hang over the U.S. until we convince Israel to make peace with the Palestinians."3 Appearing on ABC with Peter Jennings, Hanan Ashrawi also charged that the U.S. alliance with Israel was to blame for the September 11 attack.4
This argument, unfortunately, has also found particular currency in Europe. Thus, British Foreign Minster Jack Straw told an Iranian newspaper: "One of the factors that helps breed terror is the anger that many people in the region feel at events over the years in the Palestinian territories."5 Egyptian diplomacy has clearly found this theme to be useful; thus President Mubarak asserted during a trip to Germany: "Without solving the Palestine problem with U.S. and European help we will see a new generation of terrorists threatening world security."6
One significant exception to this trend was the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who frankly answered a question posed by CNN's Larry King as to whether the sentiment that caused the attack came from frustration over the failure of the peace process: "As a cause of it, I don't think so."7
Bin Laden himself only placed the Palestinian issue front and center among his grievances against the West during a video clip broadcast after Anglo-American Forces began their retaliatory strikes against Afghanistan on October 7, 2001: "America will never dream nor those who live in America will never taste security and safety unless we feel security and safety in our land and in Palestine."8
Yet a careful examination of the ideology and organization of bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network demonstrates that these disturbingly ubiquitous assertions about the centrality of Israel as the cause of the fury of militant Islam are seriously flawed. In fact, state-supported media in parts of the Arab world continually engage in incitement of the Arab civilian population against the United States, regardless of the Israeli factor. Unless the sources of anti-Americanism are correctly understood and addressed, policy-makers are likely to fail to deal with the true motivating factors behind the attack on the United States.
Ideological Sources of Bin Laden's Anti-Americanism
A 1998 fatwa (religious ruling) issued by bin Laden jointly with militant Islamic leaders from Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh provides an insight into the sources of his anti-Americanism.9 The document calls "on every Muslim...to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it." True, bin Laden uses language like "the Zionist-Crusader alliance" that sweeps in the issue of Israel, but the primary justification for doing so is that "for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, [and] terrorizing its neighbors." Having helped to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s with other Arab volunteers, bin Laden has now turned his attention to the remaining superpower, the United States. U.S. forces are specifically described as "Crusader armies spreading...like locusts."
A second bin Laden grievance is "the continuing aggression against the Iraqi people." The "guarantee of Israel's survival" appears only as the third reason for criticizing U.S. policy. Bin Laden also refers to the Jews' "occupation of Jerusalem," but gives no indication whatsoever of accepting Jewish statehood within any borders. In fact, in 1998 he was critical of the Saudis for their support of "Yasser Arafat's regime" against Hamas.10 Israel's very existence is the issue -- not the status of the peace process. It is not surprising that the planning and training for the September 11 attack is believed to have begun several years ago, well before the current Palestinian intifada and the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. There simply is no correlation between the new terrorism facing the U.S. and the Arab-Israeli peace process.
The "Holy Land" is Arabia
Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University also noted bin Laden's prioritization in his analysis of bin Laden's 1998 fatwa in Foreign Affairs:
The three areas of grievance listed in the declaration -- Arabia, Iraq, and Jerusalem -- will be familiar to observers of the Middle Eastern scene. What may be less familiar is the sequence and emphasis. For Muslims, as we in the West sometimes tend to forget but those familiar with Islamic history and literature know, the holy land par excellence is Arabia -- Mecca, where the Prophet was born; Medina, where he established the first Muslim state; and the Hijaz, whose people were the first to rally to the new faith....Thereafter, except for a brief interlude in Syria, the center of the Islamic world and the scene of its major achievements was Iraq....For Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced, but none compares in significance with Arabia and Iraq....Of those two, Arabia is by far the more important (emphasis added).11
Bin Laden issued an earlier document in 1996 called a "Declaration of War Against the American Occupying of the Land of the Two Holy Places" (referring to Mecca and Medina). Here, too, bin Laden demonstrated that his priorities focus first and foremost on the Arabian peninsula: "If there is more than one duty to be carried out, then the most important one should receive priority. Clearly after Belief (Imaan), there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land (i.e., Arabia) (emphasis added)." Bin Laden made the same point in a 1998 interview with ABC News: "Allah ordered us in this religion to purify Muslim land of all non-believers and especially the Arabian Peninsula, where the Ke'ba is (emphasis added)."12
Purifying Islam from Alien Innovations
In order to understand this prioritization, it is necessary to delve into the general mindset of militant Islam. Like the Wahhabis of eighteenth century Arabia, followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1787), whose doctrine was part of bin Laden's early Saudi education, militant Islamists seek to return Islam to a more puritanical period, like the seventh century of the Prophet Muhammad, before the Islamic world was contaminated by alien ideas, especially from the West but also from within the Middle East. In their view, the sources of heterodox impurities in Islam had to be eradicated. The early Wahhabi movement, which had formed a political alliance with the Saudi family, attacked Shi'ites as heretics and even sacked the Iraqi Shi'ite holy city of Karbala in 1801, slaughtering its residents. The Taliban, who came out of Islamic seminaries in Pakistan funded by Saudi Arabia and inspired by its Wahhabi doctrine,13 actually continued this violent Wahhabi tradition through their harsh treatment of Afghan Shi'ites.
Looking beyond the adherents of Wahhabism to the wider perspective of militant Islamists more generally, the Islamic world (Dar al-Islam) at present may not be under the complete physical occupation of the West, but it is under a kind of spiritual occupation: "in Sunni terms, Dar al-Islam has returned to a state of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic darkness) even worse than the one that preceded the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia."14 This perspective has been associated with two of bin Laden's militant Egyptian associates, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya.15
The response of militant Islam to this situation is to seek the overthrow of pro-Western regimes in the Islamic world and to campaign for the elimination of Western power and influence from the Middle East entirely. In the seventh century, the first Islamic state arose on the ruins of the two great empires of that era: the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, defeat of the U.S. becomes the next logical struggle. It is not surprising that the handwritten document of terrorist ringleader Muhammad Atta states: "Remember the battle of the Prophet...against the infidels, as he went on building the Islamic state."16 Thus, the organizing principle of militant Islam is anti-Americanism; a pro-Western regime that is anti-Israel in orientation still remains a target of militant Islam.
The Organizational Priorities of the Bin Laden Network
An examination of bin Laden's organizational network further reveals that the issue of Israel is not a top priority or focus for his brand of militant Islam. The U.S. Department of State's Patterns of Global Terrorism -- 2000 identifies Sunni Islamic extremist groups that have been linked to Osama bin Laden's worldwide network: the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Egypt's al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the Harakat ul-Mujahidin, a Pakistan-based group operating against India in Kashmir. The Islamic Renaissance Party received support in late 1996 from "militant Arab Afghans" in Afghanistan as it trained for cross-border attacks on Tajikistan.17 Bin Laden's organization also became involved in the Tajikistan struggle.18 Additionally, bin Laden's network is known to reach Albania, the Philippines, Chechnya, Indonesia, India, Jordan, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Yemen.
