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Patrick Seale: New dangers on the Middle East
Special to Gulf News 10/1/2004
There are ominous signs the conflicts in the Middle East are set to widen in the coming months, sucking in new actors and posing new threats to the United States and its allies.
In the eyes of Arab and Islamic militants, the war against American forces in Iraq and Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation are increasingly seen as one and the same battle.
In the absence of any prospect for peace on either battlefield, alliances are being formed and command structures established which suggest that the struggle is entering a more lethal phase.
Western intelligence sources report a new high command is emerging made up of Hezbollah (the Shia Lebanese resistance movement that forced Israel out of southern Lebanon); Hamas (the hard-line Palestinian movement which has supplanted Yasser Arafat's Palestinian National Authority (PNA) as the spearhead of resistance to Israel); the Muslim Brotherhood (represented in the Occupied Territories by Islamic Jihad); and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
A striking features of this alliance is that it bridges the Sunni-Shia divide in the Muslim world; and unites Arab nationalists and Islamists in a common cause. As one of their members put it to me: 'There is today no difference between resistance and jihad.'
Victory of militants over moderates
Several factors lie behind the new, more organised and determined militancy, of which the more important may be listed as follows:
- US backing for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for his expansion of Jewish colonies, his separation wall in the West Bank, and his all-out war against the Palestinians has ruled out any prospect of a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The international consensus of a two-state solution seems increasingly unrealistic.
As a result, Palestinian moderates have been silenced while the PNA has virtually collapsed under Israeli blows and the bitter frustration of a population under siege. The initiative has passed to militants who argue there is no alternative but armed struggle.
The huge sacrifices the Palestinians have endured in their four-year intifada are, paradoxically, seen as arguments for continuing the battle, however long it takes.
- In Iraq, US attempts to crush the insurgency by force indeed reports that the US is planning an all-out campaign before the end of the year to 'clean out' Fallujah and other centres of resistance in preparation for elections in January are rallying anti-American forces in many parts of the world.
For Arab and Islamic militants, Iraq has become a fighting issue and a mobilising cause as intense as the Palestinian cause itself.
- Repeated American and Israeli threats to strike at Iran in order to destroy its alleged nuclear weapons programme have also contributed to the hardening mood in that country and in the region. They have encouraged hardliners in the Iranian regime to act forcefully and pre-emptively in both Iraq and the Palestinian/Lebanese arena so as to hold American and Israeli ambitions in check.
The victory of the militants was not inevitable. Movements like Hizballah and Hamas had long been reluctant to act outside their own respective battlefields of Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. They wanted their local grievances to be recognised and addressed. They sought to 'engage' the United States and are still hoping for a change in American policy.
But American and Israeli insistence to label, denounce and outlaw them as terrorist movements has increased their popularity and legitimacy and driven them to seek a wider arena for their actions.
A debate about the wisdom of suicide bombings has been raging for months in Palestinian circles. Moderates have argued that suicide bombings play into Sharon's hands, keep him in power and provide him with a pretext to destroy not just the PNA but Palestinian society itself.
The moderates argued that, if the Palestinians were to abandon suicide bombings and adopt a strategy of non-violent resistance, they could win over world opinion to their just cause and arouse the conscience of the world including the conscience of many Israelis.
In today's climate, these arguments cut little ice. On the contrary, the militants argue that the intifada and the suicide bombings have hit Israel hard.
Occupation and repression have brutalised Israeli society, inward investment has dwindled, unemployment and crime have soared, tourism has plummeted, young people are leaving, and world opinion has turned hostile.
Israel, they argue, is more isolated than ever, and would not survive were it not for American backing.
The strategy must therefore be to hit American as well as Israeli targets even harder, so as to bring home to American opinion the price the US has to pay for its one-sided policies and persuade Israelis to return to sanity. This is the dominant trend in the region today.
The debate in the Arab and Islamic world is being echoed by a still relatively-muted debate in the US.
Open opposition is beginning to surface on the internet, in speeches by prominent figures, and even in the mainstream press against the 'neoconservatives' and the 'civilian leadership of the Pentagon' who are held responsible for the Iraqi debacle and for the hatred against America in the Arab and Muslim world.
Mounting casualties and the soaring cost of the Iraq war, together with fear of terrorist attack, widely felt in the United States, has empowered the opposition to speak out against what is seen in many quarters as the consequence of the capture of America's foreign and security policy by right-wing friends of Israel.
Such views are to be heard among members of America's more traditional foreign policy establishment and among senior officers. The failure to recognise the threat from the neo-cons is being much lamented, as is the failure to block their rise to prominence over the past decade.
The American debate
A full-page advertisement in last Sunday's New York Times by an anonymous group calling itself americanrespect.com denounced America's "profound misunderstanding" of the causes of terrorism and the mistaken war against Iraq.
"Terrorists are not inherently malevolent", the advertisement declared. 'They are filled with passion and a sense of being aggrieved as true of Al Qaida as the Palestinians under Israel...' Muslims "view US foreign policy and aid to be heavily biased in favour of Israel and a significant threat to Islam..."
Such public advertisements are the tip of a very large iceberg. Dissent against the policies of the Bush administration is widespread, but it may not be strong or organised enough to put the Democratic challenger John Kerry in the White House.
Needless to say, the neo-cons are far from surrendering. They retain the upper hand in many parts of the Administration.
If President George W Bush is re-elected and the latest polls suggest he is well ahead of Kerry they will fight to retain their posts and their influence, not only inside government but in the many Washington think-tanks that shape American opinion.
The battle over the coming months between the United States and Israel on one side and a world-wide Islamic and nationalist insurgency on the other is likely to be exceedingly hot.
Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs. He can be contacted at: pseale@gulfnews.com
Interesting at their website that they choose to remain anonymous.
New Republican Dictionary Defines Traitor as “Everyone Against Us”