Stop Cultivating Terrorists

AMERICA SHOULD CONCENTRATE ON POLICIES THAT LESSEN HATRED, SEEK COOPERATION IN MIDDLE EAST

By Edward Cuddy
Updated: 09/02/07 7:22 AM
BuffaloNews

On April 18, 1994, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin delivered a startling message to the Israeli Knesset. “I want to tell the truth,” he told the legislators.

“For 27 years, we have been dominating another people against its will,” he argued, inflicting misery on Palestinians and provoking a “fierce hatred” that threatens Israeli citizens with suicidal terror. That was the premise behind his “land for peace” strategy, embodied in the Oslo peace process, raising hopes that at last Palestinians and Israelis might live in harmony under their own governments.

Unfortunately, those hopes were short-circuited the following year by Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish extremist.

In the annals of warfare, Rabin’s initiative was a rare act of courage and integrity, a leader under enemy fire who acknowledged his own country’s role in provoking the conflict. His initiative offers inspiration for nations struggling to settle conflicts by diplomacy rather than brute force.

The art of diplomacy requires empathy with the adversary. “Put yourself in his shoes so as to see things through his eyes,” was President

John F. Kennedy’s adopted motto. “Avoid selfrighteousness like the devil — nothing is so selfblinding.”

The terrorist menace we face — diffused across the globe but concentrated now in Iraq — is driven partly by Islamic extremism, poverty and political repression.

But to ignore anti- American grievances festering in the Arab-Muslim world, or to rely primarily on military power to crush our enemies, is to court danger and failure.

In current circumstances, a decisive military victory in Iraq or in the global struggle against terrorism is probably unattainable, arguably undesirable.

Our defining objective on both fronts should be “peace without victory” — or, more precisely, peace based on justice, not the peace of the cemetery amid smoldering ruins, which in turn is fertile soil for revenge and endless conflict.

Two major strategies should be added to our diplomatic arsenal:

First, drain the swamp of anti-Americanism — stop doing the things that motivate and empower terrorists to attack Americans.

Second, build a real “coalition of the willing” based not on Washington’s messianic vision to spread democracy, but on vital security interests shared by America and the Arab/Muslim world — the only solid foundation for all alliances.

Blaming Washington for stirring the embers of terrorism is utter nonsense in George Bush’s America.

Shortly after 9/11 the president professed “amazement” over the “vitriolic hatred for America” in Islamic countries, knowing “how good we are.” They “hate America because they hate freedom,” he explained.

But promoting the mythology of American innocence “is a strategic mistake,” according to the Pentagon’s Science Defense Board.

“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather they hate our policies,” the advisory panel claims.

The mind-set that “America does not need to re-evaluate its policies, let alone change them,” adds former CIA analyst Michael Sheuer, actually endangers American security.

According to a Pew Center survey released in June 2005, opinion leaders worldwide thought that “most or many” of their countrymen blamed U.S. policies for the 9/11 attacks.

Public opinion can be simplistic and polls misleading, but many scholars cite U.S. interventions into the Middle East as a major source of anti-American hostility — a history dating back at least to 1953, when the CIA toppled Iran’s democratically elected government, installed Shah Reva Pahlavi’s repressive regime and put American and European corporations in control of Iran’s oil.

In the following decades, Washington’s military build-up of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime in the 1980s, its support for Israel’s expanding occupation in Palestinian lands and numerous other actions fueled the virulent anti-Americanism in the region.

Especially telling was Washington’s role in arming and launching Osama bin Laden’s terrorist cadres in the 1980s against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, after which Afghanistan became the command center for bin Laden’s killing machine, al-Qaida.

Americans helped create a “monster,” and “now it has turned against you and the world,” groused an Algerian sociologist to an American correspondent in 1996 — five years before Arab hijackers slammed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

America’s conquest of Iraq in 2003 was simply the latest episode in Washington’s collisions with Arab-Muslim people, a pre-emptive war that played into bin Laden’s trap to “bait” the United States into “bleeding wars” in the Middle East, said former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel.

Overnight, Washington’s disastrous detour diverted critical resources from the area of al-Qaida’s central command posts in Afghanistan and Pakistan; affirmed bin Laden’s accusations describing America as an “imperialist force;” ignited the ancient Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict in Iraq; opened gates, hitherto closed, to al-Qaida terrorists and fueled an al-Qaida power surge throughout the Arab/Muslim world.

Today, American soldiers are stuck in a hostile urban terrain, where allies and enemies mingle together and where the dreadful toll on civilian lives — caught in the spiral of terrorist attacks and American retaliations — creates more terrorists.

Despite widespread admiration, even envy, for America’s democratic institutions, its dominant characteristic as perceived by overwhelming majorities in several Arab countries is its “unfair foreign policy,” according to a June 2004 Zogby International survey.

Any realistic strategy to checkmate terrorism must take stock of the “justness of U.S. policies,” warns Carnegie scholar George Perkovich.

As a guiding principle, “The United States must be concerned that justice is done and is seen to be done.”

To pursue military victory in Iraq, which seems to favor bin Laden’s agenda over Bush’s, is a dubious strategy at best. To continue sacrificing lives without forging an effective regional diplomacy smacks of criminal negligence.