Looking at bin Laden's organizational network, a number of concerns are evident. First, bin Laden is continuing his struggle against Russia, even after the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This involves, as noted above, continued support for already existing Islamic movements in the independent Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union. It also entails backing movements that are seeking to dismember parts of Russia itself, beyond the obvious case of Chechnya, in the Northern Caucasus. Daghestan, which commands 70 percent of Russia's coast on the oil-rich Caspian Sea, faced a threat from radical Islamists in 1999.19
Many commentators see Saudi-exported Wahhabism as one of the principal causes of militant Islamic fundamentalism in southern Russia. Thus, Hajj Salih Brandt, the Chechen government's Special Envoy to Europe, claimed: "[T]he whole political agenda of Wahabbi Fundamentalism (what the West now calls Islamism)...is a deviation of Islam taught in Madinah University in Saudi Arabia, sponsored by the Saudi government and exported from there....Out of it have come Hamas, the Taliban, Usama Bin Laden, the FIS, Sudan, and now the gangs roaming Chechnya and Daghestan."20
Consistent with his ideological position, a second concern of bin Laden's organization involves directing efforts against the U.S., particularly against the American presence in and around the Arabian peninsula. There is no clear connection between bin Laden and attacks against Americans on Saudi territory in 1995 and 1996, which appear to have been the responsibility of Shi'ite organizations like Saudi Hizballah. However, bin Laden has penetrated Egypt, Sudan, and Yemen, which control the Red Sea approaches to the Arabian peninsula, as well as Jordan, which borders Saudi Arabia from the north. In this context, he has been supportive of the overthrow of pro-American regimes. A third concern for bin Laden is a focus on achieving Muslim independence in multi-ethnic states, like the case of Kashmir in India. Israel and the Palestinians are simply dwarfed by these other areas of concern and activity.
In fact, Reuven Paz of the Herzliya International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism has noted that the bin Laden network has not connected with militant Islamic movements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite its mobilization of Palestinians from Lebanon and Jordan over the last decade.21 The U.S. Department of State noted only one case of a militant, Nabil Awkil, connected to both Hamas and Osama bin Laden. Very few other cases have been identified.22 The head of Israeli Military Intelligence, Major General Amos Malka, has stated that two attempts by the bin Laden organization to penetrate into Israel were prevented.23
True, a Palestinian figure from Jordan, Dr. Abdallah Azzam, played a major role in the formative years of bin Laden's organization until he was killed in 1989 by a car bomb in Peshawar, Pakistan. However, Azzam did not focus on the Palestinian issue but rather stressed Afghanistan's troubles exclusively.24 In fact, there have been reports that bin Laden has been criticized for his indifference to the Palestinian question.25 Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of the Lebanese daily as-Safir, stated on CNN: "He [bin Laden] never served the Palestinian cause. He never did anything to help the Palestinian people. His focus was on Afghanistan and on Chechnya. Never cared for the Palestinian cause."26
If the Palestinian issue were a high priority for bin Laden, then efforts to mobilize Palestinian militants and establish a widespread presence in the territories would have been far more extensive. Instead, the bin Laden network largely reflects the concerns of an Afghan-based organization with strong links to Pakistan; hence, its involvement in the Indian subcontinent, the former Muslim republics of the Soviet Union, and strategic points around the Arabian peninsula, especially Yemen.
The Supportive Media Environment in Arab States
One of the surprising aspects of the September attack on the U.S. is the role of nationals who come from states that are thought to be friendly to the U.S.: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Evidently, bin Laden's anti-Americanism has considerable resonance in the government-controlled media of much of the Arab world. Even Egypt's official media have contributed to this environment. Thus, a columnist in the state-controlled Al-Akhbar wrote in August 2001: "The conflict that we call the Arab-Israeli conflict is, in truth, an Arab conflict with Western, particularly American, colonialism....The U.S. treats the [Arabs] as it treated the slaves inside the American continent....The issue no longer concerns the Israeli-Arab conflict. The real issue is the Arab-American conflict."27 Writing less than a month before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the columnist stated that "The Statue of Liberty, in New York Harbor, must be destroyed." Unfortunately, this sort of anti-Americanism is not uncommon in the Egyptian press.
Often, Arab states with close relations to the U.S. permit media outlets that spread violent anti-Americanism. Qatar's al-Jazeera satellite network, that broadcasts to the entire Arab world, carried a speech on May 23, 2001, by the Mufti of the Palestinian Liberation Army which praised the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen: "My blessings to those who carried out the [USS] Cole operation."28
Israel and the Quest for a Coalition
There will be those who might accept the argument that the Israel issue is not at the core of the current anti-American rage, but nonetheless they would argue that Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic progress is necessary to assure the preservation of the anti-terrorism coalition. Yet this assumption needs careful reexamination as well. The 1990-91 Gulf War coalition against Iraq was established in the total absence of an Arab-Israeli peace process. The Madrid Peace Conference followed the coalition victory against Saddam Hussein.
Moreover, after the war, the coalition began to disintegrate even as the peace process appeared to be succeeding. For example, in the fall of 1994 after the Oslo Agreement and the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, the coalition did not hold together when Saddam Hussein massed armored units on the Kuwaiti border (the U.S. and Kuwait acted alone).
Two factors provided the glue to tie the original Gulf War coalition together: a perceived mutual threat among the coalition members, and the consensus of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The Arab world did not want to be in a position of defying what it had always called the main source of international legitimacy -- the UN. Today, with Russia and China supporting the U.S. anti-terrorism effort along with Great Britain and France, the U.S. could assure itself of Arab support by gaining prior approval of a concert of great powers.
The Real Issue: Anti-American Incitement
Placing Israel and the Palestinian issue in the spotlight of the current anti-Americanism motivating the militant Islamic groups connected with Osama bin Laden is simply wrong. It can also lead to a misplaced emphasis in current U.S. policy options toward the Middle East. Political pressure on Israel to make concessions under present-day Palestinian violence could easily compromise Israeli security, but would not address either the primary or even secondary reasons behind the rage of militant Islam toward America.
In order to address the hostile environment toward the U.S. in parts of the Arab world today, anti-American incitement in government-controlled media should be examined. Eliminating terrorism requires not only purely military measures, but also diplomatic moves aimed at making sure that there is no fertile ground for mobilizing more militant operations. While press freedoms are to be respected, systematic anti-American incitement of whole populations must cease in order to create an environment that is not supportive of future attacks against the U.S. and its citizens. If these governments already selectively censor criticism of their own regimes in their state-controlled media outlets, then they can also take measures against the spread of anti-Americanism through these same official organs.
