|
 he
Muslim Middle East is baffling. It damns America for not supporting
elections; yet its home-grown ayatollahs in Iran, the Taliban in
Afghanistan, and the fanatics in Algeria are furious not about the
absence a Bill of Rights, but over the difficulty in establishing
Allah's absolute — and quite undemocratic — reign on earth.
Reformers scream that they want the United States to support consensual
government. But then they hate us because we use U.N. sanctions
(rather than bombs?) to check the power of fascism in Iraq —
the biggest killer of Muslims in the last two decades. Middle Eastern
reformers berate us for giving any money at all to authoritarian
regimes in Jordan and Egypt — then up the ante of their hypocrisy
by shouting that democratic Israel receives more than they do.
Intellectuals
— and often the mullahs themselves — endlessly provoke
the United States. But both lust for European and American sojourns,
jobs, fellowships, and readership whenever possible. Bin Laden says
the West is repulsive; however, in his creepy video he also seems
delighted over his supposed resonance in Holland and America. His
supporters shout his name and are proud of his blows against America
— then claim his taped confession to planning that September
11 coup is doctored, and an American propaganda plot! They allege
American conspiracies in releasing videos of bin Laden's rants,
but then publish moronic accounts of how Israelis blew up the World
Trade Center. Our citizens are hectored to be careful of falling
into "Islamophobia"; yet blatantly racist and anti-Semitic
news, entertainment, and commentary are broadcast daily from the
Middle East.
Americans are
exhausted by the Middle Eastern use of the word "but."
Remember the nightly choruses: "We deplore September 11, BUT."
"We do not approve of the suicide bombings against Israel,
BUT." "Osama bin Laden does not represent Islam, BUT."
Adversative clauses then follow to damn us and almost every manifestation
of American foreign policy.
Overt threats
and frenzied hostility — whether in the Arab street or in the
chic enclaves of Gulf sheiks — rise and fall as little more
than a barometer of current American military strength. Clinton's
few Tomahawk missiles invited big talk against our national character;
B-52s and daisy cutters prompt quiet respect, and have pampered
grandees scurrying to Washington to assure us that they really do
like us after all.
How is America
to deal in a methodical and intelligible fashion with such a contradictory
and incendiary — and maddening — region of nearly half
a billion people? Complete disengagement from such unpleasant regimes
and hostile peoples is a very attractive idea — until we remember
that the Middle East and surrounding area are home to the world's
three great religions. They occupy a strategic nexus of three continents,
hold a sizable percentage of the world's oil reserves, contain the
Suez Canal, and lie in close proximity to Europe. Yet, we must accept
the sad truth that our present ad hoc policy has been an unmitigated
disaster. Giving billions to Egypt and providing military hardware
to Saudi Arabia did not prevent their citizens from spearheading
the murder of thousands of our innocents — to the cheers and
quiet approbation of their own millions back home.
So we need
a new direction that is logical, time-tried, and designed to be
enduring and systematic in its treatment of all the countries
of the Middle East. In other words, America must remember its past
successful approach toward Eastern Europe — accepting that
Islam in its increasing radical manifestation (along with its twin
of military dictatorship) represents the same dire threat to freedom
and civilization, both at home and abroad, as did the Iron Curtain
of Soviet totalitarianism.
No Soviet nuke,
after all, incinerated thousands of innocent Americans at once.
Even Khrushchev's metaphorical "We will bury you" was
not as bad as "Kill every American." The Polish never
blew up four airliners in flight; nor did the Hungarian Communists
bomb the Pentagon. Rather than continuing to give billions to illegitimate
regimes in Jordan and Egypt, cozying up to fundamentalists in the
Gulf, and labeling vast areas like Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Lebanon
as supporters of terrorism — while doing nothing to prevent
them from killing more Americans — we should treat the entire
region uniformly, as we once did Poland, Hungary, Romania, East
Germany, and the other members of the old Warsaw Pact.
Just as an
American-led NATO was ready for anything that came west, so too
must we be ever vigilant against the Middle East bloc. Militarily,
America should increase it forces in the region. The United States
must accept the grim reality that in any given month we can be on
the verge of war with almost any country of the Islamic world.
Remember that, in the last two decades alone, we tried to use armed
force to free our hostages in Iran, fought the Iraqis, had shootouts
in the streets of Somalia, bombed terrorists in Libya, and tried
to retaliate against killers in Lebanon and the Sudan — all
this quite apart from supplying weapons to Israel, in the not-too-distant
past, to fight the Syrians, Jordanians, and Egyptians. If we throw
in Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Sudan, Yemen, and the barracks in Saudi
Arabia, are there very many countries in the Islamic world where
Americans have not been in the line of fire?
