[iwar] [fc:America.should.beware.provoking.the.wider.intifada.Bin.Laden.wants]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-25 22:03:15
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Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 22:03:15 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:America.should.beware.provoking.the.wider.intifada.Bin.Laden.wants]
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The shame of Palestine
America should beware provoking the wider intifada Bin Laden wants
David Hirst
Tuesday September 25, 2001
The Guardian

If, as seems all but certain, Osama bin Laden masterminded the
apocalyptic atrocity of New York, it was, self-evidently, directed
against the US, in line with his call on Muslims everywhere to "kill
Americans and loot their riches wherever you find them". 

But, indirectly, the target was Muslim too, in the shape of Arab
regimes, and not least the House of Saud, which, basing its entire
legitimacy on the Koran and the Prophetic traditions, claims to be the
most quintessentially Muslim of all. 

On returning home after their victory over the Russians, the "Arab
Afghans" had at first concentrated on an "internal" jihad against these
"apostate" rulers whom they deemed Muslim in name only. 

It was only in the later 90s that they resumed the external one, with
the US, their former ally, replacing the Soviet Union as the mortal foe:
hence the bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. 

But with this switch in priorities, they certainly did not forget the
enemies within.  Their sin, in Saudi Arabia's case, was to have turned
the lands of Mecca and Medina into an American colony, or, in the case
of all of them, to have done nothing to rescue Jerusalem and al-Aqsa
from the Zionist usurper. 

Of all the grounds on which Bin Laden could hope to embarrass Arab
regimes, the most fertile is Palestine.  That is, Palestine and the Arab
regimes' reliance on a unwaveringly pro-Israeli US to extricate
themselves from the shame and ignominy, the threat to their existences,
which this chief of Arab causes has become. 

Confined to Israelis and Palestinians alone, the intifida would be a
hopelessly unequal struggle.  But helping to sustain the Palestinians
has been the knowledge that if the Arab world could be induced to deploy
a smidgeon of its enormous potential on their behalf - economic,
diplomatic as much as military - it could have dramatically shifted the
balance of power in their favour. 

But never has the Arab world seemed more scandalously absent, and never,
as the intifada approaches its first anniversary this week, have Arab
commentators been more outspoken in saying so.  They relentlessly assail
the "shameful impotence" and "helpless defeatism" of Arab regimes,
especially Egypt and Jordan, the two countries which, having made peace
with Israel, are the spearheads of so-called "moderation". 

The impotence is seen to have deep roots, amounting, in many people's
view, to the bankruptcy of the whole peace-seeking strategy that has
been unfolding since the Egyptian-Israeli treaty of 1978.  It was then
that the Arabs first turned so earnestly to the US, as the honest broker
who would compensate them diplomatically for what they could not do
militarily. 

The Palestinians' anger and disappointment is shared by the Arab
"street".  True, after an initial effervescence, this street has been
relatively quiescent.  Yet the signs are that it is as emotionally
embroiled in Palestine as ever.  According to a recent survey, some 60%
of the people of four rather disparate countries - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
the Emirates and Lebanon - regard Palestine as the "single most
important issue to them personally"; in Egypt, the key country, that
figure rises to a remarkable 79%.  "The Palestinian issue remains an
identity concern for most Arabs," commented Shibley Telhami, an American
Egyptian academic.  "Most Arabs are shamed by their inability to help
the Palestinians."

To make matters worse, the impotence over Palestine is but a measure of
the more general failure of some of the world's most ossified, corrupt
and repressive regimes.  Palestine taps into a reservoir of resentment
over a range of other, often strictly domestic, issues.  Not only is the
whole peace process coming to be seen as a bogus agenda in which their
rulers ignominiously connived, the economic and political rewards which
Egyptian and Jordanian leaders promised their people would flow from it
have not materialised either.  Quite the reverse. 

The economic reforms on which President Mubarak has mainly staked his
regime's future are in deepening trouble.  Last month, as one body of
security forces kept a nervous eye on worshippers brandishing Korans and
banners proclaiming that "al-Aqsa is captive", another clashed with
thousands of graduates clamouring for their quota of
government-guaranteed jobs - convergent symptoms of a latent discontent
which could explode into full-scale confrontation at any time. 

But the greatest blow to the regimes has come from the Americans, now
betraying, as never before, the trust which the late President Sadat
first placed in them.  With the rise of General Sharon and the most
extreme, belligerent government in Israel's history, the regimes
urgently needed the US to redress the balance. 

But the US, in the person of President Bush, simply walked away from the
peace process that it had unsuccessfully monopolised for 10 years - and
then blamed Arafat, not Sharon, for its collapse.  "There is complete
and blatant American bias in Israel's favour," said an unusually
forthright Mubarak last month.  And his confidant, Ibrahim Nafi, editor
of al-Ahram, warned that throughout the Arab world, not just Palestine,
"hatred of America has reached unprecedented levels".  Another
government newspaper, al-Akhbar, said that the Arab-Israeli conflict was
being superseded by "a broader and more dangerous Arab-American
conflict". 