After the September 11 terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many American analysts have been seeking to understand the source of the intense hatred against the United States that could have motivated an act of violence on such an unprecedented scale. In that context, a new canard is beginning to run through repeated news reports and features: that somehow America's support for Israel is behind the fury of militant Islamic movements, like that of Osama bin Laden, towards the United States. Indeed, a Newsweek poll conducted on October 4-5, 2001, found that 58 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. relationship with Israel is "a big reason terrorists attacked the United States."1
These attitudes had to come from somewhere. For example, Caryl Murphy wrote in the Washington Post: "If we want to avoid creating more terrorists, we must end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict quickly."2 Similarly, Gary Kamiya, Salon magazine's executive editor, added: "A sword will hang over the U.S. until we convince Israel to make peace with the Palestinians."3 Appearing on ABC with Peter Jennings, Hanan Ashrawi also charged that the U.S. alliance with Israel was to blame for the September 11 attack.4
This argument, unfortunately, has also found particular currency in Europe. Thus, British Foreign Minster Jack Straw told an Iranian newspaper: "One of the factors that helps breed terror is the anger that many people in the region feel at events over the years in the Palestinian territories."5 Egyptian diplomacy has clearly found this theme to be useful; thus President Mubarak asserted during a trip to Germany: "Without solving the Palestine problem with U.S. and European help we will see a new generation of terrorists threatening world security."6
One significant exception to this trend was the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who frankly answered a question posed by CNN's Larry King as to whether the sentiment that caused the attack came from frustration over the failure of the peace process: "As a cause of it, I don't think so."7
Bin Laden himself only placed the Palestinian issue front and center among his grievances against the West during a video clip broadcast after Anglo-American Forces began their retaliatory strikes against Afghanistan on October 7, 2001: "America will never dream nor those who live in America will never taste security and safety unless we feel security and safety in our land and in Palestine."8
Yet a careful examination of the ideology and organization of bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network demonstrates that these disturbingly ubiquitous assertions about the centrality of Israel as the cause of the fury of militant Islam are seriously flawed. In fact, state-supported media in parts of the Arab world continually engage in incitement of the Arab civilian population against the United States, regardless of the Israeli factor. Unless the sources of anti-Americanism are correctly understood and addressed, policy-makers are likely to fail to deal with the true motivating factors behind the attack on the United States.
Ideological Sources of Bin Laden's Anti-Americanism
A 1998 fatwa (religious ruling) issued by bin Laden jointly with militant Islamic leaders from Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh provides an insight into the sources of his anti-Americanism.9 The document calls "on every Muslim...to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it." True, bin Laden uses language like "the Zionist-Crusader alliance" that sweeps in the issue of Israel, but the primary justification for doing so is that "for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, [and] terrorizing its neighbors." Having helped to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s with other Arab volunteers, bin Laden has now turned his attention to the remaining superpower, the United States. U.S. forces are specifically described as "Crusader armies spreading...like locusts."
A second bin Laden grievance is "the continuing aggression against the Iraqi people." The "guarantee of Israel's survival" appears only as the third reason for criticizing U.S. policy. Bin Laden also refers to the Jews' "occupation of Jerusalem," but gives no indication whatsoever of accepting Jewish statehood within any borders. In fact, in 1998 he was critical of the Saudis for their support of "Yasser Arafat's regime" against Hamas.10 Israel's very existence is the issue -- not the status of the peace process. It is not surprising that the planning and training for the September 11 attack is believed to have begun several years ago, well before the current Palestinian intifada and the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. There simply is no correlation between the new terrorism facing the U.S. and the Arab-Israeli peace process.
The "Holy Land" is Arabia
Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University also noted bin Laden's prioritization in his analysis of bin Laden's 1998 fatwa in Foreign Affairs:
The three areas of grievance listed in the declaration -- Arabia, Iraq, and Jerusalem -- will be familiar to observers of the Middle Eastern scene. What may be less familiar is the sequence and emphasis. For Muslims, as we in the West sometimes tend to forget but those familiar with Islamic history and literature know, the holy land par excellence is Arabia -- Mecca, where the Prophet was born; Medina, where he established the first Muslim state; and the Hijaz, whose people were the first to rally to the new faith....Thereafter, except for a brief interlude in Syria, the center of the Islamic world and the scene of its major achievements was Iraq....For Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced, but none compares in significance with Arabia and Iraq....Of those two, Arabia is by far the more important (emphasis added).11
Bin Laden issued an earlier document in 1996 called a "Declaration of War Against the American Occupying of the Land of the Two Holy Places" (referring to Mecca and Medina). Here, too, bin Laden demonstrated that his priorities focus first and foremost on the Arabian peninsula: "If there is more than one duty to be carried out, then the most important one should receive priority. Clearly after Belief (Imaan), there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land (i.e., Arabia) (emphasis added)." Bin Laden made the same point in a 1998 interview with ABC News: "Allah ordered us in this religion to purify Muslim land of all non-believers and especially the Arabian Peninsula, where the Ke'ba is (emphasis added)."12
Purifying Islam from Alien Innovations
In order to understand this prioritization, it is necessary to delve into the general mindset of militant Islam. Like the Wahhabis of eighteenth century Arabia, followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1787), whose doctrine was part of bin Laden's early Saudi education, militant Islamists seek to return Islam to a more puritanical period, like the seventh century of the Prophet Muhammad, before the Islamic world was contaminated by alien ideas, especially from the West but also from within the Middle East. In their view, the sources of heterodox impurities in Islam had to be eradicated. The early Wahhabi movement, which had formed a political alliance with the Saudi family, attacked Shi'ites as heretics and even sacked the Iraqi Shi'ite holy city of Karbala in 1801, slaughtering its residents. The Taliban, who came out of Islamic seminaries in Pakistan funded by Saudi Arabia and inspired by its Wahhabi doctrine,13 actually continued this violent Wahhabi tradition through their harsh treatment of Afghan Shi'ites.
Looking beyond the adherents of Wahhabism to the wider perspective of militant Islamists more generally, the Islamic world (Dar al-Islam) at present may not be under the complete physical occupation of the West, but it is under a kind of spiritual occupation: "in Sunni terms, Dar al-Islam has returned to a state of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic darkness) even worse than the one that preceded the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia."14 This perspective has been associated with two of bin Laden's militant Egyptian associates, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya.15
The response of militant Islam to this situation is to seek the overthrow of pro-Western regimes in the Islamic world and to campaign for the elimination of Western power and influence from the Middle East entirely. In the seventh century, the first Islamic state arose on the ruins of the two great empires of that era: the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, defeat of the U.S. becomes the next logical struggle. It is not surprising that the handwritten document of terrorist ringleader Muhammad Atta states: "Remember the battle of the Prophet...against the infidels, as he went on building the Islamic state."16 Thus, the organizing principle of militant Islam is anti-Americanism; a pro-Western regime that is anti-Israel in orientation still remains a target of militant Islam.
The Organizational Priorities of the Bin Laden Network
An examination of bin Laden's organizational network further reveals that the issue of Israel is not a top priority or focus for his brand of militant Islam. The U.S. Department of State's Patterns of Global Terrorism -- 2000 identifies Sunni Islamic extremist groups that have been linked to Osama bin Laden's worldwide network: the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Egypt's al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the Harakat ul-Mujahidin, a Pakistan-based group operating against India in Kashmir. The Islamic Renaissance Party received support in late 1996 from "militant Arab Afghans" in Afghanistan as it trained for cross-border attacks on Tajikistan.17 Bin Laden's organization also became involved in the Tajikistan struggle.18 Additionally, bin Laden's network is known to reach Albania, the Philippines, Chechnya, Indonesia, India, Jordan, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Yemen.
