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 ince
September 11, the State Department has done a good job at keeping
most Arab states inside the new coalition against terrorism, but
the price is getting steeper.
A stream of
Arab leaders are equating the root causes of terror with the frustration
their subjects feel regarding Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians.
By this logic, Palestinian terrorism is not really terrorism at
all, but rather the exasperated response of occupied peoples.
By this logic,
the United States should draw a distinction in its war on terror
between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and terrorists in Palestine such
as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Take Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak's remarks Monday to Al-Azhar University
in Cairo. "People have reached a state of frustration and feeling
of injustice which leads to more violence between the Palestinians
and the Israelis," he said. And these remarks are from one
of Arabia's moderate leaders, according to the State Department,
a steadfast American ally that receives billions in military aid.
Mubarak's old
foreign minister and the current secretary general of the Arab League,
Amre Moussa sounded a similar call on October 22. "Phase two
of the international effort should focus on the root causes of terrorism.
Frustration, despair and anger are sentiments which if unchecked
can be channeled into destructive acts," Moussa told a packed
luncheon sponsored by the Washington-based Arab American Institute.
"One of the key problems that cause great frustration in the
Arab world is to watch the Palestinians suffer under foreign military
occupation."
Saudi Prince
Alwaleed bin Talal made the same point earlier this month when he
suggested U.S. Middle East policies may have indirectly brought
about the September 11 terrorist attacks. He made the speech after
donating $10 million to the charity set up to aid the victims of
the crashes that toppled the World Trade Center, money that was
returned by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after the speech.
The Arab coalition
calculus is increasingly important in light of this week's events
in the Holy Land. Under public pressure from Washington, the Israeli
Defense Forces began to withdraw troops from the West Bank towns
of Bethlehem and Beit Jala after reaching a tentative agreement
with Palestinian security officials in a meeting brokered by the
CIA.
Israel went
forward with the incursion into the major West Bank towns after
members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a
group with offices operating inside Palestinian controlled territory,
claimed responsibility for the assassination of its Right-wing tourism
minister, Rehevam Ze'evi.
Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon agreed to the withdrawal one day after Palestinian
operatives killed seven Israelis and injured 50 more in Hedera.
The IDF's intelligence chief, Col. Yosef Kuperwasser told reporters
Monday that the operatives responsible for the attack were among
the terrorists Israel has asked Arafat to arrest for months.
If Kuperwasser
is right and if PFLP offices are indeed operating freely inside
the borders of what may one day become the Palestinian state, then
Arafat is a harborer of terrorists. And if President Bush means
what he said on September 19, that the new war is against all terrorism,
including those who give them "safe haven," then Arafat
should be worried about U.S. reprisals.
The State Department
however has been reluctant to accept this point. While spokesmen
for the department repeat the same tired rhetoric that Arafat must
do more to control the violence, these phrases are said in the same
breath with pleas for Israel to restrain its response. Thus the
reaction to terror somehow fuels it.
Secretary of
State Colin Powell walked this line on Thursday when told the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, "You start to run into areas where
one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And that's
where you have to apply judgment. You have to apply judgment that
says, is there a better way to express grievances?; or is there
a better way to change the political problem that you're dealing
with?"
And this rhetoric
is backed up by the Bush administration's reluctance to include
Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah — three groups it dubs
foreign terrorist organizations — on a list of groups for which
the Treasury Department has instructed all banks worldwide to freeze
assets. So far that list only includes groups linked to al Qaeda.
The State Department instinctively understood the Arab coalition
calculus in the 24 hours following the September 11 attacks. The
Israeli government had hoped that terrorist acts in the United States
would create a further common bond between the two countries, and
strengthen U.S. opposition to the suicide attacks by Palestinian
groups that killed Israeli civilians at open markets, in stores,
and at bus stops.
To the surprise
of Israeli officials, the reverse happened. In telephone calls to
Israel, U.S. diplomats pressed Ariel Sharon's government to allow
his dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres to meet with Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat — something Sharon had been resisting.
Other State Department officials made the point more forcefully
to Jewish organizations, hoping they would serve as a back channel
to Sharon's government.
And sure enough,
instead of sending Mossad bounty hunters to Afghanistan, Israel
acquiesced to American demands and cobbled together yet another
ceasefire that would be broken in a matter of days.
If Moussa,
Mubarak, and Prince bin-Talal get their way, then U.S. rhetoric
at Senate hearings and press briefings will be backed up by real
policy. So far this hasn't happened. But it's worth asking the question
what would a pro-Arab shift in Middle East policy look like?
To start, Washington
can invoke the little known Arms Export Control Act. That law specifically
prohibits countries that receive U.S. armaments from using the weapons
for anything other than self-defense, particularly if the actions
decrease stability in the region. Despite the repeated calls for
Israel not to use U.S. helicopter gunships and jet fighters in targeted
killings of suspected Palestinian terrorists, the Bush administration
has not even started a review of whether Israel may have violated
the legislation.
This is exactly
what Moussa's host last Monday, James Zogby, president of the Arab
American Institute has pushed the State Department to do for the
last nine months. But to date there has been no action from the
State Department or Congress.
The United
States has vetoed any efforts in the United Nations Security Council
to send an international peacekeeping force to hot spots in the
conflict and even lobbied other states on the U.N. panel not to
support such a resolution. Taking away an American veto threat would
be another way the Arab world may want to see Washington get serious
about the peace process, considering Arab states in conjunction
with the Palestinians have pushed for U.N. peacekeepers since the
beginning of the latest conflict.
In the end
however, it is up to President Bush to decide whether these actions,
which would enrage already nervous Jewish American voters not to
mention all Israelis, are worth the promise of an Arab coalition
against terror — and the promise of security that it holds.
It's worth
noting that four of the seven states Washington deems "sponsors
of terrorism" are members of the Arab League — Iraq, Libya,
Sudan, and Syria. This is not to mention the financial links the
Treasury Department is seeking to sever between al Qaeda and large
banks in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
In countries
like Yemen, where the government is seen as friendly and cooperative
on terrorism, there are still huge swathes of the country that escape
the reach of a central government — areas where terrorists
enjoy safe haven due in part to the government's inability to assert
its reach. Other states, like Syria employ terror as a strategy
by allowing arms and supplies to reach the groups over their sovereign
territory.
Eliminating
terrorism and those who aid and abet it in the Arab world will require
significant sacrifices for many leaders, to say the least. There
are some in the Bush administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, who argue it would require ending some of these
regimes altogether. Others like Powell have argued that international
isolation as a result of a coalition only helps the U.S. cause in
hunting down suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and
his associates by denying them safe haven.
If the war on terrorism is just that — a war on all terrorism
— bin Laden will only be phase one. And if Moussa gets his
way, Israel may in some way pay the price for his capture.
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