Little did al-Akhbar foresee just how much broader and more dangerous it
would be.  This spectacular terrorist exploit was something else as
well: the most striking demonstration of the leverage which the Arab
regimes, had they chosen, could have brought to bear on behalf of their
Palestinian brethren.  In its colossal impact on the world economy, New
York amounts to the terrorists' version of the celebrated "oil weapon"
which the Arabs last unsheathed in 1973, during the last full-scale
Arab-Israeli war, but which, in deference to America, they have more or
less promised never to unsheath again. 

Will the regimes now seek to impress on the Americans the absolute, dire
need to achieve a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian settlement, for
the world's sake as well as their own? Or will they, in heeding
America's demand to join the coalition against terror, end up more
subservient to it, at Palestine's expense, than ever before? The
ceasefire to which Israelis and Palestinians committed themselves in the
wake of the atrocity is seen as a step in the right direction.  But it
is a small step only, and the fear is that it is just a replay of the
Gulf war, when the Americans promised the Arabs that, in return for
joining the coalition against Saddam, they would make a real effort to
settle the Palestinian problem.  The promise proved vain and, the Arabs
fear, it will do so again because the whole peace process will become
subject to the logic and dynamism of the war on terror. 

But these apprehensions have not stopped Arab regimes from rushing to
identify themselves, at least in principle, with the anti-terror
campaign.  After all, some of them, most importantly Egypt and Saudi
Arabia, were themselves targets of the Arab Afghans' internal jihad. 
And the Arab and Muslim public has shown some revulsion and
consternation at what the terrorists have done in their name. 

Doubtless, it is less whole-hearted than elsewhere; but some newspapers
have been quite radical in their condemnation.  Kuwait's al-Watansaid it
was not just the Americans who "must transform themselves, so must the
Arab world and the Islamic mind", and rid itself of the widespread
approval of violence, force martyrdom and jihad that pervades the
"dominant religious culture".  Even Lebanon's Hizbullah has deplored
"the loss of innocent lives". 

But America's categoric "you are with us or against us"; its insistence
that terrorists of every kind must be tracked down everywhere, along
with all those who give them sanctuary, is ominous for the regimes. 
Mubarak and others have made it clear that a western onslaught on
Afghanistan will be bad enough, even though it lies outside the Arab
world; after earlier US attacks on Iraq, Libya, Sudan, it will fuel the
widespread perception of western hatred and hostility to all things Arab
or Muslim.  Clerics and religious scholars, such as those in pro-western
Jordan, have decreed that joining any US-led "aggression" against "any
Muslim country" is "religiously forbidden, treason to God, his prophet
and the faithful". 

But worse, for the Arabs, is the prospect that the Americans, having
dealt with Afghanistan, will turn to terrorists closer to home.  The
first likely target is Iraq.  Arab regimes which, under pressure of
public opinion, were so hostile to recent Anglo-American attempts to
tighten the embargo on Saddam Hussein, would find it more difficult than
ever to support a renewed military campaign against him; and, more
worryingly, according to Arab press reports, the US under secretary of
state, William Burns, delivered to six Arab ambassadors what amounted to
an ultimatum: cooperate fully with the anti-terrorist campaign or face
the full wrath of the west. 

Cooperation required the arrest or extradition of all terrorists in all
Arab countries.  Who exactly are these terrorists? Evidently, to the
Americans, they include Lebanon's Hizbullah.  The Lebanese government
has been shocked to learn that the US expects it to accomplish the
almost impossible task of dismantling an organisation that not only
enjoys great prestige for successful resistance to Israeli occupation,
but has become an integral part of the country's social, political and
sectarian fabric.  And they almost certainly include the Palestinian
Hamas and Islamic Jihad.  These are symbols and instruments of what
Arabs regard as legitimate resistance to the Israeli occupier.  In
moving against them, at least without any quid pro quo being expected of
the Israelis, the regimes would be grievously flouting public sentiment
already roused on the Palestinians' behalf. 

They know it.  Mubarak has called for a UN conference that would define
the differences between legitimate and illegitimate political violence. 
Saudi Arabia, that other key US ally, is in a particularly tough spot. 
Upholder of a deeply conservative religious orthodoxy from which Bin
Laden himself springs, deeply sensitive to the Palestinian issue, it has
on the one hand put advertisements in US newspapers saying: "America, we
stand with you", while, on the other, an official asserts: "We will not
agree under any circumstances on hitting any sister country such as
Syria, or groups resisting occupation such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and
Hizbullah."

Bin Laden is clearly a believer of sorts in the "clash of
civilisations", in an implacable enmity between Islam and the infidel
west, and with this atrocity he undoubtedly sought to bring this
Mani-chean conflict to a decisive climax.  His calculation is that when
the west counter- attacks, the Muslims will rise up in a general
intifada that will bring down those "apostate", pseudo-Muslim regimes
that do the west's bidding.  It is an improbable scenario.  But the
wider and fiercer America's war on terror and the more retreat or
humiliation it requires of Arab regimes at Palestine's expense, the less
improbable it becomes that, in the coming tumult, something, at least,
of his messianic ambition will be fulfilled. 


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