Looking at bin Laden's organizational network, a number of concerns are evident. First, bin Laden is continuing his struggle against Russia, even after the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This involves, as noted above, continued support for already existing Islamic movements in the independent Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union. It also entails backing movements that are seeking to dismember parts of Russia itself, beyond the obvious case of Chechnya, in the Northern Caucasus. Daghestan, which commands 70 percent of Russia's coast on the oil-rich Caspian Sea, faced a threat from radical Islamists in 1999.19
Many commentators see Saudi-exported Wahhabism as one of the principal causes of militant Islamic fundamentalism in southern Russia. Thus, Hajj Salih Brandt, the Chechen government's Special Envoy to Europe, claimed: "[T]he whole political agenda of Wahabbi Fundamentalism (what the West now calls Islamism)...is a deviation of Islam taught in Madinah University in Saudi Arabia, sponsored by the Saudi government and exported from there....Out of it have come Hamas, the Taliban, Usama Bin Laden, the FIS, Sudan, and now the gangs roaming Chechnya and Daghestan."20
Consistent with his ideological position, a second concern of bin Laden's organization involves directing efforts against the U.S., particularly against the American presence in and around the Arabian peninsula. There is no clear connection between bin Laden and attacks against Americans on Saudi territory in 1995 and 1996, which appear to have been the responsibility of Shi'ite organizations like Saudi Hizballah. However, bin Laden has penetrated Egypt, Sudan, and Yemen, which control the Red Sea approaches to the Arabian peninsula, as well as Jordan, which borders Saudi Arabia from the north. In this context, he has been supportive of the overthrow of pro-American regimes. A third concern for bin Laden is a focus on achieving Muslim independence in multi-ethnic states, like the case of Kashmir in India. Israel and the Palestinians are simply dwarfed by these other areas of concern and activity.
In fact, Reuven Paz of the Herzliya International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism has noted that the bin Laden network has not connected with militant Islamic movements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite its mobilization of Palestinians from Lebanon and Jordan over the last decade.21 The U.S. Department of State noted only one case of a militant, Nabil Awkil, connected to both Hamas and Osama bin Laden. Very few other cases have been identified.22 The head of Israeli Military Intelligence, Major General Amos Malka, has stated that two attempts by the bin Laden organization to penetrate into Israel were prevented.23
True, a Palestinian figure from Jordan, Dr. Abdallah Azzam, played a major role in the formative years of bin Laden's organization until he was killed in 1989 by a car bomb in Peshawar, Pakistan. However, Azzam did not focus on the Palestinian issue but rather stressed Afghanistan's troubles exclusively.24 In fact, there have been reports that bin Laden has been criticized for his indifference to the Palestinian question.25 Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of the Lebanese daily as-Safir, stated on CNN: "He [bin Laden] never served the Palestinian cause. He never did anything to help the Palestinian people. His focus was on Afghanistan and on Chechnya. Never cared for the Palestinian cause."26
If the Palestinian issue were a high priority for bin Laden, then efforts to mobilize Palestinian militants and establish a widespread presence in the territories would have been far more extensive. Instead, the bin Laden network largely reflects the concerns of an Afghan-based organization with strong links to Pakistan; hence, its involvement in the Indian subcontinent, the former Muslim republics of the Soviet Union, and strategic points around the Arabian peninsula, especially Yemen.
The Supportive Media Environment in Arab States
One of the surprising aspects of the September attack on the U.S. is the role of nationals who come from states that are thought to be friendly to the U.S.: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Evidently, bin Laden's anti-Americanism has considerable resonance in the government-controlled media of much of the Arab world. Even Egypt's official media have contributed to this environment. Thus, a columnist in the state-controlled Al-Akhbar wrote in August 2001: "The conflict that we call the Arab-Israeli conflict is, in truth, an Arab conflict with Western, particularly American, colonialism....The U.S. treats the [Arabs] as it treated the slaves inside the American continent....The issue no longer concerns the Israeli-Arab conflict. The real issue is the Arab-American conflict."27 Writing less than a month before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the columnist stated that "The Statue of Liberty, in New York Harbor, must be destroyed." Unfortunately, this sort of anti-Americanism is not uncommon in the Egyptian press.
Often, Arab states with close relations to the U.S. permit media outlets that spread violent anti-Americanism. Qatar's al-Jazeera satellite network, that broadcasts to the entire Arab world, carried a speech on May 23, 2001, by the Mufti of the Palestinian Liberation Army which praised the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen: "My blessings to those who carried out the [USS] Cole operation."28
Israel and the Quest for a Coalition
There will be those who might accept the argument that the Israel issue is not at the core of the current anti-American rage, but nonetheless they would argue that Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic progress is necessary to assure the preservation of the anti-terrorism coalition. Yet this assumption needs careful reexamination as well. The 1990-91 Gulf War coalition against Iraq was established in the total absence of an Arab-Israeli peace process. The Madrid Peace Conference followed the coalition victory against Saddam Hussein.
Moreover, after the war, the coalition began to disintegrate even as the peace process appeared to be succeeding. For example, in the fall of 1994 after the Oslo Agreement and the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, the coalition did not hold together when Saddam Hussein massed armored units on the Kuwaiti border (the U.S. and Kuwait acted alone).
Two factors provided the glue to tie the original Gulf War coalition together: a perceived mutual threat among the coalition members, and the consensus of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The Arab world did not want to be in a position of defying what it had always called the main source of international legitimacy -- the UN. Today, with Russia and China supporting the U.S. anti-terrorism effort along with Great Britain and France, the U.S. could assure itself of Arab support by gaining prior approval of a concert of great powers.
The Real Issue: Anti-American Incitement
Placing Israel and the Palestinian issue in the spotlight of the current anti-Americanism motivating the militant Islamic groups connected with Osama bin Laden is simply wrong. It can also lead to a misplaced emphasis in current U.S. policy options toward the Middle East. Political pressure on Israel to make concessions under present-day Palestinian violence could easily compromise Israeli security, but would not address either the primary or even secondary reasons behind the rage of militant Islam toward America.
In order to address the hostile environment toward the U.S. in parts of the Arab world today, anti-American incitement in government-controlled media should be examined. Eliminating terrorism requires not only purely military measures, but also diplomatic moves aimed at making sure that there is no fertile ground for mobilizing more militant operations. While press freedoms are to be respected, systematic anti-American incitement of whole populations must cease in order to create an environment that is not supportive of future attacks against the U.S. and its citizens. If these governments already selectively censor criticism of their own regimes in their state-controlled media outlets, then they can also take measures against the spread of anti-Americanism through these same official organs.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
Homepage:
http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp463.htm
Comments
Hide the following 12 comments
Ignoring the issue
14.07.2006 11:23
However, what you ignore is that Palestine/Israel does motivate the broader population in the Arab and Muslim world. And it is anger around that issue that breeds a population that is open to the Islamist message, which motivates would-be 'martyrs' and which leads to a groundswell of support for the most extreme actions.
Try as you might, if you want to tackle the Islamists you need to create a situation where they are viewed as fanatics by the general Arab and Muslim populations in the middle east. You don't do that by doing what Israel is doing.
Progressive Contrarian
Homepage:
http://progcontra.blogspot.com
Jack
14.07.2006 12:12
E.g.
