It is of paramount importance that US
policymakers begin to dispassionately inquire about the sources of anti-US
Arab rage incarnated in militant Islamic terror. Military operations alone, no
matter how extensive and destructive they might be, cannot achieve victory
without new, broadly based political thinking. US officials and mass-media
analyses seem to have been satisfied with describing the tragic events of 11
September as a declaration of war on the country, as well as a gross
manifestation of hate for the way of life and value system upheld so dearly by
the American people. The drive to create national consensus on the motives of
the suicide terrorists and to provide for long-term public support for sustained
retaliatory strikes against the hideouts of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism
appear to have engendered a conventional wisdom predicated on faulty
foundations. Grounding the motives of the 11 September attackers on sheer hatred
for the USA’s values and way of life fails to satisfy the intellectual
curiosity of the human mind, including those individuals at the extreme left of
the intelligence curve.
The roots of Arab–Islamic disaffection with the West
go back to the last years of the 18th century, when Napoleon’s armies landed in
Egypt and showed Muslims, in a spectacular display of force, the extent of their
cultural, scientific, and military backwardness vis-à-vis the West. The
inception of Western colonialism awakened Arabs and Muslims to a bitter reality,
which they found difficult to tackle. They became increasingly defensive as
Europe threateningly closed on them. Religious reform, vigorously under
consideration since the early 1830s, became the most unfortunate casualty of the
century; Arabs and Muslims unquestioningly returned to medieval Islam in the
hope that it would come to their rescue. It did not!
Arabs’ defining grievance against the USA pertains,
no doubt, to the repercussions of its orchestrated 1991 Gulf War to evict the
Iraqi army from Kuwait. The arrival of about half a million US troops and
hundreds of combat aircraft literally transformed Saudi Arabia – the country
whose ruling elite derives political legitimacy from its custodianship of
Islam’s two holiest shrines – into a US colony. The often-neglected truth is
that the implications of Desert Storm meant a virtual US conquest of the Middle
East. The USA’s dream of controlling the Gulf’s oilfields (in a way reminiscent
of tsarist Russia’s yearning to gain access to the warm waters of the Black Sea)
ultimately came true. The USA enjoyed its moment in the region, as did Israel in
its dealings with Arabs on issues of land and peace.
Indicators suggest, nevertheless, that the USA
operates in the Gulf, and in the rest of the Middle East, on a daily basis.
Examples abound: In response to the Iraqi army’s onslaught against the
peshmergas of the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan in April 1991, which caused millions of Kurds to flee to Iran and
Turkey, the US government responded – in addition to declaring a no-fly zone in
the north – by hastily assembling Operation Provide Comfort and establishing a
safe haven in northern Iraq. The USA acted primarily in order to appease Turkey,
which has consistently objected to the creation of a Kurdish state and did not
want to deal with the burden of Kurdish refugees; Washington neither had plans
for nor envisioned dealing with the roots of the Kurdish question. Similarly, in
response to Saddam Hussein’s unabated military campaign against Shi’ite
militants in the south, in August 1992 the USA imposed a no-fly zone in the
southern part of Iraq, though it never enforced the 1994 no-drive zone. Short of
a strategic policy on Iraq, the US government appeared not to object to Saddam
Hussein’s control of the south (the thought of a Shi’ite state there is anathema
to Saudi Arabia’s ever-phobic royals) as long as Iraqi gunships did not make the
headlines. The US position on the thorny final status talks between Israel and
the Palestinians has been equally noncommittal. From Dennis Ross to Anthony
Zinni, US peace envoys have appeared to be more focused on checking
uncontrollable outbursts of violence than on achieving enduring peace. Working
from the assumption that the USA has no serious threat to its vital national
interests in the region (oil and Israel), policymakers in Washington have
shunned acting on any of the area’s burning issues. In the meantime, the future
of Iraq remains on hold, and the suffering of its people fails to awaken the
slumbering conscience of Washington’s policy formulators.
The USA has also failed to honor the 1990 promise of
former president Bush to bring about a peaceful settlement to the Arab–Israeli
conflict, including its Palestinian core. In a bid to encourage reluctant Arab
and Muslim states to join his hastily assembled anti-Iraq coalition, Bush
pledged to turn his full attention to the Arab–Israeli conflict immediately
after the liberation of Kuwait. But the US president reneged on his promise;
nothing came out of the October 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. Instead of
pursuing peace, Bush focused his attention on a losing bid to secure a second
term in the White House. His successor, President Bill Clinton, eased himself
out of his predecessor’s commitment. Clinton, himself a strong supporter of
Israel, spent his White House years trying to shore up his presidency against
the vagaries of his personal conduct. The Palestinians, in despair over Israel’s
disinclination towards peace and ostracized because, in their desperation, they
applauded Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, found no recourse but to engage in Oslo’s
secret negotiations. For the Palestinians, direct negotiations with the
Israelis, in the absence of a major power acting as an impartial arbiter,
effectively meant dealing with the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The United States has indefatigably shrugged off Arab
requests for a balanced regional policy. Recent years saw an alarming increase
in US support for Israel, as well as blatant endorsement of unpopular Arab
dictatorships. This seemed symptomatic of Washington’s assessment that Arabs no
longer posed a credible threat to its policies in the region. Such an
inauspicious development stunned the USA’s Arab allies, who reached the
conclusion that the USA treats both its Arab friends and enemies alike – by
showing distaste for the former and contempt for the latter.