Politically,
we must accept that there is not a real democracy in the entire
subcontinent. And when elections are proclaimed, as in Iran and
on the West Bank, they are quickly subverted into little more than
referenda for autocracy. The only mystery hinges on whether unelected
mullahs or authoritarian councils will allow "radical"
or "moderate" candidates to take over the reins of government.
Are purportedly
friendly governments, in truth, either moderate or neutral? Just
as the supposedly maverick states of Romania and Yugoslavia proclaimed
their independence from the Soviet Union, and falsely postured as
nonaligned countries who were not practitioners of totalitarianism,
so are the unelected governments of the Gulf, Egypt, Jordan, and
Saudi Arabia telling us they are not as bad as Libya and Syria —
even as they thwart us, and their young men crash airliners into
our skyscrapers. "Friendly" Saudi citizens have killed
far more Americans than have "enemy" Cubans.
So, we must
return to a comprehensive and systematic approach that recognizes
that America cannot be allies with any existing government
in the Middle East — that an Iron Veil has fallen across the
region preventing all free intercourse — until the entire region
has been liberated from mullahs like those in Iran; killers such
as Saddam Hussein, Assad, and Khadafi; plutocrats like the sheiks;
and even the benevolent dictators in suits and ties in Jordan and
Egypt.
In the past,
Radio Free America and our official policy made it clear to the
Eastern Europeans that we saw them as captive peoples of commissars,
who someday could rejoice under democracy. America should treat
the unfree millions of the Arab world the same way. The more we
hate their governments now, the less they will hate us later. We
did not seek military alliances with Communist Hungary, sell weapons
to Czechoslovakia, welcome in students from Bulgaria, or encourage
cultural ties with East Germany.
So also after
September 11. We should not expect such reciprocal exchanges with
countries that are either theocratic or autocratic, in which hate-mongering
mullahs and servile media are either subsidized or at least government-sponsored.
Neither students nor intellectuals from undemocratic countries of
the presently constituted Middle East should come to the United
States. Nor should regular air flights continue — in either
direction. Nor should Americans be allowed to travel freely to visit
Bethlehem, the Pyramids, or the bazaars of the Gulf.
In other words,
we should begin to see all the governments of the Middle
East as we do Iran and Libya, keeping only minimal, thoroughly frosty
ties on an official level — even as we wage a desperate political
and cultural war to appeal directly to the people themselves, so
that they might rise up and fight for legitimate government. On
the theory that Eastern Europe, prior to Soviet-installed Communism,
had a distinguished pedigree, so too we must at least profess that
before the recent batch of dictators and theocrats, the Middle East
at least had no prolonged history of exporting terrorists to kill
Americans.
Critics on
the right will no doubt dub such efforts to promote democracy in
areas without literacy, secularism, the rule of law, or viable economies
as naïve — while leftists will dismiss a new cold war
as retrograde or worse. But we must remember that the Cold War was
a victory. Our faith in the people on the other side of the Iron
Curtain proved to be warranted, and half a continent is now legal
rather than renegade — a bulwark, not a nemesis, of Western
Europe.
Nor must we
sigh that our vigilance will bear no fruit until a half-century
hence. Ad hoc strongmen and even bloodthirsty mullahs do not possess
the power or resilience of Soviet-inspired terror. The world is
also a different place than it was in 1946. Nearly all the promised
utopias of the past — fascism, Communism, Third-World liberationist
kleptocracy, and Islamic theocracy — have now had their day
and failed miserably before the eyes of billions. A Westernized
and secular minority in the Middle East knows that the future lies
only with freedom and democracy. They may be hostile to America
in a variety of ways, but liberty remains still the only hope of
millions. America must stand ready to go to war with any country
of the region that kills our citizens — and stand aloof from
all the illegitimate governments of the Middle East bloc —
even as it wages a desperate fight over the airwaves, through thousands
of agents and dissidents, and with subsidies and encouragement to
thousands more democrats-in-exile to free an oppressed population.
If we adopt
a principled and tough resistance to Middle Eastern governments
— while at the same time offering the carrot of honest friendship
and material support for any of their silenced citizens who aspire
to democracy — then what once happened among the enslaved peoples
of the Warsaw Pact could occur again in the Middle East — and
in a decade or less, rather than 50 years. The same old dominoes
of repression are now tottering. With a concerted push, they could
set off a chain reaction as quickly and unexpectedly as they once
did in Eastern Europe.
|