If the US stopped Israel's war on Palestine and enforeced UN R-242, it would make it a non-recruitment issue.
Not convinced
Ya got it backwards
14.07.2006 13:26
If the US stopped Israel's war on Palestine and enforeced UN R-242, it would make it a non-recruitment issue."
LOL!!!! The Moslems would then destroy Israel with religious fervor...
Besides, it's "palestine's" war on Israel
Nana
FRAUD!!!
14.07.2006 14:30
It seems that I must be taken down a peg (by some mysterious entity no doubt) for my stand against zionism.
The above article has nothing to do with me.
But hey guys, its good to know I'm getting to you.
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
quack quack
14.07.2006 14:44
... have you ever heard him talk? He doesn't talk actually, he quacks. Very loudly. It half amuses me, in a horrified way, and half horrifies me, in an amusing way!
jackslucid
e-mail:
jackslucid@hotmail.com
Sportpalast
14.07.2006 15:12
You have just stated that if Israel ever stops fighting Arabs then it risks being annhilated. You are committing to continual war, total war. It wasn't until 1943 that Nazi Germany commited to total war.
The Shoah isn't the only important lesson to learn from that war.
Danny
Why Is This Zionist Propaganda Here?
14.07.2006 15:26
Dual Loyalties
The Bush Neocons and Israel
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA political analysts
[Editors' Note: This is a slightly revised version of essay that originally appeared in CounterPunch in December 2002. The piece also appeared in The Politics of Anti-Semitism.]
Since the long-forgotten days when the State Department's Middle East policy was run by a group of so-called Arabists, U.S. policy on Israel and the Arab world has increasingly become the purview of officials well known for tilting toward Israel. From the 1920s roughly to 1990, Arabists, who had a personal history and an educational background in the Arab world and were accused by supporters of Israel of being totally biased toward Arab interests, held sway at the State Department and, despite having limited power in the policymaking circles of any administration, helped maintain some semblance of U.S. balance by keeping policy from tipping over totally toward Israel. But Arabists have been steadily replaced by their exact opposites, what some observers are calling Israelists, and policymaking circles throughout government now no longer even make a pretense of exhibiting balance between Israeli and Arab, particularly Palestinian, interests.
In the Clinton administration, the three most senior State Department officials dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli peace process were all partisans of Israel to one degree or another. All had lived at least for brief periods in Israel and maintained ties with Israel while in office, occasionally vacationing there. One of these officials had worked both as a pro-Israel lobbyist and as director of a pro-Israel think tank in Washington before taking a position in the Clinton administration from which he helped make policy on Palestinian-Israeli issues. Another has headed the pro-Israel think tank since leaving government.
The link between active promoters of Israeli interests and policymaking circles is stronger by several orders of magnitude in the Bush administration, which is peppered with people who have long records of activism on behalf of Israel in the United States, of policy advocacy in Israel, and of promoting an agenda for Israel often at odds with existing U.S. policy. These people, who can fairly be called Israeli loyalists, are now at all levels of government, from desk officers at the Defense Department to the deputy secretary level at both State and Defense, as well as on the National Security Council staff and in the vice president's office.
We still tiptoe around putting a name to this phenomenon. We write articles about the neo-conservatives' agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and imply that in the neo-con universe there is little light between the two countries. We talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media. We make wry jokes about Congress being "Israeli-occupied territory." Jason Vest in The Nation magazine reported forthrightly that some of the think tanks that hold sway over Bush administration thinking see no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests. But we never pronounce the particular words that best describe the real meaning of those observations and wry remarks. It's time, however, that we say the words out loud and deal with what they really signify.
Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties -- the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to secure Israel's safety and predominance in the Middle East through the advancement of the U.S. imperium.
"Dual loyalties" has always been one of those red flags posted around the subject of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, something that induces horrified gasps and rapid heartbeats because of its implication of Jewish disloyalty to the United States and the common assumption that anyone who would speak such a canard is ipso facto an anti-Semite. (We have a Jewish friend who is not bothered by the term in the least, who believes that U.S. and Israeli interests should be identical and sees it as perfectly natural for American Jews to feel as much loyalty to Israel as they do to the United States. But this is clearly not the usual reaction when the subject of dual loyalties arises.)
Although much has been written about the neo-cons who dot the Bush administration, the treatment of the their ties to Israel has generally been very gingerly. Although much has come to light recently about the fact that ridding Iraq both of its leader and of its weapons inventory has been on the neo-con agenda since long before there was a Bush administration, little has been said about the link between this goal and the neo-cons' overriding desire to provide greater security for Israel. But an examination of the cast of characters in Bush administration policymaking circles reveals a startlingly pervasive network of pro-Israel activists, and an examination of the neo-cons' voluminous written record shows that Israel comes up constantly as a neo-con reference point, always mentioned with the United States as the beneficiary of a recommended policy, always linked with the United States when national interests are at issue.
The Begats
First to the cast of characters. Beneath cabinet level, the list of pro-Israel neo-cons who are either policy functionaries themselves or advise policymakers from perches just on the edges of government reads like the old biblical "begats." Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz leads the pack. He was a protégé of Richard Perle, who heads the prominent Pentagon advisory body, the Defense Policy Board. Many of today's neo-cons, including Perle, are the intellectual progeny of the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a strong defense hawk and one of Israel's most strident congressional supporters in the 1970s.
Wolfowitz in turn is the mentor of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff who was first a student of Wolfowitz and later a subordinate during the 1980s in both the State and the Defense Departments. Another Perle protégé is Douglas Feith, who is currently undersecretary of defense for policy, the department's number-three man, and has worked closely with Perle both as a lobbyist for Turkey and in co-authoring strategy papers for right-wing Israeli governments. Assistant Secretaries Peter Rodman and Dov Zackheim, old hands from the Reagan administration when the neo-cons first flourished, fill out the subcabinet ranks at Defense. At lower levels, the Israel and the Syria/Lebanon desk officers at Defense are imports from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank spun off from the pro-Israel lobby organization, AIPAC.
Neo-cons have not made many inroads at the State Department, except for John Bolton, an American Enterprise Institute hawk and Israeli proponent who is said to have been forced on a reluctant Colin Powell as undersecretary for arms control. Bolton's special assistant is David Wurmser, who wrote and/or co-authored with Perle and Feith at least two strategy papers for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996. Wurmser's wife, Meyrav Wurmser, is a co-founder of the media-watch website MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), which is run by retired Israeli military and intelligence officers and specializes in translating and widely circulating Arab media and statements by Arab leaders. A recent investigation by the Guardian of London found that MEMRI's translations are skewed by being highly selective. Although it inevitably translates and circulates the most extreme of Arab statements, it ignores moderate Arab commentary and extremist Hebrew statements.
In the vice president's office, Cheney has established his own personal national security staff, run by aides known to be very pro-Israel. The deputy director of the staff, John Hannah, is a former fellow of the Israeli-oriented Washington Institute. On the National Security Council staff, the newly appointed director of Middle East affairs is Elliott Abrams, who came to prominence after pleading guilty to withholding information from Congress during the Iran-contra scandal (and was pardoned by President Bush the elder) and who has long been a vocal proponent of right-wing Israeli positions. Putting him in a key policymaking position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is like entrusting the henhouse to a fox.