America needs leaders “with a talent for building bridges, not burning them . . . a Tom Sawyerlike skill in getting other kids in the global neighborhood to paint the fence,” declares Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter.

In the volcanic Middle East, dangerously fractured by ethnic, nationalistic and religious conflicts and roiled by terrorism, leaders already are “painting the fence” — pulling the foot-dragging Bush administration in directions where Washington should be leading.

Take Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah. As the most pro-American leader in the Arab world, Abdullah has tried to tame the region’s searing anti-Americanism over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Two times, in 2002 and again last March, he prodded the Arab League to adopt peace initiatives in line with U.N. resolutions and the Road Map to Peace sponsored by the “Quartet” — the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia.

All 22 Arab governments offered recognition and permanent peace for Israel in return for its withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories, acceptance of a Palestinian state and a just solution for the Palestinian refugee problem.

Israel rejected the deal both times while Bush, ignoring his own policy, remained aloof from the peace process so critical to taming the anti-Americanism in the region. The doors for negotiation are still open, declared Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal.

Going beyond the Arab world, Abdullah traveled to Ankara in August 2006 to strengthen relations with Turkey, including plans to advance the Arab-Israeli peace process. But Turkey, under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was already “emerging as an important diplomatic actor in the Middle East,” underscored by 1,000 Turkish troops committed to a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, according to RAND scholar F. Stephen Larrabee.

Aroused by the turmoil in the Middle East, Turkey has hurdled a bundle of conflicting issues to promote stability in the region, engaging especially Israel (despite Ankara’s pro-Palestinian policy), Iran (despite its nuclear ambitions) and Syria.

U.S.-Turkish relations nose-dived after America’s invasion of Iraq, which exposed Turkey to increased Kurdish terrorism and separatism. Nevertheless, Turkey has become a major “bridge to the Middle East,” Larrabee declares, a potent partner in pacifying the region — if Washington can seize the moment.

Among the Bush follies, the Iran problem stands out as a double-barreled fiasco:

first by declaring Iran our implacable enemy, then by boosting its power. By replacing Iraq’s anti-Iran Sunni regime with a pro-Iran Shiite government, Washington empowered Iran to rally the region’s Shiites and challenge American influence in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

Bush’s clumsy war policy escalating Iran’s power, however, could become his “one clear achievement” in Iraq, argues Vali Nasr, a leading Middle Eastern scholar.

Lost in the noisy chatter poisoning Iranian-American relations are the mutual interests shared by both countries — a tribute to Bush’s genius for turning potential allies into enemies.

In Afghanistan in 2001, Iran joined U.S. forces against the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists, even pledging $500 million to rebuild the country. Later, it readily endorsed Iraq’s governing council under U.S. occupation.

Both countries are deeply concerned over the chaos in Iraq threatening to erupt across the region. Most significantly, both are committed to eliminating al- Qaida — the heart and center of America’s war on terrorism.

Iran is also a bridge — a Persian country forging ties with fellow Shiites in an Arab world; a Shiite power with Sunni allies poised to tame the explosive Sunni-Shiite divide threatening to engulf the region.

With good reason, former Secretary of State Colin Powell urged Bush to open talks with Iran, as did the Iraq Study Group later — advice that fell on deaf ears.

Instead, Bush posted Iran on his “axis of evil,” charting a belligerent course that undercut Iran’s moderates, strengthened anti-American hard-liners and culminated in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rise to power — a leader who, allegedly, is supporting Shiite militants against Israel, Iraq’s Sunni terrorists and U.S. soldiers.

What tragic irony! For years, bin Laden has been itching for war between America and Iran. Bush, beating the war drums, seems inclined to oblige.

But vital interests and common enemies still link the two nations.

Tehran has signaled its desire to negotiate their conflicts and America’s ally, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, calls Iran a valuable “helper and a solution” in the war against terrorism — much to Bush’s dismay.

With smarter U.S. diplomacy, Tehran could become a major ally in pacifying the region. In the crosscurrents of international relations, today’s enemies often become tomorrow’s allies — and vice versa.

The arduous enterprise of peace-making should not automatically blackball terrorists themselves.

The very label — “war on terrorism” — muddles the waters, cobbling all terrorists into a single category of psychopathic killers, ignoring the oppression that provoked them and the hostilities that divide them.

In the struggle for Irish freedom during the World War I era, Michael Collins waged a vicious terrorist campaign to break the power of British imperialism. Yet when the colonial overlords were ready to deal, Collins himself led the negotiations, even accepting the partition of Ireland for the sake of peace.

Even terrorists can hunger for just solutions and an end to the carnage.

Sometimes, “The fault is not in our stars . . . but in ourselves,” as Shakespeare reminds us.

America is not a helpless giant in a world plagued by terrorism, because critical decisions to drain the swamp of anti-Americanism — the life-blood of our terrorist enemies — depend substantially on Washington.

So too, are the policy changes needed to rally a true “coalition of the willing” — nations with higher stakes and less baggage than ours, already committed to objectives that serve our interests: to co-opt or subdue terrorists while pursuing peace and stability; to cushion the shocks of America’s withdrawal from Iraq; to rebuild shattered lives, devastated lands and broken economies; to redirect the vast wealth of the Middle East to the welfare of its peoples.

A critical question remains:

Are American leaders up to the task — to do justice for foreign people as readily as they have been to wage wars in foreign lands?