America and the War on Terror
Jihad el Khazen Al-Hayat - 28/11/05//
Ever since the US declared a war against terror, the phenomenon has been on the rise, not the decline, and the number of suicide operations has grown by many times over.
The war on terror has failed and this failure will continue because the US is not treating the causes. Instead, the US has helped the phenomenon expand, as the White House fights terror where it does not exist. As a result, suicide operations, which were limited before the invasion of Iraq, have become a weapon used daily.
I cannot present a detailed study on terror in this column, treating the causes and the war against it. But I will contribute some broad ideas for the ongoing debate, especially after suicide operations in Jordan and Iraq.
The origin of all problems in the Middle East is the Palestinian issue, and the basis for the hostility to the US in the region is the US' support for Israel, support that has steadily risen to become an absolute commitment by the Bush administration to the Jewish state. Any other explanation is a smokescreen. If one denies this, one is either ignorant or a partisan of Israel. In both cases, the hostility to the US and the accompanying terrorism will continue.
The US was subject to horrible terrorism on 11 September 2001 and waged a justified war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. However, the war against the Taliban and al-Qaida turned into the war against Iraq, where there was no terror threatening the US or anyone else. In Iraq there was domestic terror, by the regime against its people, after its external terror (the invasion of Kuwait) was defeated and Iraq punished and subjected to sanctions.
Instead of the US' exploiting worldwide sympathy, including the feelings of Arabs and Muslims, after 11 September 2001 it destroyed all of its new and old capital in an unjustified war against Iraq, which created a problem with Arabs and Muslims greater than the problem of Palestine.
I was inspired to write about this today after reading a report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on "Suicide Terrorism in the Middle East: Origins and Response," based on a lecture by Professor Robert Pape and commented on by Martin Kramer, an expert in the field. I don't have a criticism of what the two said, but an observation about ignoring important aspects that no war on terror can afford to, if it is to be successful. Pape offers suggestions such as making al-Qaida the Bush administration's priority, with the responsibility for security in Iraq going completely to the Iraqi government. I agree on the first part but say it's too late; US forces are in Iraq and the overwhelming majority of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims are opposed to this presence. As for handing over security to the Iraqis, it's logical but not practical, since Iraqi security forces are incapable of the task, according to all official reports about their status.
In his commentary on Pape, Kramer is both right and wrong. Here, I would like to deny the simplification that Palestinian terror operations have been a reflection of the struggle between Hamas and the PLO and Yasser Arafat. The history of suicide/martyrdom operations in the Middle East is the following:
In the 1970s, there were none of these acts by Palestinians and when the Palestinian resistance required them in the mid-1970s, volunteers from the Japanese Red Army carried them out, in the attack on Lod airport. The 1972 Munich incident was not a suicide operation; Palestinian gunmen tried to kidnap Israeli athletes and take them to an Arab country, perhaps Algeria, to trade for Palestinian prisoners. The Israeli athletes were killed in a failed attempt by the German police to free them via a military airport.
Suicide operations began with the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. Suddenly, Arabs and Muslims faced the phenomenon of adolescent boys blowing their bodies up with mines, and their corpses returned wearing the key of heaven around their necks.
Lebanese suicide operations against US forces in Lebanon and against Israel, and both Palestinian operations and the attacks in Iraq have all followed the Iranian model. Although Saddam Hussein lacked Ayatollah Khomeini's suicide attackers, he encouraged death and there were popular funeral "celebrations" that resembled "weddings for the groom."
Today, not a week goes by without news of a suicide bombing, like in Sharm el-Sheikh or Amman, although most of the operations are in Iraq and the practice has become common. The suicide attacks in Baghdad on the eve of the Iraqi reconciliation conference in Cairo were greater than the ones suffered in Amman, although the media coverage lasted for only a day, until the next attack took place.
Iraqis did not know suicide operations before the occupation; the Arabs and Muslims did know of such attacks before they became part of Iranian strategy during the first Gulf War. The time has passed when there were no Arab or Muslim suicide bombers and now they stand in a long line, in various countries.
The Bush administration is acting like it has gotten quite carried away, as it does not acknowledge any mistakes and does not back down from its positions, even though the results show that the situation is worse now than when the US began to try and treat it. This means that terror will continue, and perhaps suicide attacks will increase, not decrease, with no logical solution to be expected for the foreseeable future.
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