Pro-Israel activists with close links to the administration are also busy in the information arena inside and outside government. The head of Radio Liberty, a Cold War propaganda holdover now converted to service in the "war on terror," is Thomas Dine, who was the very active head of AIPAC throughout most of the Reagan and the Bush-41 administrations. Elsewhere on the periphery, William Kristol, son of neo-con originals Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, is closely linked to the administration's pro-Israel coterie and serves as its cheerleader through the Rupert Murdoch-owned magazine that he edits, The Weekly Standard. Some of Bush's speechwriters -- including David Frum, who coined the term "axis of evil" for Bush's state-of-the-union address but was forced to resign when his wife publicly bragged about his linguistic prowess -- have come from The Weekly Standard. Frank Gaffney, another Jackson and Perle protégé and Reagan administration defense official, puts his pro-Israel oar in from his think tank, the Center for Security Policy, and through frequent media appearances and regular columns in the Washington Times.
The incestuous nature of the proliferating boards and think tanks, whose membership lists are more or less identical and totally interchangeable, is frighteningly insidious. Several scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, including former Reagan UN ambassador and long-time supporter of the Israeli right wing Jeane Kirkpatrick, make their pro-Israel views known vocally from the sidelines and occupy positions on other boards. Probably the most important organization, in terms of its influence on Bush administration policy formulation, is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Formed after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war specifically to bring Israel's security concerns to the attention of U.S. policymakers and concentrating also on broad defense issues, the extremely hawkish, right-wing JINSA has always had a high-powered board able to place its members inside conservative U.S. administrations. Cheney, Bolton, and Feith were members until they entered the Bush administration. Several lower level JINSA functionaries are now working in the Defense Department. Perle is still a member, as are Kirkpatrick, former CIA director and leading Iraq-war hawk James Woolsey, and old-time rabid pro-Israel types like Eugene Rostow and Michael Ledeen. Both JINSA and Gaffney's Center for Security Policy are heavily underwritten by Irving Moskowitz, a right-wing American Zionist, California business magnate (his money comes from bingo parlors), and JINSA board member who has lavishly financed the establishment of several religious settlements in Arab East Jerusalem.
By Their Own Testimony
Most of the neo-cons now in government have left a long paper trail giving clear evidence of their fervently right-wing pro-Israel, and fervently anti-Palestinian, sentiments. Whether being pro-Israel, even pro right-wing Israel, constitutes having dual loyalties -- that is, a desire to further Israel's interests that equals or exceeds the desire to further U.S. interests -- is obviously not easy to determine, but the record gives some clues.
Wolfowitz himself has been circumspect in public, writing primarily about broader strategic issues rather than about Israel specifically or even the Middle East, but it is clear that at bottom Israel is a major interest and may be the principal reason for his near obsession with the effort, of which he is the primary spearhead, to dump Saddam Hussein, remake the Iraqi government in an American image, and then further redraw the Middle East map by accomplishing the same goals in Syria, Iran, and perhaps other countries. Profiles of Wolfowitz paint him as having two distinct aspects: one obessively bent on advancing U.S. dominance throughout the world, ruthless and uncompromising, seriously prepared to "end states," as he once put it, that support terrorism in any way, a velociraptor in the words of one former colleague cited in the Economist; the other a softer aspect, which shows him to be a soft-spoken political moralist, an ardent democrat, even a bleeding heart on social issues, and desirous for purely moral and humanitarian reasons of modernizing and democratizing the Islamic world.
But his interest in Israel always crops up. Even profiles that downplay his attachment to Israel nonetheless always mention the influence the Holocaust, in which several of his family perished, has had on his thinking. One source inside the administration has described him frankly as "over-the-top crazy when it comes to Israel." Although this probably accurately describes most of the rest of the neo-con coterie, and Wolfowitz is guilty at least by association, he is actually more complex and nuanced than this. A recent New York Times Magazine profile by the Times' Bill Keller cites critics who say that "Israel exercises a powerful gravitational pull on the man" and notes that as a teenager Wolfowitz lived in Israel during his mathematician father's sabbatical semester there. His sister is married to an Israeli. Keller even somewhat reluctantly acknowledges the accuracy of one characterization of Wolfowitz as "Israel-centric." But Keller goes through considerable contortions to shun what he calls "the offensive suggestion of dual loyalty" and in the process makes one wonder if he is protesting too much. Keller concludes that Wolfowitz is less animated by the security of Israel than by the promise of a more moderate Islam. He cites as evidence Wolfowitz's admiration for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel and also draws on a former Wolfowitz subordinate who says that "as a moral man, he might have found Israel the heart of the Middle East story. But as a policy maker, Turkey and the gulf and Egypt didn't loom any less large for him."
These remarks are revealing. Anyone not so fearful of broaching the issue of dual loyalties might at least have raised the suggestion that Wolfowitz's real concern may indeed be to ensure Israel's security. Otherwise, why do his overriding interests seem to be reinventing Anwar Sadats throughout the Middle East by transforming the Arab and Muslim worlds and thereby making life safer for Israel, and a passion for fighting a pre-emptive war against Iraq -- when there are critical areas totally apart from the Middle East and myriad other broad strategic issues that any deputy secretary of defense should be thinking about just as much? His current interest in Turkey, which is shared by the other neo-cons, some of whom have served as lobbyists for Turkey, seems also to be directed at securing Israel's place in the region; there seems little reason for particular interest in this moderate Islamic, non-Arab country, other than that it is a moderate Islamic but non-Arab neighbor of Israel. Furthermore, the notion suggested by the Wolfowitz subordinate that any moral man would obviously look to Israel as the "heart of the Middle East story" is itself an Israel-centered idea: the assumption that Israel is a moral state, always pursuing moral policies, and that any moral person would naturally attach himself to Israel automatically presumes that there is an identity of interests between the United States and Israel; only those who assume such a complete coincidence of interests accept the notion that Israel is, across the board, a moral state.
Others among the neo-con policymakers have been more direct and open in expressing their pro-Israel views. Douglas Feith has been the most prolific of the group, with a two-decade-long record of policy papers, many co-authored with Perle, propounding a strongly anti-Palestinian, pro-Likud view. He views the Palestinians as not constituting a legitimate national group, believes that the West Bank and Gaza belong to Israel by right, and has long advocated that the U.S. abandon any mediating effort altogether and particularly foreswear the land-for-peace formula.
In 1996, Feith, Perle, and both David and Meyrav Wurmser were among the authors of a policy paper issued by an Israeli think tank and written for newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that urged Israel to make a "clean break" from pursuit of the peace process, particularly its land-for-peace aspects, which the authors regarded as a prescription for Israel's annihilation. Arabs must rather accept a "peace-for-peace" formula through unconditional acceptance of Israel's rights, including its territorial rights in the occupied territories. The paper advocated that Israel "engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism" by disengaging from economic and political dependence on the U.S. while maintaining a more "mature," self-reliant partnership with the U.S. not focused "narrowly on territorial disputes." Greater self-reliance would, these freelance policymakers told Netanyahu, give Israel "greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure [i.e., U.S. pressure] used against it in the past."