Poor judgement has caused the failure of US foreign
policy in the Middle East, especially since the mid-1960s. Conversely, the
powerful Zionist lobby has been astonishingly successful in linking US national
interests to staunch support for the Jewish state. The Zionists created a
virtual creed stating that US and Israeli interests are inseparable. They
successfully tied Judaism and Christianity together and put this contrived
linkage on a par with the West’s much-valued Greco-Roman tradition. Narrow
electoral interests necessitating constituency appeasement have effectively
transformed the US Congress into an assembly of defective and self-serving
legislation on Middle Eastern matters.
The USA can no longer afford to ignore the need to
reformulate its policy approach towards the Middle East. Preference for harmony
and balance is particularly compelling in the pluralist nature of US political
processes. On the national level, pluralism invites compromise, but the invasive
encroachment of national components of the political process on foreign policy
matters tends to facilitate arbitrary choices. The subservience of foreign
policy options to the pluralist requirements of domestic politics seemed
desirable to US administrations, inasmuch as they did not cause any backlash.
Globalization, or the so-called transformation of the globe into a small
village, appears to have nullified the concept of immunity from backlash.
Globalization does not just mean the elimination of barriers on trade, but on
terror as well. The communication revolution has certainly gone beyond the
spread of capitalism and notions of democracy to the promotion of religious
fanaticism and obscurantism. The genius of the US political system goes way
beyond ardent democratic orientation: it reveals its strength through
outstanding maintenance and adaptive capacities in reaction to manifest crises,
and in anticipation of latent ones. The events of 11 September have strikingly
demonstrated the extent to which external variables, hitherto uncontrollable,
can affect the deeper fibers of the American way of life.
There are unmistakable indicators that the USA’s
powerful Zionist lobby is seeking to broaden the scope of the campaign against
terror. It points to Iraq as a possible source of the anthrax scare and
campaigns aggressively to include the militant movements of Lebanon’s Hezbollah
and the Palestinian Territory’s Hamas among the sources of global terror.
As the world’s lone superpower, the USA can no longer
afford to surrender the making of its consequential foreign policy decisions to
frenzied domestic lobbying. For years, the US approach to the Middle East’s
problems has been utilitarian. The USA has inexcusably neglected the dues that
go with its pre-eminence in the region. Washington led the West in providing for
Israel’s military superiority against the Arabs’ combined forces, then called on
the belligerents to resolve the century-old conflict on their own. Its support
for Saudi Arabia’s anachronistic ruling elite has stifled the kingdom’s social
and political evolution and invited the wrath of the country’s austere religious
pundits. The great influence of the USA in the region is the product of its
paramount power: influence and power go together. In order for Washington to
maintain its preponderance in the region, it must use its influence discreetly
and its power fairly, across the board. For Arabs, special US–Israeli relations
simply mean policies detrimental to their interests, whereas the concept of
vital interests implies the sanctioning of traditional authoritarian
leaderships.
Washington has the power and influence needed to
resolve the thorny, final-status components of the Palestinian question.
Similarly, it controls the key to ending Iraq’s misery: the time has arrived for
a new, post-Saddam Hussein, sanction-free Iraq. The USA should neither support
Saudi royals, nor meddle in the country’s political ecology by obstructing the
forces of change to ensure that the production and supply of oil are not
endangered. Peace and stability in the region can best be fostered through the
promotion of a community of Middle Eastern countries brought together by mutual
bonds of economic interest.
Military action alone does not eradicate militant
terror, and the experiences of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa
attest to that. Those countries failed mainly because they reduced militant
Islamic terror to a security problem. The USA, in its war against global terror,
can – and should – go to the political and economic roots of the problem.
Globalization has facilitated the transfer of technology, including instruments
of mass destruction. Failure to act on the underlying sources of global terror
emanating from this region, which is mired in a deep malaise, runs the risk of
widening the recruitment base of technologically equipped suicidal terrorism.
Global terror originating from the Middle East is stoppable. The means are
available, but the USA’s political resolve is still wanting.
Prof. Hilal Khashan
Department of Government and Foreign Affairs
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA,
USA