The paper advocated, even as far back as 1996, containment of the threat against Israel by working closely with -- guess who? -- Turkey, as well as with Jordan, apparently regarded as the only reliably moderate Arab regime. Jordan had become attractive for these strategists because it was at the time working with opposition elements in Iraq to reestablish a Hashemite monarchy there that would have been allied by blood lines and political leanings to the Hashemite throne in Jordan. The paper's authors saw the principal threat to Israel coming, we should not be surprised to discover now, from Iraq and Syria and advised that focusing on the removal of Saddam Hussein would kill two birds with one stone by also thwarting Syria's regional ambitions. In what amounts to a prelude to the neo-cons' principal policy thrust in the Bush administration, the paper spoke frankly of Israel's interest in overturning the Iraqi leadership and replacing it with a malleable monarchy. Referring to Saddam Hussein's ouster as "an important Israeli strategic objective," the paper observed that "Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly" -- meaning give Israel unquestioned predominance in the region. The authors urged therefore that Israel support the Hashemites in their "efforts to redefine Iraq."
In a much longer policy document written at about the same time for the same Israeli think tank, David Wurmser repeatedly linked the U.S. and Israel when talking about national interests in the Middle East. The "battle to dominate and define Iraq," he wrote "is, by extension, the battle to dominate the balance of power in the Levant over the long run," and "the United States and Israel" can fight this battle together. Repeated references to U.S. and Israeli strategic policy, pitted against a "Saudi-Iraqi-Syrian-Iranian-PLO axis," and to strategic moves that establish a balance of power in which the United States and Israel are ascendant, in alliance with Turkey and Jordan, betray a thought process that cannot separate U.S. from Israeli interests.
Perle gave further impetus to this thrust when six years later, in September 2002, he gave a briefing for Pentagon officials that included a slide depicting a recommended strategic goal for the U.S. in the Middle East: all of Palestine as Israel, Jordan as Palestine, and Iraq as the Hashemite kingdom. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seems to have taken this aboard, since he spoke at about the same time of the West Bank and Gaza as the "so-called occupied territories" -- effectively turning all of Palestine into Israel.
Elliott Abrams is another unabashed supporter of the Israeli right, now bringing his links with Israel into the service of U.S. policymaking on Palestinian-Israeli issues. The neo-con community is crowing about Abrams' appointment as Middle East director on the NSC staff (where this Iran-contra criminal has already been working since mid-2001, badly miscast as the director for, of all things, democracy and human rights). The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes has hailed his appointment as a decisive move that neatly cocks a snook at the pro-Palestinian wimps at the State Department. Accurately characterizing Abrams as "more pro-Israel, less solicitous of Palestinians" than the State Department and strongly opposed to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, Barnes gloats that the Abrams triumph signals that the White House will not cede control of Middle East policy to Colin Powell and the "foreign service bureaucrats." Abrams comes to the post after a year in which it had effectively been left vacant. His predecessor, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been serving concurrently as Bush's personal representative to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban and has devoted little time to the NSC job, but several attempts to appoint a successor early this year were vetoed by neo-con hawks who felt the appointees were not devoted enough to Israel.
Although Abrams has no particular Middle East expertise, he has managed to insert himself in the Middle East debate repeatedly over the years. He has a family interest in propounding a pro-Israel view; he is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, one of the original neo-cons and a long-time strident supporter of right-wing Israeli causes as editor of Commentary magazine, and Midge Decter, a frequent right-wing commentator. Abrams has written a good deal on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, opposing U.S. mediation and any effort to press for Israeli concessions. In an article published in advance of the 2000 elections, he propounded a rationale for a U.S. missile defense system, and a foreign policy agenda in general, geared almost entirely toward ensuring Israel's security. "It is a simple fact," he wrote, that the possession of missiles and weapons of mass destruction by Iraq and Iran vastly increases Israel's vulnerability, and this threat would be greatly diminished if the U.S. provided a missile shield and brought about the demise of Saddam Hussein. He concluded with a wholehearted assertion of the identity of U.S. and Israeli interests: "The next decade will present enormous opportunities to advance American interests in the Middle East [by] boldly asserting our support of our friends" -- that is, of course, Israel. Many of the fundamental negotiating issues critical to Israel, he said, are also critical to U.S. policy in the region and "require the United States to defend its interests and allies" rather than giving in to Palestinian demands.
Neo-cons in the Henhouse
The neo-con strategy papers half a dozen years ago were dotted with concepts like "redefining Iraq," "redrawing the map of the Middle East," "nurturing alternatives to Arafat," all of which have in recent months become familiar parts of the Bush administration's diplomatic lingo. Objectives laid out in these papers as important strategic goals for Israel -- including the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the strategic transformation of the entire Middle East, the death of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, regime change wherever the U.S. and Israel don't happen to like the existing government, the abandonment of any effort to forge a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace or even a narrower Palestinian-Israeli peace -- have now become, under the guidance of this group of pro-Israel neo-cons, important strategic goals for the United States. The enthusiasm with which senior administration officials like Bush himself, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have adopted strategic themes originally defined for Israel's guidance -- and did so in many cases well before September 11 and the so-called war on terror -- testifies to the persuasiveness of a neo-con philosophy focused narrowly on Israel and the pervasiveness of the network throughout policymaking councils.
Does all this add up to dual loyalties to Israel and the United States? Many would still contend indignantly that it does not, and that it is anti-Semitic to suggest such a thing. In fact, zealous advocacy of Israel's causes may be just that -- zealotry, an emotional connection to Israel that still leaves room for primary loyalty to the United States -- and affection for Israel is not in any case a sentiment limited to Jews. But passion and emotion -- and, as George Washington wisely advised, a passionate attachment to any country -- have no place in foreign policy formulation, and it is mere hair-splitting to suggest that a passionate attachment to another country is not loyalty to that country. Zealotry clouds judgment, and emotion should never be the basis for policymaking.
Zealotry can lead to extreme actions to sustain policies, as is apparently occurring in the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith Defense Department. People knowledgeable of the intelligence community have said, according to a recent article in The American Prospect, that the CIA is under tremendous pressure to produce intelligence more supportive of war with Iraq -- as one former CIA official put it, "to support policies that have already been adopted." Key Defense Department officials, including Feith, are said to be attempting to make the case for pre-emptive war by producing their own unverified intelligence. Wolfowitz betrayed his lack of concern for real evidence when, in answer to a recent question about where the evidence is for Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, he replied, "It's like the judge said about pornography. I can't define it, but I will know it when I see it."
Zealotry can also lead to a myopic focus on the wrong issues in a conflict or crisis, as is occurring among all Bush policymakers with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The administration's obsessive focus on deposing Yasir Arafat, a policy suggested by the neo-cons years before Bush came to office, is a dodge and a diversion that merely perpetuates the conflict by failing to address its real roots. Advocates of this policy fail or refuse to see that, however unappealing the Palestinian leadership, it is not the cause of the conflict, and "regime change" among the Palestinians will do nothing to end the violence. The administration's utter refusal to engage in any mediation process that might produce a stable, equitable peace, also a neo-con strategy based on the paranoid belief that any peace involving territorial compromise will spell the annihilation of Israel, will also merely prolong the violence. Zealotry produces blindness: the zealous effort to pursue Israel's right-wing agenda has blinded the dual loyalists in the administration to the true face of Israel as occupier, to any concern for justice or equity and any consideration that interests other than Israel's are involved, and indeed to any pragmatic consideration that continued unquestioning accommodation of Israel, far from bringing an end to violence, will actually lead to its tragic escalation and to increased terrorism against both the United States and Israel.
What does it matter, in the end, if these men split their loyalties between the United States and Israel? Apart from the evidence of the policy distortions that arise from zealotry, one need only ask whether it can be mere coincidence that those in the Bush administration who most strongly promote "regime change" in Iraq are also those who most strongly support the policies of the Israeli right wing. And would it bother most Americans to know that the United States is planning a war against Iraq for the benefit of Israel? Can it be mere coincidence, for example, that Vice President Cheney, now the leading senior-level proponent of war with Iraq, repudiated just this option for all the right reasons in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991? He was defense secretary at the time, and in an interview with the New York Times on April 13, 1991, he said:
"If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you will do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Ba'athists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists. How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for the government, and what happens to it once we leave?"
Since Cheney clearly changed his mind between 1991 and today, is it not legitimate to ask why, and whether Israel might have a greater influence over U.S. foreign policy now than it had in 1991? After all, notwithstanding his wisdom in rejecting an expansion of the war on Iraq a decade ago, Cheney was just as interested in promoting U.S. imperialism and was at that same moment in the early 1990s outlining a plan for world domination by the United States, one that did not include conquering Iraq at any point along the way. The only new ingredient in the mix today that is inducing Cheney to begin the march to U.S. world domination by conquering Iraq is the presence in the Bush-Cheney administration of a bevy of aggressive right-wing neo-con hawks who have long backed the Jewish fundamentalists of Israel's own right wing and who have been advocating some move on Iraq for at least the last half dozen years.
The suggestion that the war with Iraq is being planned at Israel's behest, or at the instigation of policymakers whose main motivation is trying to create a secure environment for Israel, is strong. Many Israeli analysts believe this. The Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar recently observed frankly in a Ha'aretz column that Perle, Feith, and their fellow strategists "are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments and Israeli interests." The suggestion of dual loyalties is not a verboten subject in the Israeli press, as it is in the United States. Peace activist Uri Avnery, who knows Israeli Prime Minister Sharon well, has written that Sharon has long planned grandiose schemes for restructuring the Middle East and that "the winds blowing now in Washington remind me of Sharon. I have absolutely no proof that the Bushies got their ideas from him . But the style is the same."
The dual loyalists in the Bush administration have given added impetus to the growth of a messianic strain of Christian fundamentalism that has allied itself with Israel in preparation for the so-called End of Days. These crazed fundamentalists see Israel's domination over all of Palestine as a necessary step toward fulfillment of the biblical Millennium, consider any Israeli relinquishment of territory in Palestine as a sacrilege, and view warfare between Jews and Arabs as a divinely ordained prelude to Armageddon. These right-wing Christian extremists have a profound influence on Bush and his administration, with the result that the Jewish fundamentalists working for the perpetuation of Israel's domination in Palestine and the Christian fundamentalists working for the Millennium strengthen and reinforce each other's policies in administration councils. The Armageddon that Christian Zionists seem to be actively promoting and that Israeli loyalists inside the administration have tactically allied themselves with raises the horrifying but very real prospect of an apocalyptic Christian-Islamic war. The neo-cons seem unconcerned, and Bush's occasional pro forma remonstrations against blaming all Islam for the sins of Islamic extremists do nothing to make this prospect less likely.
These two strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice president heavily invested in oil. All of these factors -- the dual loyalties of an extensive network of policymakers allied with Israel, the influence of a fanatical wing of Christian fundamentalists, and oil -- probably factor in more or less equally to the administration's calculations on the Palestinian-Israeli situation and on war with Iraq. But the most critical factor directing U.S. policymaking is the group of Israeli loyalists: neither Christian fundamentalist support for Israel nor oil calculations would carry the weight in administration councils that they do without the pivotal input of those loyalists, who clearly know how to play to the Christian fanatics and undoubtedly also know that their own and Israel's bread is buttered by the oil interests of people like Bush and Cheney. This is where loyalty to Israel by government officials colors and influences U.S. policymaking in ways that are extremely dangerous.
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, CounterPunch's new history of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kathleen Christison, a former CIA political analyst, is the author of Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy and Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story.
They can be reached at:
Zionism, Irrelevant Within a Generation
Counterpunch
14.07.2006 15:41
911=PNAC, CIA, Mossad
Islam's Eternal War
14.07.2006 15:44
Hardly what we in the West know as peace movements
Nana
Ach...
14.07.2006 16:56
The admins can delete the e-mail addy if they wish but the name jackslucid is mine forver here now.
jackslucid
Vengeance begets vengeance
14.07.2006 17:09
No, but then we are no strangers in the west to terrorist/freedom-fighters, like the IRA. The US and Israels founders fit in that category too. The UK never occupied Eire everytime the IRA committed an atrocity, that wouldn't have helped. Hamas and Hezb'Allah aren't peace movements. Nobody ever negotiates and signs peace-deals with peace movements, you make peace with enemies. In reality Hamas and Hezb'Allah pose not threat to the existence of Israel, only to individual Israelis. Inflicting collective punishment on cities and nations for the actions of a few is illegal and barbaric, such behaviour should be beneath the dignity of a moral and strong army. Recognition of a state of Israel is Hamas and Hezb'Allahs only negotiating card, short of hostage-taking or a unilateral ceasefire in the faceof aggression. It is no surprise that they cling on to it. When people get used to peace and justice then they stop tolerating extremism and war-mongering.
Despite the IRA analogy, I do not feel the slightest bit superior to any Israeli citizen simply since I am British, my government has killed more innocents than yours has over the past 5 years. And I know you'll laugh or spit at my naiviety for even saying this, but as an anarchist I think the only way you will ever find peace in that land is in the 'no-state' solution - no central government at all.
Danny
total war precedes total destruction
14.07.2006 17:49
No, but then we are no strangers in the west to terrorist/freedom-fighters/social-movements, like the IRA. The US and Israels founders fit in that category too. The UK never occupied Eire everytime the IRA committed an atrocity, that wouldn't have helped - and more importantly the US wouldn't have allowed it. Hamas and Hezb'Allah aren't peace movements but neither are they criminal gangs. Nobody ever negotiates and signs peace-deals with peacemovements or pacifists, you make peace with your enemies. Invading countries and bombing civilians in the lands you occupy just makes more enemies. Lebanon 82 is recognised in Israel as the Israeli vietnam is it not ?
You will laugh or spit at my naiviety but as an anarchist the only peaceful and sustainable solution I can see for your land is the 'no-state' solution. If Israel could somehow be made totally secure and independent in its 67 borders, would you mind it if it was a foriegn army providing the security ?
Danny